Putin's Wars (37 page)
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.
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 of 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]
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]
Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,”
Connections
8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 85.
Pavel Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya,”
Crimes of War Project
(April 18, 2003).
http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-felgenhauer.html
.
Jonathan Marcus, “Russians Urged to Stop ‘Vacuum’ Bombings,”
BBC News Online
(February 15, 2000).
Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
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.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 101.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 101–102.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 103.
Cf. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
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.
Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.
Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.
Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 71.
Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya,
A Dirty War
(London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xxv–xxvi.
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.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 56.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 53.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 51.
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 51–52.
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.).
Quoted in Solovyov and Klepikova,
Inside the Kremlin
, 249.
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).)
Alice Lagnado, “An Interview with Oleg Orlov,”
Crimes of War Project
(April 18, 2003).
Herfried Münkler,
Die neuen Kriege
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2002), 32.
Münkler,
Die neuen Kriege
, 31–32.
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.)
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 63.
Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” 93.
Politkovskaya,
A Dirty War.
Halbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: Ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,”
15.
Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit
, Amnesty International Report, 103.
Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, “Torture and Rape Stalk the Streets of Chechnya,”
The Guardian
(October 27, 2002).
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).
Gilligan,
Terror in Chechnya
, 63.
Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,”
in
Der Krieg im Schatten: Russland und Tschetschenien
, ed. Florian Hassel, 128.
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.
Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”
Jonathan Littell,
Tchétchénie: An III
(Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 38.
Littell,
Tchétchénie: An III
, 41–42.
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).)
Littell,
Tchétchénie: An III
, 64–65.
Quoted in Paul Goble, “Chechnya Far from Peaceful and Far Less under Russian Control,”
Moldova.org
(April 15, 2010).
Charles King and Rajan Menon, “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russia’s Invisible Civil
War,”
Foreign Affairs
89, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 30.
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.”
Paul Quinn-Judge, “Russia’s Brutal Guerilla War,”
Foreign Policy
(August 31, 2009).
Piotr Smolar, “En Tchétchénie la violence augmente, selon un rapport,”
Le Monde
(November 26, 2009).
Aleksey Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village,” Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Carnegie Commentary (August 30, 2010).
Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village.”
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).
Cf. Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoilée,” in
Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit
, 22–23.
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.
Cf. Nougayrède,
Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit
, 89.
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.
Andrey Bortsov and Vadim Trukhachev, “Poland Ascribes Non-existent Genocide of Chechens
to Russia,”
Pravda.ru
(September 28, 2010).
Hallbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,”
18.
Littell,
Tchétchénie, An III
, 56.
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.
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.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
(New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 36.