May 20, 2016 by
Today the most significant video archive of the two Chechen wars goes online: www.chechenarchive.org. The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), supported by PeaceWomen Across the Globe and Reporters Without Borders, has processed 1,270 video sequences filmed by human rights activists and brought to safety in Switzerland. The archive provides the Chechen people with an important resource for coming to terms legally and historically with the past and will also serve to fight against impunity and oblivion.
Chechen human rights activist Zaynap Gashaeva, together with other activists, journalists and documentary filmmakers, recorded and filmed war crimes which were committed particularly by the Russian army during the wars fought in her country between 1994 and 2006. The videos feature interviews with witnesses, soldiers, journalists and victims or their families and document the destruction of settlements. They also include unique videos with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006 primarily because of her commitment to Chechnya.
The videos have been safely brought to Switzerland. The Chechen Archive Association, founded jointly by the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), PeaceWomen Across the Globe and Reporters Without Borders Switzerland, has cleaned, digitized and analysed these videos, thereby creating a comprehensive video archive that bears disturbing testimony to these wars. To protect the witnesses, only a textual database with information about the videos is made public; the videos themselves and the sensitive information are being made available solely after consultation to make sure that personal data and other sensitive information remain confidential.
The human rights situation both in the Chechen republic and in the Russian Federation has massively deteriorated in the last few years. Defenders of human rights are persecuted, subjected to pressure, and sometimes even tortured or killed. Organisations are branded as foreign agents and prevented from doing human rights work.
A systematic coming to terms with war crimes cannot be envisaged at present either in Chechnya or in Russia. This makes the archive all the more important for historical research and for supporting the cases of the families of victims at the European Court of Human Rights. The archive will prove particularly beneficial if the political environment in Chechnya and Russia allows a legal coming to terms with the wartime period or a truth commission can be set up to establish facts and findings about the crimes committed against the Chechen people.
The website is now live at: www.chechenarchive.org
For further information contact:
Chechen Archive at Society for Threatened Peoples,
phone +41 (0) 31 939 00 00, e-mail: chechenarchive@gmail.com