Moved my site from joomla to modx. 301 Redirects don't work correctly

Hello. I said goodbye to joomla and installed the modx. The site is in Russian so I'll try to simplify the problem and the URLs here.
The site is a travel agency and has a page for every country. The old page was like this: http://prestige-voyage.com.ua/countries/france and it has changed to http://prestige-voyage.com.ua/france

So I just simply added the following line into .htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /countries/france http://prestige-voyage.com.ua/france

The thing is, The 301 Redirect doesn't seem to work properly. The server returns the page http://prestige-voyage.com.ua/france?q=countries/france. So it just adds a parameter (or what the hell is that) with the old URL. Does anyone know how to fix it?

I'm new to MODx, so would really appreciate the help.

First, here's a guide to setting up friendly urls within MODX:
http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Using+Friendly+URLs

If that's all set up properly and you have FURLs switched on in your system settings, try this in place of the redirect you have already:

** Remove the space after http: above - this forum is messing up the code