35. The Novaya Gazeta wrote: “Within two weeks he turned into a very old man, his skin came off and his inner organs stopped functioning one by one. Doctors in the special government hospital speculated that he had been poisoned. Forensic experts said the same in private conversations. However, everyone signed the official reports confirming his death was natural.” (“Shchekochikhin’s Case,” Novaya Gazeta (March 25, 2008).)
36. Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin (London: Gibson Square, 2008), 242.
37. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 343.
38. Natalie Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoyée,” in Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, Amnesty International Report (Paris: Editions Autrement Frontières, 2010), 15.
39. Vaksberg, Le laboratoire des poisons de Lénine à Poutine, 351.
40. Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, 252.
Chapter 12
The Second Chechen War
Putin’s War
The Second Chechen War started on September 22, 1999. On this day Russia began an aerial campaign over Chechnya, which was followed by a ground invasion at the beginning of October. Almost ten years later, on April 16, 2009, the Russian government officially declared the war to be over and won—although there was still some fighting going on. The war took almost a decade, roughly the same time as the war in Afghanistan. The war in Chechnya, however, was not called a war, but a kontrterroristskaya operatsiya, an “anti-terrorist operation,” or KTO. This second war would be fought in an even more violent and ruthless way than the First Chechen War. On the Russian side there existed a clear urge to take revenge and punish the Chechen people for the lost first war. It led to an all-out war with little or no respect for the rules of war or for human rights, least of all the right to life of the Chechen civilian population. The actions of the Russian army can be listed under six headings:
Bombardments
The use of contract soldiers (kontraktniki)
The conduction of sweep operations (zachistki)
The installation of so called filtration points
Forced disappearances
Chechenization
Bombardments: The Massive Slaughter
In the First Chechen War the Chechen capital Grozny was heavily bombed for months, which led to a death toll second only in recent European history to the death toll of Dresden during World War II. In the first war also the Russian army suffered important losses. In the second war the Russian commanders had learned the lessons of the NATO actions in Kosovo some months before. Their new strategy was this: bomb until victory and conduct a war at distance without heavy casualties. The NATO war against Serbia, however, relied on a strategy of precision bombardments and the availability of smart weapons that minimized collateral damage and victims in the civilian population. Such a strategy, however, was lacking in the Second Chechen War. “Collateral damage in Chechnya was of little interest to the Russian public and to international audiences (aside from human rights organizations, which had little influence in Russia), and consequently Moscow did not take them into account.”[1] According to the Russian defense expert Pavel Felgenhauer,
The loss of life, mostly civilian, and the damage to property was terrific . . . . In many instances Russian troops committed appalling war crimes, deliberately attacking the civilian population in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. There is credible evidence of use of the so-called Heavy Flamethrowing System (TOS-1)—a fuel bomb land-based multiple launch delivery system, also known as “Buratino” among the Russian rank and file—against Chechen towns and villages during the winter campaign of 2000. The third protocol of the 1980 Geneva Convention strictly forbids the use of such “air-delivered incendiary weapons” in populated areas, even against military targets.[2]
The effects of these fuel bombs are described as follows:
A typical bomb consists of a container of fuel and two separate explosive charges. After the munition is dropped or fired the first explosive charge breaks open the container at a pre-determined height dispersing the fuel as a fine mist over a large area. This mixes with atmospheric oxygen and flows into and around structures. The second charge then detonates the cloud creating a massive blast wave. This pressure wave kills people even in cellars or bunkers. If people are not killed by the blast they are incinerated.[3]
The Russian forces also used “Tochka” and “Tochka-U” ballistic missiles. These missiles have a radius of 120 km and on impact can cover up to 7 hectares with cluster shrapnel. According to Felgenhauer, “the use of such mass-destruction weapons as aerosol (fuel) munitions and ballistic missiles against civilian targets was undoubtedly authorized by Moscow and may implicate the President Putin personally, as well as his top military chiefs, in war crimes.”[4] According to Jacob Kipp, an expert on the Russian army at the University of Kansas, the Russian army has certain peculiarities that make it more prone to commit war crimes than Western armies. “The Russians have a tradition in which every war is a ‘total war.’ . . . When the decision has been taken to start a war, there is no feeling for the fact that there can be limits and should be limits how this war is conducted.”[5] The Russians call this situation bespredel, which literally means “without limits.” It implies torture, cruelty, and gratuitous acts of violence which remain, as a rule, unpunished.
