CHECHNYA LINKS LIBRARY

Grozny authorities ban rally by relatives of abducted residents of Dagestan and Chechnya

By Ruslan Isayev

GROZNY, Chechnya – Local authorities have banned a rally by relatives of abducted residents of Dagestan and Chechnya that was scheduled to take place in the Chechen capital on Tuesday evening.

The organizers had planned to gather a large number of people, but the event was banned before it even began. Relatives had to make do with a short briefing session at the House of the Press, where they talked to journalists.

25 people have been abducted in Dagestan since the beginning of this year. In Makhachkala alone 12 people have been illegally detained, their relatives say. Most Dagestanis hold the republic’s police responsible. "There’s now a group of law enforcers who have started a war on the people of this republic," said Magomed, one of the protesters.

Elderly Dzhamal Umarov’s son and two friends were kidnapped. "Since then there hasn’t been much news of his whereabouts," says Dzhamal. Currently the two friends are being held at a remand prison in Dagestan. The kidnappers have called Dzhamal on his mobile phone several times, demanding payment of a ransom for the return of his son. Dzhamal even has all the phone numbers from which he received these calls, but he says that the authorities aren’t doing anything about it. He is certain that his son is in Gudermes, Chechnya.

Nearly all the protesters were holding placards and banners demanding the release of innocent people who have been detained. For Chechen women who have been looking for their sons, brothers or husbands for years, these demonstrations have by now become routine. Even though they have little faith that the authorities can do anything to help them, some attended the rally none the less. The son of one of the women is in a penal colony in Nizhny Tagil, a Russian city located near the virtual border between Europe and Asia. He was sentenced to 17 years.

"If this is a war, then tell us that it’s the people you’re at war with, and then perhaps we’ll be able to understand it all, but when any young man can be seized and have the label of terrorist hung on him, we can’t tolerate it. They’d do better to throw us all into the same saucepan, sons and mothers alike, cook us and eat us. I hope that then they might have enough of our suffering," she says.

A woman from Dagestan named Gulnara joins in the conversation: "The law enforcers wouldn’t have dared to do such things to us without Putin’s permission. And the mothers of Dagestan accuse Russia’s President Putin of these crimes. Does he think the people are blind and deaf, and don’t know who blew up the apartment houses on Kashirskoye Shosse and the ones at Volgodonsk, or who gave the order to kill Politkovskaya? And who carried out the bombing in Kaspiisk on May 9? It wasn’t the Wahhabis, it was Russia’s special services," she said.

The rally’s organizer was Euro MP Bart Staes’s representative, Imran Ezhiyev. According to him, human rights and freedoms continue to be grossly violated in the North Caucasus. "People in the region are still being abducted as before, people disappear without trace, criminal cases are fabricated against people who have been illegally detained, and the courts hand down harsh sentences on them. I don’t see any improvement in the situation concerning abductions, an improvement of the kind the authorities are talking about," Ezhiyev commented.

(Translation by DM)

(D/T)