Putin's Wars (35 page)

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
  

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]

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 (Special 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]

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 V
elikaya 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]