Crimea will participate in the elections to the Russian State Duma on September 18th. The elections take place according to a mixed system: 225 MPs will be elected from party lists and 225 from single mandate districts. Four single mandate districts were created in Crimea. The Russian opposition politician Garry Kasparov has already expressed his view that the elections in Crimea will be accompanied with great falsifications, and their results will be determined by the Kremlin. Alexander Brod, director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, a member of the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights, a member of the Presidential Council for Interethnic Relations, has a different view.
“We very much appreciate the cooperation with the Public Chamber of the Republic of Crimea and with the Electoral Commission of the Republic of Crimea. And recently we conducted a roundtable with colleagues, dedicated to the forthcoming election campaign. We intend to monitor this campaign, to evaluate it objectively, to connect local non-governmental organizations to the analysis of possible problem situations, to observation in the regions and to objective coverage of the campaign. We also plan to publish the book ‘Crimea: The Long Way Home’, which implies monologues of inhabitants of the peninsula of all social strata, human rights activists, entrepreneurs, representatives of ethnic communities and villagers, so that they would speak about what happened, about their desire to be with Russia and what problems they are now concerned about. And we hope this frank conversation, the frank attitude of the residents of the Crimea, will allow them to be heard,” Brod said.
At the same time, he admitted that there are many problems in Crimea: “It is about the return of the loans by the residents of Crimea to Ukrainian banks, despite the fact that the Ukrainian banks themselves have not yet returned the loans of the residents of the Crimea. And the Crimeans are now living in the conditions of a horrible blockade. And their living standards are far from the norm. Therefore, I do not want the collection agencies, embossing debts, to provoke protests. That is why the recommendations of the Public Chamber of the Republic of Crimea, the deputies of the ARC must carefully review these accepted norms of debt repayment for the purpose, so that people still, above all, would improve their standard of living, are close to us.”
According to Brod, another sensitive issue is the conclusion of the European institutions on the Crimean Tatar issue: “We and our colleagues from the Public Chamber supported the actions of the prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea, her appeal to the Supreme Court of the Republic on the recognition of ‘Majlis’ as an extremist organization. She could not refrain from responding, because the actions of the former leaders of the Majlis are, in fact, inflaming the situation, constantly provoking controveries and conflicts. They were involved in the organization of the blockade, in the creation of the battalion which stands on the border with Crimea and includes radicals and outright extremists. Therefore, these actions of the prosecutor's office are, I believe, justified for the sake of peace and the security of Crimea.”
