Translated material
#Kind Camp of volunteers in the fight against the Kremlin organized crime group
Since July 7, Moscow and the whole of Russia fell into an information vacuum - at that time, Krymsk was drowning from water that came from nowhere, and on TV and in the print media throughout the country they said that this was a slight flooding of the city and nearby villages from a very heavy rain... While the governor of the Krasnodar Territory Tkachev, famous for the periodic hundreds of deaths in the territories entrusted to him, from floods in 2002 and 2010 and the massacre in the village of Kushchevskaya, wrote on his Twitter about the flooding of Gelendzhik and posted photos - at that time people came from Moscow and other Russian cities the first volunteers to help victims in the Crimean region.
The first volunteers to arrive in the disaster zone came from Moscow. Gathering at the Moscow club “Zavtra”, a group of friends learned about the devastating flood that had occurred in the Krasnodar region, canceled the party and began to think about how to most effectively help the victims. Having decided to gather at 10 o’clock on Sunday at the observation deck on Vorobyovy Gory opposite the Moscow State University building, they began to decide how to get to Krymsk with humanitarian aid. Information about the gathering place, published on social networks and Twitter, spread instantly. People began to come and bring humanitarian aid, offering their assistance in delivering volunteers to the disaster site. The question arose about how to transport the goods - volunteers were found with cars, and in the evening the first vanguard group of volunteers went to the site of the flooding in a bus .
At 4 o'clock in the morning, a bus, a motor home and several cars filled to the ceiling with humanitarian aid left Moscow and 22 hours later arrived at the epicenter of the disaster. On the same night, help was sent by the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which arrived in the village of Nizhnebakanskaya, which took the first blow of the destructive elements.
The first thing the volunteers saw at night was the darkness hanging over the area, as there was no electricity in the entire area. Upon arrival at the camp site, 9 tents were deployed, in which a group of 28 people settled. And at 8 am they all set off for the first work to eliminate the consequences of the violence of the elements.
At first, the volunteers were commanded by the local administration, coordinating the actions of the Krasnodar rescuers from Kuban-Spas, to which the volunteers were attached. But as practice has shown, the administration was incompetent and completely disintegrated. She sent the guys to places where there was virtually no work. There they simply wasted precious time. Also, local authorities made every effort to prevent visitors from seeing the scale of the destruction. The volunteers, realizing this, decided to act independently and began to independently organize rescue teams to search for missing people, clear away rubble and deliver humanitarian aid to the victims directly - bypassing the clumsy bureaucratic apparatus and the arbitrariness of the local authorities - which prevents them from acting productively and taking the necessary measures as quickly as possible. key decisions. Having coordinated and divided into teams consisting of 10 people each, volunteers began to provide targeted assistance to every home and person, bypassing official nuances.
From the very first days to the present day, the removal of rubble, the clearing of surviving houses from silt, the search for the bodies of dead people and animals, and the delivery of humanitarian aid to addresses have continued. For the first time, the days of the Ministry of Emergency Situations helped volunteers and residents by doing their work. But they could only be found on the main streets of the city, leaving many small alleys unexplored, since there was not enough strength. They had no normal maps of the area, they didn’t even have enough ordinary rubber boots, or everything that was required to clear the rubble and help the residents. They used maps that did not show house addresses. The volunteers did this work themselves - they found and printed out detailed maps of the area and the city, and also provided them with all the missing things.
Volunteers organized targeted assistance and collected contact details of residents with a list of necessary work to clear the area of rubble and deliver humanitarian supplies. They sent an equipped work team to thousands of collected addresses, which worked until the work was completed in each individual house. In three weeks, #KindVolunteerCamp processed more than five thousand applications from local residents.
