PEACE MARCH BEGINS.

PEACE MARCH BEGINS.

On August 1, a group of eighty-six Chechen refugees set off from their tent camp in Ingushetia on a two-month-long peace march to Moscow hoping that, as correspondent Anna Badkhen wrote in the August 3 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle “it would be the Chechen version of the 1965 freedom march in Selma, Alabama.” However, Badkhen continued: “They didn’t make it past the first 1,000 feet. Club-wielding police and military broke up the march–beating and arresting twelve protesters, including the organizers, and driving them off to a jail in Ingushetia…. Ten marchers–all Chechens–remained in custody [on August 2], and the march’s organizers, human rights activists Aleksandr Lyuboslavsky of Moscow and Vladimir Shaklein of Yekaterinburg, were put on a train scheduled to arrive in Moscow [on August 3]” (see also Gazeta.ru, August 1). Also on August 1, a camera team working for the ARD television network in Germany were detained in Ingushetia and interrogated for three hours. Ingush security people whispered to the members of the team that “the FSB has given orders to deactivate you” (ARD Television and Lenta.ru, August 2).