Russians Need To Respect Themselves
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How long can Moscow ignore the mounting evidence against its Chechen puppet?
In the summer of 2004, two years and four months before she was gunned down in the entrance to her Moscow apartment, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya made a bold visit to Chechnya to interview 27-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, who had recently become (with the Kremlin’s blessing) the republic’s de-facto leader. It proved to be a harrowing experience. When they met face to face, Kadyrov could not contain his rage at Politkovskaya for reporting on his brutal rise to power, even threatening to have her shot. Politkovskaya concluded later that “a little dragon has been raised by the Kremlin. Now they need to feed it. Otherwise it will spit fire.” Politkovskaya was all too right. Since becoming president of Chechnya in 2007, Kadyrov has made the republic into his own fiefdom, which he rules by violence and terror. He has also, apparently, had his gunmen carry out a series of brazen killings of his perceived enemies in Moscow, Dubai, Istanbul and the North Caucasus. Until recently, the Kremlin, which has provided military and economic support to Kadyrov’s regime, consistently brushed off the murder allegations against him. Since April, prosecutors in two separate cases—a murder in Vienna and a murder attempt in Moscow—have for the first time implicated Kadyrov directly. And in the weeks since those revelations, the Kremlin leadership appears to be showing misgivings about its unconditional support for Kadyrov. How these cases play out could have profound effects on the future of Moscow’s Chechen policy.
Amnesty International Portugal and advertising agency Leo Burnett Iberia have launched TyrannyBook, a social network dedicated to the surveillance of some of the world's worst violators of human rights. As the name implies, the website is a Facebook clone, and looks almost exactly the same, with the familiar blue giving way to an aggressive red.
TyrannyBook is part of Amnesty International’s plan of getting more involved in social networks, both to gain the visibility inherent to these web platforms and to facilitate the contact between the causes it promotes and the public. The network aims to generate a global consciousness about the countless atrocities that take place across the globe. http://blip.tv/file/3598175/http://www.waynakh.com/eng/2010/05/tyrannybook-%E2%80%93-the-social-network-to-keep-an-eye-on-tyrants/
Parents of armed insurgents in Chechnya will have no rights whatsoever as long as their children continue their armed fight, said Muslim Khuchiev, mayor of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Chechnya's official Vaynakh TV channel carried a report about a meeting on 7 April 2010 at which local officials, including Chechnya's "human rights ombudsman" Nurdi Nukhazhiev, openly threatened the relatives of insurgents.
Speaking to residents of Grozny's Staropromyslovsky district, Khuchiev said: "We will treat you the same way as your children treat civilians. If you think that after the talk you will be able to sit quietly at home, you are deeply mistaken." Zelimkhan Istamulov, head of the Staropromyslovsky district added: "You live on my territory. If you think that from this moment you will be able to live free, to walk around, it is not true." Source: WaYNaKH Online, 13.04.2010
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said he would “rather die 100 times” than disappoint Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to an interview published in Nasha Versia on 11 January 2010.
“I’m the real representative of the Kremlin. I am completely Vladimir Putin’s man,” Kadyrov told the Moscow weekly. “I’d rather die 100 times than let him down,” Bloomberg reported. Kadyrov blamed “the same foreign powers that destroyed the Soviet Union” for continuing violence in the republic. Those same enemies are responsible for “alcoholism, drug abuse and prostitution” in Siberia, Kadyrov said. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/397345.html
