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TITLE: International Monitors to Probe Rights Abuses in Chechnya |
AUTHOR: |
PUB: Agence France Presse |
DATE: January 14, 2001 |
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Senior human rights monitors from the Council of Europe were due to fly to the north Caucasus Sunday amid fears that Chechen rebels would step up attacks in a bid to provoke Russian reprisals during the visit. The delegation from the Council's parliamentary assembly (PACE), headed by Lord Frank Judd, arrived in Moscow on Saturday for a four- day visit to probe Russia's rights record in Chechnya ahead of a key debate at the 41-nation assembly. The monitors are to draw up a report for the Strasbourg-based assembly's winter session, scheduled for January 22-26, which is set to debate whether to reinstate Russia's voting rights, suspended last April because of the Chechen conflict. The PACE team was due to hold talks Sunday with President Vladimir Putin's special human rights envoy to Chechnya, Vladimir Kalamanov, in the southern Russian city of Stavropol before traveling into Chechnya the following day. Kalamanov said Sunday that Lord Judd and his colleague Germany's Rudolf Bindig would get "a complete picture" of conditions on the ground in Chechnya. "I hope that the results of the improving situation during the past year will have some influence on the parliamentary assembly, whose decision last April was wrong, in my opinion," he told the private NTV television channel. The PACE visit comes at a time of heightened tension in Chechnya following last Tuesday's kidnapping of Kenny Gluck, a U.S. aid worker with the Nobel prize-winning charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). Putin discussed Gluck's abduction by four masked gunmen at a meeting Saturday in the Kremlin with the head of the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya. After the meeting, Kadyrov sought to relieve official pessimism over the chances of the American's early release by highlighting measures being taken by his staff to discover the whereabouts of the kidnappers and their victim. "I have activated my own information channels. I believe that he (Gluck) will be freed. Maybe, the kidnappers will suggest either a ransom or a swap," Kadyrov was cited as saying by ITAR-TASS after the Kremlin meeting. Meanwhile in Chechnya, military sources said separatist rebels were stepping up anti-Russian propaganda and preparing to carry out armed actions during the PACE delegation's visit in a bid to provoke a military clampdown. "The rebels are hoping that these actions will provoke a sharp response by the military that will hurt civilians, so that the PACE representatives will register human rights violations," Interfax cited pro-Russian sources as saying. Seven Russian troops had been killed and at least 10 others wounded in fighting after a military truck hit a rebel landmine, the press service of Chechen separatist president Aslan Maskhadov told AFP Sunday. The Russian soldiers, who were members of the interior ministry's elite OMON unit were killed in a shootout late Friday on the outskirts of the nominal capital Grozny. Russia has been fighting a 15-month war against the rebels in Chechnya since launching a self-styled "anti-terrorist" operation in the troubled republic on October 1, 1999. It became the first member in the Council of Europe's 50-year history to be stripped of its voting rights last April because of human rights abuses committed by its troops in the breakaway republic. END |