Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-15-Speech-4-206"
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"en.20010215.9.4-206"2
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".
Mr President, I cannot speak about Chechnya here without thinking back more than ten years when the Baltic States were struggling for their freedom. Many Members of this Parliament, among them Michael Gahler, played a part in the effort to secure the freedom of the Baltic States. I was in the Baltic States at that time too. It was a Chechen, the Soviet general Dzhokhar Dudayev, later to become the first President of Chechnya, who refused to crush the independence movement in the Baltic States. He took this stance in Estonia and Latvia in particular. Thereafter, as we know, the secession of Lithuania was unfortunately a far less peaceful process, thanks to the brutal excesses of the OMON militias.
And so a Chechen played his part in ensuring that European countries, which will soon be members of the European Union, did not have to undergo the baptism of blood that one or two people had in mind for them. As this example – along with the fact that Chechnya lies within the ambit of the Council of Europe and its Human Rights Convention – shows us quite clearly, Chechnya is not one of those problems on the opposite side of the globe but an essentially European problem. That is why it is such a disgrace that an unholy alliance of deceit and self-deception has been forged. The deceit is partly the product of official government propaganda in Moscow. The self-deception is happening here. It consists in a refusal to register what is actually happening in Chechnya. It is not a matter of the occasional atrocity but of systematic genocide. Mrs Schroedter was perfectly correct when she stated that half of the Chechen population has been murdered or driven out of Chechnya. This is systematic genocide of the Chechen people for the sake of energy resources and geostrategic interests. That is why we must exert intense pressure and say quite clearly to the Russians that the partnership agreement is rooted in human rights. If human rights are not respected, the partnership cannot function. We must tell our Russian partners quite clearly that this is a
in our eyes and that it is high time they started negotiating with the elected representatives of the Chechen people."@en1
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