Nicolae Timofti

Nicolae Timofti (b. 22 December 1948) is a Moldovan politician and jurist who was the head of the Supreme Magistrate Council. He was elected president by parliament on March 16, 2012.

Personal Life

Nicolae Timofti was born to Elena (b. 1927) and Vasile Timofti in Ciutulești, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union, and has four siblings.[citation needed] At the beginning of 1949, his family moved to Florești. On July 6, 1949, his paternal grandfather Tudor Timofti was deported by Soviet authorities to the Amur region, where his grandfather died in 1953.

Timofti is married to the lawyer Margareta Timofti and they have three sons: Alexei (b. 1977) works as a lawyer for the World Bank in Washington, Nicu (b. 1980) is a sports journalist in Chişinău, and Ștefan (b. 1989) studies economics in Chişinău.

Early activity

Timofti graduated from the law school of Moldova State University in 1972 and spent two years in the Soviet Army before beginning his career as a judge in 1976. "He is a person who was with us when we started reforms in the 1990s," Mihai Ghimpu said. In 2005, Timofti was appointed to the Higher Judicial Chamber and, in 2011, he was named chairman of the Supreme Council of Magistrates.

President of Moldova

"The European orientation of Moldova must be a priority. This has been the policy of Moldova in recent years and this is the policy that must continue" said at his his election by parliament. "I am convinced that Moldova has no other future than a European future," Timofti said. "He is a progressive man, and this means a lot for the Republic of Moldova." Mihai Ghimpu said.

His election by parliament on March 16, 2012 is going to be validated by the Constitutional Court of Moldova. According to Article 80 of the constitution: "The President of Moldova takes office on the oath-taking day and his term has a duration of 4 years."

From : www.wikipedia.org

Akhmad Kadyrov

Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov (Russian: Ахмат Абдулхамидович Кадыров) (August 23, 1951 – May 9, 2004), also spelled Akhmat, was the Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s during and after the First Chechen War. At the outbreak of the Second Chechen War he switched sides, offering his service to the Russian government, and later became the President of the Chechen Republic from October 5, 2003, acting as head of administration since July 2000.

On May 9, 2004, he was assassinated by Chechen Islamists in Grozny, using a bomb blast during a World War II memorial victory parade. His son, Ramzan Kadyrov, who led his father's militia, became one of his successors in March 2007 as the President of the Chechen Republic.

Life

Akhmad (or Akhmat) Abdulkhamidovich Kadyrov was born in Karaganda in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, to a Chechen family that had been expelled from Chechnya during the Stalinist repressions. In April 1957, his family returned to Shalinsky District of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. In 1980, he started studying Islam at Mir-i Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, and followed by studying at Tashkent Islamic University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, from 1982–86. In the early 1990s, he returned to Chechnya, and founded the Islam Institute in the village of Kurchaloy.

First Chechen War

Following the Chechen declaration of independence, he became a supporter of separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev. Kadyrov fought prominently in the First Chechen War on the Chechen side as a militia commander. In 1995 he was appointed Chief Mufti of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Following the outbreak of violence between Moscow and Chechen separatists, Kadyrov famously declared that "Russians outnumber Chechens in many times, thus every Chechen would have to kill 150 Russians."

Second Chechen War

While the first war was mainly fought for nationalism, after the de facto independence of Ichkeria, much of the Chechen forces were jihadis, such as the Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya.

Kadyrov, as Chief Mufti, was critical of Wahhabism, to which many of the foreign fighters were adherent to. Kadyrov – a leading figure in the resistance movement – decided to abandon the insurgency in 1999 and offered his support to Russian federal forces in Second Chechen War. Maskhadov immediately fired him from the Chief Mufti chair, although this decree was never accepted by Kadyrov, who abdicated himself a few months later due to his civilian chairman career. According to James Hughes, Kadyrov's U-turn may have been motivated partly by personal ambition and partly by a concern with the desperate condition of the Chechen population, and was also driven by a fear of the growing sectarian Wahhabi influence on the insurgency.

After the Russian forces seized control over Chechnya in July 2000, Kadyrov was appointed acting Head of the Administration by the Russian president Vladimir Putin. On October 5, 2003, he was elected the first President of Chechnya. In this position, he remained mainly pro-Moscow. He also advocated numerous amnesty campaigns for former rebel fighters, who were allowed to join Chechen police and loyalist militia forces if they surrender. His chief personal bodyguard was Movladi Baisarov. Reportedly, there were at least a dozen assassination attempts against him before the final one.

