WUNRN
OSCE - Organization for Security
& Co-Operation in Europe - http://www.osce.org/fom/118144
OSCE
media freedom representative denounces continuing attacks, kidnappings, of
journalists, forced switching of TV channels in Ukraine conflict areas - 29
April 2014.
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Website Link Includes Video.
UKRAINE - WOMAN JOURNALIST &
ACTIVIST FROM KIEV, IRMA KRAT, HELD CAPTIVE IN EAST UKRAINE
'I
came over here to give voice to people who have not been heard'
She
was led in wearing rather unlikely prison clothing: a pale fashionable
coat and vivid red shoes, a tiny figure with a burly man in a balaclava holding
each arm. One of them unwrapped the black and white check scarf around her
face, leaving Irma Krat blinking in the sunlight, looking momentarily lost.
But the young woman whose detention by the separatists in eastern Ukraine
has turned into a cause célèbre tried hard to gain composure, protesting her
innocence of the accusations against her. They ranged from taking part in the
torture of a journalist, to belonging to an extremist right-wing group, to
having an outdated press card.
Ms Krat is one of many. The pro-Moscow groups who have taken
over state institutions in a swathe of cities and towns in the region have been
responsible for holding a growing number of detainees. Vyacheslav Ponomaryov,
the newly-installed mayor of Slovyansk, had no hesitation confirming this at
the weekend, stating: “We have captured some spies, infiltrators. Right now,
we’re working them over: they are being held in captivity.”
A few of the captives have been released after pressure from
human rights groups. Friends of Ms Kart are approaching international
organizations for help. One of them, Oleg Veremeenko, a lawyer in Kiev, said:
“She was crazy to go there [to the east]. But I couldn’t talk her out of
it”. He is among a group now knocking on doors to get her released.
But Ms Krat is regarded as a valuable asset by her captors, not
least in the propaganda war. The 29-year-old woman is a journalist and an
activist; not just an activist but one of the few women to serve with militia
groups in the Maidan, the centre of protest in Kiev which overthrew the
government of Viktor Yanukovych. In particular, it has been claimed, she was
linked to the Patriots of Ukraine, ultra-nationalists regarded as bedfellows of
the Right Sector, regularly attacked as Nazis in this area.
Ms Krat arrived in the east from Kiev at the start of the Easter
weekend, posting Facebook messages from the city of Kramatorsk where Ukrainian
troops, sent on an anti-terrorist mission to retake government buildings seized
by protestors, have taken refuge at the airport after having their own armoured
personnel carriers seized.
On Sunday, she arrived at next-door Slovyansk; it was a bad
place to be at a wrong time. The city has become a formidable bastion for the
militant movement, its police station occupied by some of the best trained and
best armed fighters among the secessionists; many of them former soldiers and
police officers. Furthermore, just hours earlier, there had been an attack on a
checkpoint, with Right Sector blamed for three killings.
Tension was high in the aftermath, with snarling militiamen accusing foreign journalists of being spies. Ms Kart was recognized and swiftly arrested. Her Facebook page shows her with men with armbands which looked like the Wolfsangel, an emblem favoured by the extreme right. In any event she had been vocal and prominent as a leader of the Womens’ 100 organisation which guarded protests camps in the Maidan.