It is quite clear that in Chechnya such a large number of people could not have been eliminated “through defensible military operations.” If one estimates the total number of Chechen fighters in both wars at around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand, this means that for each killed Chechen fighter the Russians killed nine to ten Chechen civilians. This indiscriminate mass killing of civilians cannot, under any circumstance, be qualified as collateral damage. The human rights activist Sergey Kovalyov wrote in February 2000, during the bombing campaign of Grozny:
The Russian army is quite prepared for genocide. This was demonstrated in the previous war; it was proven again recently by events in the village of Alkhan-Yurt, where professional soldiers shot around forty unarmed inhabitants—for no reason. It has already been confirmed by official announcements that vacuum bombs are being employed in Chechnya—terrible weapons that kill every living thing over a wide area, including people in shelters. What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.[62]
Goldhagen is quite clear on the Chechen case. “States and their leaders often give tacit support, remain silent, or make quiet pro forma objections when allies or other important countries commit mass murders or eliminations. Aside from a few tepid and oblique objections, this has characterized virtually every state’s stance toward the Russians’ mass murdering and vast destruction in Chechnya.”[63] The likelihood of members of the Russian government being pursued for war crimes and crimes against humanity is not great. The juridical instruments, however, are in place. On the table is an important verdict of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Akhmadov and others v. Russia. This concerns an attack on October 27, 2001, by Russian soldiers, firing from helicopters on people, harvesting in the fields near the village of Komsomolskoye. The court decided that the attack violated article 2 of the Convention (right to life). In the explication of the verdict the court spoke of an “armed conflict” in Chechnya. This was the first time the court used the expression “armed conflict.” In all former verdicts the court had spoken about the “repression of an armed rebellion.” Amnesty International has stressed the importance of this verdict: “to agree that in Chechnya exists an armed conflict is of great importance for the international legal and penal qualification of human rights violations. The existence of an armed conflict is the necessary condition for the application of norms concerning war crimes that, let us remember, are imprescriptible.”[64] Another hopeful initiative was the adoption of a resolution on April 2, 2003, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) asking for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes committed in Chechnya. Unfortunately, this initiative remained without follow-up.[65]
It is disappointing that—apart from condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights—the alleged war crimes committed by Russia in Chechnya have met with so little protest from the international community, especially from nearby Europe. This lack of interest can certainly be explained. Not only was the war considered an internal affair of the Russian Federation, but the West also believed (or wanted to believe) the Russian propaganda that the war in Chechnya was a part of “the global war on Islamist terrorism.” The West’s failure to react—and especially Europe’s failure to react in the framework of the Council of Europe—was a disgrace. The war crimes committed in Chechnya—repulsive and criminal as they were in themselves—were also a warning for the West about Russia’s eventual future behavior. Michael Ignatieff wrote: “Even when a state’s domestic behavior is not a clear and present danger to the international system, it is a reliable predictor that it is likely to be so in the future. Consider the example of Hitler’s regime, 1933–38, or Stalin’s in the same period. In hindsight, there seems no doubt that Western governments’ failure to sanction or even condemn their domestic policies encouraged both dictators to believe that their international adventures would go unpunished and unresisted.”[66]
Notes
1. Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” Connections 8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 85.
2. Pavel Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003). http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-felgenhauer.html.
3. Jonathan Marcus, “Russians Urged to Stop ‘Vacuum’ Bombings,” BBC News Online (February 15, 2000).
4. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
5. Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Russland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 135.
6. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 101.
7. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 101–102.
8. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 103.
9. Cf. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
10. Cf. Marina Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” in Combating Terrorism and Its Implications for the Security Sector, eds. Amb. Dr. Theodor H. Winkler, Anja H. Ebnöther, and Mats B. Hansson (Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2005), 216.
11. Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.
12. Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.
13. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
14. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 71.
15. Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War (London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xxv–xxvi.
