 My name is Aksana Chelyseva. I'm a Russian journalist. For the last five years I've been living and working in Finland because of the political reality of Russia nowadays. It turned out to be the only way for me to continue to work independently and to escape some dangers. I've been working with quite a number of Finnish organizations including Finnish Pen Center and the Union of Journalists. I'm a member now of the Union of Journalists of Finland. The problem of my situation is that I can't visit my home country so I haven't been there since the day when I made that decision to stay in Finland. It was in March 2008. But at the same time Finland has provided me with a lot more possibilities to work on cases of politically persecuted people in Russia to draw attention to their cases and to their faith from international community and in some occasions to organize some real help to them. In this respect I'm content with my life although it's pretty tough to be honest to have this kind of experience and the reason why for instance I wouldn't advise anybody else to follow my path. The reasons for this troubling situation I've had since 2005 are very complex. It's not just one accident or a couple of accidents which motivated me to take this decision. Actually mostly it was because of my work as a journalist on Chechnya because I used to work as the editor of the Russian Chechen Information Agency which was established by the Russian friendship Chechen Society and NGO and we had a network of our reporters in Chechnya and in Gushetia and the agency worked since 2000 until 2006 when actually the organization as such was banned as extremist by the Russian court. But the personal problems started even before that and one of the explanations to that as I can see it now was our attempt to mediate during the Bislang crisis when the school was taken hostage in a small town of Bislang in North Ossetia on September 1, 2004. It happened so that I personally reached on phone some leaders of the Chechen separatist movement those who were moderate and reasonable with whom it was possible to communicate and already on September 1, 2004 these people condemned the act of terrorism and it helped to start political talks which were held between some leaders of the North Caucasian republics including North Ossetia and in Gushetia and by the morning of September 3, we learned that some political decision had been taken and then president of Chechnya, Aslan Mashadov who was still legitimate at that time but who was underground so he made the decision to join the rescue headquarters and to become part of the rescue headquarters or he was ready to literally speaking he was ready to start acting on the so-called Russian side to save the children but storming of the school started a few hours after that and so children die mostly in fire but when I initiated that phone conversation with those people and it was my first attempt ever to reach representatives of the so-called rebels because before that we had tried to adhere to the norm that we remain independent journalists we just put the facts and we didn't ever try to ask for commands from either side of the conflict either from the Chechen side of the conflict or from the Russian state side of the conflict so we just reported the facts without any commands but it was the first time when I decided to do that and there was one particular reason I realized that it wouldn't be possible for me to remain to consider myself a journalist if I would wait until the crisis is settled in a violent way and we should and we would start counting the dead bodies once again so if the massacre had any single chance to be prevented so we should have tried to use this chance so that's I'm never even now despite all the consequences to that decision I'm never regretted having made that attempt and later I learned that actually it was also the attempt which Anna Politkovskaya made a few hours before me but it resulted in nothing because she was on the way to be sland when she was poisoned and it was one of the first attempts at her life but soon after this mediation and this successful result in getting condemnation of terrorism as such and that particular act of terrorism from such people as Aslan Mashadov and his representatives abroad actually we came under pressure from the authorities and it all started via official media almost immediately after that articles appeared about us being friends of terrorists and then I started to receive death threats not just once and they were not phone calls or nothing like that so they were flyers, death flyers and the death flyers were disseminated in hundreds in the area where I live in Nizhny Novgorod and the death flyers provided people with my real address where my family lived and still lives and people were called to fight on me as I was represented as an enemy of Russia and an enemy of the Russian people but that attempt also failed because and for me it was a very positive sign of normal Russia having future because although there were several attempts to disseminate those death flyers with my personal address so there were no single nasty glance at my neighbors on the contrary people brought those death flyers which they found in their mailboxes to my flat they knocked and they ran the bell of my door and they expressed indignation not with me but with those people who organized the death flyers and for some time when I was on the way home my neighbors, people who I actually didn't know personally they stopped me and they told me it's already dark and we are concerned about you you shouldn't walk alone, take care of yourself so people remained on my side to be honest but while it continued and they were finally the organization was banned as extremists and our office was searched many times in 2007 we tried to organize a small, very small event to commemorate our friend and colleague Anna Politkovskaya and they didn't even let to hold this event they broke into our office they arrested our foreign guests by the way also from Catalonia yes, there were two people who came to visit us for that occasion from Manresa and they were also arrested so it was a really nonsense but it happened in the course of time as we didn't see our activities as the FSB and the state agencies failed to break our will so I continued to receive threats and be under pressure and then in 2008 when I came to Finland with a very short visit on the last day of my visit to Finland when I had the ticket for the train to Moscow and then to Nizhny Novgorod I got a phone call that morning from my colleagues from journalists who didn't work with us and they told that police were searching our office once again and that everything was confiscated and more than 20 flats of people not in Nizhny Novgorod but also in the region who were considered to be linked with us were also raided and at that time we were working on the legal research into the international law and we were in the middle of this process and all the work was halted because everything was confiscated and we lost all computers and everything my first decision was just to take the train and go home and to start doing something on that but then my Finnish friends told her come on, come down a bit don't you understand what's going on so you will go back home and so we would have to help you but you wouldn't be able to do anything there so I postponed my return to Russia firstly for one month then for two months then for three months and there I'm still in Finland I'm not yet a refugee I've been a right in exile of the Finnish Pen Center so I had the residence permit in Finland but I wasn't a refugee I'm still not a refugee to continue our work we moved the legal entity of the organization to Finland so since 2006 the Russian Church and Friendship Society has been registered as a Finnish NGO and it was one of the reasons for my trip to Finland in 2008 so it enabled us