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Outrage as Memorial Is Dismantled.
04 June 2008 By Unknown / Staff Write rGROZNY -- Authorities in Chechnya have dismantled a memorial to the victims of Soviet repression, triggering public outrage. Workmen appeared without warning last week and dismantled the monument, erected by Chechen separatist leader Dzhokbar Dudayev, who fought Russia's armies in the 1990s. "I'm outraged. To move such a monument you should ask the people," Grozny resident Zaur Timerbayev said. "There should be a referendum. This is a catastrophe." Thousands of Chechens died when Soviet leader Josef Stalin deported almost the entire population of 500,000 in 1944 for suspected collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. In 1956 the Soviet leadership encouraged Chechens to return.
Just a 20-minute walk from the center of Grozny, the monument -- a stone fist clutching a sword and surrounded by Chechen tombstones -- dominated a busy road junction. After two wars since 1994 between federal forces and Chechen rebels, Kremlin-backed Ramzan Kadyrov rules with little opposition, and public dissent is now rare. Kadyrov wants to build a new monument commemorating the Soviet deportation of the Chechens on the outskirts of the city.
"The original place for the memorial was not very convenient," Kadyrov said in comments distributed by his press service. "The new location will include a place for ceremonies, a mosque and a composite history of the subject. An obelisk will be built with all the names of the people who died in the relocation of the Chechens."
But many Chechens were angry the memorial has been dismantled. "I consider the removal of this monument as abuse," said Idris Gaitukayev, 59. "I was born during the time of the expulsions, many of my compatriots died, and I am seriously affected by what happened during this terrible period of my people's history."
Relocation of Chechen 'genocide' memorial opens wounds
Aslan Nurbiyev
Published: AFP Wednesday, June 04, 2008
GROZNY, Russia - Old wounds are reopening in Chechnya over the relocation of a memorial erected more than a decade ago to victims of Stalin's attempt to destroy their mountain nation. The memorial - comprising hundreds of tombstones and a huge dagger in a clenched fist - was raised in Grozny at the launch of Chechnya's ill-fated independence drive after the 1991 Soviet collapse. The monument's miraculous survival through years of Russian bombardments against the Chechen capital matched the uncompromising message emblazoned on a brick backdrop: "We will not break, we will not weep, we will never forget."
Now Chechnya's controversial leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who was installed by the Kremlin and brooks no dissent, has ordered the monument relocated from the centre to the outskirts, within sight of the main Russian military base. Work started at the end of last week without any public debate and ordinary Chechens are angry. "No one has the right to move those gravestones. A monument like that should be put right in the centre of the city so that every Chechen knows his history," said housewife Fatima Ibragimova, 35.
The memorial recalls Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's deportation of the entire Chechen nation and the related Ingush group - half a million people - to the steppes of Central Asia in the winter of 1944. As many as a quarter of the deportees froze, starved or died from disease in what many historians and the European Parliament call a genocide. Survivors returned to their home