CHECHNYA'S FIRST WOMEN'S MAGAZINE

July 1, 2004 - (BBC) The first magazine to be targeted at women in Chechnya has been published, according to the Russian television channel NTV.

However, the magazine, called Nana, the Chechen word for "mother", has little in common with its glossy Western counterparts.

There is no gossip about celebrities or hot fashion tips; instead it focuses on the everyday hardship faced by Chechen women as a result of the fighting in the troubled republic.

As the Russian TV station put it, the magazine's editor has decided to leave the "more light-hearted fare" for a more peaceful time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the layout is also a far cry from the bright colours familiar in the West, looking more like a Soviet-era literary journal.

'Bestseller'

Even so, its first edition had little trouble attracting readers, with demand outstripping its print run of 3,000 copies, according to the report.

"It may sound as if we are blowing our own trumpet, but the magazine has just been launched and has already become a best-seller," the magazine's editor in chief, Lula Zhumalayeva told the TV.

"Women come to us and ask for it," she added. "So we never got as far as selling the first issue: I just gave them all away."

Staff are already working on the second issue, which will feature a report on the Stalin-era deportation of large numbers of Chechens to Central Asia - a subject which still evokes painful memories in the republic.

Other controversial topics will be the major Russian military incursion in the mid-1990s, and the assassination of the republic's Moscow-backed president, Akhmad Kadyrov, on 9 May this year.

BBC Monitoring , based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/3858177.stm