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U.S. Paper Reports Human Rights Abuses in Chechnya
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| Chechen civilians are targeted by Russian soldiers |
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A U.S. newspaper reported Monday that human rights workers are collecting evidence of human rights abuses perpetrated by Russian soldiers during two military operations over the past week, as Russian forces continued a manhunt begun this weekend for Chechen combatants in the closed-off Chechen town of Argun.
Investigators for the Russian human rights group Memorial told the Los Angeles Times that Russian forces were carrying out massive human rights abuses with impunity, including indiscriminate killing, because of their country's support for the U.S.-led fight against "terrorism."
In one incident alone, five civilians, all under the age of 25, were shot dead by Russian soldiers in the Tsostan-Yurt region Friday, January 4, 2002, Marsho online news agency reported.
"Because Russia has turned out to be a very useful and instrumental ally of the U.S. in fighting international terrorism, the West has completely turned a blind eye to what is happening in Chechnya," said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies, in the Times article.
The accusations of killings came as Russian forces continued a hunt for Chechen fighters on Monday that began in military operations last week.
The Times reported the operations began as Russia closed down for New Year's Day and Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 6, holidays during which TV news broadcasts are reduced and most newspapers stop printing.
Reports that have emerged from Russian authorities concerning the operations have been "perfunctory," the Times said, without mentioning details of detentions or arrests.
In the first operation, begun December 30, 2001, in the town of Tsotsin-Yurt, Russian soldiers targeted Chechen male civilians, Memorial's deputy director told the Times.
"The soldiers kept shooting at any Chechen male they saw for four days in a row," Usam Baisayev said in the Times article. "They did not even bother to figure out whether the person they were about to deprive of life is or was a member of a rebel gang."
The Russian ITAR-TASS news agency reported conflicting accounts of the fighting at Tsotsin-Yurt, with one federal source saying 37 fighters had been killed and another saying a larger detachment had been wiped out, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
The second operation followed Chechen fighters thought to have escaped to the town of Argun, 10 miles (15 kilometers) east of the capital Grozny, which has been sealed off since Friday as soldiers searched among the civilian population for the fighters.
Two Russian soldiers were killed and others wounded as their group, heading towards the center of Argun, came under crossfire from Chechen activists hidden in houses on both sides of the road, local officials quoted by the Interfax news agency said.
A spokesman for Chechen President, Aslan Maskhadov, said that Russian security operations were continuing Monday and that the number of arrests in the region was now more than 100.
The "special operation" had left dead and wounded among the civilian population, the spokesman said, without providing numbers.
Officials at regional military headquarters told ITAR-TASS that among 38 "sympathizers" said to have been arrested in Argun Monday was a 15-year-old youth believed to have been given training at a camp run by Jordanian-born rebel warlord Khattab.
Federal officials quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency claimed no clashes or attacks had been registered overnight Sunday, and that the situation in Argun was "totally under control."
"I have been there myself today," Vsevolod Chernov, the chief prosecutor of Chechnya, was quoted in the Times as having said in an interview broadcast Sunday on the TV-6 network. "There have been no complaints from the people. Military and local prosecutors as well as representatives of the public - elders from the city of Argun - are taking part in the operation."
But Memorial's reports from Tsotsin-Yurt tell a different story, according to the Times.
One investigator, Kheda Saratova, gathered evidence over three days in Tsotsin-Yurt for the killing of at least 37 civilians - not combatants - by Russian troops, and stated that relatives were forced to sign statements saying the victims had been rebel fighters, the Times reported.
"Troops kill peaceful civilians and then try to pass them off as rebels," she told the Times in a telephone interview. "The military just grab anyone who is at hand, and then the rest of the world has to trust their 'professionalism' when they say these people were bandits."
Saratova told the paper about one resident, a 37-year-old Muslim religious leader named Musa Ismailov, who was taken away on December 30. Ismailov's 36-year-old wife Malika told Saratova she saw her husband's ear had been cut off when he was led away, and that she had to pay federal troops the equivalent of $33 and sign a statement to retrieve his body.
The Memorial investigator added in the Times article that because troops - drunk due to New Year's festivities - had burned corpses on the outskirts of Tsotsin-Yurt, "The entire town reeks of burned flesh and putrefaction."
"Most of the reports coming these days from [Tsotsin-Yurt] sound very true," the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies' Piontkovsky said in the article. "Things that would several years ago make one's hair stand on end today sound utterly commonplace.
"In the past, the West only meekly complained about large-scale human rights violations in Chechnya. After September 11, even these complaints and humble criticism stopped. Now, everything is quiet, and Russia feels it has got a free hand to do whatever it wants with Chechnya."
Around 70 fighters have been killed in Chechnya since January 1, 2002, according to officials at the Northern Caucasus general headquarters at Khankhala, near Grozny, quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Meanwhile, Maskhadov's spokesman expressed anger that envoys from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and from the Council of Europe "have refused to visit the scenes of the crimes of the Russian forces."
OSCE and CE missions have made numerous visits to the breakaway republic, invariably under Russian escort.
"They should record all the crimes on Chechnya's territory, and then they would understand the Chechen's fight," the spokesman said.
Other human rights groups have also warned over the course of Russia's crackdown on Chechen separatism that accusations of "terrorism" should not cloud the facts about human rights abuses.
In October 2001, Amnesty International's European Union office issued a press release warning European leaders not to trade in human rights for the global anti-terror coalition and calling on them to commit publicly to their concerns about Russian abuses in Chechnya.
"There is a tendency emerging to soft-pedal on human rights in order to foster the broadest possible coalition, Russia being one of the more obvious examples,'' Dick Oosting, director of Amnesty's EU office, said in the October statement.
"Any sell-out at this stage may seriously undermine the credibility of the EU's entire human rights policy.”
Although the London-based watchdog acknowledged human rights violations on both sides, it stated that Russian forces were "overwhelmingly" responsible for the suffering of Chechen civilians, specifically in ethnic "cleansing operations" in which soldiers arbitrarily detained civilians and used "disproportionate force" against them.
The group also accused Russian authorities of failing to investigate cases of human rights abuses by their forces, the press release said.
In April 2001, long before the anti-terror coalition could have provided any cover for Russian abuses, Amnesty signed a letter along with six other major international human rights groups, including Memorial, calling on the 57th U.N. Commission on Human Rights to respond to "the continuing human rights crisis in Chechnya."
The previous Commission had adopted a resolution calling for various measures to alleviate the situation, but the groups found that Russia did not fulfill the measures required.
"Taking this into account," the April statement said, "the Commission must now adopt a resolution that acknowledges the failure by Russian authorities to implement the resolution, renews calls for invitations to the special mechanisms, and calls for the creation of an international commission of inquiry to investigate violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."
Seven months later, in the October statement, Amnesty pointed out that "the human rights situation in Chechnya remains critical and Russian assurances to the EU and the U.N. have not been honored."
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