Putin's Wars
Page 30
Forced Disappearances and Blowing Up Dead Bodies
Sweep operations by masked men, temporary filtration points set up for a few weeks, one week, or even a few days, in an empty factory hall, a school, a tent, or a bus, gave the torturers carte blanche, free from the risk of being disturbed by witnesses. The Russian Special Forces that were involved showed an extreme need for secrecy. There was, first, the need to hide one’s own identity; second, to hide the identity of the army unit or government agency one belonged to; third, there was the need to hide the acts one was committing; and, fourth, and last but not least, there was the need to hide the results of these acts. This brings us to another feature of this war that fully justifies the name it was given by Anna Politkovskaya: “A Dirty War.”[30] The sweep operations in the first year of the war led to mass executions of civilians. When, later, mass graves were discovered, it was possible to establish the identity of a number of the bodies. The dead body of an executed civilian, discovered in a mass grave, was the material proof of a war crime. Even if the perpetrators of the crime could not be identified (and the police and judicial instances were not very cooperative in identifying, finding, and prosecuting them), there always remained a certain risk of being identified later.
This led to a new practice. People started to disappear. They were taken away from their homes by armed, masked men in armored patrol vehicles, and their families were not informed where they were being held or what had happened to them. By 2002 the disappearance rate was more than a hundred civilians per month.[31] According to estimates by Amnesty International, published in 2010, between three thousand and five thousand people had disappeared since the beginning of the Second Chechen War. They added, however, that the actual number would be higher, due to the fact that, in the generalized climate of fear, not all cases had been reported to the police.[32] Mass graves, when they are discovered, are embarrassing facts for the perpetrators. To conceal the killings of abducted people the perpetrators took care, therefore, to have the corpses disappear also. “Blowing people up, dead or alive . . . is the latest tactic introduced by the federal army into the conflict,” wrote the correspondent of The Guardian in October 2002. “It was utilised perhaps most effectively on 3 July [2002] in the village of Meskyer Yurt, where 21 men, women and children were bound together and blown up, their remains thrown into a ditch. From the perspective of the perpetrators, this method of killing is highly practical, it prevents the number of bodies from being counted, or possibly from ever being found.”[33]
In 2003 blowing up corpses had become a systematic practice. “[R]esidents and human rights campaigners say fragments of blown-up bodies are being found all over the war-ruined region. Rather than put a stop to human rights violations, the military appears to be doing its best to hide them, critics say. . . . Lawmaker and rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov theorizes that the intent is to make it difficult for independent investigators to connect the corpses to the soldiers who allegedly arrested them.”[34] Stalin has been credited with the phrase “no person, no problem” (net cheloveka, net problemi). Stalin liquidated his problems by liquidating the people. In Chechnya the Russian Special Forces cynically changed Stalin’s adage into “no corpse, no problem.” “The analogies to Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ were by no means unfounded,” wrote Gilligan. “The tactics grew increasingly reminiscent of those of Jorge Videla’s military government from 1976 to 1983.”[35] During Videla’s dictatorship, between nine thousand and thirty thousand people disappeared. During vuelos de la muerte (death flights) many were pushed out of planes into the Atlantic Ocean and the Rio de la Plata. The same happened in Chechnya, but over land. One of the Russian soldiers interviewed by Maura Reynolds told her: “We also threw rebels out of helicopters. It was important to find the right height. We didn’t want them to die immediately. We wanted them to suffer before dying.”[36]
According to Article 1 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted on December 20, 2006, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, “1. No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance. 2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.” Article 2 states that “for the purposes of this Convention, ‘enforced disappearance’ is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” Article 5 states that “the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity.”[37] Equally, Article 7, Paragraph 1 (i) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the enforced disappearance of persons as a crime against humanity. The crimes committed in Chechnya, the site of such “widespread and systematic practice of enforced disappearance,” unambiguously fall under the definition of both the UN Convention and the Rome Statute that determine them to be crimes against humanity.
The Process of Chechenization
In October 1999 (then) Prime Minister Putin promised that the war in Chechnya would be short and casualties would be low. It would be the Chechens themselves, he said, not the Russians who would be fighting the bandits and terrorists. Pavel Felgenhauer commented: “It actually seemed at times that Richard Nixon was back, talking of the ‘Vietnamization of the war.’”[38] The Chechenization, announced by Putin, was, indeed, another difference with the First Chechen War. The second phase—in which local Chechen allies of the Russians would play an increasing role—began on October 5, 2003, when Imam Akhmad Kadyrov (the father of the present leader Ramzan Kadyrov) was installed as president by the Russian government. It had a profound impact on the way the war was conducted. In all the villages Kadyrov’s men had their local informers. The sweep operations could therefore become more focused. From now on zachistki became adresnye zachistki: targeting only selected addresses. Consequently, the number of victims gradually decreased. The struggle of Chechens against Chechens, however, was not less violent, but it lacked the clear racist undertones that characterized the Russian offensive of the first two years.
