When the Second Russian-Chechen War started in 1999, Zurab Markhiev was living in Grozny. Like many others he fled to neighboring Ingushetia where he lived for a while in a refugee camp and often helped foreign journalists as a guide in Chechnya. As someone who grew up in Grozny he knew every corner of the city. It was then that Markhiev decided to become a journalist.

For her reporting, Elena Maglevannaya was accused of libel, found guilty by a court, sentenced to publish a refutation and pay an approximately $6,5000 penalty. Maglevannaya had never seen that much money in her entire life. A professional lawyer, she worked as a freelancer for the local newspaper Svobodnoe Slovo in her hometown of Volgograd in Southern Russia. The highest honorarium she ever received rarely exceeded $30. But it was not the absence of money that upset her the most.

Extremely brave is the first characteristic you hear when interviewing people who had known Natalya Estemirova as a colleague, friend, journalist and human rights advocate.

On 15 July 2009 Natasha Estemirova was kidnapped outside her flat in Grozny, bundled into a car, driven away and shot. One year later Tanya Lokshina, Russia Researcher of Human Rights Watch, still grieves for her, reflecting how difficult it is to come to terms with her death.

In January 2009, an asylum seeker from Chechnya was gunned down in front of a supermarket in Vienna. Austrian investigators now say that their inquiries have led them to suspect that [puppet] Chechen President Ramzan Kadirov may have been behind the slaying. Their findings could strain relations between Europe and Russia.

A wrestler of Cavigal club from Nice, Muslim Saypulayev is a fully integration example. The Chechen origine athlete, Muslim, fights with “Les Bleus” (France National Team).

When I met Aslan Daudov, a 30-year-old Chechen asylum seeker whose name has been changed here on his request, he was afraid that he would be deported within a couple of hours to Poland. He was not as concerned about Poland’s negligible acceptance rate of Chechen asylum seekers; but was terrified of a much worse fate: that he might be kidnapped by agents of the [puppet] Chechen government, tortured and killed.

In the summer of 2004, two years and four months before she was gunned down in the entrance to her Moscow apartment, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya made a bold visit to Chechnya to interview 27-year-old Ramzan Kadirov, who had recently become (with the Kremlin’s blessing) the republic’s de-facto leader. It proved to be a harrowing experience. When they met face to face, Kadirov could not contain his rage at Politkovskaya for reporting on his brutal rise to power, even threatening to have her shot. Politkovskaya concluded later that “a little dragon has been raised by the Kremlin. Now they need […]

Most of the 1,500 Chechen refugees who have been living in Turkey for years are yet to be given official refugee status by the Turkish government. Without that status, they are not permitted by law to have a job or attend schools in the country. The refugees, many of whom had to flee Russia’s wars in Chechnya, are pushing Turkish officials to grant them those rights. But as Imran Garda reports from Turkey, there may be a political motive that has kept Turkish officials from making the move.

Europe is not safe for everyone. Neo-Nazi attacks took away a Chechen asylum seeker family from Poland to Finland, but now the family has to leave from Finland. Oksana Chelysheva wrote about the rising xenophobia, escape and long journey of Ruslan and Petimat Suleymanova and their children.

Gistam Sakaeva’s career in humanitarian work began, in 1995, “by accident” in the refugee camps of Dagestan during the First Russian-Chechen War.

The world doesn’t know much about the Russian Genocide of the Chechen people in 1944.The details of this monstrosity is contained in a book written in 1970 by Robert Conquest and titled “Nation Killers.” Other North Caucasian people exiled were the Ingush, Charachai and the Balkar.

The weather in early February 2000 was nasty, cold and grey. It was as if nature were responding to the horror of what was taking place and to the fear that was spilling over everywhere.

Aliskhan Pliyev was talking on his cell phone with his girlfriend one autumn afternoon when two dozen masked men in uniforms stormed into his family’s house, grabbed him and began to hustle him away.

A decade after they fled their homeland, Chechens in Georgia still fear it is unsafe to go back.

With Andrei Babitsky I met in the first war in 1995. He arrived in Ichkeria which was already in full swing in the war. It was in the Vedeno region where the position of the Chechen armed forces were located, above the Baku-Rostov highway.

Three weeks ago Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s federal security service, accused Georgia of harbouring Al Qaeda extremists in Pankisi. No terrorists have been discovered either by the numerous reporters who have travelled to the area or the delegation of journalists and foreign diplomats whose trip was organised by the Christian Democrat opposition party. But all the media attention aside, Pankisi remains an underreported region, home to people who have experienced the devastating power of both war and rhetoric.

Five years have passed since pro-Chechen terrorists seized School No. 1 in Beslan, a city in the North Caucasus, provoking a hostage crisis that ended in the massacre of 146 adults and 186 children. But the memory of those ghastly events continues to haunt Russia today.

Award-winning human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was determined to expose some of the shocking abuses taking place in Chechnya – but just weeks after giving this moving interview to BBC radio correspondent Lucy Ash, Natalya’s bullet-riddled body was found by the side of a road.

Out of fear of angering the government of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, executives at US publishing group Condé Nast have taken extreme measures to censor a story in GQ magazine about the Russian government’s connection to a series of bombings of apartment buildings, going so far as to stop the magazine’s distribution in Russia.

Zula is tall, with beautiful eyes, light brown, gazing from under dark blue eyelashes. Little pieces of paper are covering the cork board above her desk like thick ivy: “Thank you, Zula”, and mainly “I love you, Zula! Kuba”, “I love you, Zula! Agata”, “Zula, I love you…Jurek”, “…Zosia”, “…Rafal”… Zula is a doctor. She came to Poland after the beginning of second Russian-Chechen war.

We present you an article which is a story of the Finnish human rights activist who was trying to help Chechen refugees, the innocent victims of Russian dirty war in Chechnya since 1994.