From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 5/2/2007 1:58 PM
May 1st 2007 · Prague Watchdog / Umalt Chadayev     
    
    
Chechnya does not mourn Russia’s first president

By Umalt Chadayev

CHECHNYA - Residents of the Chechen Republic hold an extremely negative assessment of Boris Yeltsin as Russian President, and consider him mainly responsible for the calamities that rained down on the republic in the mid- to late 90s.

The death on April 23 of Boris Yeltsin, first President of "democratic" Russia, has prompted no feelings in residents of the Chechen Republic other than those of regret – the regret that he was not put on trial for the war he unleashed here. The letter of condolence sent to Yeltsin’s widow by Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov is considered by many as an insult to the memory of tens of thousands of victims of the two undeclared wars on the republic’s territory which took place during this man’s period in office.

"For me, the news of Boris Yeltsin’s death was neither good nor particularly bad," 42-year-old Grozny resident Usam Chimayev said in an interview with PW’s correspondent. “I think it would have been far better for the Chechen and Russian peoples if his death had come not now, but exactly 13 years ago, in 1994, before he was able to unleash the carnage here. For me, and probably for most Chechens, he was and remains a criminal and an executioner of the Chechen people, who has hundreds of thousands of lives and crippled human fortunes on his conscience.”

"What shocked me about the story of Yeltsin’s death was the letter of condolence Ramzan Kadyrov sent to Yeltsin's widow. Especially the part of it which said that the Chechen people ‘received the news of the death of the first President of the Russian Federation with great sorrow.’ To be honest, I used to have a great respect for Ramzan, but after this my opinion of him has changed radically. How can the people mourn the death of the man who was to blame for tragedy of the last 15 years?” Zayndi, a 4th-year student at the Chechen State University asks angrily. “This is the same Yeltsin who sent the army here in 1994 to restore ‘constitutional order’, and who five years later began the ‘counter-terrorist operation’.”

"No one can yet say how many tens of thousands of people – Chechen residents and Russian soldiers – died here during the two military campaigns. He condemned thousands of people to death without blinking an eyelid in order to satisfy his ambitions and hold on to power. Are the Chechen and Russian mothers who lost their children here going to mourn him?” he asks. “Or the children who have lost their parents? Can a resident of the village of Samashki, where the Russian military staged carried out a real massacre, feel sorry about Yeltsin’s death? Or residents of the villages of Aldy and Kotar-Yurt, where dozens of civilians were murdered during the winter of 2000? The blame for all these terrible crimes lies with Boris Yeltsin, as the country’s commander-in-chief and the guarantor of its Constitution.”

Representatives of Chechen human rights organizations also consider Boris Yeltsin the main culprit in the long-standing tragedy of the Chechen people. "Today, many well-known figures, including representatives of human rights organizations and opponents of the current [Russian] regime such as Valeriya Novodvorskaya, for whom I have great respect, have almost fallen over themselves to whitewash Yeltsin. In doing so, they compare him with the current Russian president, and conclude that, by comparison with Putin, Boris Yeltsin was a great democrat. But who was it who brought the previously unknown KGB Colonel Putin to power?" says a staff member of one of the local human rights NGOs.

“Boris Yeltsin is not only to blame for two wars on the territory of the Chechen Republic," says the human rights defender. “He is one of the main culprits of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was responsible for the shelling of his own parliament in October 1993, when hundreds of civilians were killed. Now everyone seems to have forgotten how Yeltsin used to get as drunk as a pig and degrade Russia: whether it was trying to conduct a German brass band, dancing ‘Kalinka’, or being unable to get off his plane for a meeting with a high-ranking foreign official. He began his political career as a democrat and ended it as a practitioner of genocide."

“Boris Yeltsin was just an ordinary petty tyrant, a tsar surrounded by a crowd of flatterers and toadies,” says the interviewee. “For the atrocities his army committed in Chechnya, however, he ought at the very least to have been brought before an international tribunal like the one that was created for the former Yugoslavia. They say one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. No one will say anything good about him in Chechnya. For Chechens the first president of Russia was a war criminal, guilty of the deaths of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, families and friends."
http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=000000-000004-000002-000030&lang=1