| German NGO protests visit by Chechnyan
leaders 7 April 2005 GOETTINGEN - A leading German human rights group on Thursday protested plans for a visit to the upcoming Hanover Fair by Chechnyan President Alu Alkhanov and Deputy Premier Ramsan Kadyrov, calling the two men "suspected war criminals". The Goettingen-based Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) sent an open letter to Lower Saxony Premier Christian Wulff demanding that he make it clear to the public that the two Chechnyan leaders were unwelcome in the state. Hanover is the capital of Lower Saxony. The GfbV protest came three days before German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian president Vladimir Putin were due to open the Hanover Fair, with both Alkhanov and Kadyrov also due to attend. The group said Schroeder and Putin were permitting themselves "to be accompanied by two suspected war criminals". Alkhanov came to power in August 2004 "under the bayonets of the Russian army", while Kadyrov maintains his own private army which was responsible for 70 percent of the murders, rapes, torture and kidnappings in Chechnya, the GfbV charged. The protest letter came as human rights groups announced plans to hold a vigil in Hanover to protest against the visit by the two Chechnyan leaders. DPA Society for Threatened Peoples [Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, GfbV] Open letter to the Premier of Niedersachsen [Lower Saxony], Mr. Christian Wulff Suspected Chechen war criminals on Putin’s side should not be welcomed in Hanover Göttingen, 07. April 2005 Dear Mr. Premier: On Saturday, German Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Russian President Wladimir Putin will inaugurate the Hanover fair. Two suspected war criminals will be accompanying the Chancellor and the Russian president on this to Germany: the so-called Chechen president, Alu Alchanov, who made it to power in August 2004 thanks to elections rigged under the pressure of the Russian army’s bayonets, and the so-called representative of the head of government, Ramsan Kadyrov. On the occasion of their visit at the Hanover fair, Mr. Alchanov and Mr. Kadyrov intend to hold a talk on German humanitarian help in the crisis area. The Society for Threatened Peoples (SftP) accuses the two Chechen politicians of serious human rights violations carried out on their fellow citizens in the interest of the Russian occupying power. Kadyrov is in charge of Chechen security forces the so called “Kadyrovtsy” who are responsible for about 70 percent of the murders, rapes, and kidnappings of Chechen children, women, and men at the moment. People are being tortured daily in secretly kept camps under the control of Kadyrov. Since 1994, up to 200,000 dies as a result of the war. During the first Chechen war (1994-1996), leading social-democrats criticized the Kohl/Kinkel government for being partly responsible for the genocide in Chechnya (which took the lives of 80,000 people) by keeping silent about the crimes. Today, the close cooperation of the military and the secret services reveal how the Federal Chancellor is obviously identifying with war making in Chechnya. He must therefore also be made partly responsible for these horrible human rights violations. The visit of the two suspected war criminals to Hanover, flanked at the sides of the Federal Chancellor, shows how far this cooperation really goes. On December 21st , 2004, Schröder claimed that he was cooperating with Putin to find a solution to the Chechen war. If this is his solution, he is facilitating the genocide. Dear Mr. Premier, the Society for Threatened Peoples entreats you to make it clear to the public that Mr. Alchanow and Mr. Kadyrow are not welcome in Niedersachsen. Sincerely, Tilman Zülch, Secretary General http://www.gfbv.de/ VOA Experts Urge West to be More Involved in Chechen Solution By Andre de Nesnera Washington 07 April 2005 Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been able to either defeat the Chechen separatists or find a political solution to the conflict. For the past 10 years, Chechnya has been the scene of violence as Russian troops try to defeat separatist rebels. The toll on the civilian population has been devastating. Chechnya's capital, Grozny, has been almost razed to the ground. Western human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, say an estimated 300,000 civilians have been displaced by the conflict, both inside Chechnya and in neighboring republics. It is unknown how many civilians have been killed as a result of the conflict, but the most conservative estimates say the number is in the tens of thousands. But civilians in Chechnya face another threat. A recent report by Human Rights Watch says since 1999, thousands of people have disappeared. The organization says they have been taken either by Russian federal forces or local Chechen security squads subordinate to Russian authorities. Rachel Denber is the acting Director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division. She says the targets are men between the ages of 17 and 45. "So they are youngish men who I suppose the authorities suspect of somehow being linked to Chechen rebel forces," she said. "Either they are being disappeared because they suspect they are part of the rebel forces or because they suspect that they are somehow involved in arming rebel forces or somehow collaborating or somehow, maybe have information about rebel forces and they would like to interrogate them in very secret ways. " Russian authorities deny any responsibility for their fate or knowledge of their whereabouts. Marshall Goldman is a Russia expert with Harvard University. He says Russian president Vladimir Putin will use any means to stop the independence movement and keep his country intact. "From Putin's point of view, he sees what's going on there as an effort to not only separate Chechnya, but to ignite the whole region in the northern Caucasus and spread all the way up to the Volga, to bring about the disintegration of Russia and he's paranoid about this," said Mr. Goldman. President Putin says the Chechen issue is an internal Russian problem. At the same time, he places Russia's fight against Chechen separatists in the context of the global war on terrorism. And he has refused any talks with the rebels. Thomas de Waal, expert on Chechnya with London's Institute for War and Peace Reporting, says there is a fundamental paradox in the Russian government's position. "The Russians constantly say this is a front on the international war on terror and the West needs to support us on this and yet they do not, so far at least, accept that there needs to be, in order to defeat what they call an international problem, there needs to be some kind of international involvement in Chechnya, purely on the practical level," he noted. Many human rights and aid organizations have criticized Western countries for not speaking out on the situation in Chechnya. U.S. administration officials have been reluctant to talk publicly about Mr. Putin's policy on Chechnya. But they have consistently called on the Russian leader to find a political, rather than military, solution to the Chechen conflict. Charles Fairbanks is director of the Central-Asian Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He says the West needs to act and find a peaceful solution in Chechnya. "I do think that this is a very dangerous hotbed, a potential source of terrorism and I frankly don't see that the Bush administration or European countries have really had any strategy for dealing with the problem. And we urgently need one," he said. For his part, John Russell, Chechnya expert at Bradford University, says western leaders have shirked their responsibility vis-à-vis Chechnya. "When you've got conflicts going on in the world like the Middle East conflict, the situation in northern Ireland, which are so complicated and so difficult to find a satisfactory conclusion to, the war in Chechnya is not only complicated, but it's a long way away," said Mr. Russell. "Nobody really knows, the public really doesn't know too much about it, and it's easier to think of in simplistic terms: the Chechens are the terrorists and the Russians are the good guys." Experts say in the final analysis, solving the Chechnya conflict comes down to a matter of political will. They say that President Putin must change his policy and be open to talks with Chechen separatists, and the United States and other Western countries must get more involved in helping find a political solution. |