"The savagery we must bear is not new. We remember Stalin’s salt mines, his guard towers, barbed wire and unmarked graves. The pain of exodus and genocide we have known before. So we recognise the others with whom we share a terrible kinship of horror. The skeletal Jews and Romani in the ovens of Dachau and Auschwitz. The bayonet fodder of Nanjing. The ancient, wide-eyed children of Biafra. The pleading mother and baby facing the rifles at My Lai. The marsh Arabs of Iraq choked by the clouds of mustard gas. The Tutsi of Rwanda butchered on the Kigali road by the knives of the Interahamwe. They are all our martyred brothers and sisters in the legacy of senseless murder. Only our slaughter, our death is not yesterday’s, it belongs in the living nightmare of the present. How many Chechens will have died in the time you take to read this letter?"