Peace Prize goes to Chechen lawyer Abdulla KhamzayevTimur Aliyev, North Caucasus - The Yalta Intitiative for Peace in Chechnya (YIPCh), a coalition of human rights organizations, will bestow its Peace Prize to Chechen lawyer Abdulla Khamzayev, announced Ruslan Badalov, Chechen human rights defender and YIPCh board member.
"Khamzayev is the most praiseworthy of the proposed candidates. His part in the case of Colonel Budanov helped to sentence the murderer, but caused Khamzayev to have a heart attack," Badalov said.
The Peace Prize was established by the YIPCh in the middle of last year to award public figures or organizations involved in peace-making, relief aid or humanitarian activities who contributed the most toward peace in Chechnya since 1991. The YIPCh was to select two winners, a Chechen and a Russian.
According to Badalov, candidate selection was divided into two rounds. “There were 45 nominees submitted; and on February 10 the YIPCh voted for five candidates from each group.”
Besides Khamzayev, the short-listed Chechen candidates were Tamerlan Aliyev, editor-in-chief of Chechenskoye obshetstvo; Sulumbek Tashtamirov, head of the human rights organization Sintar, and famous for his hunger strike in protest against the war in Chechnya; Musa Kornukayev, who began a similar hunger strike two and a half years ago; and Eliza Musayeva, chairwoman of a Nazran-based office of the human rights organization Memorial.
"In the second round, only the YIPCh board members chose who of the finalists deserved the most credit for their peacemaking efforts. And the final votes went to Khamzayev and Ylena Batenkova, a long-standing Russian organizer of anti-war rallies in Moscow," stated Badalov.
This award will be given on March 10 in Moscow. The organizers planned on having Lord Judd, the former PACE Rapporteur for Chechnya, hand out the awards until they learned that Russia refused to give him a visa. The Russian Foreign Ministry explained that the decision was made for technical reasons.
According to Stanislav Dmitriyevsky, co-chairman of the Society for Russian-Chechen Friendship, “Khamzayev's peacemaking efforts are based on the principle ‘Peace via the Law.’ Having virtually no financial support from donors, he’s been acting for a very long time on behalf of the victims of war crimes; in the pre-investigative stage as well as during investigations and at various courts of law, including the European Court of Human Rights.” (T) RELATED ARTICLES:
· Website of the Yalta Initiative for Peace in Chechnya
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