COPENHAGEN, October 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Defying furious Russian warnings of reprisals, Denmark vowed Sunday, October 27, to go ahead with an international conference on Chechnya, only days after a bloody end to a hostage-taking by Chechen rebels in Moscow.

Moscow accused Denmark - current European Union president - of "solidarity with terrorists" and said if the two-day meeting went ahead it would boycott a Russia-EU summit planned for next month, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"If a meeting of the terrorists' accomplices goes ahead, the Russia-EU summit will become impossible," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that it had summoned the Danish Ambassador to convey the message.

The Foreign Ministry accused Danish authorities of "solidarity with Chechen terrorists."

The timing of the conference has deeply antagonized Russia, seething over the seizure of hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theatre by Chechen militants demanding an end to the war in the breakaway republic.

However, Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller insisted that his government "cannot and does not want to ban" the conference being held Monday and Tuesday, October 28-29, in Copenhagen on what he said was a "private initiative."

"We clearly condemn terrorism but we also have rights under the constitution that say that lawful meetings are allowed to be held," he said.

However, Moeller also advised the conference organizers to "analyze the situation very carefully and consider how it will be seen across the world."

The congress, planned by the Chechen Diaspora and the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, is set to focus on the war in the breakaway Russian republic, the social and humanitarian situation and the problems of refugees and internally displaced persons.

Moscow has also threatened to boycott a Russian-Danish summit planned to take place in tandem with the meeting with the 15-member EU.

At a summit in Brussels last week, EU leaders endorsed a deal allowing transit across EU territory of Kaliningrad residents who will be cut off from the rest of Russia when Poland and Lithuania join the EU as planned in 2004.

Russia has been bogged down in a bloody conflict in Chechnya for three years after its forces moved in to the breakaway Caucasus republic in October 1999 in what President Vladimir Putin labeled an "anti-terrorism operation."

Putin, whose tough stance on Chechnya helped him into office, has likened his campaign against the republic's separatists to U.S. President George W. Bush's "war on terrorism" after the September 11 attacks.

His commissioner for human rights in Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said on Saturday, October 26, that the objective of the Chechen conference was "to promote the terrorists' demands worldwide".

"This congress is a gathering of terrorist accomplices, smeared with the blood of Russian citizens," Interfax quoted Sultygov as saying.