Death and legacy

On May 9, 2004, an explosion ripped through the VIP seating at the Dinamo football stadium during a mid-morning Soviet Victory Day parade in the capital city of Grozny, instantly killing Akhmad Kadyrov. Two of Kadyrov's bodyguards, the Chairman of the Chechen State Council, a Reuters journalist, and as many as a dozen others were also killed (a later report stated that more than 30 people had died). Some 56 others were wounded, including Colonel General Valery Baranov, the commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, who lost his leg in the explosion. The bomb was said to have been built into the concrete of a supporting column during recent repairs.

Akhmad Kadyrov had four children, three sons and a daughter. As of 2009, only one son is still alive, Ramzan Kadyrov, who led his father's militia (the eldest son, Zelimkhan Kadyrov, died later in May 2004). Ramzan was later appointed as Prime Minister of Chechnya and President of Chechnya in March 2007.

As of today, Akhmad is buried in the Grozny Central Dome Mosque.

From : www.wikipedia.org

Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev

Zelimkhan Abdumuslimovich Yandarbiyev (Chechen: Яндарбин Абдулмуслиман-кIант Зелимха, Russian: Зелимхан Абдумуслимович Яндарбиев, also spelled Yandarbiev) (September 12, 1952 – February 13, 2004) was a Chechen writer and a politician, who served as acting president of the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria between 1996 and 1997. In 2004 Yandarbiyev was killed in exile in Qatar .

Life

Originally a literary scholar, poet and children's literature writer Yandarbiyev became a leader in the Chechen nationalist movement as the Soviet Union began to collapse. In May 1990, he founded and led the Vainakh Democratic Party (VDP), the first Chechen political party, which was committed to an independent Chechnya. The VDP initially represented both Chechen and Ingush until their split after Chechnya's declaration of independence from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.[citation needed]

In November 1990 he became a deputy chairman to the newly formed All-National Congress of the Chechen People (NCChP), which was led by Dzhokhar Dudayev and which ousted the Soviet-era leadership. With Dudayev, he signed an agreement with Ingush leaders splitting the joint Chechen-Ingush republic in two. In the first Chechen parliament, from 1991–1993, Yandarbiyev headed the media committee. Since 1991 he served as Vice-President of the self-proclaimed republic.[citation needed]

In April 1996, following the assassination of his predecessor Dzhokhar Dudayev, he became an Acting President. In late May 1996, Yandarbiyev headed a Chechen delegation that met President of Russia Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister of Russia Viktor Chernomyrdin for peace talks at the Kremlin that resulted in the signature of a ceasefire agreement on May 27, 1996.

In 1997, during the signing of the Russian-Chechen Peace Treaty in Moscow, Yandarbiyev famously forced his Russian counterpart President Yeltsin to change seats at a negotiating table so he would be received like a head of sovereign state. Yandarbiyev stood in the presidential election held in Chechnya in February 1997, but was defeated by the Chechen separatist top military leader, General Aslan Maskhadov, getting 10 per cent of the votes and landing third behind Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev. Together with Maskhadov, Yandarbiyev took part of signing of the "lasting" peace treaty in Moscow. The two Chechen leaders fell out badly the following year, when Yandarbiyev was accused of being behind an assassination attempt against Maskhadov. In September 1998, Maskhadov publicly denounced Yandarbiyev, accusing him of importing the radical Islamic philosophy of "Wahhabism" and of being responsible for "anti-state activities" including anti-government speeches and public meetings, as well as the organisation of illegal armed groups. Yandarbiyev subsequently joined forces with the hard-line Islamist opposition to Maskhadov's rule.

In August–September 1999, Yandarbiyev was assumed as a key figure behind the invasion by the Islamic International Brigade-led coalition of Islamist guerrillas on the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan. At the beginning of the Second Chechen War, Yandarbiyev traveled abroad to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and eventually settled in Qatar in 1999, where he sought to obtain Muslim support for the Chechen cause.[citation needed]

After Yandarbiyev's involvement in the October 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, Yandarbiyev was placed on Interpol's most wanted list and Russia made the first of several requests for extradition in February 2003, citing Yandarbiyev as a major international terrorist and financier of the al-Qaeda-backed Chechen resistance. In June 2003, his name was consequently added to the United Nations Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee's blacklist of al-Qaeda-related suspects. Yandarbiyev played a key role in directing funding from foundations in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf in order to support a radical Chechen faction dubbed the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment, a militant group responsible for the Moscow theater hostage crisis. In January 2004 he was interviewed extensively in Qatar for the BBC Four documentary The Smell of Paradise, where the film-makers called him the "spiritual leader of the Chechens and a poet on the road to jihad."