Jonathan Littell, a French-American author and winner of the prestigious French literature prize Prix Goncourt, who worked in Chechnya for a humanitarian organization in the 1990s, revisited Chechnya in 2009. He was impressed by the totally rebuilt center of Grozny.
Already from the plane, I could get an idea of the scale of the reconstruction: all the apartment buildings along the avenue seemed to be new, the green roofs and the canary yellow façades . . . . In the centre, everything is brand new, absolutely everything: not only the beautiful 19th century buildings, completely restored, alongside the Prospekt, but also the sidewalks, the pavement, the green grass lawns with automatic sprinklers.”[39]
Littell saw modern restaurants, a pharaonic new mosque, named after Akhmad Kadyrov, the president’s father, which is an exact copy of the famous blue mosque of Istanbul, and a reconstructed orthodox cathedral with glittering golden onion-shaped towers. The main boulevard, the Prospekt Pobedy (Victory Boulevard) had been rebaptized into Prospekt Putina (Putin Boulevard). “One could almost say, without exaggeration, that Paris seems to keep more traces of the Second World War,” wrote Littell, “than Grozny of its two conflicts.”[40] Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose father Akhmad was killed in April 2004, is Putin’s special protégé. He reigns as a sultanist, oriental despot, and his feared militia, the kadyrovtsy, maintains a climate of terror.[41] The system holds only because of the “special relationship” between Kadyrov and Putin. Ramzan’s regime, however, shows the limits of Putin’s Chechenization. As more and more former separatist fighters side with Ramzan, “
there is an aspect of Ramzan’s policy that is [for the Russian authorities] a subject of great concern: the massive cooptation of former independentist fighters.”[42] Should Ramzan disappear, this feudal structure based upon the personal loyalty of the Chechen leader to Vladimir Putin, could break down and Moscow would be confronted with some twenty thousand heavily armed Chechens. When, on April 16, 2009, Moscow decreed the official end of the kontrterroristicheskaya operatsiya (KTO) in Chechnya, it was a victory especially for Ramzan Kadyrov, who had acquired an almost complete autonomy by declarations of loyalty. According to the Russian political commentator Sergey Markedonov, “beginning in 2003, the Kadyrovs, first father and then son, in fact had succeeded in pushing out the federal presence from the republic. Slowly, step by step, but consistently.”[43] And Charles King and Rajan Menon observed: “there are persistent worries in Moscow that he [Ramzan Kadyrov] has built his own state within a state—offering a model for how savvier Chechens, Circassians, and others might one day gain the kind of de facto autonomy, perhaps even independence, that previous generations failed to win.”[44]
The “victory” proclaimed by the Russian government in the spring of 2009, after having formally ended the war, soon turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Not only because Moscow was gradually losing its grip on Kadyrov—a fact that Russian analysts also recognized[45] —but because the conflict began to spill over into the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, where a ruthless guerilla war was raging. “The [Chechen] conflict has splintered and metastasized,” wrote Foreign Policy four months after the official “end” of the war in Chechnya.[46] Also Chechnya itself was far from being pacified. This became clear from a report by Thomas Hammarberg, the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe. Hammarberg wrote that in Chechnya in 2009 an increase in terrorist acts, murders, and abductions could be observed in comparison with 2008.[47] The most famous case was the murder of Natalya Estemirova, representative of the human rights organization Memorial, who was kidnapped and murdered on July 15, 2009. Despite the harsh repression rebel forces remained active. On August 29, 2010, a surprise attack took place on the house of Ramzan Kadyrov in his home village Tsentoroi, followed by a suicide attack on the Chechen Parliament on October 19. The first attack was called by a Russian commentator “out of the ordinary,” because “this latest attack strikes a blow at the very heart of the Caucasus vertical power structure.”[48] And he added that “the attack on Tsentoroi has shown the vulnerability of the Kadyrov regime, which many consider the most successful in the North Caucasus.”[49] Kadyrov’s vulnerability shows at the same time, behind the apparent strength of the Kremlin’s “power vertical,” the vulnerability of Putin’s regime. Interviewed on the situation in the Caucasus by the French paper Le Monde the well-known Russian analyst Lilia Shevtsova said that “everything in the region is getting out of control. We find there a non constitutional entity, Chechnya. Nobody talks about it, but it is a real humiliation for the federal authorities. You have there a feudal and ‘sultanist’ regime, which means: clannish and authoritarian, that is supported by money from Moscow. . . . It produces resistance in the young generation against this regime and against the federal forces. The terrorist attacks take place almost on a daily basis.”[50]
The War in Chechnya and the European Court of Human Rights
A final difference between the First and the Second Chechen War was that during the second war the Russian Federation was a fully fledged member of the Council of Europe, one of the most prestigious intergovernmental human rights organizations in the world. Russia had become a member on February 28, 1996, when the First Chechen War was beginning to unwind. One would have expected that the council would have condemned the war crimes committed in Chechnya, but, unfortunately, the reaction of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe was rather muted. Apart from a temporary suspension of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly for some months in 2000, Moscow escaped any sanction.[51] The European Court of Human Rights, however, was still able to play an important and useful role, because a rapidly growing number of cases of Russian—also Chechen—citizens was brought before the jurisdiction of the court. In the beginning of 2007, 19,300 allocated applications against the Russian Federation were pending, which represented 21.5 percent of all cases from all forty-seven member states. By the end of the same year the total number of cases against Russia was over 20,000 and represented 26 percent of the total. By the end of 2008 the total number of cases against Russia had grown further to 27,246, which was 28 percent of the total.[52]
