Blogger agrees to meet Surkov to discuss peace dialogue in Northern Caucasus

On February 28, the Chechen blogger "Timur Stigal" complained to the Twitter microblog of President Dmitry Medvedev on the bribes in the amount of 300,000 US dollars, allegedly extorted by the retinue of Vladislav Surkov for arranging a meeting with him.

The blogger explained that the reason for seeking Mr Surkov's audience was in his desire to stop the "unofficial war" waged in Northern Caucasus, particularly in Chechnya.

The President told the blogger that he had showed his post to Surkov and offered to call the latter's reception office, while the President's assistant Arkady Dvorkovich posted the required phone number.

Then, the first deputy head of the President's administration Vladislav Surkov called the blogger, and "Timur Stigal" wrote in his blog: "Vladislav Yurievich has just called me... I'm happy with the talk - I told, he listened. We decided to meet after the elections," the blogger wrote.

As he clarified in his recent posts, Mr Surkov had explained the postponement of the meeting by his dense schedule and that "it's better to communicate with a cold head; and now they are too busy."

"I wanted to make specific proposals on dialogue with those who want peace, but disagree with the position of the federals. They are often forced to go against the law and persecuted for their religious beliefs. In the end, they leave for the mountains. It is necessary that they wouldn't go there and wouldn't be labelled as Islamic extremists. In Chechnya, the problems are not economic in nature, the dialogue is needed on the problems of religious nature, as there are problems on this basis," said "Timur Stigal" to the "Gazeta.Ru".

According to his story, a concrete proposal is to establish a sort of the forum "Strategy-2020", which is held in different regions by the "Edinaya Rossiya" (United Russia) Party, where the main point is to discuss reconciliation among the Muslims, who are willing to go to the mountains because of disagreement with the policy of the federal government.

We remind you that in total the Chechen Republic has 63 registered bloggers.