Human Rights in Chechnya….The art of mimicry – Kavkazcenter.com
But it was all a fiction, a kind of mimicry. The Ombudsman and his staff didn’t really do much about anything at all, whether it was the sites of mass graves, about which they had also previously issued a great many statements, or female prisoners, or Yuri Budanov. Other initiatives also ran into the sand and vanished as though they had never existed. In particular, the transfer of Chechen prisoners who were being held in camps in various parts of Russia to places closer to their homeland …
One problematic area was, however, clarified: the independent Chechen human rights groups of which there had once been so many now lined themselves up in a single pro-government formation. These groups began to attack the ones that remained, those – like Memorial — which had kept their independence and continued to talk about the crimes that were being committed in Chechnya. Our website was suddenly declared more or less hostile, and all our activities were said to be aimed at undermining Russia.
In animals, mimicry is a defensive reaction of the organism. In human beings it is nearly always deception, and is usually followed by aggression, as in the case I have just described.