Death

On February 13, 2004, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed when a bomb ripped through his SUV in the Qatari capital, Doha. Yandarbiyev was seriously wounded and died in hospital. His 13-year old son Daud was seriously injured. Some, but not all, reports said two of his bodyguards were killed, but this has not been confirmed.

It was initially unclear who was responsible for the blast, but suspicion fell on SVR and/or GRU, Russian intelligence agencies denying any involvement, or internal feuding among the Chechen rebel leadership. Aslan Maskhadov's separatist foreign ministry condemned the attack as a "Russian terrorist attack", comparing it to the 1996 attack that killed Dzhokhar Dudayev. The car bomb eventually led to Qatar's first counter-terrorism law, declaring lethal terrorist acts punishable by death or life imprisonment.

The day after the attack, Qatari authorities arrested three Russians in a Russian embassy villa. One of them, the first secretary of the Russian Embassy in Qatar, Aleksandr Fetisov, was released in March due to his diplomatic status and the remaining two, the GRU agents Anatoly Yablochkov (also known as Belashkov) and Vasily Pugachyov (sometimes misspelled as Bogachyov), were charged with the assassination of Yandarbiyev, an assassination attempt of his son Daud Yandarbiyev, and smuggling weapons into Qatar. According to Moscow, Yablochkov and Pugachyov were secret intelligence agents sent to the Russian Embassy in Doha to collect information about global terrorism. Russia’s acting Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov pledged state support to the suspects and declared that their imprisonment was illegal. There were some speculations that Fetisov had been released in exchange for Qatari wrestlers detained in Moscow.

The trial proceedings were closed to the public after the defendants claimed that the Qatari police had tortured them in the first days after their arrest, when they had been held incommunicado; the two Russians alleged that they had suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and attacks by guard dogs. Based on these torture allegations and the fact that the two officers were arrested within an extraterritorial compound belonging to the Russian Embassy, Russia demanded the immediate release of its citizens; they were represented by the attorney of the law firm founded by Nikolai Yegorov, a friend and fellow student of Vladimir Putin at Leningrad State University. The Qatari prosecutors concluded that the suspects had received the order to eliminate Zelimkhan Yandarbiev from Sergei Ivanov personally.

On June 30, 2004, both Russians were sentenced to life imprisonment; passing the sentence, the judge stated that they had acted on orders from the Russian leadership.

The verdict of the Doha court caused severe tensions between Qatar and Russia, and on December 23, 2004, Qatar agreed to extradite the prisoners to Russia, where they would serve out their life sentences. The agents however received a heroes' welcome on returning to Moscow in January 2005 but disappeared from public view shortly afterwards. The Russian prison authorities admitted in February 2005 that they were not in jail, but said that a sentence handed down in Qatar was "irrelevant" in Russia.

From : www.wikipedia.org

Abdul-Halim Sadulayev

Abdul-Halim Salamovich Sadulayev (Chechen: Садулин Абусаламин кант Абдулхалим Sadulin Abusalamin-Kant Abdulhalim, Russian: Абдул-Халим Саламович Сайдулаев Abdul-Khalim Salamovich Saydulayev) (June 2, 1966 – June 17, 2006) was the fourth President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Sadulayev served little more than a full year as President before being killed in a gun battle with FSB and pro-Russian Chechen forces.

Sadulayev was the first Chechen rebel leader effectively attempting to unify the Islamic rebel forces outside Chechnya, as he had won pledges of loyalty not only from Chechen separatists, but also from Islamist groups seeking the overthrow of the Kremlin's authority across the North Caucasus; this formation became known as the Caucasian Front. He was also credited with persuading radical warlord Shamil Basayev not to carry out any major terrorist attacks since Beslan.

Name

There is considerable variation in writing his name in both English and Russian sources. His surname is variously written Sadulaev, Sadulayev, Saidulaev, Saidulayev, Saidullaev, Saidullayev or Saydullayev; the first two of these seem to be favored by insurgent sources, while the others are favored by Russian sources and Western media. His first name is also written Abdul-Khalim, and is sometimes written with or without a hyphen. In Russian his name with surname is written Абдул-Халим Сайдуллаев or Абдул-Халим Сайдулаев or Абдул-Халим Садулаев, with or without the hyphen.