The civilian death toll in Grozny was not as massive as in the winter of 1994–1995. This was due to the fact that many inhabitants, remembering what happened in the first war, fled to the neighboring republics, especially to Ingushetia. During the bombing campaign 250,000 civilians, more than a quarter of the total Chechen population, crossed the border. However, restricting the civilian death toll seemed not to be a top priority for the Russian government. Emma Gilligan has given an extremely precise and horrifying account of the failure of the Russian government to provide safe evacuation routes out of the war zone. “The failure to evacuate the capital,” she wrote, “became the most symbolic event. This was the decisive moment when the Russian government unashamedly revealed that it was prepared to subject the civilian population of Chechnya to a massive bombing campaign in order to take back the capital.”[6] On December 6, 1999, the Russian armed forces dropped leaflets on the city, demanding that civilians still remaining in Grozny leave within five days or face destruction. At that moment fifteen to forty thousand civilians were still trapped in the city. “The crude logic was that fifteen to forty thousand civilians, if unable to move out of fear for their personal safety, or because of age, physical illness, or lack of financial means, might well be sacrificed for the defeat of several thousand separatist fighters.”[7] The imminent bombing campaign on the most vulnerable citizens led to an international outcry, which put enough pressure on the Russian authorities to open—although belatedly and reluctantly—two evacuation routes. “The failure to evacuate the civilian population,” wrote Gilligan, “constituted one of Russia’s deepest failures of principle and leadership, in both the first and the second wars in Chechnya. This failure . . . reaffirmed a growing consensus among many civilians that they were being targeted as part of a larger campaign of racial destruction.”[8]
Kontraktniki: The Criminal Volunteers
The First Chechen War was fought with badly trained conscript soldiers with low morale, who, despite the superiority of their weapons, were often no match for the highly motivated Chechen fighters. For this reason the Russian army introduced—alongside the conscript soldiers—a new kind of soldier, the contract soldier or kontraktnik (plural: kontraktniki). These kontraktniki had, as a rule, a contract for six months and were very well paid by Russian standards, receiving 800 rubles, or approximately $25 per day.[9] Most of them were demobilized soldiers from the former Soviet armed forces, who joined Private Security Companies (of which over twelve thousand were registered). The most well-known of these was the Moscow-based Alpha firm, founded by former KGB Spetsnaz (Specia
l Forces) personnel, which is connected to the international ArmorGroup firm.[10] What interests governments is the fact that
the companies, as opposed to the individuals that work for them, do not fall within many aspects of international law and would not, for instance, come within the Statute of the International Criminal Court. . . . Governments may see in PMFs [private military forces] not only a means of saving money but a way to use a low-profile force to solve awkward, politically sensitive, or potentially embarrassing situations that develop on the fringes of policy. Since PMFs are willing to go where the government would prefer not to be seen, they offer a way to create conditions for “plausible deniability” and may be used to carry out operations that would be expected to meet with public or legal disapproval, or operations that sidestep legislatively imposed limits on military operations and force levels. . . .[11] [This includes, however,] the risk that PMF employees can get away with murder, sex slavery, rape, human rights abuse, etc.[12]
This risk became a fateful reality in the Second Chechen War. The introduction of kontraktniki had a deep impact on the character of this war. Conscript soldiers were certainly no innocents or angelic young lads. They included the average number of sadists that can be found in the general population. But the great majority of them were normal guys, mostly from modest provincial homes, trying to uphold a minimum of decency amidst these events. The kontraktniki were of another kind. According to Pavel Felgenhauer, “many kontraktniki enlisted, but the process of screening volunteers for Chechnya was superficial and they were sent into combat without any further selection or training. Many of these volunteers have been drunks, bums and other fallouts of Russian society.”[13] The contract soldiers were not given military uniforms. Soon they developed their own private dress codes: “the bandanas [pirate’s scarves], the fox tail hanging down the back of the neck, singlet tops, sunglasses, and tattoos—all of these were emblems of their status and self-aggrandizement.”[14] Thomas de Waal, who actually met them at checkpoints in Chechnya, described them as follows: “They were often ex-criminals with tattoos along their arms and bandannas [sic] on their heads, creatures more of gangland than a modern European army—and no friends to journalists.”[15] The contract soldiers soon got the reputation of brutal killers, but also of thieves who openly carried out their robberies from people’s homes.[16]
Zachistki: The Purges
Together with the Special Forces (Spetsnaz) the kontraktniki would play a leading role in sweep operations by the Russian army in occupied territory, the so-called zachistki. These operations were sometimes conducted at night or early in the morning, sometimes also during the day. The army would encircle a village and hermetically seal it off from the outside world. Thereupon small groups of six to nine men enter the village and conduct street-by-street searches of homes. There were no official witnesses, no search warrants, and the faces of the soldiers were, as a rule, covered by masks or blackened to avoid identification. For the same reason the registration plates of the military vehicles were covered. Hiding their identity was a priority for these troops to carry out the most hideous acts. The official reason for these sweep operations was to control the identity papers of the Chechen population and to identify members of “illegally armed formations.” But in practice these zachistki degenerated into summary executions, torture, arson, and looting. A notorious case was that of the village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, when soldiers threw grenades into basements full of civilians and set houses alight with the inhabitants still inside.[17] During the same operation fifty-six civilians were summarily executed. The word zachistka became one of the Russian catchwords in the winter of 1999–2000. In December 1999 the weekly Moskovskie Novosti published a list with “words of the year.” The word zachistka was number one on the list.[18]
Emma Gilligan has analyzed how the word zachistka made its way into the Russian media.
