Russia Gets the Blame After Chechen Congress No-Show

By Nabi Abdullaev

Staff Writer

MOSCOW – A Chechen congress failed to take place in Istanbul over the weekend after Turkish authorities asked organizers to call it off, organizers said, blaming pressure from Russia for the cancellation.

"The congress to demonstrate the unity of the Chechens despite their different views on the future of the nation would have meant a fiasco to Russia's policy of separating Chechens," chief organizer Deni Teps said Monday by phone from Istanbul. "That's what maddened Russian officialdom."

Teps said Russia's Ambassador to Turkey, Alexander Lebedev, had urged Turkish officials to outlaw the meeting, in which both pro-Moscow Chechens and rebel representatives had agreed to take part.

Also, Dmitry Rogozin, head of the State Duma's international affairs committee, asked the Russian Foreign Ministry last week to push Istanbul into banning the meeting.

"It is a destructive action sponsored by the same sources that finance the rebels," a spokesperson for Rogozin's office said Monday.

"Moreover, Russia-based Chechen non-governmental organizations are already united under the Consultative Council to Promote Peaceful Settlement in Chechnya, and any alternative initiative will only hinder its work," he said on condition of anonymity.

The Foreign Ministry refused to comment.

A Turkish Embassy spokesperson said he had no information about any diplomatic exchange on the issue.

Teps said the failed weekend meeting was organized by the U.S.-based Congress of Chechen International Organizations, created in 1995 by Mohammed Shashani, a former professor of Pittsburgh University and an ethnic Chechen.

He said it was sponsored by the Chechen diaspora in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Russia.

Representatives with several respected international and Russian human-rights organizations had been invited to join hundreds of guests from the Chechen diaspora from all over the world in discussing the conflict in Chechnya, Teps said.

General Aslanbek Aslakhanov, who represents Chechnya in the Duma and was among the invited guests, said he doubted the congress would have reached any kind of consensus.

"I really wanted to go to Istanbul to see the rebel representatives," he said. "I would have pointed to them as the guilty party for the bloodshed in Chechnya."