For the Interim United Nations Administration in Chechnya
Dear Chechen friends, dear friends of Chechnya,
as if the tragedy in progress in Chechnya were not enough, the governments of
the democratic countries - beginning with the US and the European Union - have
added their own dishonour to the horror by once again sacrificing the genocide
underway in Chechnya on the altar of a so-called strategic vision, that of the
stability of Russia (or of its oligarchy) at whatever price, including therefore
at the price of the life of the Chechens and of the establishment of democracy
in Russia.
There is no point elaborating on the numerous historical precedents and their
tragic consequences for humanity. In St. Petersburg Europe, the United States,
the democracies have chosen once again not to see and not to act.
It seems to me more important at a moment when the tragedy experienced by the
Chechen people is joined by the blindness, the deafness and the resignation of
the Western governments to attempt to understand what we can and must do to give
a another chance to dialogue, to real negotiations, in a word to politics.
From this point of view, in this desolate panorama that we know only too well
one extremely important fact has recently emerged. I am referring, of course,
to the new peace plan drawn up by the Chechen Foreign Minister Ilyas Akhmadov,
calling for the establishment of an interim United Nations Administration in Chechnya.
The plan is a radically new proposal in that it takes account for the first time
of the legitimate interests of the Russian Federation, of the other neighbouring
states and of the international community as a whole, in that it is perfectly
aware of the further deterioration of the situation in Chechnya caused by three
years of the policy of terror pursued by the Russian occupying forces, and in
that it has drawn the necessary conclusions from the unhappy experience from 1996
to 1999. And on the basis of these considerations the Foreign Minister believes
that without the firm establishment of democracy and the Rule of Law there can
be no real future for Chechnya.
Having established this, however, the most difficult task still remains. That
is, to convince the international community to back this new peace plan. This
enormous, difficult task cannot be carried out successfully without widespread
mobilisation - by the Chechens, first of all, but also by the citizens of Russia
and of all the democratic countries.
Since it is absolutely convinced of the importance and the urgency of the proposal
put forward by the Chechen Foreign Minister, the Transnational Radical Party has
decided to launch an appeal to the United Nations in support of the plan. Dozens
of leading international figures and members of the European and national parliaments
and hundreds of ordinary people from over fifty countries have already decided
to join the initiative by signing the appeal. But this is far - very far - from
being enough! If this new peace plan is not backed in the coming weeks and months
by tens of thousands of people from Chechnya, Russia, the United States, Europe,
... , if it does not become an instrument of mobilisation and co-ordination, the
risk is that the Chechen people, and with them everyone who fights for freedom,
democracy and the Rule of Law in Chechnya and in Russia, will be condemned a little
more to resignation or despair.
For these reasons I invite you to support this new Peace Plan by signing and encouraging
others to sign the appeal to the Secretary General and to the heads of state and
government of the member countries of the United Nations. The appeal can be signed
on-line at the Transnational Radical Party website: www.radicalparty.org
Olivier Dupuis
Member of the European Parliament, Radical
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Appeal to the Secretary General and to the Heads of State and of Government of
the member countries of the United Nations
We citizens of Chechnya, of Russia, and of the whole world address this appeal
with confidence to the United Nations and to all States that hold dear the fate
of human life and civilisation in this far corner of Europe, cancelled from the
conscience of the West and of the free countries and consigned for the last ten
years to the Russian occupying forces.
The Russian State is renewing a tragedy that has dragged on for three centuries,
from one occupation to the next, from one deportation to the next, from one massacre
to the next. This centuries-old colonisation is a source of shame for the whole
of humanity and a tragedy that unites, rather than divides, the Russian and Chechen
peoples in a common fate.
We Chechens, have, in the last ten years, seen our country devastated, our capital
Grozny razed to the ground, our villages, fields and woods, and our people itself,
become the daily target of a war that seems to have no end or epilogue other than
our definitive annihilation.
We have seen our sons and daughters, our fathers and mothers, our husbands and
wives, our brothers and sisters, rounded up in the middle of the night, deported,
imprisoned, tortured, raped, mutilated and murdered. We have seen, with great
anguish, the growing risk that some of those younger and weaker than us, brought
up in a world that knows nothing but war, will yield to the temptation of terrorism
and entrust their hopes to a "murderous courage" that would put them on the same
level as the occupiers. We have seen that our fragile institutions, consecrated
by a democratic election in 1997 and recognised by the international community
and by the Russian Federation itself, were first delegitimised, then replaced
by a straw government, and finally swept away by a sham referendum.
We Russians, know that thousands of our soldiers have been killed, their bodies
returned secretly to the cemeteries in our towns and villages.
We know that our soldiers are condemned to commit innumerable atrocities and crimes
on the orders of cynical, mercenary autocrats and generals. We know that this
war kills tens of thousands of men and women, and with them the hopes for democracy
and freedom that we have been nurturing in our hearts since the end of the Cold
War.
We citizens of the whole world, share the sense of horror felt by many Russians
and the sense of terror that haunts the Chechens in the face of the devastation
of this small piece of Europe and of the world, which is still called Chechnya.
