News

The Moscow Mayor's Office banned the meeting to commemorate victims of the war, to protest against it, and to urge a political settlement of the Russian-Chechen conflict that was planned to be held at the memorial stone on Lubyanskaya Square in Moscow on February 23.

The possible change of the place for the exercises is connected with the brutal murder committed in Budapest on February 19, when a lieutenant of the Armenian Armed Forces was killed by an Azerbaijan officer.

"The state of the hunger strike participants is normal; medical intervention is not needed. Just some changes have been made to their nourishment, with their state being taken into consideration," said the official of the Ministry of Justice.

"We are not going to start a war, but we shall not allow Abkhazia to become an exporter of arms and drugs," said the Georgian President.

Refugees believe they are simply being forced to leave Ingushetia by the deliberate worsening of their living conditions.

"Whatever sphere of the Russian social life we take (not to mention the developments in Chechnya), everywhere we witness the growth of overt violations of fundamental rights," reads the statement.

Both the officers were taking part in English courses within the framework of NATO's Partnership for Peace program in Hungary.

About 500 thousand antipersonnel mines are buried and wait for their time in Chechnya.

Larisa Alaverdian, chairwoman of the Foundation Against Illegality, has been appointed the first ombudsperson of Armenia.

$4.5 dollars have come in on al-Walid's foreign account the other day, according to special services' information.

"We have been working for many years to form a certain field for the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and I am not going to throw all this work into the water," stressed the President of Armenia.

The police watched the Chechens and human rights activists being evicted from the school but preferred to remain aloof and not to interfere in the situation.

According to information received by Amnesty International, minority ethnic groups from the Caucasus region have once again become the target of discriminatory rhetoric, arbitrary document checks and searches, and racially-motivated revenge attacks.

The authorities explained their actions by saying that the NGO Danish Refugee Council had illegally built housing for displaced persons from liquidated tent camps on the territory of the accommodation center.

As reported by a high-ranking official at Bailovsky Investigatory Isolation Ward 1, the state of Arifoglu's health worsened and isolation ward workers had to warn him of the possibility of using forced feeding.

The films to be shown are Murder with International Consent (Poland), Terror in Moscow (Great Britain), Chechen Lullaby (France), and Children's Stories - Not for Kids (Russia).

The organizers of the rally were going to commemorate the victims of the Chechen genocide, to urge the political settlement of the Russian-Chechen conflict and establishment of a United Nations interim administration in Chechnya.

More than twenty non-government organizations, foundations and parties founded the association "Against Numbering of People". Its main task is to stop the process of introducing the system of social cards in Armenia.

Svetlana Gannushkina has appealed to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov drawing his attention to leaflets extremist in content that appeared in Moscow metro trains. These leaflets call upon the citizens to come to the meeting "Clear Moscow of Chechen Bandits."

The State Security Ministry of Georgia will make KGB (State Security Committee of the USSR) archives accessible to the wide public in the near future.