Menelaos Tzelios: traveling the world to bear witness to human rights violations

Menelaos Tzelios was in the Russian republic of Chechnya in 1994 as a human rights observer when he heard someone pounding on his bedroom door one night. And when he opened it, he saw two "giants" standing outside.

"American? American?" they said.
"Yes," he answered. "American."
They smiled and said, "Okay."
"And the next day," he remembers, "I found out they had been sent by the president of Chechnya, Dudayev, to guard me. They were my guards...That is the time," he admits, "I felt I must be in some kind of danger."

In fact, Dudayev was killed only a few months afterwards when the Russians invaded the region, and when Tzelios visited Chechnya again after the conflict to monitor the first free elections, he found the capital, Grozny, completely leveled.

"It's a very sad picture, and it's needless destruction in human lives and property," says Tzelios, who in his work with the International Federation for the Protection of the Rights of Ethnic, Religious, Linguistic and Other Minorities, based in Long Island City, New York, has visited dozens of countries and participated in several international conferences to monitor human rights.

Among the scenes of destruction he witnessed was the fate of the town of Konstantinofka in Abkhazia, Georgia, which before the Second World War was home to 50,000 Greeks who had emigrated from Pontos to escape persecution since the 1850s. Stalin had deported many of the townspeople to Kazakistan because they would not pledge him allegiance, but the 15,000 or so who returned after the strongman's death soon established a thriving community with fish farms, cattle herds, and a church and Greek school.

"They kept their culture, they had it in spirit, they knew they were Greek," says Tzelios.

But after the Soviet Union was disbanded, the town was destroyed during the fighting in the Georgian civil war and most of the population has scattered.

"It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be tomorrow, but people have to realize that it's to their advantage to work together and to cooperate," Tzelios explains, after witnessing the consequences of many wars and ethnic rivalries.
He's not hopeful that world governments will have the stomach to stop the fighting. When the shooting erupted in Chechnya, then Vice President Al Gore was in Moscow but he merely stated that the hostilities were an internal affair of the Russian federation.

"That means he was washing his hands," says Tzelios. "And it's a crime what has been done to this area and these people. And also the Russians suffered very extensive casualties."

He's more hopeful that private enterprise will be the glue that holds the disparate races and ethnic nations of the world together.

"I believe that private enterprise can be more effective now," he says. "You know how many Greeks are in Skopje--even with the embargo? They run a lot of the businesses. There are a lot of Greeks in Rumania...There is money in these countries, and if their standard of living improves a little bit, they will need everything."

He also insists that hope for the future lies in education.

"When I talk about education, I don't mean academics," he says. "I mean the education of the people to know and realize that it is to their advantage to work towards unity and cooperation...It's an extremely slow process."

In the meantime, there is a global network of organizations like the International Federation, which was formed in 1982 by the Pan Epiroti Federation of America and Canada and given status in 1984 by the UN as a non-governmental organization, eligible to "participate either as observers or as participant" in human rights disputes around the world.

The group's 11-member board is made up of volunteers like Tzelios, who runs a candle-making business in Long Island City, but who in the years of the organization's existence has mostly at his own expense visited hot spots like Chechnya twice, Abkhazia during the fighting, Taiwan during its first democratic elections, and extensively monitored the plight of the Greeks and other minorities in the Balkans.

"We cannot get official records, but there are a lot of Greek Vlachs over there who are deprived and denied their ethnic identity," he says. He estimates there are at least 150,00 Greeks in the former Yugoslav Republic of Eastern Macedonia.

And he says the Albanians and other minorities there "have been suffering. They are being denied education in their own language, they are being denied employment," he says. "In education, you see the Macedonian schools against the Albanian schools and it's like night and day."

As a Greek, his objectivity on the state of ethnic inequality in the region was sometimes suspect.

"But there were other participants, too," he says of his travels there. "And our report also included the views of the Albanians of Kosovo. It also reflects their opinion and it's a very clear report, that the rights of the Greeks in Albania are being violated."

As an American citizen his presence is also suspect. "When we went up to the hostilities in Abkhazia on the Russian border, the whole mission was detained for more than two hours," he recalls. "They couldn't understand why an American citizens was going to Abkhazia when the country was completely destroyed by the war."

But he pursues his mission despite the risks and dangers because he says it makes a difference. “It makes a lot of difference to these people," he says. "They're waiting for missions and organizations to come and talk to them about their suffering. You see the encouragement they get."

Tzelios himself was born in northern Epirus, but his family was displaced in 1945 and he lived in Greece for several years before he came to New York in 1956 and later attended City College. He got involved with the monitoring of human rights first in the fight for the rights of Greeks in Albania.

"And then you get to know a lot of other people from different organizations, and you find common ground, and you put the resources together," he says.

He says the time spent on missions and conferences has taken a toll on his business, but he doesn't regret the sacrifice.

"It's hard for us living in a free society, especially living in the United States, to understand the effect of these missions on people in other countries," he says. "But if you go to a place where people are suffering and you see the encouragement they get, it's amazing.”