A week later, military personnel began to appear in Krymsk. For the first time, the military were engaged in drill training, arranging their lives and practically did not leave their camp. Most of the soldiers were not motivated to do anything, but there were also proactive soldiers who came up and asked for a specific job. But here, too, a problem arose - the soldiers were not given either gloves or respirators to clear the rubble, and they had to turn to volunteers for help. The troops of the Ministry of Emergency Situations worked the most. Despite the fact that the regional press writes that already on the same day a local military unit was brought in, its help was not tangible, since, according to local residents, there is a catastrophic shortage of workers. After the official statement of Putin, who came for the second time, the number of troops was increased to 5,500 people and 300 units of equipment. After this, the soldiers began to march in formation to clear the rubble and clean the streets, and their work became noticeable everywhere. Also in Krymsk and Nizhnebakanskaya, a special forces medical detachment of the Southern Military District and detachments of the North Caucasus Regional Command are currently involved in eliminating the consequences of the emergency.
The warehouse with humanitarian aid collected at the observation deck in Moscow and distributed from it in Krymsk is under the protection of the volunteer camp #GoodCamp - the largest, effectively structured and voluntary formation, which accepted more than 1000 people into its ranks during two weeks of deployment on Kommunisticheskaya Street . Food, medicine, personal hygiene products, cleaning supplies, clothing, cots and much more were sorted into individual aid packages and distributed to the victims. The #GoodCamp partly consists of activists from Russian protest movements and the open-ended protest of Moscow squares and boulevards #OccupyAbai. There is also an organization of yogis and volunteer psychologists, curated by Natalya Vodianova, located in the coordination center, Liza Alert - a volunteer organization for searching for missing people, as well as activists of the White Ribbon movement, the Left Front and the Russian Socialist Movement (RSM) . From time to time, even Nashists, activists of the pro-Putin Nashi movement, helped our Good Camp. It is worth noting an important point that despite the different political views of the volunteers, they all worked hand in hand and acted as a single team, without promoting the position of their political organization. In the village of Nizhnebakanskaya there is a fragment of our camp - in general, these are activists of the St. Petersburg protest camp Occupy with #Isaakievskaya. There are about 150 of them and #GoodCamp coordinates its work with them.
In Nizhnebakanskaya, volunteers also organized targeted assistance in homes. Through the efforts of the former head of social services, a local resident, and drivers who brought humanitarian aid in cars, which was delivered to the residents of “Bakanka” in every home. This is a direct and bold challenge to the authorities, both Putin and Tkachev. Especially Tkachev, who said that the administration and those responsible for notification are not going to visit every house, both before and after the incident. Volunteers have proven through their work that they are ready to come to everyone with help and find an individual approach, dismantle the rubble and clean the house with their own hands, and with tools purchased with money collected from donations from ordinary citizens of the Russian Federation. And what’s more, they helped even in the most terrible of all work: searching for missing people and collecting the bodies of the dead, which for the first time during the days of the Ministry of Emergency Situations were simply left on the street. Neither Tkachev nor Putin ever entered the damaged house!
According to representatives of local authorities and official media, the population does not need humanitarian assistance. The authorities, represented by Nepotoplyaemy and Obeschalkin, naively believe that all the victims received this meager compensation and will be able to buy the necessary things in stores, and therefore they are trying with all their might to curtail the distribution of humanitarian aid and volunteer camps. And this has already been done. Several camps were closed under the pretext of a single location for volunteers in Krymsk. The camp is constantly visited with inspections from Rospotrebnadzor and Gennady Onishchenko personally, to determine compliance with nutrition and food preparation standards. Also, several times local law enforcement officers tried to illegally carry out a census of the passport data of volunteers, citing a mythical article of the police law. In the second week of work in many volunteer camps, warehouses stopped working at full capacity and trucks that arrive there can no longer be accepted for unloading. This situation arose because the authorities spread misinformation that the victims no longer needed absolutely anything. But our #GoodCamp continues to accept and distribute humanitarian aid, as well as fight against the arbitrariness of the authorities. With its work, #GoodCamp bursts the information bubble that is propagated in the federal media about the “wonderful” life of the drowned people. Humanitarian cargo continues to be transported from Moscow and other cities, although the official site on Smotrovaya is no longer a collection point for aid.
