2023-06-16 10:43:38
Disbanded by Vladimir Putin shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian human rights NGO Memorial is reviving abroad. It will open a Swiss branch in Bern on Saturday, with the aim of supporting its colleagues still in Russia.
At the end of December 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the Human Rights Center of the NGO Memorial International following having already dissolved the parent structure of this organization which fights once morest repressions in contemporary Russia.
At the time, the judge in charge of the case had declared “to accede to the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office” to dissolve this NGO. In question, the non-respect of obligations arising from its status as a “foreign agent”, a label reminiscent of that of “enemy of the people” during the USSR and which designates organizations considered to be acting once morest the Russian interests.
Since then, the NGO has gone into exile in several countries and now has organizations located in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and soon in Switzerland since a branch will be created on Saturday in Bern. It has also established its headquarters in international Geneva, but according to Patrick Seriot, professor emeritus of Slavic linguistics at the University of Lausanne, this address mainly serves as a “mailbox”.
Objective: talk regarding Russia
Invited Friday in La Matinale, Patrick Seriot will participate in the creation of this Bernese branch. To explain the importance of this creation, the Russia specialist recalls that in the Soviet Union, as in Putin’s Russia, “there is an astonishing idea that those we don’t talk regarding don’t exist (…) This seems catastrophic to me and the goal of Memorial is to rediscover this forgotten, lost, concealed memory of the repressions and imprisonments of the Stalin era.”
“The goal of our Swiss Memorial association will also be to talk regarding Russia, to explain, to make it understood that the words do not have the same meaning. Our job is essentially to spread this information”, he says.
Memorial was founded at the time of President Boris Yeltsin, “when everything still seemed possible and when the archives were opening up, and a civil society was beginning to appear” in Russia, specifies Patrick Seriot, “This extraordinary period did not last very long,” he laments.
Although dissolved, Memorial is not totally dead in Russia. “There are still extremely brave people who make excursions to places of memory in most cities of Russia. They put up memorial plaques in apartments, where people who were murdered in Soviet times once lived. This work is very important and the goal of the Swiss variant of Memorial is to participate, to recover this memory and to help colleagues in Russia”, explains Patrick Seriot.
Role of language
The Waldensian linguist also believes that the role of language in understanding the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is underestimated. “The role of language is fundamental in Eastern Europe where the definition of collective identity goes through ethnolinguistics, that is to say that for Vladimir Putin, any place where people speak Russian is Russia. The comparison is difficult but necessary: when Adolf Hitler considered that German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens were Germans before being Czechoslovak citizens”, according to Patrick Seriot.
In Ukraine, the language problem is extremely complicated. “It must be understood that in Soviet times, Russian speakers had an extreme advantage over others. Everyone had to speak Russian, while Russian speakers had little interest in speaking local languages. They lost this advantage and this privilege, so they bitch.”
A parallel can even be drawn with Switzerland, explains the professor of Slavic linguistics: “It’s very boring because the vast majority of people I know in Russia are convinced that the French-speaking Swiss are a French population that does not dream only one thing: to be recuperated by the Republic on the other side of the lake. We are faced with a gigantic misunderstanding and it is important to understand that in Soviet times a clear distinction was made between Soviet citizenship and nationality. distinction no longer exists on domestic papers, but it still exists in legislation in Russia.”
Interview by Frédéric Mamaïs
Web adaptation: Jérémie Favre
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