By late 1999, the use of zachistka in the press and everyday speech had reached an infectious and alarming level. From September 1999 to 2005, zachistka appeared 787 times in the headlines of Moscow’s central newspapers in relation to the second war in Chechnya. In the text of the papers, it appeared 10,730 times. From the verb zachistit’, zachistka was used in the literal sense to describe the cleaning of pipes, the sanding or smoothing out of metal, the cleaning of paint or corrosion from surfaces . . . .[19] It was linked euphemistically to the idea of cleaning out human beings—in this case, suspected Chechen rebel fighters and their alleged civilian supporters. No longer neutral or inoffensive, zachistka became congruent with the practice of gathering or sweeping, in the literal sense, Chechen men and women into fields, factories, or schools to be checked, detained, or executed, usually on the outskirts of a targeted village. In this respect, the idea of harvesting or cleansing the land is reminiscent of the metaphor adopted in Hitler’s Germany—that of völkische Flurbereinigung (cleansing of the soil).[20]
The resemblance to the Serb word etnicko ciscenje (ethnical cleansing), coined in the wars of the former Yugoslavia some years earlier, was, indeed, striking. Not only because of its etymological origin, but also because of its meaning. Another linguistic root of zachistka is the Russian word chistka, which means purge. Stalin’s repression in the 1930s in which hundreds of thousands of party members, intellectuals, and kulaks were liquidated was called Velikaya Chistka (Great Purge). The word zachistka therefore evokes a double association: on the one hand with the practices of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand with the purges of Russia’s Stalinist past. We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.”[21] That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.”[22]
In 2005 the Russian human rights organization Memorial estimated the total death toll of civilians due to the zachistki between two thousand and three thousand.[23] But the zachistki were not only murderous events, they were equally economic events. They were well organized looting operations. Oleg Orlov, one of the leaders of Memorial, wrote that “these operations are usually accompanied by crimes against the local population. Robberies on a mass scale are the most common and basic form of war crime. This doesn’t just mean that the troops or police take people’s money. These are organised operations in which, quite openly, right in front of the local population, people’s property is loaded onto trucks or armoured personnel carriers. This is not just a matter of a few undisciplined soldiers and clearly sanctioned by the officers. For the military, it’s a business.”[24] Corruption and looting were widely accepted and had become quasi-institutionalized practices for the rank and file, as well as for the officers, who had become “war entrepreneurs.” For them the war had become a means of personal enrichment. This commercial aspect of the war in Chechnya has also been stressed by Herfried Münkler, who wrote that “the war in Chechnya is conducted by both sides in such a way that it is no longer clear where the dividing line is between acts of war and normal criminal violence.”[25] This war criminality merges with a wider criminality, because “in the end the actors in these wars make many contacts with international organized crime to sell the booty, trade illegal goods, or to buy weapons and ammunition.”[26] What is alarming in the Chechen case is that these criminal acts were not committed by irregular, disorganized fighters in a faraway and obscure failed state, but by the special troops and the regular army of a great European power, which is a member of the Council of Europe.[27]
Filtration Points: Hiding Torture
Immediately linked with the zachistki was the installation of so-called fi
ltration points (filtratsionnye punkty). These were temporary detention points. They were installed as an answer to national and international protests against torture practices in the official detention center in Chernokozovo. In the decentralized and ad hoc organized filtration points these torture practices could continue, but were no longer hindered by critical witnesses. “Torture was a routine practice at the temporary filtration points,” wrote Gilligan. “Unlike at Chernokozovo, torture was practiced in specially equipped wagons, in tents, or in fields. The torture wagons were the ultimate symbol of impunity—they were linked to neither a legal detention point nor possible witnesses. The most common forms of torture practiced included the following: electric shocks to the genitals, toes, and fingers with a field telephone . . . ; asphyxiation with plastic bags; cutting off ears; filling mouths with kerosene; setting dogs on the legs of the detained; knife cuts; and carving crosses in the back of detainees.”[28] In 2000 there were about thirty filtration points in operation where somewhere between ten and twenty thousand detainees were held.[29]
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