Not only the administration, but also city social and public organizations refuse to fulfill their direct responsibilities. In the central city hospital of the city of Krymsk, all loaders were dismissed in order to use free volunteer labor. Women workers at this hospital are forced to unload incoming medical equipment, medicines and baby food themselves. This is not the only case. The local hotel where the drowning survivors were accommodated partially dismissed the service staff, telling the people checking in that volunteers would now perform the maid function.
The local government created a Public Control Committee to monitor humanitarian aid, cleaning houses and paying compensation, but this organization, by joining Putin’s All-Russian Popular Front, provided access to direct control by United Russia of the work of volunteers. The administration, even without Putin’s control, controls the incoming humanitarian aid to the population - with warehouses filled with: cots, household appliances, shovels, buckets and much more, in the hope of laundering money from the budget according to the standard cut scheme, they do not give anything to those in need - they “feed them breakfast”, or throw them away people receive crumbs, citing humanitarian aid from volunteers. What else can we say about the ruling party sticking its symbols on humanitarian aid? How much longer will the administration profit from the misfortune of people?!
All this bacchanalia reminds us of the future law on the officialization of volunteerism and the conclusion of a “volunteer” agreement to place all voluntary organizations under state control. Upon arrival home from the #GoodCamp, volunteers will face a struggle against the adoption of this law, which will also not be a good word for the president and his party. We must fight for our right to voluntarily and free of charge help all those whom our state, which has the loud name of the Russian Federation, does not want to help and cannot justify the assigned responsibility to protect its citizens.
The administration and Tkachev himself, still acting governor, believe that the population has received the promised initial cash payments, and they are able to use this money to buy basic necessities in stores. It seems that the unsinkable governor decided to include local residents in the Guinness Book of Records - since for these meager pennies (even 10 thousand have not yet been paid to everyone!) the victims must build a new house and arrange their life from scratch. As usual, according to the old tradition in our country, citizens were left alone with their problems, left to the mercy of fate... Perhaps the local government structures are completely unaware of the difficulties faced by the notorious Russian bureaucratic red tape - certificates, copies of certificates, documents, copies of documents, certificates of documents - faced by residents affected by the disaster, especially mothers with children and old people who have lost everything.
The state not only does not want to help, but also personally kills its citizens. Information about the flooding of the Crimean region was received and transmitted to the regional administration and the Ministry of Emergency Situations by the Roshydromet organization , which monitors and forecasts adverse natural phenomena, on July 3. The Ministry of Emergency Situations posted this information on its website , and on July 6, having received a confirmed forecast , it did not fulfill one of its functions - informing the population about predicted and occurring emergency situations. But it is worth noting that on July 6, Rostov EMERCOM troops arrived in Krymsk in advance (!). They were placed on the highest point in the city, without telling them why they had come here. Only the next morning, July 7, they received orders to begin search and rescue operations and liquidation of the consequences of the flood. This shows that there was no warning system in Krymsk. The entire civil defense system in Russia is based on the Soviet legacy, but the USSR has been gone for 20 years now, all of this not only collapsed, but also completely ceased to function.
Local residents are under pressure from the prosecutor's office of the Krasnodar region. Victims are forced to sign documents to give false testimony - for example, about informing the population and the sound of the siren. Thus, silencing the primary source of information. Also, the contractor who built houses in Krymsk for military families, whose apartments were taken away in favor of flood victims, has still not been paid by the state for the construction and finishing work performed.
The authorities' shortsightedness is striking in its scale. The garbage that the destructive wave left behind is now transported day and night by Kamaz trucks of the Chechesky Avtodor outside the city - to a landfill 10 kilometers from Krymsk. Environmental organizations claim that there were no measures to equip the quarry. But most importantly, this landfill is located in a water protection zone where groundwater flows; there is a danger that it will soon be polluted by waste and infectious bacteria. The authorities, knowing what they are doing, are preparing a new emergency situation that will develop into an environmental disaster for the entire Krasnodar region.
