While GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio keeps going on about the wrongness of the Obama administration’s restoration of ties with Cuba, to be consistent, he should also say something about our ties with Russia, (for starters) given his concern with human rights.
A 2014 Human Rights Watch report details numerous violations that run the gamut, from enforcement of a “foreign agents” law that led to an unprecedented inspection of hundreds of nongovernmental organization, to the adoption of laws restricting LGBT rights, and freedom of expression and infringing on the right to privacy. The report says that the violations are an extension of the crackdown on civil society and government critics that began in 2012. Other abuses are linked to the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, wherein authorities continued to intimidate and harass organizations, individuals and journalists who criticized the local government in the Black Sea city of Sochi.
President Vladimir V. Putin hogged international headlines last year with the seizure of Crimea, and the ongoing Ukrainian crisis. This led President Obama and other Western leaders to kick Russia from the Group of 8 economic powers and impose harsh sanctions. But this month, Secretary of State John Kerry was back in Russia, in Sochi specifically, which The New York Times reported “was widely interpreted here as a signal of surrender by the Americans — an olive branch from President Obama, and an acknowledgment that Russia and its leader are simply too important to ignore.”
They may indeed be “too important” to ignore, but that’s more because no one knows what “they” will do next, to other countries, or their own people. Americans need to keep in mind who our government is doing business with, and determine for themselves whether Putin is more important than Russian citizens.
Russia has long been obsessed with “foreign agents,” spying on and imprisoning its own people, etc. If such actions seem de rigueur for Russia, and therefore ho hum, consider another bone-chilling abuse reported by Human Rights Watch: Cancer patients are committing suicide in high numbers, most likely because they don’t have access to painkillers.
Think of that: Dying of cancer without any pain medication. That is brutal, torturous. The Human Rights Watch report says that a 2013 government decree “somewhat eased patients” access to narcotic pain medications. However, “implementation is problematic.” USA Today reported, citing Russian media, that at least 10 cancer patients committed suicide in February in Moscow alone. That’s out of a total of 70 suicides in the city that month.
It’s hard to fathom that people could be suffering from cancer and not have pain relief. Here at home, 44 people a day die from overdose of prescription painkillers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Most are not cancer patients.) And each day, almost 7,000 people are treated in emergency departments for using these drugs in a manner other than as directed.
While Kerry went to Russia with an olive branch, he also “made clear our deep concerns,” including Russia’s “continued arming, training, command and control of separatist forces,” the New York Times reported.
It would be appropriate to add those deep concerns: Russia’s lack of treatment for suffering cancer patients.
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