The service kavkazcenter.com, which was being hosted out of Finland, was shut down in October following pressure from the Finnish government and security police, even though it broke no Finnish law.
On Monday the website host told AFP that he had relaunched the page over the weekend since requests from Finnish officials to shut it down had no legal basis.
"It's a question of freedom of speech. There is no reason to prohibit it from being published," Mikael Storsjoe, a Finnish IT entrepreneur, said.
In September Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the deadly school hostage-taking in Beslan in southern Russia that killed some 340 people in a letter posted on kavkazcenter.com, which at the time operated from a server in Vilnius in nearby Lithuania.
Following the publication of the letter, Moscow requested that the page be shut down, and Lithuanian authorities quickly halted it.
Storsjoe agreed to host the website on his server a month ago after checking for illegalities but finding none.
The day after, however, he was visited by Finnish security police.
Even though investigators found nothing illegal on the page, Storsjoe obliged when they urged him to shut it down, as he was told it would damage Finnish-Russian relations.
While Finnish foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja and Moscow heralded the move, it caused an uproar in Finland with critics claiming the affair smacked of "Finlandization," a term used for Finland's servile policies toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
"I think it is some kind of late 'Finlandization,'" Storsjoe himself said on Monday, adding that the page is now being published on servers both in Finland and Sweden to make it more difficult to close it down.
kavkazcenter.com is also published through a number of other mirror sites, including from Britain.
"I understand that the Russians don't like free information about their genocide in Chechnya, but, anyway, we have our law in this country and we should follow it and not give it up to bow to Russian pressure," he stressed.
Founded in 1999, kavkazcenter.com has regularly been used by Basayev and other hardline Chechens fighting for an independent Chechen republic. It also has occasionally published statements by former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.
© 2004 Agence France-Presse
To add a comment,
Please log in:
Don't have an account?
Register now to comment on stories and stay up to date on important events and issues in the Middle East with our newsletter.