Chechen women protest in Grozny against abductions
By Ruslan Isayev
GROZNY, Chechnya – One hundred women gathered in the center of the Chechen capital today to stage a protest against the abductions and illegal detentions of their relatives. Holding photographs of their loved ones, they waited all day for an official response, but in vain.
Many women held two or three photographs of men and youths who had been kidnapped during the years of the second war in Chechnya.
One woman I spoke to has been trying for four years to find a trace of her three sons, students who had been seized at home by masked gunmen. "Wherever I go, I face indifference and the unwillingness of the authorities to help," she said.
Her older sister stood next to her, holding a photograph of a young man in farm boots, with a tractor in the background. He is her only son. He was kidnapped in the village of Mesker-Yurt in Shalinsky district in 2002.
A bit farther down, there is a woman holding a big bed sheet, to which she has attached photographs of two girls and their young mother, who was kidnapped by the military. The sign on the sheet speaks for itself: "Return Our Mum!"
Another women approached the journalists and asked them to deliver a photograph of her kidnapped son to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Chechen Premier, with a plea to order his subordinates to provide information about the fate of the abductees.
"It's important for us to know what has happened to them. If they are dead, we are ready to accept it; if by some miracle they are alive, we should be told their whereabouts," said the woman, fighting back tears.
This was not the first protest by abductees' mothers in Chechnya. There have been hundreds of such rallies since the beginning of the second war, but the authorities have made no specific response. However, the mothers won't give up hope that one day they will get the answer to the questions: Who seized their loved ones, and why?(T/E)
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