“On February 23, 1944 we were hurriedly put onto the "studebaker" trucks, taken to the railway station and there loaded into freezing-cold rail-wagons. We were beset by pestilence almost the moment we left. The people were dying of starvation and hypothermia. The relatives of the deceased were hiding the corpses of their beloved and dear ones in the hope of burying them properly upon arrival at our final destination. But at every station the soldiers would check the wagons; any dead bodies that were found would be thrown onto the railway embankment.”
“When we finally arrived in Kyrgyzstan, even those who were supposed to collect us and take us onward were afraid to approach us. In the weeks that followed, we were made to live in former stables and on stock farms. Instead of beds, we were given half-frozen bales of hay. Five members of my family died that year. My brother and I were the only ones who survived.”
These are the heart-breaking words of Samart Dudayeva who at the age of 7, was deported by Stalin, along with the entire Chechen and Ingush population, to Siberia and Central Asia. The year was 1944. The date was 23 February. Traditionally celebrated in Russia as Red Army Day, in Chechnya it is remembered as a day of mourning. For on the 25th anniversary of Red Army Day, efforts were made to annihilate a whole nation and an entire people. On that grim day, almost 500,000 people were forcibly transported from their homeland, over half of whom never survived, dying of starvation, cold, illness and disease.
Within days an entire people had been erased from the land of their ancestors. Overnight Chechnya and Ingushetia were emptied of their native inhabitants, and every reference to Chechnya was removed from official maps, records and encyclopaedias. Cartographers, historians and lexicographers were told subsequently to delete any reference to the Chechens from maps, textbooks and encyclopaedias. Chechen gravestones were broken up and used in the construction of pavements in Grozny. Beginning in 1944, there was no longer a nation by that name: It had no past, no present, no future.
Today is the 63rd anniversary of those genocidal deportations. But the collective suffering of the Chechen people has not ceased. 23 February 1944 was only a landmark in its history of agony stretching as far back as the 17th Century when the first invaders arrived in the region. Their epic struggle against foreign occupation has continued right up until today as has the anguish which often accompanies such struggles.
The current war began in 1999 after Russia invaded Chechnya following a series of mysterious apartment block bombings within Russia. Although fingers have always been pointed at the Chechens for these attacks, a growing volume of evidence is steadily emerging indicating that the bombings were actually the work of the Russian Security Services, the FSB. Most recently, these claims have been made by former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, John Hopkins University and Hoover Institute scholar David Satter, and Russian lawmaker, Sergei Yushenkov, who allege that the bombings were perpetrated by the FSB to create a pretext to invade Chechnya and bring the then head of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, to power. The bitter truth is that Russia’s pride was still hurting after being forced to withdraw from Chechnya in 1996 after encountering ferocious resistance from guerrilla fighters.
Since 1994, over a quarter of a million people have been killed in Chechnya. Leading human rights organisations have reported thousands of disappearances with uncounted cases of extrajudicial killings, rape and torture by Russian forces. These crimes are now increasingly being committed by the inhumane death squads of the pro-Moscow puppet Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov. It is these militias that are feared most by the civilians of Chechnya. Researchers from the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights recently found that although some victims and their relatives were willing to elaborate on the violation of their rights by federal servicemen, they were far more reluctant to talk about the crimes of the “Kadyrovtsi,” lowering their voice to a whisper and trying to avoid any concrete facts. The human rights abuses have increased to such an extent that Human Rights Watch recently described them as “crimes against humanity.”
Russia has gone to great lengths to ensure that the world remains oblivious to the humanitarian catastrophe in Chechnya, cracking down on any criticism and brutally suppressing any dissent from within. Many have laid the blame for the shocking assassinations of courageous journalist Anna Politskovkaya and former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko at the door of the Kremlin. In the same week that the world commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day last month, the Kremlin won a legal battle to shut down the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, a human rights NGO that had been active in exposing and reporting on allegations of torture, kidnapping, and murder in Chechnya. The closure came on the heels of the suspension of the Russian Justice Initiative; a legal group which has successfully helped Chechen victims of human rights abuses bring their cases before the European Court of Human Rights.
Yet, not a word of condemnation is uttered by the leaders of the world who are content to appease Russia while the Chechen genocide continues. Last month, Medecins Sans Frontieres stated that Chechnya was one of the ten most under-reported humanitarian stories of 2006. In fact, the only time any attention is given to the region is where acts of terrorism are committed by Chechens against Russian civilians. Attacks such as the Moscow theatre siege and Beslan hostage crisis, while they must be condemned in the strongest terms, do not exist in a vacuum but are a tragic result of Russia’s brutal war. The horrific events at Beslan are only a snapshot of daily life for the typical Chechen child. But in today’s world, the blood of some children is more sacred than others.
In January 2004, 60 years after the Chechen deportations took place, the conscience of Europe finally awoke and the European Parliament recognized the deportations as ‘genocide’. With the current genocide continuing unabated, must we wait another 60 years for that conscience to re-awaken?
World Chechnya Day (23 February) is intended to commemorate the dignity and resilience of a people who, against all odds, refused to be erased from existence. For more information about events commemorating World Chechnya Day, please visit www.worldchechnyaday.org