Oct. 22, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Oppression by Paperwork in Putin’s Russia
 
By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
 
A classic method of social control by autocratic governments is to impose an arduous permit process, requiring endless waits and documentation, for even the most innocuous activities.
 
And so it is that the Russian government has ordered almost 100 foreign nongovernmental organizations to suspend all operations while they comply with a pointless and needlessly complex registration process. Russian NGOs face even more draconian requirements.
 
The foreign NGOs -- among them, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and two congressionally funded democratic advocacy groups -- are one of the last areas of Russian public life not under Kremlin control.
 
Since Vladimir Putin became president, his government has systematically set out to curtail democratic rights and bring the institutions of a free society -- the media, private sector enterprises, an independent judiciary -- under control. It has been one backward step after another. The recent murder of a muckraking reporter, one of many assassinations still unsolved, shows that the process is not always gentle.
 
And all of this has been accompanied by a new belligerence toward its neighbors.
 
Each of these developments has been met with international disapproval and little good it has done. But Russia's leadership has been openly anxious to command the respect of other nations and a place in the global economy.
 
At U.S. urging, the G-7, a club of the world's larger industrial democracies, became the G-8, making room for Russia even though its economy was far too small to qualify for membership. And it still is not included in meetings of the group's central bankers and finance ministers. But if Russia were not a democracy, it wouldn't qualify at all.
 
Russia would also like to qualify for World Trade Organization membership and perhaps one day inclusion in the European Union.
 
Maybe it is now time for the West to bide its time about accommodating Russia's ambitions until we see where Putin and his government are taking Russia. If the club of major nations needs more members, there are other nations out there -- India, Brazil, Mexico -- with larger economies and better democracies.
 
Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD@)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com