Participants of conference "Enough to crackdown Caucasus" report on continuing disappearances of people

During the press conference "Enough to crackdown Caucasus" held in Moscow, human rights defenders from different regions of Northern Caucasus have discussed the problems of election fraud, continuing kidnappings of people, and the situation with natives of the Caucasus serving their sentences in prisons in Russia.

The main topic of the press conference was the kidnappings in the Caucasus. Despite the fact that on February 18, the first congress of the human rights defenders entitled "Caucasian Forum" was attended by visited the Ingushetian leader Yunus-Bek Evkurov, who admitted that secret services are involved in kidnappings, people continue to disappear, the participants of the conference emphasized.

"In a couple of days after the forum end, it became again known that a person disappeared in Ingushetia, and later, power agents kidnapped another person. Then, the situation repeats," said the Ingushetian oppositionist Magomed Khazbiev.

In her interview to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent, Svetlana Isaeva, Chairperson of the organization "Mothers of Dagestan", who failed to attend the press conference due to lack of finance, stated that she was also going to raise "the most painful topic in Dagestan about kidnappings of people, which acquired a massive character."

According to the human rights defender, during more than ten years, Dagestan is in a state of low war, where one side is represented by members of the armed underground and the other side by power agencies. "Besides, power agents fight against those people, who are somehow connected with members of the armed underground, and methods of that struggle are far from the constitutional ones," she has emphasized.

The speech of Kheda Saratova, the Chechen human rights defender, was devoted to the tight situation with natives of the Caucasus, serving their sentences in Russian prisons outside the region and to pressure on them.

"Recently, we received a signal from the Ryazan Region from the colony No. 3. There, convicted Caucasians complain that they are fed only with pork meat, and that contradicts their religious feelings. 14 persons signed the complaint. And that is not a single case. In total, 21,000 convicted natives of Chechnya serve their sentences in Russian prisons," Kheda Saratova said.