Websites of Chechen human
rights organizations to be shut down
Internet informational resources of the Chechen Committee for National Salvation
(ChKNS) and the Council of Non-governmental Organisations (SNO) located on a server
owned by the Mastak.Ru provider (http://www.mastak.ru) will be shut down as of
January 24. The organizations learned this news from an email sent to them on
January 21 by Mastak.Ru representative Galina Borisova.
“Unfortunately, we have to announce that it is not possible for us to provide
you further with web-hosting services,” the message writes. “Our
company always strives to stay clear of politics, while your resource is
of anti-Russian character, which seriously complicates our work.”
ChKNS’s website (http://www.savechechnya.org) has been located on the Mastak.Ru
server since January 2002, the SNO website (http://www.ngochechnya.org) since
September 2002.
ChKNS chairman Ruslan Badalov rejects the allegations of the “anti-Russian
character” of his organization’s activities. “In our work we
have never attempted to engage in such activities, we always simply reported the
truth about what was going on,” he claims.
“Not in a single one of our statements or documents has there been a single
word aimed against Russia. On the contrary, we informed the Russian public about
facts they hadn’t known about,” says Ruslan Badalov.
By Tamerlan Aliyev for the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.