Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Kaleidoscope
COUNTRY:
Russia
PERSON: Sergei Kovalyov
HEADLINE: Biographies
The former head of a parliamentary human rights committee, Sergei A. Kovalyov
made headlines at the end of 1994 for his outspoken criticism of the Russian
invasion of Chechnya. He suffered a serious heart attack after the reelection
of President Boris Yeltsin in July 1996.
A
biologist by profession, Kovalyov earned a reputation in the Soviet era as a
political dissident and was sent to a labor camp after being arrested in 1975
for publicizing the cases of human rights prisoners. After his release in 1987,
his friend Andrei Sakharov
persuaded him to run for political office in 1991 and he won a seat in the
legislature that year as a member of the prodemocratic Russia's Choice party.
He was reelected in 1993 and renewed his advocacy of human rights in the wake
of the surprise showing of the extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.
Kovalyov reported on the effects of Russia's military operation in the
secessionist Chechen territory shortly after it began. His condemnation of the
widespread bombing of the capital, Grozny, and the deaths of innocent civilians
during the first several weeks of the war helped bring international scrutiny,
and ultimately censure, to the war.
Kovalyov held a private meeting with President Boris Yeltsin in the first week
of January 1994 and persuaded him to call the first of many largely unheeded
cease-fires in the bombing raids against the Chechen republic. Kovalyov vowed
to monitor the war until its end from an outpost
in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. In 1995 State Duma nationalists
revoked Kovalyov's human rights commission.
In January 1996 Kovalyov resigned as head of Yeltsin's human rights
commission, criticizing the president in a newspaper article for a shift to
authoritarianism.
"You began
your career as a forceful and energetic crusader against official deceit and
party disposition but you are ending it as the obedient executor of the will of
the power-seekers in your entourage," Kovalyov wrote.
[Source: The New York Times]
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
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1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
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