Blair Backs Putin on Chechnya The Associated Press | 19 June 03
Posted on 06/19/2003 7:05 AM PDT by RussianConservative
LONDON -- Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday that he would raise the issue of human rights abuses in Chechnya in an upcoming meeting with President Vladimir Putin, but said he also supported Moscow's efforts to fight terrorism.
"I always raise the issue of Chechnya with President Putin, but I do so in a way that also recognizes this point -- that as a result of terrorism coming out from extremists based in Chechnya, the Russian people have also suffered a very great deal," Blair said in the House of Commons.
Conservative Party lawmaker Crispin Blunt pressed Blair on the issue during the prime minister's weekly question-and-answer session in Parliament, saying Russian security forces had been responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people in the Chechen conflict.
Blair agreed it was important to discuss human rights but said Britain must also support Putin's anti-terror efforts.
"It's worth just pointing out that when we finally won the conflict in Iraq, some of those people that were still offering resistance were in fact from Chechnya, extremists who were based there," Blair said.
He also credited Putin with working for a political solution of the Chechen conflict.
"I hope we can agree both on the need for human rights but also on the need for a complete end for any form of terrorism emanating from Chechnya," he told his Tory questioner.
Putin visits Britain next week and is likely to push Blair on his hopes for visa-free travel between Russia and the expanding European Union and for western help to stem the flow of drugs from Afghanistan. Tensions with Iran and North Korea are also expected to be on the agenda.
Strains between the two leaders over the U.S.-led war on Iraq, which Blair backed and Putin opposed, appear to have eased.
Buckingham Palace announced that Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, would stay at the palace and be greeted with the full pomp of a state visit -- the first time that has been done for a Russian leader since Queen Victoria's reign in the second half of the 19th century.
n The head of a European Parliament delegation that recently returned from Chechnya said Wednesday that he saw "the first signs of recovery" in the republic.
"People are rising from their cellars from below the ground, to the floors above," said Reino Paasilinna, "I believe we are at a watershed."
He added, however, that the March referendum in Chechnya, presented by the Kremlin as a significant step toward stability, was flawed.
"The referendum was not satisfactory on all fronts," Paasilinna said.
He spoke at a news conference in Brussels that was beamed by satellite to Moscow.
In the March referendum, Chechens approved a Kremlin-backed constitution that cemented the region's status as part of Russia while promising it limited autonomy that has yet to be defined.
Although members of the delegation compared Grozny to Berlin and Stalingrad after World War II, Paasilinna welcomed the reopening of schools and hospitals and the return of water and electricity to parts of the city.
However, he expressed particular concern about the rising number of reported kidnappings in Chechnya, which human rights groups blame largely on the Russian military.
"People are disappearing all the time. This year there have been more than 250 registered cases of disappearances, which is an alarming figure," he said.
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