His full name given by the separatist website Kavkaz Center appears to be Abdul-Halim Abu-Salamovich Sadulayev (Абдул-Халим Абу-Саламович Садулаев).

Life

Sadulayev was born into the Ustradoi teip, an influential clan in the town of Argun on the plains of central Chechnya to the east of Grozny. After growing up in Argun, he entered Grozny's university to study Chechen and Russian philology, but had to break off his studies as the First Chechen War with the Russian Federation broke out in 1994. He joined an Argun militia to fight against the Russians as a volunteer fighter.

Sadulayev also studied Islam under local Islamic theologians, and from 1996 began appearing regularly on Chechen television speaking about Islam. He lectured across Chechnya, and eventually ended up leading Argun's Muslim community as the town's Imam. Sadulayev made the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, the only time he is known to have left his homeland.

Sadulayev become the leader of the only Argun jamaat in his city, which was known to carry out missionary activities, as well a policing the neighborhoods. Apart from their religious & civil functions, most of the jamaats in Chechnya also represented military detachments formed to guard villages and towns against the Russian Military and bandits alike. During a standoff between a group of foreign radicals and Chechen authorities in 1998, Sadulayev sided against Khabib Abdurrakhman, a Jordanian leader of a small Foreign/Chechen jamaat who was amassing a militia & advocating extreme violence against Russian & Non-Islamic Chechen peoples alike. After these events, Abdurrakhman was stripped of his Chechen citizenship and declared persona non grata in Chechnya; he died in 2001 while fighting in one of the jamaats as a regular soldier.

In 1999, Aslan Maskhadov appointed Sadulayev to a commission for constitutional Sharia reform, a commission then headed by Akhmad Kadyrov, who would later reject the rebels and embrace Moscow. Maskhadov offered Sadulaev the head of the Supreme Sharia Court of Chechnya, but Sadulaev turned down the offer, explaining that he did not have sufficient clerical knowledge to judge other people.

When the Second Chechen War started Sadulayev again returned to fighting, commanding the popular militia from Argun. Since 1999, Sadulaev had been one of Maskhadov's most loyal field commanders. In 2002, he was designated by Maskhadov to be his successor as president of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.

Presidency

Shortly following Maskhadov's death on 8 March 2005, the Chechen rebel council announced that Sadulayev had assumed Maskhadov's position, a move that was quickly endorsed by Shamil Basayev, the Chechens' highest-profile guerrilla commander. After assuming power, Sadulayev called for expanding the Chechnya conflict into a "decolonization" of Muslim-dominated adjoining regions and adoption of a constitution based on Islamic law, or Sharia. He also strongly condemned hostage takings and said that after the end of the war the new president should be democratically elected.

Sadulayev had not only an ideological commitment to maintaining the conflict, but perhaps a personal one as well. Chechen insurgent sources claim that his wife was kidnapped in 2003 by Russian spetsnaz forces and killed by the FSB when attempts to buy her back failed. He had worked to eliminate terrorist violence and urged Basayev and other warlords to direct attacks on "legitimate targets" (including law enforcement officials, federal troops and local civil servants and their offices), and stressed that attacks on such targets should avoid injuring civilians. He appeared to have convinced Basayev, who was enlisted in the formation of the Caucasian Front, that giving up on civilian targets would help spread the insurgency across the North Caucasus.

In February 2006, Sadulayev has announced a cabinet reshuffle targeting several top rebel representatives living abroad, including Akhmed Zakayev has been dismissed as deputy prime minister. Sadulayev has also signed a decree ordering all his ministers to be based in Chechnya.

Death

On 17 June 2006, Sadulayev was killed in a gun battle with the FSB and pro-Moscow militiamen in Argun. According to the FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, two members of the federal forces were killed and five were wounded in a firefight in which Sadulayev and his bodyguard were killed, and two others rebels escaped. In August 2006, rebel commander Isa Muskiev said the federals and the kadyrovtsy lost five men killed in the shootout, one of them shot by Sadulayev personally, and three fighters escaped.

