From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/8/2007 12:48 AM
December 8, 2007

Address by the Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of the ChRI Akhmed Zakaev

SIA CHECHENPRESS, Official information section, December 1, 2007

In the name of Allah, Gracious and Merciful!

Dear compatriots!

The reason for this address is the fact of the ChRI Parliament entrusting me with the responsibilities of the Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya.

Nobody is better aware than us, the Chechens, what difficult times we are living in, what irrevocable losses we have endured in the long years of this war. Nobody could know it better than us that our will has not been broken and that we will not yield an iota of what our enemies are making a claim to.

Russia has always laid claims to our territory, to our right to be its sovereign masters. This was the case in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the colonisers were burning down our villages and destroying ancient woodlands to move further into the heart of Chechnya. Every Russian settlement in the Caucasus is a result of ethnic cleansing with all its inhumane attributes.

The deportation of the Chechens into Siberia and Kazakhstan in 1944, with the preceding terror of 1920-1930s was yet another attempt to deprive us of the land to live on. Finally, starting from 1991 and until now Russia has been taking dirty and criminal steps trying in vain to stop the course of history and to return the Chechen people to the colonial yoke.

Thousands of our brothers and sisters have given their lives for the freedom and honour of our motherland. We can state that today the Chechens are in control of most of their country, with the exception of the places where the occupiers are holed in. In their search of allies to fight the Resistance forces the Russians have armed thousands of the so-called pro-Russian Chechens, as a result of which the Chechens have never been better armed and trained how to fight.

Our government sees it as its main priority to force Russia to peace. This means that military and political methods would be combined with economic ones. I am sure that as soon as this inhumane regime is gone, peace with Russia would become a reality. There are healthy forces in Moscow who understand that a war in the Caucasus does not serve Russia’s long-term interests.

A key to a speedy peace settlement of the Russian-Chechen conflict is our own manifest national unity. Gone is the time when many Chechens, finding themselves face to face with the criminal Russian military clique had to pretend to agree to the abuse of power by the occupants in order to save their own and their families’ lives. The time has come to speak plainly. Our government intends to have extensive consultations with the representatives of all strata of the Chechen society, not tarnished by blood.

Alongside with force, ideological sabotage has been used against us. After the Supreme Soviet of the Chechen Autonomous Republic declared a sovereign Chechen-Ingush state in 1990, Russia would split us into constituent parts with or without a reason. First they would separate the Ingush from the Chechens, having promised to give them back the Prigorodny district. Then they divided us into party hacks and democrats, in other words, into the followers of Zavgaev and Dudaev. The hardest to bear was the religious division. We had heard about a clash between the Shia and the Sunnis happening elsewhere in the world, yet they had succeeded in dividing us despite the fact that we were all Sunnis. It is obvious today that the provocateurs on both sides were managed from the same centre. The purpose pursued by Russia all along has been to stop the Chechens from coming about as an independent nation.

The tradition Islamic ideology a la Kadyrov and the ‘Islamic order’ a la Udugov have been used in equal measure to split the Chechen society and to move against our independence when the time was ripe. If the Kadyrov’s camp became apparent at the beginning of the second war, the brothers Udugov tandem had a more long-term task - to split the core of the armed Chechen resistance by creating another split away organisation known as ‘the Emirate’. Our bitter experience teaches us never again to allow such a manipulation of religious values. One of the key tasks for the new government would be to preserve the unity of our armed forces.

Our experience of the Russian-Chechen war tells us that it is essential to be ready for peace before it is established. Our government is planning to pay the most serious attention to the programme of the development of the socio-economic infrastructure. In order to achieve this we shall adapt international best practice of post-war reconstruction.