Putin's Wars (36 page)
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]
Immediately linked with the
zachistki
was the installation of so-called filtration 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]
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
.
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]