For Aset Vatsuyeva, her new job as a newscaster on Russian television is more than a good career move, it's a small victory for the Chechen people she hopes to represent.
"Chechens are really happy to see me on television. For them it's a small victory," said Vatsuyeva, 25.
Vatsuyeva fled her native Chechnya to escape the first war that ravaged the separatist republic from 1994 to 1996.
In Moscow, she was approached by veteran NTV journalist Leonid Parfionov to present a new program called "Strana i Mir" (The Country and the World).
"It's a political gesture," Parfionov said.
"I want to contribute to the disappearance of the phrase 'person of Caucasian origin,' a pejorative expression rooted in Russian society, most of which thinks (Chechens) are 'criminal' or 'terrorist,'" he told AFP.
Vatsuyeva's first program, aired in late October, focused on the Chechen women who formed part of a band of rebels who held 800 theatre-goers in Moscow hostage for three days.
It was a controversial debut, with many viewers accusing the Chechen newscaster of sympathy for the hostage-takers.
"After the hostage-taking, the police arrested my 20-year-old brother Apti and accused him of links to the abductors. The NTV leadership had to step in
so they would let him go," Vatsuyeva said in an interview with AFP.
In the days following the theatre crisis -- which left 129 hostages and all 41 hostage-takers dead -- anti-Chechen sentiment in Moscow ran even higher than usual, with widespread accusations of police harassment and summary detentions.
Similar accusations emerge daily from Chechnya, with human rights groups accusing federal forces of everything from kidnapping to summary executions and rape against the civilian population.
"I don't need to watch the news to know what's going on in Chechnya," said Vatsuyeva.
"I just have to talk to my relatives, who go back regularly and tell us how our neighbors were grabbed by masked men and found dead a few days later," she said.
"Do you call that a peaceful existence?"
President Vladimir Putin has been attempting to press on the world that the war in Chechnya is coming to a peaceful end, planning a constitutional referendum later in the month that is set to be followed by presidential and
local elections.
He has refused to negotiate with the Chechen rebel leadership.
"The position of the Russian authorities is a vicious circle," Vatsuyeva said. "All wars end through negotiations."
The young Chechen was just 16 when the Russian federal forces first swept into the southern republic to put down a separatist rebellion in 1994.
"All my dreams and illusions were destroyed," she remembered.
"The worst thing was the bombings. You couldn't find shelter anywhere," she said.
"Our family fled to the village of Goyty (10 kilometers, six miles south of Grozny), but my father and uncle were trapped in Grozny by federal forces," she said. "For several months, we didn't even know if they were alive."
Vatsuyeva's father, veteran Chechen dissident Abdulla Vatsuyev, did surive, but has since become paralyzed from a stroke.
The second war broke out in October 1999 as Vatsuyeva was in the middle of her journalism studies in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
Her family fled to Ingushetia, the republic bordering Chechnya which is home
to thousands of refugees from the war, before joining her in Moscow in November.
"The first year, every night my mother would say: 'I think that in a month we can go back home,'" Vatsuyeva remembered.
"Now, she understands that that is impossible -- our house was destroyed," she said.
Vatsuyeva's work as a journalist led her to return to Chechnya in summer 2000, in the midst of the bloody war that continues to ravage the republic.
"I didn't recognize my hometown," she said.
"The ruins, the depressed people -- I've never seen anything worse, not in my worst nightmares, not even in films," she said with tears in her eyes.