Chechnya’s disappeared. The war after the war

The scandal of Chechnya's “disappeared” people

COMPARED with the first war of 1994-96, when Grozny was flattened, or with the early period of the second war in 1999-2000, Russia's grimmest north Caucasian republic is now relatively peaceful. But another peril, as terrifying and in a way more insidious, has replaced the threat of bombing. Credible estimates suggest that 3,000-5,000 people have “disappeared” in Chechnya since 1999, often to face torture and summary execution.

In about a third of cases documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW), a lobby group, in a report out this week, the perpetrators' accents and vehicles identified them as Russian forces (though they often wore masks and covered up number-plates). In the rest, they were Chechen “security” forces: often henchmen of Ramzan Kadyrov, son of a Chechen president blown up last year, who is now Chechnya's first deputy prime minister. (Mr Kadyrov has implausibly threatened to sue activists who accuse him of involvement.)

After the slaughter of schoolchildren in Beslan last September, Russia's prosecutor-general suggested the idea of detention of terrorists' relatives. The idea was dropped in Moscow - but not in Chechnya. Some of the disappeared were members of known or suspected rebels' families, such as seven kinsmen of Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen leader killed earlier this month. Yet most were ordinary young people who caught the wrong eye, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Alexander Petrov of HRW's Moscow office speculates that, under torture, victims may incriminate innocent people, who are in turn snatched and tortured. At least under Stalin, says another human-rights worker, there was a pretence of legal protocol.

Cash, not politics or religion, often explains why the Chechen conflict has become so nasty. As Tolstoy's Caucasian stories attest, loot has long been a perquisite for fighters of Russia's southern wars. These days, cash may be snatched along with people. Yet only in a few cases does ransom money change hands. (Memorial, a Russian human-rights group, says relatives sometimes pay to retrieve a corpse.) The bigger causes of disappearances may be the dysfunctional state of the Russian army, exacerbated by the stress of serving in a brutalising region; a desire to intimidate an alienated population; and the Kremlin's encouragement of rivalries among various pro-Moscow factions.

Some top officials recognise the problem, even if Alu Alkhanov, the latest Chechen president, played it down this week at a pow-wow in Strasbourg. But, as so often, rhetoric at the top seems not to be filtering down into action. Umpteen investigations have begun in Chechnya, but securing convictions is another matter. Vladimir Lukin, Russia's human-rights ombudsman, hopes this may change “in the not too distant future”, adding that the plethora of security services in Chechnya is a complication. Complaints ping-pong between military and civil prosecutors, relatives are threatened into dropping them, and, as Mr Petrov puts it, “an atmosphere of absolute impunity” prevails.

Last month, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in three cases involving bombing and extra-judicial killing that the Russian government had violated Chechens' rights. HRW says that the disappearances should be seen as a “crime against humanity”, a legal classification that, in theory, enables other countries to act. But it is hard to see what anybody from outside could do. Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, who once offered to arrange the circumcision of a journalist who was bothering him over Chechnya, is notoriously touchy on the subject. Nor will Maskhadov's demise help the situation. His own authority over Shamil Basayev and other violent terrorists was doubtful, at best. But his nominal successor, Abdul-Khalim Saidulayev, may have even less.

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