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SNA CHECHENPRESS, The Current Information Section, 29/05/08
The puppet political institutions in Chechnya, doing the bidding of the occupants, have demolished the memorial dedicated to the deportation of 1944. The puppet regime explains its decision to demolish the monument by the alleged need to move the memorial to the outskirts of the capital Grozny.
The memorial was erected under the President Dzhokhar Dudaev, before the invasion of 1994. During the construction of the memorial its creators used tomb stones gathered all over Chechnya from the Chechen cemeteries destroyed by the Russians.
In order to destroy the memory of the people during deportation the Russian occupants used to destroy Chechen cemeteries and used the tomb stones to build all kinds of projects – roads, pavements and even pigsties.
It is difficult to miss the symbolic nature of this current act of the occupants, which is aimed at continuing the aggression and at destroying everything which has something to do with the historic memory of the people.
These actions of the occupying administration have caused an extremely negative reaction of the Chechen citizens. However, the people who are terrorised on a daily basis are afraid of openly opposing such actions.
One of the publications of the Memorial Human Rights Centre ‘The Caucasus Hub’ quotes some of the participants of the survey carried out in Chechnya on the issue of the current vandalism.
According to one resident of Dzhokhar, the 66-year old Salakh, whose parents died during the 1944 deportation ‘ These events amount to barbarity, sacrilege and outright mockery of the memory of our people. These churts [the tomb memorials - ChP] had been brought here from all over Chechnya , they had been found in the foundations of buildings, under pigsties and cattle farms, and brought here by people in order to remind our descendants of the villainous crimes of the Stalin regime, to remind them of the tens and hundreds of thousands of victims of that monstrous campaign.’
The Dzhokhar resident reminds us that ‘the local Chechen puppets who have constantly appealed to the national patriotic feelings and have urged us to observe our traditions and customs, have themselves committed the truly barbaric act of mockery at the memory of our ancestors! How could they call themselves Chechens after that!?»
«After our deportation the churts from our cemeteries were used to build roads and other buildings. Only after the arrival of the ‘Gorbachev thaw’ we could finally speak openly about this issue and thanks to Dzhokhar Dudaev the memorial complex was built here in Grozny’, - said Tumisha, one of the residents of the Chechen capital.
It was destroyed twice in the course of the recent military campaigns but neither the Russian authorities, nor the local Chechen authorities at the time ‘ had dared to impinge on the sacred memory of the people, on our ancestors’ churts,’ – said Tumisha. ‘One can only qualify these actions as acts of vandalism and wild hatred of one’s own past and present,’ – she added. ‘Whoever gave the order to do it does not deserve to be called a Muslim or a Chechen or even a believer. They are an unbeliever, a person without conscience or honour.’
«Our [occupying – ChP] municipal authorities have been preparing to carry out this act for quite some time’ – claims Salman, another resident of the capital.
He draws our attention to the fact that several months ago the meeting between Muslim Khuchiev (the pro-Moscow so-called ‘mayor’ of the occupied Dzhokhar) and representatives of the local communities was shown on TV.
“There was an ecstatic lady who raised this issue during the meeting, speaking ‘with great indignation’ about the memorial which, according to her, did not fit the historic image of our city, and resembled ‘a pole stuck in the ground’ and so on and so forth. The mayor had naturally promised her to ‘take on board the public’s wishes”, - recounts Grozny’s resident.
He suggests that main reason the monument was demolished is its link with Dzhokhar Dudaev.
“It was clear even then that they were trying to put on a cheap act and that the woman was simply a ‘stool pigeon’. The only reason they wanted to demolish the monument was the fact that it had been erected by Dzhokhar Dudaev. The current authorities who are so used to take credit for absolutely everything have decided to destroy the memory of the people about those times by destroying the memorial. But they are not going to succeed”, - asserts Salman.
The puppets – the occupants’ henchmen - who call themselves Chechens and Muslims have revealed to us their real face and their real roots. Only the misbegotten ‘k’uts’, descendants of the slaves, who feel their own inferiority compared to the Chechens, could treat in this way the memory of the people who they claim to belong to and who they have nothing in common with, thus revealing their true colours only at the time of occupation. |
