Anne Nivat, from LeMonde:
As she knows, it is necessary to have an account of the dead to back up a claim of genocide in Chechnya, and the numbers do not exist. “We waited too long before we started counting. If we want to find out how many Chechens have died and how many have fled to western Europe or Russia, we’d have a few surprises. There are hardly any Chechens left in Chechnya. I know that it’s hard for a European to understand this conflict. But it’s an aberration to destroy all the elements of a people’s culture.”
She points out that during the 1944 deportation “all the old history books in Chechen and Arabic were burned on the main square of Grozny. Today nobody is capable of explaining how the old towers in our mountain villages were built. The tradition is lost. Only 50 of them remain out of 300. We can’t even visit them, because troops are stationed in the mountains.”
Here.