We believe that what is happening in this deliberately and blamefully abandoned
region increasingly resembles a full-fledged genocide.
Dear Secretary General, dear Heads of State and of Government,
We believe that it is intolerable that the international community should continue
to ignore the daily unfolding of this terrible tragedy, and that we cannot continue
to turn a blind eye and shirk our responsibilities with respect to what is happening
in Chechnya.
We support the plan for "conditional independence" presented by the Minister for
Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Ilyas Akhmadov, which proposes
the establishment of an interim United Nations administration on the basis of
the disarmament of all the Chechen forces and the withdrawal of all the Russian
military and administrative personnel. At the end of this period of transition,
during which the UN would be charged with administering the country and co-coordinating
the re-establishment of the civil, political and material order of a country strewn
with ruins and common graves, the surviving population would be called to elect
its own parliament and government.
We citizens of Chechnya, of Russia, and of the whole world ask you solemnly and
with confidence to take all the necessary steps to ensure that the Akhmadov plan
for peace and democracy in Chechnya is first studied and then implemented. We
hope that, in this framework, a Special Representative of the UN Secretary General
for Chechnya will be appointed as soon as possible. The security of the Russian
people and the lives of the Chechen people cannot be sacrificed to the logic of
a conflict that no-one can hope any longer to win on the battlefield. It is up
to the international community and to the United Nations to enable two peoples
who are both losing a shameful war to join forces in order to win a honourable
peace.
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P.P.S. Among the first signatories of the appeal: Otto von Habsburg, president
of the Paneuropean Union, the philosophers Andre Glucksmann and Pascal Bruckner,
Bernard Kouchner, former High Representative of the UN in Kosovo, the former Soviet
dissidents Elena Bonner-Sakharov, Leonid Plioutsch, Vladimir Bukovsky and Andrei
Mironov, the politician and writer Adriano Sofri, the film-maker Romain Goupil,
the Chechen Health Minister Oumar Khanbiev, the Vice-Speaker of the Chechen Parliament
Seilam Bechaev, the resistant of the Warsaw ghetto Marek Edelman, the journalist
Barbara Spinelli, the Asian dissidents Vo Van Ai (Vietnam), Enver Can (East Turkestan),
Kok Ksor (Montagnards), and Vanida Thephsouvanh (Laos), the Albanian writer Ismail
Kadare, Ariane Mnouchkine, director of the Theatre du Soleil, the sinologist Marie
Holzman, the MEPs Danielle Auroi, Emma Bonino, Alima Boumediene-Thiery, John Bowis,
Renato Brunetta, Marco Cappato, Marie-Arlette Carlotti, Paulo Casaca, Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
Raffaele Costa, Benedetto Della Vedova, Gianfranco Dell'Alba, Harlem Desir, Jan
Dhaene, Giuseppe Di Lello, Antonio Di Pietro, Olivier Dupuis, Carlo Fatuzzo, Enrico
Ferri, Helene Flautre, Glyn Ford, Pernille Frahm, Monica Frassoni, Per Gahrton,
Jas Gawronski, Vitaliano Gemelli, Fiorella Ghilardotti, Pierre Jonckheer, Paul
Lannoye, Alain Lipietz, Giorgio Lisi, Sarah Ludford, Lucio Manisco, Thomas Mann,
Mario Mauro, Jose Maria Mendiluce, Reinhold Messner, Luisa Morgantini, Francesco
Musotto, Pasqualina Napoletano, Gerard Onesta, Doris Pack, Marco Pannella, Bernd
Posselt, Lennart Sacredeus, Giacomo Santini, Luciana Sbarbati, Mariotto Segni,
Francesco Speroni, The Earl Of Stockton, Fode Sylla, Franz Turchi, Ari Vatanen,
Gianni Vattimo, Demetrio Volcic, Matti Wuori, Stefano Zappala and Francois Zimeray,
the french MP and former Minister Jack Lang, the Italian MPs Marco Boato, Roberto
Giachetti and Antonio Del Pennino, the Cambodian MPs Son Chhay, Sam Rainsy and
Saumura Tioulong, the Bulgarian MP Kina Andreeva, the Croatian MPs Snjezana Biga-Friganovic,
Zlatko Kramaric, Ivo Skrabalo and Djurdja Adlesic, the Albanian MPs Gaqo Apostoli,
Fatmir Mediu, Dashamir Shehi and Engjell Bejtaj, Mariusz Kaminski (Poland), the
belgian senators Jean Cornil and Georges Dallemagne, the Representative of the
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Aminat Saijeva (Lithuania), Ramzan Ampoukaev (Poland),
Karoly Arszlan Berg (Hungary), Lev Ponomarev, President of the Movement for Human
Rights (Russia), Irena Lasota, President of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern
Europe (USA), the President of the Russian Radicals Nikolaj Khramov and the Co-Chairman
of the Russian Chechen Friendship Society Stanislav Mikhailovic Dmitrievskiy.