The body was later moved to Ramzan Kadyrov's hometown of Tsentoroi. Kadyrov said an informant had tipped off police for drug money. Kadyrov said that his paramilitary police had wanted to capture Sadulayev but were forced to kill him when he resisted arrest, and also stated Sadulayev was in Argun organizing "a big terrorist attack" to coincide with the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg next month. The killing of Sheikh Abdul Halim was trumpeted by leaders of the Moscow-backed official government of the province, claiming that the separatist forces there had been dealt a "decapitating" blow "from which they will never recover."

The next day, June 18, Sadulayev was succeeded as head of the Chechen resistance by the rebel vice-president and an active guerrilla commander Dokka Umarov.

On June 20, 2006, the Russian human rights organization Memorial posted the findings of its investigation on the Kavkazky Uzel website. According to Memorial's version, Sadulayev's death was accidental; security officials did not know that he was in the house. Memorial reports that on June 17, about 10:00 a.m., a group of 12 FSB officers and local policemen approached a possible rebel safe house. They immediately came under gunfire as they entered the yard. Two of the servicemen were killed, and the group retreated after throwing a hand grenade into a window of the house. The grenade blast killed Abdul Halim. This version is contradicted by the official account.

From : www.wikipedia.org

Joseph Kony

Joseph Rao Kony (born c. 1961) is a Ugandan guerrilla group leader, head of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government based on the Ten Commandments throughout Uganda. The LRA is a militant group with a syncretic Christian extreme religious ideology. They are known for the extreme atrocities they commit against civilians, including murder, mutilations, rape, and in some accounts even cannibalism.

Directed by Kony, the LRA has earned a reputation for its actions against the people of several countries, including northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Sudan. It has abducted and forced an estimated 66,000 children to fight for them, and has forced the internal displacement of over 2 million people since its rebellion began in 1986. In 2005 Kony was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, but has evaded capture.

Early Life

Kony was born c. 1961 in Odek, a village east of Gulu in northern Uganda. A member of the Acholi people, The son of farmers, he enjoyed a good relationship with his siblings, but was quick to retaliate in a dispute, and when confronted he would often resort to physical violence. His father was a lay catechist of the Catholic Church and his mother was an Anglican. Kony was an altar boy for several years, but he stopped attending church around the age of 15. As a teenager Kony apprenticed as the village witch doctor under his older brother, Jamie Brow, and when his older brother died, Kony took over the position. He did not graduate from high school. Kony first came to prominence in January 1986 as the leader of one of the many premillennialist groups that sprang up in Acholiland in the wake of the wildly popular Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Auma (also known as Lakwena), to whom Kony is thought to be related. Their relative loss of influence after the overthrow of Acholi President Tito Okello by Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army (NRA) during the Ugandan Bush War (1981–1986) spurred resentment among the Acholi, which boosted Joseph Kony's popularity.

From : www.wikipedia.org

Félicien Kabuga

Félicien Kabuga (born 1935) is a Rwandan businessman, accused of bankrolling and participating in the Rwandan Genocide. He has always claimed he is innocent.

Early Life

Kabuga was born in Muniga and always dreamed of being a bus driver, in the commune of Mukarange, prefecture of Byumba, Rwanda. A multimillionaire, he was closely connected to Juvénal Habyarimana's MRND party.

Life as a fugitive

In June 1994, after Rwanda was conquered by the RPF, Kabuga fled the country. He first attempted to enter Switzerland, but was ordered to leave. He went to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was later believed to bfe resident in Nairobi, Kenya.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda issued an international arrest warrant for Kabuga in August 1999, charging him with 11 counts, including genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.

In a speech given on August 28, 2006 during his visit to Kenya, then U.S. Senator Barack Obama accused Kenya of "allowing him [Kabuga] to purchase safe haven." The Kenyan government denied these allegations and described Obama's allegation regarding Kabuga as "an insult to the people of this country."

According to June 2008 reports by a Norwegian-based blogger calling himself African Press International (API), Kabuga was in hiding in Oslo, and might be seeking to turn himself in. Authorities dismissed this claim as a hoax.

KTN news network in Kenya reported on June 14, 2008 that Kabuga had been arrested by Kenya Police the day before and is being held at Gigiri Police Station in Nairobi. Later, the suspect was found to be a local university lecturer, not Kabuga as previously thought, and released. It is suspected that Kabuga is in Kenya, and is believed to be running businesses and enjoying protection from either the Kenyan government or some influential figures within the country.

From : www.wikipedia.org