I am Madina Magomadova from Chechnya, and I speak on behalf of the International Peace Bureau, an NGO which remains very much concerned about the continuing cruel and unlawful war in Chechnya.

I would like to thank the Commission for this opportunity to speak.

Under the slogan of an 'anti-terrorist operation' the Russian government continues the war in the Chechen Republic. The first to suffer from the military actions are the peaceful citizens, especially children and youth. What is happening there must be qualified as a war crime, a crime against humanity.

From 1994 to 1996, and from 1999 until now, a total of around 175,000 peaceful citizens were killed, the majority children, women and old people. In February 2000 in just one Chechen village, Katir Yurt, 420 peaceful citizens were killed after rocket attacks by Russian troops. It is the first time during the last half century in Europe when a whole city is almost totally destroyed. In Grozny 300 settlements out of 425 have been flattened.

During the last year and a half, Chechnya has became a closed zone, a firing range, where the military and police of the Russian government, according to their own interests, test new kinds of weapons and methods of mass destruction of people and their environment.

The absence of effective local authorities, law-enforcement agencies and international control leads to impunity and irresponsible practices. This isolation has led to an enormous increase in military crimes and crimes against humanity on such a large scale that we will need a new international tribunal.

Today Russia is a full member of the Council of Europe and bears the whole responsibility for the fulfilment of the commitments it has entered into to respect human rights and freedoms. However, we are bound to report that not one of these commitments have been fulfilled. There is no improvement yet in the observance of human rights in the Chechen Republic.

We regret that many politicians of different states do not want to see the real picture of what is going on in Chechnya, and are satisfied by declarations and symbolic steps from the Russian side.

The methods of conducting war that Russia has chosen in the Northern Caucasus have turned the present Chechen campaign into a serious crime wave, accompanied by masses of victims.

Moreover, the actions of the Russian federal troops are the actions of military and police who are under the command of the internationally-recognised government of the Russian Federation, the state that signed a series of international documents and took the responsibility to observe human rights. That is why the violations in Chechnya by the Russian federal forces are especially cynical and hard to bear.

The military actions are still continuing and they have acquired the character of a guerrilla war. To the attacks and diversions of the guerrillas the military forces respond by terror against the peaceful population. There are many examples of this. A lot of people are still disappearing in Chechnya, detained by the Russian military. Some 1500 people (mostly Chechen men) disappeared according to the official information from 1994-1996, and 6000 people more have disappeared according to unofficial information from August 1999 to January 2001.

The relatives of the detained, as a rule, cannot get any information for a long time about the reasons for their detention, they don't know where the person is kept, whether he is charged or not. It goes without saying that the detained cannot have a lawyer.

After several weeks or even months, most of the detained people are found in secret mass graves. The information about the location of these graves is usually sold for money by the soldiers. The bodies are found with signs of torture. But there are many cases when it was impossible to find anywhere the persons detained by the federal army.

The whole of Chechnya, in the places where the Russian army is located, is dotted with terrifying handmade holes in the ground, in which arrested civilians are kept. These torture holes are unlawful filtration points.

Edelbek Isayev, a peaceful citizen of the village Stariye Atagi, was put in such a hole and in the end they took his heart out of his body, scalped him, broke his hands, cut off the ends of his hands, and his ribs were removed. And then in his belly they cut out their signatures.

Among the bodies in the mass grave near Khankala there was a body of a six-year old girl who had been shot in the head, and also the bodies of three women detained by Russian soldiers in Grozny on 3 June.

Such stories are countless in the present Chechnya - thousands and thousands of them.

Not one official, guilty of such disappearances of detained people is made to answer for this. Moreover, not one case of the complete disappearances has been investigated.

We thank the UN Commission for the principled position it took regarding the tragic events going on in the Northern Caucasus, and the tough resolution it passed last year on the situation in the Chechen Republic. But unfortunately we must report that not one item of this resolution was fulfilled by the Russian side.

On behalf of the people suffering such terrible violations, and which we fear is now approaching the stage of dying out, we appeal to this Commission to immediately create an independent international commission to investigate the crimes committed by the Russian army on the territory of Chechnya.

Thank you for your attention.