'Novyy vestnik', Karaganda

By Elena Ulyankina

On July 16th the Karaganda resident who died after the assault of the theatrical center on Dubrovka would have been 18.

Five days before Sasha’s 18th birthday, victims of the Dubrovka terror act and members of the ‘Nord-Ost’ public organization, of which her mother, Svetlana Gubareva, is a member, filed a petition with the Russian prosecutor general. They are demanding a criminal case be opened against members of the operational headquarters that freed the hostages. Before this, on May 19th, the investigation had been halted.

They are accusing FSB director Nikolai Patrushev and his assistant, Vladimir Pronichev, FSB special operations center chief Alexander Tikhonov, and former security council secretary Vladimir Rushailo. “We do not rule out the president’s personal responsibility,” declared ‘Nord-Ost’ coordinator Tatiana Karpova.

The victims of the terror act want the Prosecutor General to open a criminal case according to articles in the Russian criminal codex: Article 237, part 2 (“Withholding information, by a person in a government position, about circumstances that threaten human life or health”) and Article 293, part 3 (“Negligence leading to the accidental death of two or more persons”).

Meanwhile, attorney Igor Trunov, who is representing the interests of many of the victims, received before this a letter from the European Court of Human Rights (in Strasbourg). The letter informed the plaintiffs, among whom is Svetlana Gubareva, about the start of the communications process. I recall that the appeal to the court was sent in 2003. Why so long? After all, it has been 4 years already.

“As an example I’ll read you a quote from journalist Leonid Nikitinsky’s interview with Anatoly Kovler, a judge at the European Court of Human Rights,” Svetlana Gubareva answers. “Listen: ‘Physical presence and calling the sides into the Strasbourg Court is an exceptional event, because no procedures are performed in the presence of plaintiffs and defendants, but through correspondence with the declarants and their representatives. The court reporter readies the project for the chamber, which sends it to all active and accessory judges in the chamber, and each can of them can latch onto it and offer to formulate something else, and no resolution on the substance of the case will be made or published until then.’ Such is the procedure.” According to Kovler, the ECHR has now accumulated 95 thousand complaints, 20 thousand of them from Russia. In 2006 there were only 400 decisions on these cases.

While the ‘Nord-Ost’ people are working for the general good in Russia, Svetlana Nikolaevna is trying to preserve the memory of all 130 victims of the terror act, including her daughter, Sasha Letyago, here in Kazakhstan by creating a maintaining a site on the Internet dedicated to them (http://nord-ost.org/). So that they remember the tragedy in Karaganda, she hopes to convince School #38, where her daughter was a student, to place a memorial plaque.

“During those autumn days of 2002 a lot of words were said by officials of various ranks, that this tragedy would never be forgotten,” Svetlana Gubareva recalls. “It seems to me that a memorial plaque at the school would be one way of carrying out these promises. Everytime I walk past the building next door I see a tablet with the name of a soldier who died in Afghanistan, Kotsoev, and I remember the war. Terror acts are also ‘hot spots’ where peaceful people can fall to the whims of fate. While tablets with the names of the dead and remarks about the tragedies that occurred are warnings to those who don’t take the danger of terrorism seriously. I’d like it, certainly, if a memorial plaque with Sasha’s name would happen this year, but time will tell.”

In order to make this idea a reality, Svetlana Nikolaevna has to have a declaration signed by the director of the municipal memorial commission, Almagul Salimbayeva, and bring it to the city administrative office. The editorial offices of ‘NV’ offer this article as Ms. Gubareva’s declaration.

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