"Mr President, you are bringing death to Chechnya!"

With an "unmasking" human rights campaign the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) received the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Dresden on Tuesday. There was a larger than life picture of Putin on a banner, behind whose harmlessly smiling face the evil face of terror and violence was looking out. Next to it in huge letters was the charge: "Mr President, you are bringing death to Chechnya!" The GfbV campaign was supported by the Dresden groups of Pax Christi, the Ecumenical Information Centre, the Committee for Foreigners and Bundnis 90/The Greens.

"While the former KGB officer in Dresden, Putin, puts in at his old place of work an appearance as the wily representative of the Russian economy, in Chechnya thousands of people are being abducted every day, they are being tortured and murdered", said the GfbV, reminding us of the continuing suffering of the Chechnyan civilian population. Putin could put an end to this genocide, which his predecessor Yeltsin began ten years ago and which has to date claimed 160,000 victims. However he is protecting the present Prime Minister of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose militia is responsible for some 75 percent of the severe violations of human rights in Chechnya and has not been brought to justice. So out of 1949 cases brought to the public prosecutor since 1999 for abduction 1697 have been closed with no result.

"With the death of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya last Saturday in Moscow Chechnya has lost one of its last advocates in Russia", said the GfbV General Secretary Tilman Zülch. He called urgently on the Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel to demand from Putin an investigation into the murder. "Otherwise the suspicion will be substantiated that Russian secret agents were involved with the object of getting rid of this tenacious critic of the regime" Although Politkovskaya had been threatened for many years she always reported fearlessly in the "Novaya Gazeta"on the most serious violations of human rights in Chechnya. Yesterday an article by her on torture in the small Caucasian republic was due to be published in that newspaper.

The GfbV held it up as "quite disgraceful" that the football club Schalke 04 should have chosen the Russian supplier of energy, Gazprom, as its main sponsor. "There is no fair play to be expected from this partner, it´s just a matter of money and power", said Zülch. In this sense Putin pushed the energy giant into the foreground in 2003 to silence critical media. Gazprom just bought up the TV station NTV and turned it into a state TV station. The Russian state owns more than 50 percent of the shares of the largest gas company in the world.

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