Open letter to Mr. Pat Cox
President of the European Parliament
And to the Members of the European Parliament

Subject: hungerstrike for Chechnya

Brussels, 20 February 2002

Dear President,

In a few days time it will be the 58th anniversary of the deportation by Stalin of the Chechen people. Another episode of deportation, extermination, and injustice against a people that has suffered atrocities of this kind time and time again throughout the 300 years of Russian colonial occupation.

In December 1994, the tragedy began once again. Until President Maskhadov and General Lebed, as the representative of President Yeltsin, brought it to an end in August 1996, when Russia granted independence, de facto if not de jure, to the Chechen people. A reading recently confirmed by Mr. Putin himself (1).
It was not to last. In response to a wave of attacks allegedly organised by the Chechens (2) in Moscow and other major cities in Russia, the Kremlin troops returned to Chechnya in October 1999. They are still there…

I will not go into detail about the daily horrors in Chechnya. Those who want to know already know. Thanks to the work of a few journalists who, often putting their lives at risk and equally often exposing themselves to sarcastic comments from their colleagues, have continued to keep us informed, to say the unsayable. Anna Politovskaia, Sophie Shihab, Anthony Lloyd, Patrick Cockburn, Mylaine Saulnoy, Markus Wehner, Andrei Babitsky, Antonio Russo, the correspondent in Chechnya for Radio Radicale and a member of my own party, assassinated in Tbilisi in October 2000 (3), …

My friends and I in the Transnational Radical Party, with the European friends of Chechnya, could continue to struggle with national governments to urge them to issue visas to the representatives of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, to children badly wounded by bombs or mines so that they can be treated in Europe. We could continue to try to arrange meetings for Umar Khanbiev, the Chechen Minister of Health, received by President Nicole Fontaine, but shunned by the Commission. We could continue with Bernd Posselt (4) and one or two other colleagues to denounce the conduct of a European Commissioner for aid who after thirty months of war has still not found the strength or the time to visit the sites of the Chechen tragedy! Despite repeated calls by the European Parliament urging him to visit the country (5). With Cecilia Malmström, Pasqualina Napoletano, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Pedro Marset-Campos and several others we could pass over the veto expressed by one or two colleagues and once again propose that the Committee on Foreign Affairs should invite (6) the Russian and Chechen negotiators so that they can inform us of the state of progress of the negotiations that the European Parliament has expressly called for (7). We could forget that over 50 MEPs (8), dozens of members of national parliaments, and hundreds of leading figures and members of the public have signed an appeal (9) calling on the Member States to work for the international recognition of Chechnya. Just as we could forget the pressing demands made by the European Parliament urging the Russian Federation to respect the commitments made at the OECD Summit in Istanbul, to create "the conditions to allow the international organisations to provide humanitarian aid" (…) "that a political solution is essential and that the assistance of the OECD would contribute to the achievement of this aim." (10). We could forget that the European Parliament decided on 16 March 2000 (11) to send an ad hoc delegation of 5 members to the North Caucasus region to "talk to the Russian authorities and to the Chechen representatives about all the files relating to the conflict in progress", and that this visit has never taken place.

We could also pretend to hope, on the eve of the opening of the proceedings of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, that the Member States of the EU will respond, as they failed to do last year (12), to the request made by the European Parliament urging them to table a resolution on Chechnya. Just as we could hope that when Mr. Khanbiev addresses the Geneva Commission once again, in the name of the Transnational Radical Party, he will manage to arouse an indignant reaction from the Member States of the Union, and no longer only strong words of protest from the Russian Federation, as happened last year and at the March 2000 session, when the authorities of the Russian Federation demanded nothing less than the expulsion of the Radical Party from the United Nations because it had offered its speaking time to Mr. Akhiad Idigov, the President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chechen Parliament.

My Radical colleagues and I could draw up further amendments to the Union budget in favour of asylum for dozens of Chechen activists and refugees now living in inhuman conditions in Ingushetia and Chechnya. At the risk of seeing them once again thrown out by the Committee on Citizens' Freedom and Rights and the Committee on Budgets, concerned not to send out "ambiguous signals" towards European peoples extremely sensitive to the issue of immigration… Forgetting the extraordinary efforts at the time of the tragedies in Bosnia and Kosovo, and mistaking humanitarian asylum for immigration.

