International peacemaking centre to be set up in Northern Caucasus

Currently, a number of international organizations are coordinating the issue of creating, in the territory of one of the republics of Northern Caucasus, of an international civil peacemaking centre. In the near future, the project of such centre will be submitted to Presidents of Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan.

The centre will deal, together with the authorities and public organizations, with normalization of the situation, investigation of the reasons of what happens in the Caucasus and elaboration, on the basis thereof, of international techniques that can be applied for settling "frozen but unsettled conflicts" in other countries of the world.

"Here, they try to address the consequences, not the reasons, moreover the original causes of phenomena. Any conflict is like a snowball. Any action causes a counteraction. Force is no helper here. Any recent conflict, which the authorities tried to solve by force, was never settled. Neither in Afghanistan nor in Yugoslavia, in Iraq and Chechnya," Aslambek Apaev, expert of the Moscow Helsinki Group for Northern Caucasus, said to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Therefore Mr Apaev made a proposal on necessity to set up some special structure, engaged in investigation into the original causes of conflicts; such structure should include experts equidistant from all the parties in conflict.