Thank you. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. If I kindly
can ask for silence, please, thank you. Welcome here in the Bali at the Human Rights Weekend.
My name is Kasper Thomas. I'm your host this evening. I'm an editor at the Guna Amsterdamer,
the Human Rights Weekend Media Partner, and I'll be taking you through this evening.
The Guna Amsterdamer is the magazine you found a complimentary copy of on your chair, which
was one of our recent theme issues, which has added theme through 10 Lies, which I think
is a very suitable epitaph for today's evening. Tonight we'll be screening Pussy Riot, A
Punk Prayer. The film is a wonderful British Russian code production made by directors
Mike Lerner and Maxime Posdorovkin. The film has been shortlisted as an Oscar candidate,
rightfully so in my opinion. I've seen the film, but of course you should judge for yourselves.
After the film screening, there'll be a short interview with two of the Pussy Riot ladies
behind me here on stage. I'll be joined there by Nadezhda Tolokonikova and Maria Aljotina,
and I will ask them a few questions and then open up the floor to the audience, so there
will be ample time for a Q&A with all of you. Before we start the film screening, there
will be a short introduction by Razor Dunbar from Human Rights Watch. I'll short her
and introduce her as well. Just one practical note after the film screening, because there's
an audience which is twice as big as you, basically, which is sitting in the other room,
which could not sit right here, and they'll be joining in as soon as the film is over,
so we all can have basically a live view of the Q&A. So it'll be a two-minute reshuffle
where these doors open and another crowd barges in. I'd ask you to remain seated. It's not
a break, so there's no time to rush out for cigarettes and drinks, so kindly remain where
you are for the Q&A afterwards. Like I say, the film will be shortly introduced by Razor
Dunbar. She is the Deputy Director of the European Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch,
and she specialises in human rights situations in countries with the form of the Soviet Union.
She was the former Director of the Human Rights Watch Field Office in Moscow, and I think
she is the excellent person to introduce this wonderful film you're going to be seeing tonight.
So Rachel, if I can please give you the floor.
Thank you, Kasper. It's wonderful to be here. Welcome to the screening of this film. It's
wonderful actually to be in the Netherlands right now, because the Netherlands has been
one of the countries that is most supportive of human rights in Russia. We're extremely
grateful and appreciative for the support that we get from people in the Netherlands
and also from the Dutch government for human rights in Russia. I think that maybe two issues
that have resonated most in the Netherlands regarding Russia was the Pussy Riot case,
and also the crackdown on LGBT people that's been going on in Russia for the past six months.
But I think it's really important to underscore that both of those issues did not emerge in
a vacuum. They are very specifically, very directly connected to what is, I think, the
worst crackdown on human rights in Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Like Kasper said, I was the director of Human Rights Watch's Moscow office. What he did
not say very tactfully was that was a long, long time ago, in 1992 when I was a teenager.
Not really, but it was a long time ago. I really have had the privilege of seeing some
pretty dramatic historical changes take place right before my eyes. Unfortunately, the one
change that I have seen take place before my eyes happened very, very rapidly, and that
was this very sharp dramatic crackdown on human rights, the worst that I have seen in
my 22 years working on Russia for Human Rights Watch that started after Putin came back to
the Kremlin in May 2012. So where did that all come from? That came from, you might remember,
the mass protests that took place in Moscow, unprecedented protests at the end of 2011
and the beginning of 2012, all of a sudden tens of thousands of people on the streets
of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other cities. It was a big awakening, and people thought
that Russia was in for some big changes. I believe that those were people who were protesting
election fraud and the parliamentary elections, and there were also people who were very unhappy
about the fact that Putin was going to run for president again and that his victory was
almost completely guaranteed. I think that when the Kremlin saw those protests happen,
as we say in America, it got freaked out. I think that they felt betrayed, humiliated,
and profoundly threatened, and I believe that a strategy was developed to mobilize, to polarize
Russian society, to mobilize, to reach out to and mobilize the more conservative elements
of Russian society outside the big cities, and to turn them against the creative classes,
the urban classes, the liberal or progressive-minded people. They did this in a number of steps.
They started with a dizzying array of repressive laws that started coming out just not even
one month after Putin came to power, laws restricting demonstrations, laws criminalizing
certain kinds of speech, laws restricting the Internet, laws making it possibly an
active treason to do such things as go to foreign embassies and talk about human, things
like human rights, and then a law that would require human rights groups that get money
from foreign donors to register themselves as foreign agents, which in Russia can only
mean internal enemy, spy, somebody really subversive that everyone has to be very cautious about.
Those laws were also accompanied by a kind of hysterical campaign against human rights
organizations and these foreign agents, and then we saw other campaigns start. It wasn't
just a campaign against NGOs. We saw the campaign against migrants develop, hysterical campaigns,
rhetorical campaigns that involved just the worst kind of hate speech by government officials
on state TV about the menace of the migrant, and we also, of course, saw the development
of the anti-LGBT campaign by state officials, the adoption of this law that makes it an
offense, an administrative offense, to expose any minor, including a teenager, to any kind
of information that talks about non-traditional sexuality in a positive way. So it's wrong
and it's a punishable offense to say it's okay to be gay, okay, or that gay people have
equal rights. In fact, it's considered by the law to be harmful to the health of children.
So what we saw in addition to these repressive laws, we also saw a real kind of campaigns
of hysteria on state TV against these three sets of new enemies. And I believe that this
is an effort by the Kremlin to, like I said, polarize Russian society and create a sense
of us versus them. And the them is this combination of an evil western alien plot to undermine
Russian values, to undermine the Russian family, and ultimately to undermine the Russian state.
I think that we have seen this campaign get turned against not only migrants, LGBT people,
and foreign agents, human rights organizations, but also anybody who really poses is inconvenience,
who poses a challenge to government policies, whatever they might be. You really risk attracting
the ire of government officials who then will cast you as some kind of enemy. And we saw
this happen over and over. And how do they do it? They do it through, well, through the
hate campaigns on TV, and also through wildly disproportionate, unbelievable criminal charges
against you, like we saw with the Greenpeace Arctic 30, like we saw with the criminal charges
against the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and like we saw with Pussy Riot. I think that
in this kind of atmosphere, you're going to watch what I think is a really terrific film,
and I'm a very harsh critic of human rights watch film festival films. This is a terrific
film, and I think that what it shows, what I found so profoundly moving about it, is
that it really, it shows you, I hope with the background that I've just given you, just
what it takes, what the kind of courage that it takes to stand up to that system. You and
I can have a reasonable argument about whether what Pussy Riot did, their punk prayer in
the Christ the Savior Cathedral, you and I can have a reasonable argument, a reasonable
disagreement about whether that was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, whether
it was offensive or whether it was art. But I think that there can't be a reasonable argument
about, first about whether they should have gone to jail for that, whether that should
have been a criminal offense. And I think it would be very difficult to have an argument
about the kind of courage it took for them to stand up to that inexorable system and
stand up to it with dignity, and stand up to it with defiance, the way they did during
their trial, during their imprisonment, and after their liberation. And I think that that
is an inspiration. So let me just leave it there and enjoy the film.
This is the main frame that symbolizes the union of the Church and the state. This is
the main frame that symbolizes the union of the Church and the state.
This is the main frame that symbolizes the union of the Church and the state.
This is the main frame that symbolizes the union of the Church and the state.
This is the main frame that symbolizes the union of the state.
This is the main frame that symbolizes the union of the state.