16. According to the Main Military Procurator, Sergey Fridinsky, “in 2006–2007, more than 5,000 recorded crimes were committed by contract personnel. In 2008, the number of recorded crimes committed by contract servicemen increased by 50.5 percent.” (Cf. Roger N. McDermott, The Reform of Russia’s Conventional Armed Forces: Problems, Challenges and Policy Implications (Washington, DC: The Jamestown Foundation, 2011), 82–83.) Note that these recorded crimes mainly took place outside Chechnya, in the Russian Federation proper. Most crimes in Chechnya were neither recorded, nor punished.
17. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 56.
18. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 53.
19. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 51.
20. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 51–52.
21. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict, 29. And these were not mere words. “Between 1856 and 1864, approximately 600,000 Muslim peoples of the Caucasus quit that region for the Ottoman empire” (ibid.).
22. Quoted in Solovyov and Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin, 249.
23. Sergey Maksudov, “Naselenie Chechni: prava li perepis?” (The Population of Chechnya: Is the Census Right?), Kavkaz-Forum (September 8, 2005). http://www.kavkaz-forum.ru/dossier/12963.html?print=on.
The total number of victims of the zachistki for the period 1999–2009 will be higher. But from 2003 the number of victims gradually decreased, due to three facts. First, from 2003 fewer kontraktniki were engaged. Second, due to the collaboration of the Chechen mufti Akhmad Kadyrov, the Russians were better informed and replaced widespread and massive zachistki by adresnye zachistki, sweep operations that targeted only the homes of selected suspected individuals. And, third, there was the fact that at that time probably the majority of Chechen fighters had already been killed. On January 20, 2003, the Russian press agency Interfax set the figure at more than fourteen thousand rebels killed. (Quoted in Uwe Halbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: Ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” SWP-Studie, Berlin (February 2004).)
24. Alice Lagnado, “An Interview with Oleg Orlov,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003).
25. Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2002), 32.
26. Münkler, Die neuen Kriege, 31–32.
27. That the special troops and Spetsnaz elite troops began to play a more important role from the end of 2000 becomes clear from the fact that Putin (by Presidential Decree No. 61—signed on January 22, 2001) put the
FSB in charge of all anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya. All power structures operating in the North Caucasus, including the army, were to be subordinated to the new HQ. (Cf. Gordon Bennett, “Vladimir Putin & Russia’s Special Services,” C108, Conflict Studies Research Centre (August 2002), 29.)
28. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 63.
29. Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” 93.
30. Politkovskaya, A Dirty War.
31. Halbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: Ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” 15.
32. Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, Amnesty International Report, 103.
33. Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, “Torture and Rape Stalk the Streets of Chechnya,” The Guardian (October 27, 2002).
34. Sarah Karush, “A Grim New Allegation in Chechnya: Russians Blowing up Bodies,” Associated Press (March 13, 2003). In April 2003 also Oleg Orlov of the Russian NGO Memorial confirmed that this had become routine practice: “Particularly over the past few months, security forces blow up the bodies in order that they cannot be identified.” (Cf. Lagnado, “An Interview with Oleg Orlov.”) This practice had a striking resemblance with that of the Chekists just after the October Revolution. According to J. Michael Waller, “the early chekist killing method was designed so as not to create martyrs around whom opponents could rally. The doomed, naked prisoner would be brought to a normally drunken executioner armed with a tsarist-era Colt pistol. The Colt was favoured for its large caliber; when fired into the back of the head, the bullet would mutilate the face upon exiting the skull, making the body unrecognizable. This method saved the chekists the problem of dealing with relatives searching for bodies, and made recovery of a potential martyr impossible.” (Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today, 21–22).
35. Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 63.
36. Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Russland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel, 128.
37. On January 1, 2014, the convention had ninety-three signatories and was ratified by forty-one countries. The convention came into force on December 23, 2010. The Russian Federation did not sign the convention.
38. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
39. Jonathan Littell, Tchétchénie: An III (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 38.
40. Littell, Tchétchénie: An III, 41–42.
41. Suspicions have been aired that Ramzan Kadyrov is behind a series of political murders inside and outside Chechnya, that is, the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. Until recently there was no proof. This changed in 2009. A Chechen refugee in Austria, Umar Israilov, who started a procedure against Kadyrov for torture before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, was killed on the street on January 13, 2009, by a commando. One of the three accused Chechens, Otto Kaltenbrunner, had “pictures on his cell phone that show him embracing Mr Kadyrov, one of the indications of their closeness.” One of the alleged murderers had called Shakya Turlaev, an adviser of Kadyrov, after the operation. According to the Austrian MP Peter Pilz, spokesman for the Greens on questions of security and defense, Kadyrov has formed in Austria “a shock troop of 30 to 50 men who are tasked to terrorize, kidnap or kill” Chechen exiles. In the EU are living about a hundred thousand refugees, of whom twenty-six thousand in Austria. Pilz said that the FSB agent Saïd Selim Peshkoev at the Russian embassy in Vienna, a former minister of the interior of Chechnya, had direct access to data on Chechen refugees collected by the BVT (Austrian intelligence service). A statement to this effect was signed by the former conservative Austrian minister of the interior, Ernst Strasser, who is now a member of the European Parliament and president of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Association ORFG. (Cf. Joëlle Stolz, “Le procès des meurtriers d’un réfugié tchétchène dévoile le ‘système Kadyrov,’” Le Monde (November 17, 2010).)
42. Littell, Tchétchénie: An III, 64–65.
43. Quoted in Paul Goble, “Chechnya Far from Peaceful and Far Less under Russian Control,” Moldova.org (April 15, 2010).
44. Charles King and Rajan Menon, “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russia’s Invisible Civil War,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 30.
45. Cf. Sergey Maksudov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Aleksey Malashenko, and Nikolay Petrov, “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri” (Moscow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010). In this interview, in which the authors discuss their book of the same title, they say “that at this moment in this space [Chechnya] has formed a half-independent vassal government (polunezavisimoe vassalnoe gosudarstvo) that is not at all controlled from Moscow.”
46. Paul Quinn-Judge, “Russia’s Brutal Guerilla War,” Foreign Policy (August 31, 2009).
47. Piotr Smolar, “En Tchétchénie la violence augmente, selon un rapport,” Le Monde (November 26, 2009).
48. Aleksey Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Commentary (August 30, 2010).
49. Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village.”
50. Piotr Smolar, “Le maire de Moscou, Iouri Loujkov, a été évincé car il n’appartenait pas au ‘cercle du pouvoir,’” Le Monde (September 30, 2010).
51. Cf. Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoilée,” in Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 22–23.
52. Cf. Katlijn Malfliet and Stephan Parmentier, “Russia’s Membership of the Council of Europe: Ten Years After,” in Russia and the Council of Europe: 10 Years After, eds. Katlijn Malfliet and Stephan Parmentier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 14.
53. Cf. Nougayrède, Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 89.
54. Kirill Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” in Nougayrède, Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 120.
55. Andrey Bortsov and Vadim Trukhachev, “Poland Ascribes Non-existent Genocide of Chechens to Russia,” Pravda.ru (September 28, 2010).
56. Hallbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” 18.
57. Littell, Tchétchénie, An III, 56.
58. Martin Malek, “Understanding Chechen Culture,” in Chechens in the European Union, eds. Alexander Janda, Norbert Leitner, and Mathias Vogl (Vienna: Austrian Integration Fund: Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2008), 32.
59. Russian sources give other figures for the civilian war dead. Sergey Maksudov, for instance, gives a total number of Chechens killed in both wars of twenty-eight thousand (!). He contrasts this number with twenty thousand Chechen Russophones (in the next sentence called “Russians”) killed by the Chechens (and not by the Russian bombardments). (Maksudov et al., “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri.”) It is surprising to read these figures with no critical comment on the website of the Moscow Center of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
60. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 36.
61. Goldhagen, Worse than War, 29. A similar argument is made by Susan Neiman who, rightly, emphasized that not intentions, but the results are decisive. “What counts,” she wrote, “is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell. Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned.” (Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 275.)
62. Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”
63. Goldhagen, Worse than War, 250–251.
Putin's Wars Page 31