News

Locals report they saw Dagestani Isa Makasharipov among commanders of the Chechen unit acting on the territory of the Tsuntinsky district in Dagestan. Makasharipov was one of Shamil Basayev's closest mates.

In the evening of December 8, 2003 in the Leninsky district of Grozny, officers of one of the Chechen security agencies made an armed attack on a temporary accommodation center of forced migrants.

An article of the well-known conflictologist Professor Aleksandr Manasian appeared in the Azat Artsakh newspaper, which is published in Karabakh. The author notes in his article that while the OSCE Minsk Group on the Karabakh settlement is trying to arrange a complicated series of meetings and visits to the region, the US-Russian organization "Dortmund Conference", which was established as early as the 1970s, has been arranging trilateral meetings of experts from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorny Karabakh within the limits of people's diplomacy for three years already.

Baku agrees to lay on one of the Baku-Tbilisi-Jeikhan oil pipeline offshoots to Armenia, and Armenia quits the occupied lands in exchange.

From early in the morning all access routes to Soglasiya Square in Nazran were blocked by police units that let no cars through. In 1993, thousands of people attended rallies there because of the Ingush-North Osetian disputes over the Prigorodny district and the republic's separation from Chechnya.

The 25-year-old citizen of Sukhum, Tamaz Gogokhia, who was taken hostage by a Georgian gang on December 12, has been released.

The key result of the meeting is that all women's NGOs in Karachaevo-Cherkessia united into the Association of Women of Karachaevo-Cherkessia. Congress participants approved a statute of the new organization and elected its board.

The body of Gagida village administration head Abel Gogua, who disappeared on December 20, was found with traces of violent death on the border between the villages of Nanargali, the Gali district and Ganmukhuri, the Zugdidi district on December 21.

The round table "Peace Process: Myth or Reality" was held by the Chechen intelligentsia in Grozny on December 19. The aim of the event organized by the Lam cultural center was to discuss changes in the political situation in the aftermath of the presidential and State Duma elections in Chechnya.

Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Nikolay Patrushev stated it.

Participants in the quadripartite Georgian-Abkhazian meeting held at the Ingur check-point on December 18 described a situation in the border districts as "the one tending to worsen".

Although the war action made everyone suffer, the most vulnerable section of the population - children - appear to be the hardest hit.

According to the Interior Ministry, unknown individuals fired automatic weapons at the policemen in the Zavodskoy district of the city at 7:05 p.m. Moscow time last Sunday. An Interior Ministry operations major and his partner, a sergeant of the police force, were killed on duty.

The hostage, Oksana Bolshakova, was released in the course of the militia operation in the village of Shaami-Yurt. The woman was kidnapped in February 2003 in Budyonnovsk , Stavropol Territory and then taken to Kizlyar, Dagestan.

"But the responsibility will rest with the Azerbaijan authorities that agreed on the arrival of the hostile country's servicemen," stated Akif Nagi.

According to chairman of the Chechen International Human Rights Committee Aslanbek Abdurzakov, in difficult periods of the Georgian-Russian relations, the theme of the Pankisi Gorge always emerges as one of the means to either destabilize a situation in Georgia or put pressure upon it.

Due to the action, construction works are ceased in the towns of Rustavi and Marneuli, which are mainly populated by Azerbaijanians.

The fact that the Swiss Parliament joined the countries that recognized the Armenian Genocide in the beginning of the XX century in the Ottoman Empire is a victory of both Armenians and the Armenian Diaspora world wide and of all the human beings knowing the history.

Results of the action are unknown yet. On December 22, at daybreak, federal forces resumed their search for rebels.

On December 11, 2003, some information agencies reported that two teenagers, residents of the village of Prigorodnoye, were killed while placing a landmine. Members of the Human Rights Center "Memorial" have conducted their own investigation and ascertained the real circumstances of the young boys' death, which completely contradict the version of the regional operations headquarters.