Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Tuesday evening with representatives of 48 NGOs, most of them pro-Kremlin or all but unknown. The most vocal and internationally respected Russian organizations, such as Memorial, For Human Rights and the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, were not invited.

The meeting was perceived as a first step toward raising the profile of NGOs that could support the Kremlin.

"The government is trying to create twin organizations of NGOs," said Valentina Melnikova, the national director of the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers. "These organizations will serve as a screen for hiding criticism from other, more vocal NGOs."

Lev Ponomaryov, the head of For Human Rights, said the country was "going back to Soviet times, when pro-government organizations would go to the West and say that everything was fine in the Soviet Union and that they should not believe stories about political dissidents.

"The situation is exactly the same," he said.

Alexander Petrov, deputy head of the Moscow office of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the organizations dealing with serious human rights problems are "who really need to meet with representatives of the Kremlin, but Lavrov met only those convenient for him to meet."

Lavrov told those attending Tuesday's meeting that the Foreign Ministry wanted to form a common front with Russian NGOs at organizations such as the United Nations and Council of Europe.

"We highly value the civic potential of nongovernmental organizations, and we think they can promote Russian interests in the economic and social sphere, they can help promote Russian culture and language abroad, and on the whole help create a positive image of Russia outside of the country," Lavrov said, after a two-hour meeting at the Foreign Ministry's mansion.

Among the notable political figures present were Sergei Markov and Gleb Pavlovsky, who head think tanks and are close to the Kremlin, and State Duma Deputy Gennady Seleznyov, who heads a previously unknown organization called the Interparliamentary Council of NGOs.

Also in attendance was Aleftina Fedulova, a former Duma deputy who heads the Union of Russian Women, an umbrella group founded in 1990 and comprising hundreds of women's organizations nationwide.

"It is important that a member of the government was interested in meeting civic organizations," Fedulova said. "We spoke with him [Lavrov] about our problems and we agreed to meet again."

Fedulova is a former leader of the Women of Russia party, which secured 8 percent of the vote in the 1993 Duma elections, winning 22 seats. But in 1995 and 1999, the party failed to clear the 5 percent barrier needed to get into the Duma. In the last elections, in December, Fedulova said her group backed the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.

Most of the organizations that took part in Tuesday's meeting are unknown to human rights activists, and those that are known tend to have roots in Soviet times. For example, one of the participants, the Federation of Peace and Agreement, is the successor to the Soviet Committee for Peace Defense, founded in 1949. It was members of this group who traveled to the West in the early perestroika years, in 1986 and 1987, to speak about improvements in human rights. The organization is now involved in the vague task of defending peace in the world, according to its web site.

The unknown Civil Society Academy and Association for Social Partnership and a bunch of regional organizations were some of the other participants.

Markov, director of the Institute for Political Studies and often considered a mouthpiece for Kremlin views, said outspoken NGOs were not invited because "the minister wanted to talk with friendly organizations." More critical organizations might be invited to future meetings, he said.

Markov said the Kremlin's task is simple: to correct the image of Russia abroad.

"Often people who come to Russia from the West have the idea that the country is worse than it is," he said. "The president assigned the task of correcting that image and the Foreign Ministry is fulfilling it."

Political analysts like him and image-makers like Pavlovsky will consult with the Kremlin on how to achieve this goal, Markov said. The Foreign Ministry will help with contacts with the West and ease visa procedures for Western NGOs willing to work with Russian NGOs that have the Kremlin's seal of approval.

Independent NGOs have been worried that the government would take steps to restrict their activities and access to funding ever since President Vladimir Putin's state of the nation address last month, in which he accused some NGOs of serving the "interests of dubious groups and commercial interests."

Lavrov's meeting was perceived as a consequence of Putin's speech.

When the Kremlin has its loyal NGOs in place, Ponomaryov said, "the president is likely to say that there are good organizations that get Russian financing and they back its policy, but he is likely also to say that there are bad organizations getting Western funds and they need to be closed."

Markov confirmed that the Kremlin believes there are organizations financed from the West for a "specific political aim, set by those who give the money," and their aim is to spoil Russia's image abroad.

Human rights activists understood Putin's statement about NGOs as announcing the next stage of his establishment of so-called managed democracy, where every branch of government has been placed under Kremlin control and opposition voices have largely been silenced.

Representatives of NGOs remain some of the Kremlin's most vocal critics, as they continue to publicize human rights abuses in Chechnya and question the case against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, two issues about which Putin is known to be sensitive.

Last week, human rights activists raised concerns about a reported agreement between human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin and Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin to boost cooperation between police and human rights groups.

The Interior Ministry plans to assign police officers to each group with the task of "immediately reacting to citizens' complaints and their appeals to rights activists involving the work of the police," Chekalin said, Gazeta reported last Friday.

Yelena Bonner, widow of Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, called the initiative another step back to the Soviet Union.

"The situation will be similar to that of the Soviet times, when we had the so-called commissars to check on people," Bonner said, speaking from Boston.

Calls to Lukin's office seeking comment went unanswered Thursday.

Ponomaryov, Petrov and Melnikova said they are worried about Lukin's plan, but they trust him and hope it will result in better contacts with the police. All three complained that the most difficult part of their job is dealing with the Interior Ministry.

"We never get an answer to letters we write," Petrov said. "It would be nice to have a person [at the Interior Ministry] to call when we need their help."

A co-founder and co-leader of the liberal Yabloko party, Lukin was appointed ombudsman in February. At the time, human rights activists tempered their optimism by saying they feared that Lukin, a former ambassador to the United States, would be too diplomatic and do little more than pay lip service to their concerns.

But Ponomaryov and Melnikova said Lukin was doing a good job and was establishing contacts.

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Moscow Times, June 25, 2004