SNA CHECHENPRESS, Current Information Section, 29/11/09
To the President of the Republic of Georgia
Mikhail Saakashvili
Mr. President,
We are deeply concerned about the plight of Mr. Said-Khussein Tazbaev, an ethnic Chechen who has resided in Tbilisi since 2001 in his refugee status, obtained from the UNHCR Office in Georgia.
Between 12 o’clock and 1pm on 24 October Mr.Tazbaev took his son to a Tbilisi swimming pool, but never came back to collect the boy. Nobody has seen him since. Mr.Tazbaev vanished without a trace in broad daylight in the middle of Tbilisi!
There are well founded fears that he was abducted by the Russian FSB agents who had infiltrated Georgia. To begin with, Mr.Tazbaev was a Deputy Minister of Culture, Education and Science in the Maskhadov Government which gives the Russian FSB sufficient grounds for persecuting him. Secondly, a number of Russian officials (including the FSB head Mr.Bortnikov) made several ludicrous statements three weeks ago alleging that ‘the Saakashvili Government has links with al-Qaeda and sends terrorists to infiltrate the Russian territory of the North Caucasus.” This nonsense was quite naturally vehemently refuted by Georgian officials.
Nevertheless, the events could still unfold in such a way that following sophisticated tortures by the FSB henchmen the abducted Tazbaev would make a ‘confessional’ statement against Georgia. Specifically, statements relating to the subject of his alleged links with al-Qaeda and his posting by the Georgian special services to the North Caucasus to carry out terrorist attacks. The FSB and the Kremlin media feed such plausible nonsense to the Russian people that any unsophisticated reader could easily fall for these Kremlin-Lubyanka ravings.
In fact, Mr. President, Tazbaev’s abduction, together with any subsequent potential confessional statements, aims to discredit your government. Tazbaev’s life is hanging by a thread. It is quite likely that he would follow the fate of Ruslan Eliev, kidnapped in Baku, whose mutilated corpse was dropped from a Russian helicopter and found in the Samashki forest in Chechnya. Or the fate in the form of the latest vicious murder (a new type of execution specially invented by the Kadyrov-Putin regime) when a man, beaten unconscious, with multiple internal bleedings and injuries, is locked away in a psychiatric hospital, without any access to medical help. The man dies twenty four hours later in terrible pain and agony. This is what happened to Viskhan Abdurakhmanov in Baku also.
Mr. President!
We are asking you to use your influence and power to find Mr.Tazbaev and free him if he is still alive. A life of any Chechen who has managed to escape the hell called ‘Chechnya’ is priceless. These people are what is left of the gene pool which has been almost totally destroyed as a result of the two Russian wars.
Yours respectfully,
Members of the International Human Rights Group Chech3nya-Russia:
Victoria Pupko, The Anna Politkovskaya Foundation, US;
Mairbek Taramov, Chechen Human Rights Centre, Sweden;
Said-Emin Ibragimov, International Association for Peace and Human Rights, France;
Nadezhda Banchik, Amnesty International, US;
Yelena Maglevannaya, Russian journalist, Findland.
25 November 2009
http://www.chechenpress.co.uk/content/2009/12/03/main01.shtml
