From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 3/10/2006 12:29 PM
March, 10, 2006

Speech given by Ivar Amundsen on 23rd January 2006 in Oslo

CHECHENPRESS, the Department of letters

 

Dear Chechen and Norwegian friends,

Chechnya is a small country in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The area is no larger than the county of Telemark in Norway. One million Chechens have lived here. Now the population is probably 700,000. The Russians have 200,000 troops deployed in the country.

For 400 years Russia has waged war against the  peoples of the Caucasus and frequently the war crimes have been so atrocious that they have been described as genocide.

After more than 60 years of war, Chechnya was in 1863 forced into suppression and occupied by the Russians. In February 1944, the despot Stalin deported the entire Chechen people of half a million individuals to Sibiria and Kazakhstan. Another 500.000 people from North Caucasus (Ingush, Kalmyk, Karachai and Balkar) suffered the same fate. Almost half of them perished before they were able to return in 1957.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s president Boris Yeltzin once again declared war on Chechnya in 1994. The Chechens defended themselves heroically and won the war over the Russians, who had to pull out two years later. President Aslan Maskadov was elected new president in an election supervised by OSCE, and presidents Yeltzin and Maskadov signed the Peace Treaty between the two republics 12th May 1997.

In 1999, the Russians again went to war against Chechnya – a war which is still ongoing. It was started by the President Elect, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who had been recruited from the position as head of the Russian secret service, FSB – formerly known as  the KGB. More than 200,000 Chechens have been killed, among them 42,000 children. The country has been bombed to smithereens. This is genocide, - this is state terrorism - and the FSB is the world’s largest terrorist organisation.

The Russians have engaged, and are engaging, in extermination and suppression, torture, murder and rape of the Chechen people. The only thing that is new - is the name of the war. Since September 11, 2001, they have been calling the violations  ”war against international terrorism,” thereby giving themselves an alibi for their continued crimes.

The Russians have also murdered three Chechen presidents in a row; Dudaev with a missile to his located satellite telephone in 1996, Yandarbiev with a car bomb in Qatar in 2004 (such acts are rightly referred to as international terrorism)–  and president Aslan Maskadov, who was lured into ambush and executed in Chechnya in March of last year. May they rest in peace.

All of this is allowed to take place without the international community reacting as we are supposed to according to the UN Charter and the human rights conventions. The international community, including the Norwegian government, has placed itself on the sideline. This is a gigantic betrayal of a suffering Chechen people, and it sets a terrible precedent for international conflict solving.

The previous Norwegian government, headed by a clergyman, did nothing to put human rights and peace in Chechnya on the agenda. The new government has got some cleaning-up to do, and we must demand that it show moral backbone and take a firm line. Chechnya is a neighbour of Russia. The same goes for Norway, a fact we must deal with in a long-term perspective. This means that Norwegian interests in oil and gas and our neighbour’s brutal power cannot keep us silent about their war crimes and serious breach of human rights. Moreover, this is happening in our own part of the world – Europe.

The Chechen physician, Khassan Baiev, has written a book about his experiences during the first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996. I shall read a short extract from his book where he arrives in a town called Samashki after a horrible Russian massacre there in April 1996. Towards the end there is a reference to a certain general Yermolov. This is the name of a particularly brutal Russian commander from the early 1800s.

I must warn you that the description is horrifying, but this is what the Russian war in Chechnya is all about.