MOSCOW, AUG 27: A Russian human rights' group said it would sue President Vladimir Putin and the Government for a cover-up and inefficient action after the sinking of the Kursk submarine with 118 crew on board.``We want them to tell the truth about what happened to the Kursk,'' Veronika Marchenko, head of the mothers' right group, said in an interview. ``People are not fools. They know if you are lying to them or not.''``Let a court judge them as guilty. So they must apologise before the court.''The submarine tragedy has provoked a national storm of sympathy for the victims and anger toward the Government, which was slow in giving details about the tragedy and in bringing in foreign help to try to rescue the crew.Russia's failure to mount an effective rescue was highlighted when a Norwegian team finally managed to open the submarine and discover that all 118 crew-members had died.Mothers' Right, which represents mothers of servicemen killed on duty, cannot sue the Government by itself, but must team up with family-members of the deceased.Marchenko, whose group has existed for 11 years, said the relatives had a good case against the Government for ``moral damages''.``There were violations of international conventions, such as between Russia and Norway on the Barents Sea, on making information public, on the President's activities in coordinating action and on many other points,'' she said.In recent days, the Government has promised relatives a far more generous package of compensation than usual in Russian tragedies, and Putin, who stayed on vacation during the early days after the sinking was made public, has said he felt responsible and guilty for what happened.For now, many of the families are concentrating on seeking to have the bodies of their relatives recovered from the Kursk.``The people are still not buried and many still believe that there are people alive there, so to sue now would just not be right,'' said Marchenko, adding that cases would likely begin in the coming months. ``Later, we will speak to individual-families, because each suit will have the details of a specific family.''Mothers' Right has already written to the US, British and Norwegian Embassies seeking details of when they first offered assistance in the tragedy and what Moscow said in return.Valentina Melnikova, an official at the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, another lobbying group, said it was too early to evaluate the chances of legal success against the Government.``As long as it is not clear under what circumstances they died, it is impossible to evaluate the chances of winning a court case,'' she said.Marchenko said her group had filed 350 cases against the Russian Government on behalf of families whose sons died during the first war against rebel Chechnya from 1994-96. One court has awarded damages of 100,000 roubles ($3,610) and the other cases are all pending appeals in higher courts, she said.
