Svetlana Gannushkina offers to hold post-conflict children's camps in the Caucasus

Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the committee "Civil Assistance", has voiced a number of offers, when speaking at a meeting of women-peacemakers of Russia and Georgia, concerning joint projects and cooperation of the public of the two countries. In particular, she finds it reasonable to hold post-conflict children's camps in the region.

She believes that human rights activists should not have any skews. According to her story, she is guided by the principle: "After visiting one party visit the other." This is the way she and her colleagues acted during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

"We were visiting an Armenian prison, and I remember a conversation with one of its prisoners. He was almost a boy yet. He said that he ran away not from Azerbaijan to Armenia, but anywhere - to die. Every day in Azerbaijan he was beaten and raped: hazing. When in prison, he was happy: nobody offended him there," the human rights defender said.

Ms Gannushkina has added that although "any war is full of myths," but not all of them are true. "For example, we were told that in Azerbaijan captured Armenians were used as slaves in stone quarries. We came to the area and looked at what happened there. We came, and local residents told us: which Armenians? We ourselves fight for any opportunity to work," she said.

She insists that children's camps, where kids from different countries and republics, parties in recent conflicts, get together, are efficient.

The meeting of Russian and Georgian peacemakers also discussed the problem of Georgians from Abkhazia in receiving of Russian citizenship.

As noted by human rights activists, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs ignores their methodical guidelines and obstructs ethnic Georgians to receive Russian citizenship. This problem should also be addressed by the public of both countries.

However, Manana Mebuke, a member of a Georgian NGO, believes that prior to implement these plans, it is necessary to solve the most important issue: "Now, public organizations should work towards liberation of the prisoners on both sides of the conflict (the 2008 Georgian-Ossetian war). After that it is possible to start dialogue 'from a flyleaf'."