Human rights activist Yelena Ryabinina recalled to the authors: “In the early 2000s natives from Uzbekistan living in the Volga region and considered to be members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir by Uzbek secret services started to disappear.” The chain-smoking Ryabinina, a project director for the Civic Assistance Committee’s Program of Assistance to Political Exiles from Central Asia, a nongovernmental organization based in Moscow, spent many hours in the courts defending refugees from Central Asia against illegal deportation. Some of them were later traced to Uzbek prisons. Alisher Usmanov, a teacher at a madrassa in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, had been wanted by Uzbekistan since 1998 for what Uzbeks said was an “attempt to undermine the constitutional regime of the country.” But Usmanov had been granted Russian citizenship and thus could not be extradited. In 2004 Usmanov was detained by Russian police and sentenced to several months in prison for illegal possession of ammunition. On July 24, 2005, he was due to be released, but his wife says he simply disappeared. It was later ascertained that he had been abducted directly from prison, delivered to the airport, and flown to Uzbekistan. On October 24, 2005, the Russian state news agency reported,“Usmanov was handed over to Uzbekistan according to a joint plan of the FSB and the National Security Service of Uzbekistan for fighting international terrorism.”
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In November 2005 he was sentenced to an eight-year prison term in Uzbekistan.
Similar tactics were used by security services from Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan within Russia.
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In 2004 the Tajik secret services succeeded in abducting a prominent Tajik politician, Mahmadruzi Iskandarov, who had been a field commander in Tajikistan’s civil war in the early 1990s. Following a peace deal in 1998 he entered government and was appointed head of the state gas company. At the same time, he became leader of the opposition Democratic Party. In 2003 he challenged President Emomali Rahmonov’s attempt to extend presidential term limits. Soon after, he left Tajikistan for Russia. In November 2004 the General Prosecutor’s Office of Tajikistan accused Iskandarov of terrorism and issued a warrant for his arrest. He was promptly detained in Moscow. But the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office turned down an extradition request, and on April 5, 2005, Iskandarov was released.
Two weeks later he disappeared and turned up in a prison in the capital of Tajikistan. According to a letter he managed to smuggle out of prison, Iskandarov had been staying at a friend’s house outside Moscow. On the evening of April 15, he went for a walk with his friend and was met by two people wearing uniforms of the Russian transport police. They handcuffed him and pushed him into a car. After driving 500 meters, they changed cars and brought Iskandarov to a sauna. The next day they drove him to a forest and handed him over to unidentified people, who he surmised were from the Russian security services. The men blindfolded him and then put him on a plane. No announcements were made during the flight, and Iskandarov concluded that he was on a military transport aircraft. On the morning on April 17, he arrived at Dushanbe Airport, where he was met by officials of Tajikistan’s Ministry of Security. In October 2005, he was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.
Iskandarov was delivered to Dushanbe under the false name of Gennady Petrovich Balanin.
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Authorities from the Russian airports told Iskandarov’s lawyers that the surname Balanin was not registered in their databases. This admission indicated that Iskandarov’s passage from Russia had been aided by the FSB, which is responsible for guarding borders and is the agency that maintains border databases. His lawyers registered a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights about Iskandarov’s illegal extradition from Russia. The court in turn sent questions to the Russian authorities asking them to clear up their role in this incident. On September 24, 2005, a Russian official, Georgy Matushkin, responded that the Russian authorities had nothing to do with the abduction of Iskandarov. But this assertion was contradicted by Tajikistan. Borogan obtained a statement from Tajikistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights dated November 24, 2005, that claimed: “The accused Iskandarov was handed over officially to Tajikistan’s side by the security services of the Russian Federation, and on April 17th, 2005, he was put in the investigatory prison of the Ministry of Security of the Republic of Tajikistan.”
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In most cases the Russian secret services turn a blind eye on the Central Asian secret services’ activities on Russian territory, as Iskandarov’s mysterious flight to Dushanbe showed.
But the system of abductions was not yet perfected. It lacked some important elements: a coordination center, a regime of impunity for the secret agents involved in abductions, and legal grounds for transferring the captives. This seemed at odds with Russian law, which maintains an established procedure on formal extradition overseen by the general prosecutor. The new system was an effort to avoid legal extradition entirely.
The broader system was embedded in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an international cooperation group founded in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. With the exception of Uzbekistan, the other countries had been members of the Shanghai Five, founded in 1996. (Uzbekistan joined the organization in June 2001.) The stated purpose of the SCO was the joint struggle against the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. In 2004, a special antiterrorism structure was created within the organization, called the Regional Antiterrorist Structure, or RATS.
Run by an FSB deputy director, the structure held joint exercises and conferences, and at first the project seemed destined for the same irrelevance as the earlier attempts by Russia to dominate the region. But soon the purpose of the organization changed, as did its main beneficiaries, and it began carrying out abductions across national boundaries and outside standard judicial procedures, much like the infamous CIA practice of extraordinary rendition.
Renditions had been instituted in part due to frustration over the long and cumbersome extradition process.
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According to the authors’ information, the RATS spent years creating its own parallel structure that could be used instead of official extraditions.
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As stated in the Shanghai convention on combatting terrorism, separatism, and extremism, cooperation between the special services and enforcing bodies is carried out through direct requests of assistance.
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A request includes the name of an enforcing body, a purpose and justification, and a description of the action required, such as detention or transfer. The request must be signed by the head or deputy head of the relevant authority, such as the local secret service. In urgent cases, requests can be transmitted orally. The Shanghai convention also allows the laws of another country to apply within Russian territory. This is done for cases in which a person is guilty of an act that is a crime in one country, but is not defined as a crime in Russian law. It is convenient, for example, for the Chinese that supporters of Tibetan independence know that they cannot find refuge in Russia, as Russia is required to act in accordance with Chinese law.
Refugee status has been another obstacle for special services wishing to apprehend a citizen from a neighboring country. The members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization agree not to provide safe haven to people involved in terrorist, separatist, or extremist activities, thus anyone listed in the general SCO data bank cannot be given refugee status, despite the fact that extremism and separatism may be interpreted differently in different countries. (For instance, the Russian criminal code does not contain the term “separatism.”)
The FSB, for example, may advise the Russian Immigration Service about a person who is considered unreliable because his preaching displeased Uzbek authorities in the Ferghana Valley. The person in question will be refused refugee status, after which he may be deported from Russia as an illegal immigrant.
That is what happened to Dilshot Kurbanov, an ethnic Uzbek who moved to Russia in 2002 to avoid an investigation related to his membership in an Islamic organization. He was simply a believer, not an extremist, but had decided to get out of harm’s way. In 2007 Kurbanov was detained in Russia at Uzbekistan’s request and accused of spreading religious extremism. Only an intervention from the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg prevented his extradition.
Activist Yelena Ryabinina holds the FSB responsible for denying Kurbanov refugee status. According to Ryabinina, the head of the security service in the Russian city of Tula had sent a letter to the federal immigration authorities instructing them to reject it. The letter, obtained by the authors, referred to documents sent from Uzbekistan alleging that Kurbanov was guilty of various crimes including “using the Islamic religion to disturb the peace.” Although no evidence was submitted, the Immigration Service refused refugee status to Kurbanov.
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To increase the new system’s scope, the RATS created a database from two sources: the list of terrorist, separatist, and extremist organizations whose activity was forbidden in territories of the member states; and the list of individuals declared by member states’ special services and law enforcement bodies to be involved in, or suspected of involvement in, terrorist, separatist, and extremist crimes.
To improve the RATS’s ability to detain suspects in the six states, it was necessary to give guarantees of absolute protection to executing officers. The SCO’s Convention on Privileges and Immunities, ratified by Russia in 2005, gave the representatives of the organization the equivalent of diplomatic status. They are not subject to criminal liability for any actions committed in the course of their duty, and they are immune from arrest and detention. The same unlimited immunity applies to the RATS “experts,” secret service officers from any member country who are attached to the RATS for the time of their mission. Experts are shielded from arrest during and after their business trips, and, notably, their luggage cannot be searched.
RATS buildings are also shielded. The convention states that no one can enter any RATS premises without the consent of its director. The RATS property also has immunity from any interference, regardless of location.
The Russian special services have not had the same problems the CIA encountered with leaks to the press about renditions. In the RATS’s case, no one will say anything at all. For example, human rights activists were refused information concerning the way Alisher Usmanov was taken to Uzbekistan or how Iskandarov was taken to Tajikistan. It is not known how many people have been seized and transferred to another country under the RATS system.
By 2008 the guidelines for the RATS were largely established, the system was fully operational, and it was quite clear that the other countries benefited more than Russia did. It appears Russia routinely shipped people off to other countries but received none of the people it sought from them. According to FSB reports, in the 2000s there were almost no Russian detentions in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, or China, and no suspect in a terrorism or extremism case had been extradited to Russia from Uzbekistan.
But the system has proved quite profitable for Uzbekistan and China: Uighurs tend to flee to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, while Uzbeks more often flee to Russia and Tajikistan. In 2006 the Uzbeks handed over to China a Uighur imam with Chinese and Canadian citizenship, Huseyincan Celil.
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In turn FSB director Patrushev reported at a routine RATS meeting in March 2006 that Russia had handed over nineteen people suspected of membership in Hizb-ut-Tahrir to Uzbekistan.
According to information from Yelena Ryabinina, in 2007 Russia began to deport Chinese members of Falun Gong, a movement banned in China in 1999 as an organized political group “opposed to the Communist Party of China and the central government, that preaches idealism, theism, and feudal superstition.”
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On March 28, 2007, Falun Gong member Ma Hui, 44, and her daughter, 8, were deported to China even though Hui was recognized as a “mandated refugee” by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. On May 13, Gao Chuman, another Falun Gong supporter, was brought to China. That practice has continued.
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In 2003 the RATS’s headquarters was moved from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. In 2005 Russia put the Hizb-ut-Tahrir party, which is recognized as legal in Europe and the United States, on its national list of terrorist organizations, at the request of Uzbekistan.
In 2008 the FSB presented another gift to Karimov: Uzbekistan’s enemies were deemed a threat to Russian national security. At a meeting with heads of antiterrorist commissions in the Ural Federal District in Khanty-Mansiysk in April 2008,
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FSB director Patrushev declared: “The international terrorist organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) have made attempts to spread their activity to Russia.”
As of 2009, there was no record of IMU activities in Russia. The movement’s leader, Tahir Yuldashev (reportedly killed in a U.S. strike in South Naziristan in August 2009), has threatened to kill the presidents of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, but not the president of Russia.