Terrible master

Human rights activists are embarrassed by Ramzan Kadyrov's hospitality

The head of the Civic Assistance Committee, Svetlana Gannushkina, considers the demand of the Chechen authorities to transfer the offices of all humanitarian organizations working in Chechnya to the territory of the republic illegal. Last Friday, President Ramzan Kadyrov said: “We don’t dictate our terms to anyone, it doesn’t occur to us. But if humanitarian organizations set themselves the goal of helping the Chechen Republic and its people get out of a difficult economic situation in a short time, then we must work hand in hand.”

Mr. Kadyrov recalled that until now the placement of offices and, importantly, warehouses for humanitarian aid outside of Chechnya - in Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria - was motivated by Chechen instability and simply the danger of working in this republic. But now, according to the president, the situation has changed for the better, and Chechnya has become safer than its neighbors in a number of ways. Therefore, the president instructed Lema Magomadov, the former head of the republican traffic police, now the deputy prime minister in charge of the social block, to notify humanitarian missions of the need to relocate to Grozny.

Human rights activists believe that there can be no question of necessity, since non-governmental organizations can work in any territory, even if there is no official representation there. The initiative of the Chechen president can only be considered as a proposal, which also requires coordination with the federal authorities, not to mention interested humanitarian missions.

“Recently, many human rights activists have found it increasingly difficult to justify and prove the need for expenses for their maintenance, and they need fried facts about instability in Chechnya like air,” Chechen Commissioner for Human Rights Nurdi Nukhazhiev explained the presidential initiative. - During the Chechen tragedy, a cohort of figures has emerged who are not at all happy with the Chechen Republic, which is being reborn before our eyes. Real human rights activists have been working on the territory of Chechnya for a long time and step by step they are solving specific problems of people. In addition, the president’s recommendation does not concern human rights defenders at all, and let some human rights activists not shed crocodile tears in vain about this.”

There is some truth in the harsh words of the Chechen ombudsman. Of the 30-odd Russian and foreign humanitarian (and human rights) organizations, most have long since opened offices in Grozny, because it is truly more convenient to work this way. There are also rather dubious organizations such as the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which, under its friendly label, has been distributing “independent news reports” to the Russian media for several years: “In the city of Dzhokhar (the separatist name of Grozny - Ed. ), the Mujahideen attacked a column of occupation troops. Three occupiers were killed, two Mujahideen became martyrs.” But most of such oddities are a thing of the past; in fact, the region is mainly inhabited by people engaged in serious assistance programs.

However, any distribution of humanitarian aid, even if the number of local employees is reduced to a minimum, at various phases gives rise to abuses, this is known not only from the experience of the North Caucasus. It is no coincidence that Mr. Nukhazhiev separated human rights defenders - that is, people who are mainly engaged in providing legal advice to citizens - from humanitarian missions that distribute humanitarian aid with their warehouses and infrastructure, control over which has always been extremely interesting for the authorities in the region where they are located. During the period of greatest aggravation of the conflict, Chechnya was very jealous of Ingushetia, which sheltered most of the missions on its territory, although the warehouses, as a rule, remained in other, even quieter territories.

But sometimes pressure on humanitarian missions has very exotic motives , and this is not necessarily the usual suspicion of espionage. In February 2006, Ramzan Kadyrov threatened to expel the mission of the Danish Refugee Council from Chechnya, which actually fed almost a quarter of the republic’s population during the conflict, due to the publication in the Danish press of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were offensive from the point of view of Muslims. The Danish Council closed its office in Grozny, but the scandal became international, and human rights activists returned. Also in 2006, the prosecutor's office of Ingushetia sued three missions from the USA, Germany and Great Britain, which did not undergo the re-registration procedure. The Germans and Americans defended their case in court, and the British curtailed the North Caucasus project.

Ivan SUKHOV