"...one could speak of a partial responsibility of ex-chancellor Schröder for the persecution of the Chechnyans”

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) regrets the heavy attacks of ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Vice-Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier against the foreign policy of the Bundeskanzler, Frau Merkel. "These attacks are so surprising because Angela Merkel is trying to combine a policy of interests with principles of humanity and human rights”, said the General Secretary of the GfbV, Tilman Zülch, on Thursday. Gerhard Schröder on the other hand has during his period of office done whatever he could to cover up the criminal policies of genocide against the Chechnyans of Vladimir Putin. To this extent it is legitimate to speak of a partial responsibility of the Altbundeskanzler for the persecution of the Chechnyans. The Russian human rights workers Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalyov described the killing of several thousand Chechnyans as genocide. For the Czech President Vaclav Havel these crimes were the "liquidation of a small people”.

When the Russian President declared the Chechnyan war as ended on 29.02.2000 the German Defence Minister,Rudolph Scharping, announced on the same day the signing of 33 joint German-Russian military projects, among them being the training of Russian officers at the German army university in Hamburg.

A few days later the federal government sent a team of three headed by the chief of the secret service (BND), Dr August Hanning, to the totally destroyed Chechnyan town of Gudermes. The aim was not to investigate the terror of bombs and terror against the civilian population and to name the guilty, but to exchange on-spot information on terrorism with the Russian criminals. At the same time Putin refused permission to the UN delegate, Mary Robinson, to enter Chechnya . The Russian secret service FSB was at the time accused by various competent offices of having carried out the terror attacks on housing blocks in Moscow , which sparked off Putin’s Chechnyan campaign.

The GfbV accused Bundeskanzler Schröder and Defence Minister Scharping on 10th April 2000 of awakening dreadful associations with a dark part of the German past, i.e. with the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint subjugation of the Eastern European peoples. There was at that time close cooperation between NKVD and Gestapo.

It was only by lodging a criminal complaint at the Public Prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe that the GfbV was able to prevent the presumed war criminal and so-called Chechnyan Vice-President Ramzan Kadyrov from being allowed to lay a wreath as an official guest of Bundeskanzler Schröder together with President Putin at the memorial for the Soviet victims of the Nazis in Hanover. Thanks to this criminal complaint Kadyrov did not dare to come to Germany . He has been responsible according to various estimates for three quarters of the many breaches of human rights in Chechnya . Kadyrov gained office through manipulation of the elections.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was accused by the GfbV on his visit to the Lower-Saxon capital of many crimes against humanity in Chechnya, such as mass rape and expulsion, systematic persecution of the intelligentsia, liquidation of human rights workers, the bombardment of refugee treks, hospitals, ambulances, kindergartens, schools and mosques.