Press Release

The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC) at Freedom House will host a panel discussion on February 23, 2006, on Capitol Hill to commemorate the anniversary of the 1944 deportations of North Caucasus peoples by Stalin to Central Asia.  The event will also draw attention to human rights abuses and the expansion of conflict beyond Chechnya to other regions of the North Caucasus today.

Between 1943 and 1944, Stalin attempted to wipe whole ethnic groups off the map of the North Caucasus by deporting approximately 700,000 people in cattle cars to Central Asia and Siberia on the premise that they had collaborated with the Nazis.  Within five years after the deportations, at least 25 percent of the deportees perished from starvation, harsh treatment, and exposure.  Deportees were not allowed to return to their homelands until after 1957.

"The roots of the current instability spreading throughout the North Caucasus are buried in a long history of violence and oppression," said Thomas O. Melia, Freedom House Deputy Executive Director. "The 1943-44 deportations of the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and others left an indelible mark on the cultural memory of the North Caucasus peoples."

Today, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated claims that the situation in Chechnya has "stabilized," arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings occur frequently inside the war-torn republic. In 2004, a pro-Kremlin Chechen official admitted that 200,000 people have been killed since the first Chechen war began in 1994. The pre-war population of Chechnya numbered approximately one million people.

Following the assassination of moderate, secular leader Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005, the prospect of a negotiated settlement to the Chechen war appears even more remote. Years of war have increasingly polarized and radicalized segments of the population in Chechnya.  Moreover, the conflict has been spreading further beyond Chechnya's borders.  Fighting often spills over into neighboring Ingushetia, and conflicts occur almost daily in Dagestan. In early February 2006, 19 people were killed in a clash between the militia and militants in the Stavropol region to the north of Chechnya.  In late 2005, 140 people were killed when militants raided government buildings in Nalchik, in Kabardino-Balkaria.

Terrorist attacks such as the takeover of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow in 2002 and the school siege in Beslan (North Ossetia) in 2004 that left hundreds dead remind us that the situation in the North Caucasus is worsening and will have long-lasting implications for the region as well as for Russia's security and political trajectory.

President Putin has consistently rolled back political rights and civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. In January 2006, he signed a new NGO law that will place increased regulations on civic groups and will deny registration to NGOs that work on issues deemed by authorities to be politically threatening to the state.

"It is critical that the international community monitor the implementation of the new NGO law in Russia to ensure that it doesn't liquidate human rights organizations that provide valuable services and hope to people in the North Caucasus," said Melia.  "Further isolation of the North Caucasus from international observers and humanitarian services will only exacerbate the problems there." 

As ACPC co-chair Zbigniew Brzezinski stated at a conference on the Chechen war in 2004, it is important to "keep emphasizing the international responsibility for preserving the fabric and the existence of the Chechen nation, because it is faced with the possibility of genocidal extinction."  He added that the international community must also respond to "the need to salvage the Chechen people as a people, to preserve their inner fabric of identity, so that what Stalin started in 1944 doesn't become reality as a consequence of what is happening today."

The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC) at Freedom House is dedicated to disseminating analysis and knowledge about the peoples, cultures and politics of the North Caucasus and to supporting human rights defenders in the region.

Additional information about the February 23 panel discussion can be found here.

For more information on Russia and the North Caucasus visit the Freedom House website:

Freedom in the World 2005: Chechnya [Russia] 

Freedom in the World 2005: Russia

The American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus