#4
Russian humanitarian groups send Putin details of
Chechnya violations
Interfax
Moscow, 19 November: Eleven leaders of Russia's humanitarian organizations, who intend to take part in a Civil Forum (which is scheduled for 21-22 November), have written a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin about human rights violations in Chechnya, Oleg Orlov (chairman of the council of the humanitarian centre Memorial), Aleksandr Cherkasov (a member of the organization's board) and Svetlana Gannushkina (chairman of the committee Grazhdanskoye Sodeystviye (Civil Assistance) told a news conference in Moscow on Monday [19 November].
Together with the letter, whose text was distributed to the press, the activists sent the president a list of people who experienced violence in Chechnya over the past two years, complaints of their relatives and other documents.
"We took this step before the opening of the Civil Forum because Vladimir Putin said at one of his recent press conferences that he did not know the names of people who had recently been hurt in Chechnya," Orlov said.
Cherkasov said that these lists contains "some 200 names and addresses".
Commenting on the contacts between the federal authorities and representatives of Aslan Maskhadov, Orlov said that "now there is too little information about the first meeting between Kazantsev and Zakayev, but the very fact of this meeting can be seen as positive, because it could result in the stopping of military operations, in which absolutely everyone is interested".
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