News

The heads of law-enforcement agencies demanded that the members of the Organizational Committee cancel the Congress. Their demand had the nature of an ultimatum as they threatened they would institute criminal proceedings against all the organizers if they disobeyed.

Russian servicemen abducted Khavazhi Shamayev, a 33-year-old resident of the Samashki village, and took him away from his own house in the direction of the district center of Achkhoy-Martan.

The released man had severe injuries and several fractured ribs, which is evidence that he had been subjected to savage beatings for all that time.

Having searched the house and not having found the man they needed, the gunmen savagely beat the 80-year-old woman.

Burdjanadze informed she suggested that the Abkhazian leaders come to Sukhumi to prepare a new stage in the relations between Georgia and Abkhazia. "The Abkhazian side, like the South Osetian one, did not take this step," she stressed.

The Manual on How to Work Out Applications for Grants was presented at the IATP (Internet Access and Training Program) center in Vladikavkaz on December 22. A small seminar on the rules of working out the applications was conducted within the presentation.

"There is no alternative to Russian peacekeepers," Abkhazian Prime Minister Raul Khajimba stressed in his interview with Russian journalists in Sukhum.

A landmine was activated in the Zavodskoy district of Grozny when a file of OMON (special tasks police platoon) officers was passing by.

The workshop "Modern Technologies of Teaching English" took place in Rostov-on-Don on December 15-20 within the framework of the All-Russian Festival "Ways of Hope". 50 young teachers from Adygeya, North Osetia - Alania, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, the Volgograd and Astrakhan regions, and Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories were participants in the workshop.

The action is aimed not only at presenting New Year gifts to children from families of scanty means, orphan children, under age delinquents, and children with limited physical and social abilities, but at instilling a spirit of mutual aid, mercy and humanism in those children.

The broadcasting of Rustavi 2 TV Company, which is the most popular one in Georgia, was ceased in Adjaria on November 23.

President of North Osetia Aleksandr Dzasokhov signed the order to create the organizational committee that is to arrange a congress of Caucasian people in Vladikavkaz in 2004.

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.