Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-22-Speech-3-140"
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"en.20031022.6.3-140"2
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"Mr President, I was shocked by what Mr Frattini had to say about Chechnya. In making these statements, you are putting yourself at odds with what the majority in this House has thought and said for years, and also opposing the position that the majority in my party, the European People’s Party, has taken for years in this House.
We have stood up for freedom and human rights in Chechnya, where Russia is engaged in a brutal colonial war, the second stage of which was inaugurated by President Putin in the course of the bloodiest election campaign in history. Mr Putin is, unfortunately, not going to solve the problem, for he is a quite substantial part of it. On attempting to consider the problem from the point of view of Russia’s interests, one discovers relatively quickly that Russia’s interests and Chechnya’s are in fact one and the same. Russia is suffering from financial problems; in Chechnya, billions are being senselessly squandered on a futile and bloody war. In Russia, democracy and the rule of law are suffering decline and – as Andrei Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner, has very powerfully described – the war in Chechnya is being taken as an opportunity for old structures to re-establish themselves.
Russia is suffering to a quite substantial degree from remilitarisation and the return of elements from the secret services, developments that also essentially derive from Chechnya and the war that is being waged there. Russia is suffering from terrorism and from organised crime. As Mr Oostlander so rightly said, the war in Chechnya is doing nothing to remove these problems, but is making matters worse. It can therefore be said that those who commit themselves to freedom in Chechnya and to its liberation are ultimately also committing themselves to freedom and liberation for Russia. In the long term, Russia will have to recognise that the only solution for its problems is for Chechnya to be a real democracy, and we have to see that the problem is that the pseudo-referendum that has been held there is intended to legitimise someone who was and is a villain rather than a legitimate partner in dialogue, namely President Mashadov."@en1
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