Prosecutors Report a Drop in Hazing Crimes in 2006
Crime was in decline in the Russian army in 2006, military prosecutors said Thursday. The achievement was made possible thanks to joint efforts of the prosecutors and military commanders, the prosecutor’s office comments. The good crime statistics are probably used to show the positive result of the truce between the army and the prosecutors, experts believe.
The number of crimes in the Russian army fell 2.1 percent in 2006, compared to 2005, Chief Military Prosecutor Sergey Fridinsky said Thursday. The number of murders went down by 18.8 percent, and the number of those died of hazing halved, the prosecutors reported.
Sergey Fridinsky accounts the good statistics for “joint actions of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office and military headquarters”, referring to a recent truce between the prosecutors and the Defense Ministry. The two agencies spent the year 2005 at war as then Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov was accusing the military of overlooking hazing crimes and the Defense Military criticized the prosecutors for beginning a “witch-hunt”. The conflict ended with the death of Private Andrey Sychev.
After top officials at the Prosecutor’s Office were dismissed last summer, the two agencies reconciled and started reporting new methods they use to eradicate violence in the army.
“No one would venture to say that the crimes were underreported,” Alexey Sigutkin, deputy head of the Duma’s Defense Committee, told Kommersant. “The two agencies used to spend too much time wrangling. Now they can use this time to solve real problems.”
Valentina Melnikova, head of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers NGO, is glad that human rights defenders now have access to the work of military prosecutors. She reminds, though, that the new statistics with fewer crimes only reflect a drop in the number of service men.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 26, 2007
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