Dictators and madmen can count on Valdimir Putin´s friendship

Dictators and madmen - from Assad to Lukashenko -  wherever they are, have one thing in common - they can count on the unrelenting friendship of Russia´s ruler Vladimir Putin. 

Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are ... 

This is Putin´s man in Chechnya speaking: 

"In Chechnya, human rights are observed more than anywhere else," he said in a statement published on his website Friday.

He said Washington was ignoring local traditions outside the United States. "100,000 people have their own centuries-old principles. … You cannot destroy them by pressing them into American standards," he said.


The truth about Kadyrov:

Rights groups have long implicated Kadyrov in killings and abductions in Chechnya, which he is seen as governing as his personal fiefdom with the Kremlin's blessing. Kadyrov denies wrongdoing.

The State Department report dwells at length on the case of Umar Israilov, a Chechen refugee and former bodyguard of Kadyrov who was shot and killed in Vienna in 2010.

An Austrian court last year convicted three Chechens of organizing the murder. A fourth suspect, accused of pulling the trigger, Letscha Bogatirov, "was promoted by the Kadyrov government following the killing as a reward for his actions," the U.S. report said.

The New York Times sketches the background to the Israilov case: 

In complaints to Russian prosecutors and to the European Court of Human Rights, Mr. Israilov and his father, Sharpuddi Israilov, said that Mr. Kadyrov, in previous government positions, had instigated a campaign of abductions of suspected separatists and their families, and then personally tortured detainees, including the Israilovs, and ordered killings or was present as detainees were put to death. The court documents, filed in late 2006, included the first formal complaints levied against Mr. Kadyrov by an insider from his circle, and appear to have been the first to accuse Mr. Kadyrov personally in the human rights court.

Taken together, the complaints sketched the inner workings of busy institutional torture centers, part of a joint Russian-Chechen effort to subdue the separatists through force and collective punishment, and install the Kadyrov family in power. The complaints also described the brutality of one of Mr. Kadyrov's closest confidants, Adam Delimkhanov, who since 2007 has been a member of Russia's Duma, the lower house of Parliament.

A Washington Times article has more about the Kadyrov´s human rights abuses: 

Chechnya’s government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

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“You hear about these cases almost every day,” said a local human rights defender, who asked that her name not be used out of fear for her safety. “It is hard for me to investigate this topic, yet I worked on it with [human rights activist] Natasha [Estemirova] for a while. But, I can’t anymore. I am too scared now. I’ve almost given up, really.”

Estemirova, who angered Chechen authorities with reports of torture, abductions and extrajudicial killings, was found in the woods in 2009 in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Her killer or killers have not been found.

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The Association for Threatened Peoples (APM) criticises the decision of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to nominate the current Prime Minister of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov as transitional president of the Chechen Republic. For APM, Kadyrov “should be brought before an international court and not receive a governmental assignation.” According to research conducted by the human rights organisation, Kadyrov and his personal militia are directly responsible for a large number of homicides, rapes and kidnappings of Chechen civilians, among which, many children. Kadyrov has set up various illegal prisons in which whoever is suspected of belonging to Chechen liberation movements disappears and undergoes torture. Under the regime of Kadyrov the number of disappearance of relatives of combatants and presumed combatants has skyrocketed – thus reports the  communiqué of the APM.