Not only the disinterest of the authorities, but also the Cerberus of capitalism - the banks - did not heed the trouble. Ignoring requests from Rospotrebnadzor to forgive residents of Krymsk their debts on loans, for example, for sunken vehicles, state banks - Sberbank of Russia and VTB-24 - are also profiting from grief by providing only a deferment for loan repayments. According to Article 416 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, banking and creditor structures are obliged to write off all debts to those affected by a natural disaster. In our country there is such a tradition; laws and articles of the codes of the Russian Federation are not binding on those who have any power. Although laws should be for the people, not for kings.
The only local independent media in the city of Krymsk - newspaper, television and radio "Electron" - has always boldly covered all the details of events and the arbitrariness of local authorities, telling people only the truth, including in the first days after the flood. In the office of the independent radio station "Electron FM", after reporting one of the causes of the flood - discharge from a reservoir - the lights were first turned off for unknown reasons, and the radio station operated for some time from a generator on a low-power radio transmitter. And a few days later the prosecutor’s office came to them. The unsinkable Tkachev wants with all his might to sink the only media outlet accurately covering the events in Krymsk. The work of the Elektron TV and radio company was highly appreciated by Russian and foreign television and radio companies and newspapers, whose representatives, arriving in Krymsk, collaborated with the Elektron television and radio company. And this is not the only problem of the Russian media - only on July 10-11, information that was closest to the truth began to appear on the Internet, only then did a breakthrough begin in the official information vacuum on the emergency situation in Krymsk. Not only articles were deleted, but also pages of social network users, for example the VKontakte group for helping victims, who had the courage to tell the truth. In addition, “Electron” not only broadcast and printed its newspaper with information on the flood in Krymsk that did not correspond to the official version of the authorities, but also coordinated the work of volunteers in the emergency zone in real time. Now the authorities want to shut down independent media , citing the fact that they take on more airtime, blocking federal channels.
There is a danger of closing the city of Krymsk to the entrance of volunteers, the entry into the city of troops is also connected with these, a refusal to organize the delivery of volunteers from Moscow, including airplanes, perhaps the airline was put the pressure of power structures, after which the airlines stopped sending volunteers. If those who give statements that the help of volunteers would not be required, would go into the houses of residents now, who are still littered with rubbish and garbage interspersed with silt and saw under what kind of rank -and -file summarized soldiers work, they would think before saying The refusal to provide volunteer assistance, of course, if they still have a drop of common sense and conscience.
The most important thing for volunteers is now to maintain the experience of organizing volunteer work and assistance to the population. To see today's mistakes, which are many to exclude them when such work will be needed again. On the eve of the autumn attack of the attack of lawmaking from the bandits who seized power in the Kremlin and the State Duma, volunteers should, in response to the law on volunteers, build their alternative organization, acting on an ongoing basis - such as the Russian Union of Rescuers (SOS) and operating on a voluntary basis, and The main thing preserves its independence from power structures and state capital.
The price of the cut of folk money and natural wealth unsinkable and the absolute disinterest of Warm - human sacrifices, whose account is hundreds. But apparently, more killed and injured than the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation officially admitted. The authorities hide the scale of the tragedy and its causes from the world community. This is indicated by secondary signs - not providing objective information in the media, a rejection of outside assistance, such as emergency rescue services of other countries. The consequences of foreign experts were not evaluated. There is also a concealment of facts at all levels, from federal to the district authorities, on the scale and origins of the destruction and mass death of people, as well as a stupid explanation of the causes of emergencies with the wording “abnormal weather conditions”. Really, this can be convinced of everyone?! The stupid power machine projects the situation in the image and likeness of its own, believing that there was no critical opinion in the country. Due to the gaze swimming and divorced from reality, the authorities do not notice that everyone understands what is happening here now and what the negligence of power and the destructive mismanity of their activities are once again leading.
Authors of the article: Alina Polyakova and Anton Piev