Film "Missing Lives": over 3000 persons still missing in Chechnya

More than 3000 persons are still considered missing in Chechnya. They disappeared in the course of the "counterterrorist operation" that was conducted since 1999 - the time of Vladimir Putin's advent to power in Russia, who is leaving, after the recent election, a sad heritage to his successor, president-elect Dmitri Medvedev. This conclusion was made by Violetta Krasnik, WITNESS Programme coordinator for Europe and post-Soviet countries, while making her comments on release of the documentary "Missing Lives. Disappearances and Impunity in Northern Caucasus" created jointly by the WITNESS Programme and Offices of the Human Rights Centre "Memorial" in Grozny and Nazran.

Chechnya in 2000. In one of the streets, ruined by the war, we see mothers, wives and sisters of missing people. They hold in their hands opened IDs of their relatives, their photos, newspaper articles about their disappeared relatives who had once stepped inside the buildings of power agencies; the poster running "Release them". These are the starting frames of the narration "Missing Lives" about the attempts of the families of the persons, kidnapped, tortured and exposed to extrajudicial executions, to retrieve any information about those missing and to achieve any fair investigation of the fate of their kidnapped members.