Suspend Russia Aid, Bonner Tells Congressional Panel

WASHINGTON — Yelena Bonner, one of Russia’s most prominent human rights campaigners, told U.S. lawmakers Thursday that the West should suspend financial aid to Russia because of the war in Chechnya.

“The only exception to this should be humanitarian aid,” Bonner said through a translator at a congressional hearing on the Chechen rebellion.

Bonner, widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, blamed Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin for the bloodshed and said he is supported in the Russian Parliament only by the forces of ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky.

“What Mr. Zhirinovsky proclaimed in his basically National Socialist (Nazi) book, Mr. Yeltsin has taken into practice,” Bonner told the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki Commission. “Is it the case that the Western countries are beginning to be afraid of Russia and for that reason are afraid to denounce the policies of Mr. Yeltsin?”

Bonner resigned last month from Yeltsin’s Human Rights Commission in protest against the war.

Yeltsin has declared an end to the military campaign after nearly six weeks of heavy fighting, but the Chechen rebels have sworn to continue guerrilla warfare.

“I have great concern that Russian authorities will try to present the situation to the world as over and that everything is normal,” Bonner said. “But I believe the war in this region is just beginning.”

Members of the commission also raised concerns that the fighting could spread into other restive Russian republics.

Congress created the commission in 1976 to monitor human rights, rule of law, military security and relations between the 53 member states of the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe.