Features
The late Alexei Navalny
Life
Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny, born June 4, 1976, was of Russian and Ukrainian descent. His father was from a village on the Belarusian border and was evacuated to a region in Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster. He grew up in Obninsk, about 100 km southwest of Moscow but spent holidays with his grandmother in Ukraine. His parents owned a basket weaving factory which they still manage.
Navalny graduated from secondary school in 1993 and graduated from the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in 1998 with a law degree. He then further studied at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, graduating in 2001. Receiving a scholarship to Yale World Fellows Program he was in Yale University in 2010, receiving a non-degree Fellowship.
He embarked on a legal career from 1998, working in various Russian companies. In 2009, he became an advocate and member of the Kirov bar association. Moving to Moscow, he was accepted a member of the Russian association. Due to a regulation introduced soon after, he was deprived of his advocate status.
He turned to politics and became a leader of the Russian opposition, an anti-corruption activist organizing demonstrations against corruption in Russia, and against Putin. He was soon imprisoned. By now he had formed the Anti-Corruption Foundation and was recognized even overseas and by global associations such as Amnesty International. Proof of recognition gained was him being awarded the Sakharov Prize for work in human rights. Through his social media channels, he and his team published material on corruption in Russia and branded Russia’s ruling party as a “party of crooks and thieves”. He came second in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election but was debarred from contesting the 2018 presidential election.
In August 2020, Navalny while in prison was hospitalized in a serious condition after being poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. He was evacuated to Berlin and discharged a month later. Navalny pointedly accused Putin of being responsible for his near death. He returned to Russia in January 2021 and was immediately accused of parole violation because of his stay in Berlin.
Mass protests were held but to no avail. He was imprisoned in 2021 to serve the rest of his earlier term – two and a half years, and a year later given an additional nine years after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court in a new trial, described by Amnesty International as a sham case. His appeal was rejected and he was transferred to a high security prison – the Arctic Circle Corrective Colony, and literally lost to his family, supporters and watchers overseas.
Death
On February 16 this year, the Russian prison service reported that Navalny had died. He was 47. Naturally there were defiant protests but of what use? Even accusations against Russian authorities by western nations and organizations went unheeded. The chief opposition to Putin was dead; three months before Putin faces elections for a continued run of his autocratic rule. So secretive were the authorities that even his mother and lawyer were not allowed to view his remains. She was informed by Russian authorities that his body was being held for a further period of two weeks with no confirmation of where his body was. Efforts to locate it have proved useless.
His supporters accused the Russian authorities of being “killers who were covering their tracks”. Uselessly, since this democratic protester was dead (or killed) in the prime of life. A good human being has been lost to the world due to selfish autocracy: his crime being his opposition to corruption.
His wife, Yulia Navalnaya, has demanded his body be given his family so a proper burial could be carried out. Even this is refused. She has vowed to continue his work to fight for a ‘Free Russia’. She has directly accused President Vladimir Putin of murdering her husband and appealed to sympathizers and supporters to “share the fury and hate for those who dared to kill our future”. She alleged her husband’s body was retained until traces of poisoning by the nerve agent used earlier and believed to have been used again, disappeared.
Repercussions
I said earlier that I followed what was done to this activist after his return to Russia from Berlin and had a foreboding that he was doomed; he would be eliminated.
Thoughts followed, plus fearful and frightening remembrances. Sri Lanka has had more than its share of killing of opposition figures and activists against corruption and for the preservation of human rights and free speech. The retaliatory killings started in force during the Presidency of Ranasinghe Premadasa, abated during CBK’s time, and restarted. There is no need to spell out names of those who were killed or made to disappear and during which presidency. All is too well known, documented and remembered.
We are such a small country with intelligent people, boasting of being a prime Buddhist country with all other major religions allowed complete freedom to be followed. But the number of political killings is atrociously disproportionate. I do not count killings by the JVP during its two uprisings, neither by the LTTE, and by the police and authorities during the uprisings and civil war. I have in mind those killings and torture that seemed to be engineered by the highest in the land during periods in our recent history.
One case that was different, instigated by the then president of the country – Marcos in the Philippines – was the assassination of Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino Jr, on August 21, 1983, on the tarmac of Manila International Airport. He was returning to his country, having fled for fear of his life. He was shot dead point blank. But mass protests drove Marcos and wife Imelda to flee to exile in Honolulu, where Marcos died in September 1989. She returned to the Philippines and lives a good life, back in politics and surprisingly her son, Bongbong is president now. His rise to power so comparatively recent after the atrocities committed by his parents gives hope to many a son and heir of leaders supposedly guilty of murder.
The way the political papadam crumbles, as the saying goes, is very relevant to Sri Lanka as white wearing politicians guilty of this and that crime are parliamentarians and a western leaning advocate of peace and racial harmony now promotes muzzling the media, particularly social media, and advocates the manacling of even sincere activists for justice and fair play through the passing of a severe anti-terrorism Act.
Peaceful Aragalaya protestors were mercilessly hounded out by an ex Prez and his successor. Sophisticated poisoning with nerve gas may not be the local forte but plenty of killers who can be hired are freely available for a scoop of goodies or a couple of thousand rupees. Latent capability to outdo even ex-KGB Putin lies in humans among us.