Committee for Peace in the Caucasus

Public interest towards the Caucasus area remains limited to occasional, dramatic episodes such as the hostage crises at the Moscow theatre and in the Beslan school: what the collective consciousness remembers is the massacre of children, but very few are aware of what really happened, and why. The ongoing conflicts in the areas are little known; no one pays attention to the humanitarian tragedy of hundreds of thousands of refugees; to the systematic human rights abuses in Chechnya and to the potentially explosive situation that is developing in the other Caucasian republics.

If political actors and public opinion ought to be more interested in these unstable regions it is not, however, merely due to humanitarian reasons, or to the obvious economic and geopolitical attractiveness of the area for the West, due in particular to its abundant oil resources. We can observe with concern the emergence on the one hand of a new radical Islamic front –especially in some areas of the North Caucasus; on the other, of xenophobic and neo-fascist ideologies within the Russian civil society. This is occurring in the context of a visible authoritarian degeneration that could result in an anti-Western totalitarian regime, with all its unavoidable consequences for international balances of power and stability.

СРС -The Committee for Peace in the Caucasus is a registered NGO created to respond to this situation.

Our aims