In early March, Vladimir Putin installed Ramzan Kadyrov, a 30-year-old reputed warlord and torturer, as the acting president of Chechnya. He was sworn in on April 5th.
A little background: On September 13, 2004, following the Beslan school hostage crisis, Putin launched an initiative to replace the direct election of the governors of Russia with a system whereby they would be proposed by the President that is, Putin) and approved or disapproved by regional legislatures.
Born in 1976, Kadyrov is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, a muslim imam, who was assassinated on May 9, 2004. In the early 1990s, the Kadyrovs--father and son--fought against the federal forces in the First Chechen War and then defected to the Moscow side in the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999.
In August 2005, Ramzan declared that Europe's largest mosque would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown (the photo at left shows the work in progress). When he became the acting prime minister in December 2005, he banned the use and production of alcohol and spoke in favor of polygamy. In March 2006, he decreed that women would be forced to wear headscarves.
The German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has alleged that up to 70% of recent murder, torture, rape and kidnapping incidents in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's thousands-strong paramilitary forces. On November 13, 2006 Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that claimed that torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya." In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not attempt to conceal their identity.
2 comments:
This is terrible. I have not heard anything about it. Thanks for the info.
but, then again, China is looking to pass or has passed legislation that will ban spitting in public. Thank God!
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