САХАЛИНСКИЕ ПИСЬМА
N66 от 1 марта 2000 г.

Wednesday, March 1, 2000 Prosecutors Are Looking Into Greens Nationwide By Simon Saradzhyan Staff Writer.

The Prosecutor General's Office has ordered its investigators to look into environmental groups across the nation, in what ecology activists say is an attempt to hinder their work.

Groups being audited include Zelyony Mir, which has offered critical eports over the years of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, or LAES; the Ariston Fund, which keeps an unofficial eye on Karelia's Nadvoitsk Aluminum Plant; and Ecological Watch of Sakhalin, which has reported on the dumping of industrial waste in the Sea of Okhotsk.

Officials at the Prosecutor General's Office confirmed Monday that they have ordered a nationwide check into ecological organizations.

Yelena Ushakova, who oversees ecological organizations for the prosecutor's office, said the audits were planned last year and now are being carried out.

In a telephone interview Monday, she denied that the aim was to curtail environmental activism. But she would not explain the logic behind the audits.

Zelyony Mir's chief, Oleg Bodrov, said in a telephone interview Monday that he understands the logic already: "to gag ecological movements." Noting the spectacularly failed efforts to convict as traitors the environmentalists Alexander Nikitin and Grigory Pasko - who both documented navy negligence with nuclear waste - Bodrov said, "Now they are trying a different method to see what works best."

Zelyony Mir is located, along with the LAES nuclear power plant, in the village of Sosnovy Bor, 80 kilometers outside St. Petersburg. Sosnovy Bor prosecutors last week audited the group's founding documents; this week they are going through the accounting books. Bodrov said the local tax inspectorate is also separately auditing those books, even though Zelyony Mir employs just three people.

Taisia Astafyeva, an aide to the Sosnovy Bor prosecutor, confirmed that in a telephone interview Monday.

She said prosecutors were simply following orders from the higher-ups in the Leningrad region to check into local ecological organizations. Astafyeva could not explain what they were supposed to be looking for, or why.

The prosecutor's office of the Leningrad region began investigating local greens last December, and will continue doing so into March, said an official there who oversees ecological organizations.

The official, who asked not to be named, would not explain why. In neighboring Karelia, similar stories are unfolding with the Ariston Fund, which has filed lawsuits accusing the Nadvoitsk aluminum plant of contaminating nearby reservoirs and poisoning dozens of locals.

Ariston's chief, Andrei Kozlovich, said in a telephone interview Tuesday that prosecutor's have brought two court cases against his group - one accusing Ariston of undermining Karelia's economy by attacking the aluminum plant, the other accusing Kozlovich of violating his fund's founding charter.

Kozlovich said a court in Petrozavodsk threw both cases out late last year.

According to the Moscow offices of Greenpeace, prosecutors are investigating Ecological Watch of Sakhalin. Activists at the group this week did not answer telephone calls or respond to fax or e-mail messages. Greenpeace spokesman Yevgeny Usov said his office has not been visited by prosecutors, adding, "but we would not be surprised to see them."