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Dear
Friends,
This week, the Boston Globe newspaper
carries a report from author Anna Badkhen, who writes from Grozny that:
"The circumstances that fuel the insurgency are familiar to American
troops and diplomats stationed in Iraq: a weak, nascent kleptocracy;
staggering unemployment; revenge that is easily harvested by the enduring
Islamic fundamentalism. Unable to keep the rebels in check, the
government - with the tacit support of the Kremlin - carries out
arbitrary abductions and summary executions."
Radio Free Europe reports that: "A Russian official has proposed
compiling a database containing the fingerprints of the entire population
of Russia's volatile North Caucasus region [...]. Veteran human rights
campaigner Lyudmila Alekseyeva criticized the fingerprinting proposal as
'discriminatory.'"
Radio Free Europe also features an analysis of the situation in the North
Caucasus five years after the death of former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov.
Reflecting on the events that followed Russia's invasion of Chechnya in
1999, RFE reports that: "Maskhadov's repeated appeals to the
international community to persuade Moscow to begin peace talks went
unheeded. Instead, Putin named former Chechen mufti Akhmed-hadji Kadyrov
to head a pro-Moscow regime in Grozny. That move paved the way for the
inexorable rise to power of Kadyrov's son Ramzan, today the most
influential and feared political figure in the entire North
Caucasus."
The report continues to say: "Last summer, the Kremlin gave the
green light for talks between Kadyrov's envoys and Akhmed Zakayev, who
heads the Chechen government in exile. But a planned world congress to
cement reconciliation between Maskhadov's supporters and the brutal pro-Moscow
regime in Grozny, scheduled for late February, has been postponed
indefinitely."
Finally, another RFE article reports that: "Chechnya's war-battered
medical infrastructure and a long-standing stigma associated with
tuberculosis further fuel what experts say has grown into a major health
crisis. 'This is an epidemic; the situation in Chechnya is
unprecedented,' says Simon Rasin from International Medical Corps, a U.S.
group that has been fighting tuberculosis in the North Caucasus for the
past decade."
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