We could continue to applaud the President and colleague Hans-Gert Poettering every time he rightly reminds us that the battle against terrorism cannot be used as an alibi for failure to take action in the face of policies of repression, destruction and annihilation, as in the case of Chechnya.

We could forget that since the Second World War no city - not even Sarajevo or Vukovar - has been subject to continuous attacks such as those we have seen in Grozny. We could forget the terrible accounts about the "filtration camps", the traffic in human beings, the systematic extortion on the part of the Russian troops, the torture, the murderous attacks in Moscow, attributed at the time to the Chechens as a pretext for the second Chechen war, but shown by a growing body of evidence to have been committed by the Russian secret services, …

Mr. President,

Admitting that Mr. Putin is in good faith, that he really wants to enter into negotiations with the government of Mr. Maskhadov - which remains to be fully demonstrated - our policy of silence, omission, forgetfulness and cynicism would not help him to implement this policy in the face of a military lobby which is prospering as never before from the tragedy of the Chechen people.

To save Chechnya also means to save Russia, a country corrupted by a war in which even the most elementary rules of war are not respected. A country in which the "(military) death squads" are institutionalised and in which the Duma has recently called, by an overwhelming majority, for the return of the death penalty. Forgetting that it belongs to a Council of Europe that has done all it can to see "some progress" in Russian policy in Chechnya… A country that sends out death threats to the few state prosecutors appointed in Chechnya who continue to try to do their work. A country that imprisons Alexander Nikitin and that benefits from EU-funded programmes for the rehabilitation of the environment. A country that imprisons Gregory Pasko and Igor Sutyagin without any legal justification and benefits from EU-funded programmes to support the judicial system. A country that takes NTV and TV6 hostage and that benefits from the EU programmes in favour of the media...

Mr. President,

In the face of the indifference and the cynicism that surround the genocide in progress in Chechnya, in the face above all of the failure to take action of the Council and the Commission, our protests, denouncements and requests risk becoming nothing more than alibis for our inability to convince the Council and the Commission.

And this is not acceptable, either politically or ethically. This is the reason I have decided to begin an indefinite hunger strike on Thursday 21 February at midnight.

As you know, a hunger strike, like every other non-violent initiative, does not aim to demand from the relevant powers, in this case from you, as the President of the Parliament of the 350 million citizens of the Union, actions and decisions that would go against your duties and your convictions. It aims only to remind us of the commitments that our Parliament has made by adopting precise stances, and consequently to assume our responsibilities towards the citizens of Europe and, I would add, towards the people of Chechnya.

Mr. President,

Our Parliament cannot accept for much longer, without going back on its word, that silence is the only response that the Commission is able to give to our pressing and repeated demands that Commissioner Poul Nielson should visit Chechnya. By now a sense of decency alone should require the President of the Commission to hand over the Portfolio for Humanitarian Aid to another commissioner.

Our Parliament can no longer continue to repeat that any solution to the conflict should be achieved by negotiations between the Russian authorities and the legitimate authorities of Chechnya. It is now its duty to support the process that Mr. Putin seemed to want to launch when he agreed last autumn to a first meeting at Moscow Airport between his representative, General Kazantsev, and Mr. Akhmed Zakaev, Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen government and the representative of Mr. Maskhadov.

Moreover, in the face of lost time, of the days that pass with their trail of kidnap, torture, and murder, you (and Parliament with you) could make a significant contribution to the resumption of the negotiations between Russia and Chechnya by inviting Mr. Maskhadov to present his proposals to our Parliament - just as the former President Nicole Fontaine had the courage, overriding the "advice" of our governments, to invite Major Massoud, the pariah of the right-minded, short-sighted international community.

Finally, our Parliament should take Mr. Putin at his word when he says (1) that in 1996, by "withdrawing all its military and law enforcement forces" Russia had "de facto, if not de jure, granted independence to Chechnya". It should, without further delay, invite the Member States to work for the international recognition of Chechnya.

On the basis of its own positions, these are some of the initiatives (among others which would also be possible) that our Parliament should undertake without delay. Unless it prefers to disavow the ideals and principles that it claims to defend. This is the aim of my hunger strike.

I apologise for the length of this letter, and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Olivier Dupuis