to continue our work we finished our legal research it was published in Finland it was printed in Finland because it wasn't possible to find a publishing house in Russia and a great Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki helped us so he has become our official publisher of this book on Chechnya and International Law then I continued to work as a journalist but I also tried to connect Russian activists Russian journalists Russian NGOs with Finnish to find them some partners in Finland and with the course of time I became elected to the board of the Finnish Russian Citizens Forum and in 2010 on initiative from the EU there was established the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum and I'm also a member of the steering committee of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum so I continued to work with their purpose to connect people from Russia with European partners the research was launched at the European Parliament and it was also presented at the OEC and Dick Marti referred to our research in his recommendations in this special report on the North Caucasus for the European Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe it has been recognized it is complex because those are the Baltic states after gaining independence they can't be seen as having the same political conditions they are absolutely different from each other so Estonia has very little comparison with Latvia and Latvia has very little comparison with Lithuania but to start with it's very important to go back to the history because I do remember the year of 1991 and at that time I was living in Nizhny Novgorod it was my last year at the university and I do remember vividly this feeling of solidarity and support with people of the Baltic Republic in their wish to become independent so it was the overall feeling of the majority of the Soviet people to let them go so it was accepted as a matter of fact we didn't have anything against that at all I mean the majority of the Soviet people it was the overwhelming public opinion that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have all rights to go even then I knew that quite many Russian speaking people living in these countries so they also supported this independence movement so what happened afterwards was quite puzzling for me I really couldn't understand why people who felt the same and who belong to the same society were not treated the same even then it's necessary to be in mind that as a political reality over these three new countries was still different for instance I started to closely watch their situation in these countries in 2008 actually also thanks to Finland because I stayed in Finland and I got more access to these countries and I started to work in these countries as journalists on different issues for instance since 2008 I worked in Lithuania as a journalist on a particular case of a Chechen family who came under fabricated charges in Lithuania and now this family are refugees in Finland in Latvia it was... I wrote a lot of articles on Latvia and on political reality in Latvia and I regard in my estimation the most difficult situation with regard to inter-ethnic tension is in Latvia Estonia is different for instance also they also have this institution of non-citizens which was different from Latvia for instance non-citizens of Estonia have the right to participate in the municipal elections which non-citizens of Latvia are still fighting for so they are deprived of even this possibility and this is different for me because with my experience of a Finnish non-citizen I can have my own judgments even when I was living in Finland with a Russian passport I and I was registered as a resident of municipality of Helsinki even then with the Russian passport I had automatically the right to participate in the municipal elections not even to vote but also to if I wished I had the possibility to run for the municipal elections so and I am a non-citizen in Finland but this status saves me from a lot of trouble because my Russian passport was stolen and the Russian embassy refused to issue a new passport for me so and for several months I was without any documents and the Finnish police proposed me to help me in this desperate situation to issue a Finnish passport of a non-citizen so and now I can compare I've been in the same so to say position with non-citizens of Estonia and of Latvia I can compare that my status of a non-citizen of Finland actually improves my situation it makes my situation safer whereas these people who were born here so this status deprives them of possibility for instance non-citizens of Latvia so this status allows them to travel in the Schengen area but they don't have a working permit which is different because ethnic Latvians who are citizens of Latvia so they can go to any country and find a legal job for them so these non-citizens of Latvia they are treated as kind of slave force because they are confined to Latvia and the only work abroad they can get is illegal history nowadays has become a very powerful political tool and for me this is a very dangerous development because history is such a sensitive area that the whole society can be manipulated into distorted way of understanding the present so unfortunately in order to justify this kind of attitude to ethnic minorities unfortunately history has been used to influence the public as these issues of history and their collective memory are such a big thing on the agenda of these countries I feel that what is missing as an individual is collecting individual memories because very often individual stories can come into contradiction with their once and for all accepted notion of history because history is always made of different kind of exceptions and the role of just individual people is crucial one person could influence the course of events so I feel that there is quite a lot of effort being put right now into analyzing the archives and establishing the memorial sites and building museums but for instance I haven't seen anywhere in museums in this area any attempt to present testimonies of people who were part of those histories like I for instance saw in the museum of resistance in Warsaw or in the museum of Srebrenica in Sarajevo and that's extremely important to keep and to record which is now not being done here one of the possible explanations is that these kind of personal stories can contradict the official agenda Finland is a very sensitive area because of Finland's difficult relations and very complex relations with Russia but in Finland it's very interesting that they don't try to erase the past of the Russian Empire and there's something good which the Russian Empire brought to them for instance when I stayed to live in Finland I was in the first year I was really impressed with the kind of acceptance of most Finns that it was the Russian Empire which provided them with the possibility to develop their written language because the Swedes under whom the Finns were they tried to keep them away from education because they were used as soldiers and like labor force but they were no educated Finns under the Swedes which was different in Russia when Finland became part of Russia I was impressed with the very simple fact that they still have their streets named after the Rajensars like Aleksandarikattu which is the street named after Aleksandar II or Lisankattu which is the street named after Queen Elizabeth the monument to Aleksandar I, the monument to Aleksandar II the memorial sites on the houses where the Russian Tsarist families member stayed in Finland so they keep this kind of memory they don't have anything against it well I do think that it has nothing to do with history or with memory this is politics and this is contemporary politics so the whole thing was initiated in order to influence the politics of current governments and not to keep the memory or to study the history