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Education
holds the key to freedom and that is why everybody should assist
Chechen schools: L’Observateur
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PARIS,
October 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – The French
L’Observateur newspaper sponsored a campaign to finance and support
Chechen schools and students who are trying hard to finish school
despite the deadly war with Russia.
In
its Wednesday, October 23 edition, the French paper stressed that
support and funds to Chechnya should not be confined to arms, but must
also cover education in the war-ravaged republic.
In
Chechen refugee camps in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia,
students are determined to finish their schools despite the difficult
circumstances engulfing them, said the paper.
They
are being educated despite the scarcity of even school tools such as
pens and papers, it added.
Chechens
are not all fighters, it added, asserting that the sufferings of the
Chechen people are on the rise.
Education
holds the key to freedom and that is why everybody should support this
freedom by assisting Chechen schools and students, stressed L’Observateur.
Chechen
students need books in their own language or even in other languages
because the atrocities perpetrated against the Chechen people also
targeted their culture, said the paper.
Chechen
schools are in dire need of financial allocations, the fact which forces
many teachers to quit, the French paper said, adding that schools need
windows, doors, boards and even woods to heat the rooms and save the
children from freezing to death.
L’Observateur-sponsored
fundraising campaign was able to rise an initial figure of 3000 euros in
aid for Chechen schools.
Meanwhile,
Moscow's tentative official contacts with representatives of Chechen
independence fighters have brought a faint glimmer of hope to human
rights groups and NGOs despairing at the continuing blood-shedding in
the republic of Chechnya, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
The
anti-war Russian Soldiers' Mothers group wound up a two-day conference
of NGOs and religious leaders Saturday, October 19, with an appeal to
the United Nations to intervene in the three-year conflict, arguing that
the Russian war on Chechnya was tantamount to "state
terrorism".
The
call has no chance whatsoever of succeeding, Russia being a permanent
member of the U.N. Security Council with veto powers and regarding the
conflict as a strictly internal affair. The call demonstrates, though,
the sense of powerlessness felt in civil society as the Kremlin persists
in its pursuit of imposing a military solution.
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"This
is no longer a war, it is a genocide which encourages racial
hatred in the country": Soldiers' Mothers group
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"This
is no longer a war, it is a genocide which encourages racial hatred in
the country," said Tatyana Kotlyar, a regional deputy and human
rights activists in the city of Kaluga, south of Moscow.
Kotlyar
deplored public apathy towards the ongoing conflict, as does Seda
Ilayeva, one of four Chechens who have been on hunger strike in Moscow
for the past two weeks.
"Stop
the war. How can a Chechen baby and a pregnant woman be considered
rebels who have to be killed?," she said, quoted by AFP.
Other
participants in the conference, including the Chechen deputy in the
State Duma (lower house) in Moscow, Aslambek Aslakhanov, and the Chechen
Mufti Akhmed-Khadji Shamayev, denounced the racist anti-Chechen
sentiment spreading throughout Russia.
"The
venomous seeds of anti-Chechen propaganda are bearing their fruit. It is
becoming even harder for Chechens to get jobs or residence permits in
Russian cities," Aslakhanov said.
Shamayev
noted that he had recently been searched at a Moscow airport
"because of being Chechen".
Aslakhanov
stressed that it would be easier to negotiate now "with a
generation that has studied with Russians in Soviet-era universities
than in five years time with a generation that has grown up amid
violence and hatred."
He
said last week that he planned to travel to Switzerland soon to meet
Akhmed Zakayev, the personal representative of Chechen President Aslan
Maskhadov.
The
Kremlin's representative on human rights in Chechnya said Wednesday,
October 16, he had met 14 pro-Maskhadov deputies elected to the
republic's parliament in 1997, the first official contact with the
independence claiming fighters since inconclusive talks last November.
The
Kremlin is maintaining its official position to the effect that it
refuses to acknowledge Maskhadov's legitimacy as president – despite
his election in a January 1997 fair poll – or to negotiate a special
status for Chechnya, and insists that the independence fighters lay down
their weapons.
However,
the approach of parliamentary elections next year and a presidential
poll in March 2004 is concentrating minds in the Kremlin.
Public
opinion has been coming round to the need for talks, with 60 percent now
in favor, according to recent polls.
Since
Russian forces stormed Chechnya October 1, 1999 to crack down on a
Chechen independence bid, more than 4,500 of troops have died, according
to official figures (though the Soldiers' Mothers group says the true
figure may be three times as high).
Nearly
20,000 civilian Chechens have been killed in the genocide, according to
the human rights group Memorial.
