My Dear Brothers and Sisters!

I am writing to you today with the hope that I will be heard. We, the Chechens, have fled our beautiful homeland to escape the genocide carried out by the Russian occupiers. By the will of Allah, I, like many others, became an eyewitness to this terror. The group that I was involved with rescued and saved the wounded and dead resistance fighters of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. We have also taken out and saved dozens of Russian soldiers. They were handed over personally at the hands of their mothers who arrived in the territory of Ichkeria with Maria Kirbasova, a representative of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia.

The whole world witnessed the barbarism of the Russian invaders in Chechnya. It’s been many years, but until now I still live the horror of that war. It is still not forgotten. Memories of those who died in the name of freedom of our nation does not merely become a bystander and wait until this is all over. Only in the last two wars, 250,000 Chechens, including 45,000 children were killed. Thousands of people are still missing, thousands were kept in the Russian concentration camps, thousands are still in the secret prisons of the Russian executioners where they suffer torture and abuse that destroys their human dignity.

They bombed, burned alive and killed us with impunity… We were only defending our homes, but we are accused of terrorism. When our men go to the mountains to protect us – mothers, sisters, wives and homeland -, they are called bandits. Our leaders, backed by the entire nation (except for some national traitors ) are called terrorists.

Many politicians have quietly watched the destruction of our small nation, the countries tacitly supported the terrorist Putin’s policies. Nobody wanted to get involved and here another one came. If they had stopped the imperial designs of the Kremlin and asked for an answer for these crimes, for each dead Chechen child, today, neither Georgia nor Ukraine would have to suffer.

Rather than stopping the genocide against my people, the world powers turned a blind eye to the horrors of the war in Chechnya. Their silence led to the current situation. Because of their cowardice, today Russian boots trample your land, the land of my friends. And today the Kremlin is prepared to do the same with the Ukrainians as they had done to my people. The question is whether or not the world will swallow this imperial spittle once again? I am scared to think that it could happen.

People! The war is not worth a single child’s tear. Do you not understand? I’d like to look you, the leaders of the powerful countries in the eye and ask how much more blood needs to be shed before you finally begin to act?

My Dear Brothers and Sisters, People, I beg you, do not forget that if there is war, then there will be death. I urge you not to be afraid of Putin and avoid violence. Together, let us say, “Stop the war”! I appeal to the Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians :

Do not give in to provocations!
Do not give up your Freedom!
Banish this evil from the Ukraine!
For your and our freedom!

07.03.2014

Rubati Mitsaeva
Representative of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in Poland

*Text was translated by Waynakh Online and edited by Michael Capobianco