STATEMENT BY THE CHAIRMAN OF THE ChRI GOVERNMENT A. ZAKAEV April, 6th 2009
SNA CHECHENPRESS. Official information section, 31/03/09.
Following the news of the pending RF Presidential Decree ‘On the conclusion of the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya’ I would like to state the following.
With the adoption of this decision citizens of the Russian Federation can now hope that the Russian secret services would no longer blow up their apartments while they are peacefully asleep in their beds – as was the case in the autumn of 1999. They can expect that they would no longer be poisoned with nerve gas as was the case during the execution of the anti-terrorist operation in the Dubrovka theatre siege in the autumn of 2002. They can hope that their children would no longer be fired at by the tanks or burnt with napalm as was the case in the Beslan school siege in the autumn of 2004. Against this background I wholeheartedly support the conclusion of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’. The President of the Russian Federation should remember however that whereas one could start a war with a unilateral decree one cannot terminate it in the same manner. In this respect the ChRI Government reiterates that the position of the Chechen leadership remains unchanged: it believes that the Russian-Chechen conflict cannot be resolved by force. In order to achieve lasting peace in Chechnya and in the North Caucasus it is essential to look for a political solution based on the ‘Treaty on peace and the principles of relations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriya’, signed in Moscow on 12 May 1997 by Chechnya’s president Aslan Maskhadov and Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin.
Irrespective of whether the decision in question is adopted or not, I would like to express my condolences to the relatives of all victims of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and I think it necessary to remind everyone that no war can be considered to be over until all war criminals guilty of the deaths of tens and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are brought to justice in accordance with the norms and principles of international law.
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