BERLIN, October 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Germany wants the Chechnya conflict on the agenda of a summit between the European Union and Russia in Brussels next month, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Monday, October 28. Chechen rebels, meanwhile, reopened the door to peace talks with Russia to end their bloody conflict.

The German spokeswoman said that it was essential for the EU and Moscow to address the bloody anti-insurgency campaign in the southern breakaway republic at the November 11 summit as well as other issues affecting bilateral relations, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"The subject of Chechnya has always been on the agenda of political dialogue between the European Union and Russia," she added.

She also welcomed the fact that the two-day World Chechen Congress could go ahead despite protests from Russia, which was incensed it was taking place only days after the end of a mass hostage-taking by Chechen rebels in Moscow.

"It would not have been possible or right to cancel such a conference in Germany either," she said.

Denmark, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, refused to bow to Russian demands over the weekend to stop the congress in Copenhagen.

However, in a step to placate the Kremlin, it announced it was moving the summit - aimed at developing a strategic partnership and settling a row over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad - to Brussels.

For their part, representatives of the elected government in Chechnya said they were open to peace talks with Russia to end their bloody conflict.

"There is no military solution to the conflict, only a political solution," Akhmed Zakayev, the envoy of elected Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, said at an international conference on Chechnya that aroused fury in Moscow.

"President Maskhadov is ready to negotiate without preconditions, as he said before. Now it is up to the Russian leadership," Zakayev said through an interpreter.

Maskhadov, for his part, warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that more attacks like the bloody Moscow hostage siege were inevitable unless he seeks a peace settlement.

"There is no military solution," he said in a telephone interview with AFP. "You will never be able to crush the Chechen people and bring it to its knees. There is one reasonable, correct step - to sit down at the negotiating table.

“All the rest is death, blood, hostages and the death of absolutely innocent people," added Maskhadov, in his first public statement since the Moscow theatre hostage crisis.

The Russian authorities have ruled out all talks with Maskhadov since rebels launched a massive anti-insurgency campaign in the southern republic in October 1999 and peace looked even more elusive after the three-day hostage drama.

The two-day World Chechen Congress opened as Russia was holding a day of national mourning to honor the more than 115 hostages, most of whom died from a mysterious gas used when Russian troops stormed a Moscow theatre to break the siege.

The Kremlin accused the Danish authorities of "solidarity with terrorists" and threatened to boycott a November 11 summit with the European Union.

However, Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said Copenhagen could not cancel the Chechnya meeting but that it had moved the November 11 summit to Brussels in order to maintain good relations with Moscow.

"The participants at this (Chechnya) conference are not terrorists, but we decided to transfer (the summit) because it is essential to avoid a crisis between Russia and the EU," Moeller told Danish television.

Moeller said the EU wanted to "strengthen relations with Russia, and there is too much at stake to let these relations deteriorate over this affair."

The congress, planned by the Chechen Diaspora and the Danish Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, was focusing on the war in the Caucasian Russian republic and the problems of refugees and internally displaced persons.

Danish opposition deputy Holger Nielsen told AFP before addressing the meeting: "I don't understand how the Russians can imagine that any Danish government can cancel a meeting like this. We have a democracy in Denmark, we have democratic rights to hold meetings like this."

Nielsen condemned the hostage taking, saying: "It was a disaster for the Chechen cause."

But Mohammad Shishani, president of the World Congress of Chechen Diasporas, told delegates that Russia was guilty of state terrorism and described Chechen rebels who seized the Moscow theatre as "freedom fighters."

"The hostage takers in the Moscow theatre were young men and women... driven by desperation to abnormal actions" he said.

In a separate related development, Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov broke ranks with other (Russian) politicians Monday and criticized the death of 115 hostages in a weekend rescue operation in Moscow as "unjustifiable."

"More than a hundred deaths, serious physical and mental trauma for a huge number of people, these are unjustifiable losses. The authorities were incapable of taking preventative measures to stop such actions," he said in an interview with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper.

The Communist leader demanded an emergency joint session of both houses of parliament to "examine the state of national security."

"The problem is not restricted to a single terrorist act. All security structures have been shattered and we believe that we no longer have an efficient government," Zyuganov added.

Commenting on Chechnya, Zyuganov said that "there is not and never has been a military solution to Chechnya."