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was, for Chechen citizens, a court of last resort to correct the corrupt judiciary in Russia. The majority of the cases have been won by the plaintiffs. On January 26, 2006, Russia was for the first time condemned for a case of torture.[53] The Russian authorities obediently paid the fines, but they refused to change the judicial system according to the obligations Russia had accepted when it became a member of the council. Because the European Court of Human Rights abstained from obliging the Russian government to open new judicial inquiries, punish the perpetrators, and present public excuses to the family, this has led to a cynical system—resembling the medieval salic law (lex salica)—in which, in the case of a condemnation a kind of “tax” is paid by the Russian state to the families of the victims who had been killed. As a rule, “the disappearance of a human being costs 35,000 euros.”[54] Although for the plaintiffs these rulings are “better than nothing,” they do not really restore their violated sense of justice. As concerns ordinary Russians, for them the Strasbourg rulings are only another proof of Europe’s negative feelings towards Russia. “Europe,” wrote the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda, “has always disliked Russia, but has never been straightforward about it. Just google: ‘European court in Strasbourg Chechens’ and you will see how many cases against Russia have been won. Many of those cases are based on doubtful facts.”[55] There is another side to the coin: the flood of complaints is totally disrupting the court in Strasbourg, which is drowning under the overload of cases. Attempts, however, to reform the court to make procedures more efficient were blocked by Russia. Its own solution to diminish the flow has been to exert a growing pressure on the lawyers of Russian and Chechen plaintiffs, who are harassed by the authorities to discourage citizens from seeking justice in Strasbourg.
A Genocide?
The Second Chechen War was characterized by an endless series of crimes, many of which certainly deserve to be qualified as war crimes and crimes against humanity: from the indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny and the use of forbidden fuel and cluster bombs in the first months of the war, to the summary executions of civilians during the zachistki, the torture, the forced disappearances, the blowing up of bodies, the organized looting, and other acts of state terror. Another important question is whether the Russians committed genocide. There are no precise data available for the number of people killed, only estimates that vary according to the sources. Uwe Halbach wrote in February 2005—this is four years before the official end of the “counterterrorist operation”—that according to estimates, “between 10% and 20% of the population of Chechnya died in both wars, so after 1994. For the first war the numbers vary between 35,000 and more than 100,000 victims. . . . As concerns the second war . . . , in the late summer of 2002 human rights organizations calculated the [number of] victims in the Chechen population at 80,000 dead.”[56] Five years later Jonathan Littell gave for both wars a total number of two hundred thousand victims.[57] According to another author, “figures range to 300,000 killed,” adding that this “is probably an exaggeration.”[58] The last figure, apparently, does not take into account the refugees who fled the republic, whose numbers could reach one hundred thousand. It seems plausible, therefore, to estimate the total number of killed Chechens in the two conflicts between 150,000 and 200,000. These include men, women, and children, the great majority of them noncombatant citizens. Before the first war started the population o
f Chechnya was roughly one million. This means that possibly between 15 to 20 percent of the Chechen population has been exterminated.[59] To put this number in a historical perspective: Daniel Goldhagen has estimated that “Pol Pot [killed] the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.”[60] Pol Pot was, indeed, a ruthless mass murderer. And the number of people killed by his regime is tenfold of the Chechens killed in Chechnya. But the percentage of the population killed in these two cases, by Pol Pot on the one hand, and by the masters of the Kremlin on the other, are quite comparable. The question of a genocide committed by Russia in Chechnya is therefore fully on the table.
Of course there is the famous question of intent that, according to international conventions, must be proven in order that an act can qualify as genocide. Did the Russian government intentionally kill such a great proportion of the Chechen population? This cannot be proven as long as there are no records (texts of the orders given by the political leadership to the military commanders, minutes of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, etcetera) that provide undisputable proof. But is such a proof necessary? Daniel Goldhagen denies this requirement. According to him, “intent should not be a criterion for determining what instances qualify as genocide.” And he added: “If a large number of people, except through defensible military operations, are eliminated in any manner, why should this not be part of a study of genocide, which rightly becomes a study of mass murder, which rightly becomes a study of mass elimination?”[61]