'In the Caucasus, you can buy anything' This year saw the tenth anniversary of the onset of a near permanent state of war in the former Soviet republic of Chechnya. Since Russian planes first bombarded Grozny in the winter of 1994, almost half of the Chechen population has been either killed or displaced from their homes. Major military operations against massed rebel ranks have grown increasingly uncommon, but that does not mean the suffering has ceased. Instead, the war has degenerated into a complex ballet of atrocities committed by parallel networks of armed gangs, of which the most numerous and the most terrible are those supposedly "controlled" by the Russian state. The United States Senate recently found that "Russian forces continue to arbitrarily detain, torture, extra-judicially execute, extort, rape, and forcibly disappear people." Likewise, the US Helsinki Commission reports that "the most egregious violations of international humanitarian law anywhere in the OSCE region are occurring in Chechnya today." According to the Moscow-backed authorities in Chechnya themselves, the monthly rate of extra-judicial executions is now running at around 109, which is higher (on a per capita basis) than the rate seen at the height of Stalin's purges. Meanwhile, the Russian federal government has designated one-third of Chechnya a "zone of ecological disaster" and another 40 per cent "a zone of extreme environmental distress". Today, the guerrillas spend most of their time feuding with one another in the mountains, while the Russian Federal troops carefully avoid confronting them directly, preferring to terrorise the local population instead. The few journalists who have risked their lives to report from the war zone, foremost among them Anna Politovskaya of Novaya Gazeta, have described how Russian soldiers will regularly wait until rebel forces have retreated from a village before they enter it. Men are routinely tortured, and women raped; both disappear. What begins as pointless sadistic violence ends as a business operation, as the "Feds" extort money from relatives against the return of corpses which rarely, in fact, materialise. The Beslan atrocity which caught the world's attention in September 2004 was truly horrific; but it was just another instance of ongoing brutality and suffering. The kidnapping business "As it is well known, kidnappings by 'unknown camouflaged armed people' is the main problem of the second Chechen war. No one knows the exact number of the kidnapped, but they are to be counted in thousands, and in most cases their remains are never found. The years of 'counter-terrorist operations' have been a pure waste of human lives. No one was spared; no one was immune to persecution by the federal authorities: Maskhadovs's supporters, and those who opposed him; those who did well under Kadyrov [the Chechen president installed by Russia in June 2000, and assassinated in May 2004], and those who simply carried on with their lives without pledging loyalty to any of the warring parties. Now everybody hates the Feds. "[...] Over time, people learned to tell by the way the kidnappings were carried out whether they were the doing of the federal forces or of Kadyrov's people. The signs are simple: the Feds usually do not leave any bodies, while Kadyrov's men -- who are well aware of the local rule that the murderer's guilt is multiplied tenfold if the corpse is not delivered to the relatives for burial -- usually dispose of the body at some place where it can easily be found." Anna Politovskaya (www.novayagazeta.ru ) 'Beyond our comprehension' "In general, we need to admit that we did not fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. [...] We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten." -- President Vladimir Putin addressing the nation in the wake of Beslan school hostage drama. "The young suicide bombers [in the October 2002 Dubrowka Theatre seige] tried to explain to their captives that in this act of desperation they saw their only possibility of making the world understand the daily torment that their people had had to live through for so many years. [...] What united the people who decided to take children hostage for three days in Beslan [...] is still beyond our comprehension." Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the Migration and Law Network of the Memorial Human Rights Centre, 4 September 2004 "[...] On the last day, when five- year-old Soslan was dying of thirst, he stopped asking his mother to beg for water from the bandits and went to them himself. The following dialogue ensued: "Uncle, give me water ..." "Have you heard of Putin?" "I have." "Have you heard of Dzasohov? [president of North Osettia]" "I have." "Are they good people?" "They are good people." "Well, they are the ones who closed the water supply." Soslan went back to his mother and said: "Mama, would he let me drink if I said that Putin is bad?" www.novayagazeta.ru "Here is the main cause of the tragedy that hit Beslan! Today in the Caucasus you can buy anything from an official -- honour, conscience, duty, children's lives. [...] Before solving the problem of terror, we must eradicate this corruption." Tomaz Jihoev who lost his sister and niece in the Beslan school hostage crisis (www.stolica-s.com). Compiled by Shohdy Naguib and Frederick Bowie
