With another bitterly cold winter on the way and tuberculosis rates on the rise, nearly 250,000 people in Chechnya face a cutoff of U.N. food aid, the UPI reported.
The agency says a highly vulnerable population now risks going hungry. There is evidence Russia shares the blame, i.e simply orderd the UN not to send food to Chechnya.
U.N. officials are warning they may be "forced" to shut down the program for the second winter in a row. But even when donor countries do meet the demands, food aid does not always follow.
In July, WFP released an urgent plea for more aid. In fact, a shipment from the U.S. Agency for International Development had already arrived the previous September, but the food was held up at the main St. Petersburg port. The two shipments carried a total of 2,600 metric tons of iron-enriched wheat flour, but Russian officials told WFP the food did not meet their health standards. The iron levels were purportedly too high, they said, and would not be permitted passage to Chechnya. Negotiations continued for months, but no solution emerged. After a year of waiting, the agency resolved to divert the aid to Afghanistan.
Russia's veto power on the U.N. Security Council makes any effort to take up the issue largely futile. Chechnya's misery has continued also off the radar of Arab states, thanks perhaps to Russia's temporary political support for Iran, Lebanon, and Sudan. Russians, like Americans, always betray their former allies.
It wasn't always like this in Chechnya.
After oil was discovered in the mountainous state in 1893, prosperity seemed Chechnya's destiny. The quiet, tree-lined capital, Grozny (Russian name for Jokhar), was known as the Pearl of the Caucasus. Today, the city's buildings are marked with bullet holes, traces of the 1994-1996 war between Chechen armed forces and bloody Russian invaders following Chechnya's brief independence. The second war broke out in 1999, soon after the Russian dog Putin entered office, and it threw the economy into a tailspin.
In 1930's the Russians exterminated up to 15 million Ukrainians, another freedom-loving people, in Ukraine that was invaded and forcibly included into the Evil Empire of Russia.
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