Some Westerners may know Ramzan Kadyrov, who runs the Russian republic of Chechnya. Aside from being one of Russia’s most notorious warlords and a serial human right rights abuser, Kadyrov is also eternal cat lover with an undying loyalty to Vladimir Putin and Putin t-shirts, extreme workouts and online clashes with John Oliver.
But they probably haven’t heard much about Kadyrov’s dad, who was an even more unsavory character. Back in the mid-1990s, during Russia’s first war with Chechnya, the elder Kadyrov committed mass atrocities against the Russians. “Russians outnumber Chechens in many times, thus every Chechen would have to kill 150 Russians,” he once said famously. Various human rights groups have criticized the Kadyrov family for their human rights abuses in the region.
When Putin became president of Russia, he won over the elder Kadyrov with the promise of giving Chechnya a special status over other Russian Republics. He did played a crucial role in securing peace between Russian and Chechnya after defecting to the Russian side.
In 2004, a Chechen rebel group assassinated him for defecting to Moscow. (In the picture above, the father is in front, and the son behind him.)
Now, Akhmad-Hadji Kadyrov is finally getting his due for killing Russians and then switching sides: Russia’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, has named a bridge after him.
Enemy doesn't respect traitors who joined them.SLOGAN: Kadyrov's bridge in St Petersburg after gay parade on Groznyi pic.twitter.com/iWhZpdEXIo
— Chechen Center (@ChechenCenter) June 7, 2016
St Petersburg authorities said that the bridge “stresses respect to Russia’s history” and “does not disrupt the city’s traditions” because Russia does “not separate heroes by nationality.”
But not everyone is a fan of the move. Earlier this month when the idea of renaming the bridge first emerged, about a thousand people protested against naming it after Kadyrov senior. Protestors called the bridge-naming decree, which was finalized Thursday, a “political order,” and said that there will only be a “Kadyrov bridge after a gay parade in Grozny [the capital of Chechnya].” Some critics say that whilst Kadyrov did do a lot to end the conflict with Chechnya and create stability in the region, this has nothing to do with St. Petersburg.
The protestors were backed by Russian artists, like film director Alexander Sokurov, who wrote to the mayor: “We should not forget that during the first Chechen war it was precisely [Akhmad Kadyrov] who called for a jihad and who called on Chechens to kill as many Russians as possible,” he wrote. “Hundreds of people who died in this war are buried in our city, many people living here have not forgotten this.”
