Yelena Bonner compares silence on Chechnya to silence on Holocaust

26 July 2001

WASHINGTON, Jul 26, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Yelena Bonner, widow of Nobel prize-winning human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, on Wednesday compared the silence regarding Moscow's war in the rebel republic of Chechnya to that on the Holocaust.

Bonner spoke to Representatives and their guests of massacres, "cleansing operations" and mass graves perpetrated by Russian forces in Chechnya acting with impunity.

"I understand that speaking all these statistics, it threatens to become so much that it's hard to grasp," Bonner told a small lunch gathering hosted by the National Endowment for Democracy.

"In one cleansing operation, in 30-35 degree Celcius heat, villagers were taken to a field, their papers were checked, then people were ordered to strip and stand on corrugated iron sheets -- like a frying pan. Many people died right there in the field."

"Years ago when people were being taken by the Nazis to (camps) and word came back of what was happening there, the reaction was complete disbelief. And I understand when I talk about Chechnya, it is the same," she said.

Bonner also criticized what she said was the international community's double standard when it came to Chechnya.

"The political genocide of the Chechen people is ignored or covered over, forgiven for Russians ... but genocide in other parts of Europe are condemned, and effective measures are taken," she said, speaking through her interpreter and son Alexander Semyonov.

"As long as this problem is not resolved in a humane way, it is impossible to speak of a human rights situation in Russia," she said, calling on the U.S. Congress to speak against the abuses in the war- shattered republic.

"I think that to stop the genocide should be the moral imperative for the Congress," she said.

Born in 1923, Bonner met Sakharov in 1970 and the two married in 1972, dedicating their lives to human rights. Her father, a prominent Armenian Communist, was arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938. Her mother served years of hard labor as the wife of a traitor. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse)