The U.S. government should be applauded for quietly granting political asylum to seven Russian citizens from the Republic of Kalmykia who say they have been persecuted by that region's chief executive, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
Ilyumzhinov was elected head of Kalmykia in 1993 as the result of a campaign in which the already wealthy 32-year-old handed out $100 bills to voters. Under his five-year rule, Kalmykia has become one of the most thuggishly evil regions of the former Soviet Union.
While corruption sucks up state money and ordinary people go without pay owed them by the government, Ilyumzhinov lives a luxurious and free-spending lifestyle. He has built a palatial headquarters for his government f he is, after all, "president" of this provincial backwater f and money that could have been used for the community he instead has sunk into his weird obsession with chess. Ilyumzhinov is head of the World Chess Federation, FIDE, and the capital, Elitsa, has twice hosted the Chess Olympiad.
Despite calls from human rights activists ranging from Helsinki Watch to Russia's own Sergei Kovalyov, Elitsa is again hosting American, European and Russian chess teams at Chess City, a sparkling new suburb of American-style homes built solely for the Chess Olympiad.
Chess City looks wonderful. But outside that suburb, the rule in Kalmykia is fear and poverty. And those who have dared peer into the murky funding of Chess City have been murdered or repressed. This summer, Larisa Yudina, the editor of the oppositionist newspaper Sovietskaya Kalmykia, was found stabbed to death. President Boris Yeltsin denounced the murder as politically motivated and ordered a federally-run investigation.
Friends of Yudina who had also spoken out against Ilyumzhinov were beaten or confined to a psychiatric hospital. When they sought protection from federal authorities in Moscow, they were turned away with the Kafkaesque argument that there are no human rights violations in Kalmykia. One wonders if those officials noticed President Yeltsin's interpretation of Yudina's murder.
There are dozens of national teams competing in the Chess Olympiad in Elitsa. None of them should be there. They should have heeded calls from Kovalyov and others to boycott the match. The least they can do now is to pack up, leave and boycott future events as long as Ilyumzhinov is head of FIDE.
President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov also have a role to play here. Both have talked in recent days of creating a legal mechanism to remove criminal, out-of-control regional leaders. In a packed field, Ilyumzhinov is the nation's leading candidate for such treatment.