People all over the world held events on February 23 to remember the tragedy of the Chechen people, after the Save Chechnya Campaign, a support and advocacy body based in London, led a campaign to have February 23, the date of Stalin’s deportation of the Chencens to Central Asia in 1944, proclaimed as World Chechnya Day.
The Save Chechnya Campaign (SCC) UK proposes to commemorate the Stalin-era genocide of the Chechen people as World Chechnya Day (WCD) on Thursday 23 February 2006. This momentous tragedy in the history of the Chechen people resulted in the deaths of about two thirds of the Chechen people.
On 23 February 1944 the Soviet Union set in motion the deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples to the steppes of Central Asia. In the depths of winter they were subjected to summary massacres and food shortages: it was a solution neither less final nor less brutal that the one being inflicted at the same time in Europe on the Jews.
Last month, the British charity MARCCH convened a major conference on “Chechen after Maskhadov”, in cooperation with other Chechen support groups in the UK. It was attended by AHMAD MUSA, a contributor to Crescent International and a supporter of the Save Chechnya Campaign (SCC).
1
