Yeltsin wrote these words in 2000. However, the investigations of the Duma Commission, established two years later, were prematurely halted because of lack of cooperation on the part of the government, and thirteen years later still no Chechen terrorist has been tried for the apartment bombings. The whole affair has been declared a state secret by the authorities, and the many—too many—strange events and unexplained circumstances that point to an alleged involvement of the secret services, far from having been investigated exhaustively, have been subject to a cover-up. According to a report by Amnesty International, “the responsibility for these attacks [in Moscow and Volgodonsk] should rather be sought on the part of the FSB. Until today the question of Russian state terrorism remains still open. The Russian secret services, at that time, seem to have set in motion a sinister scenario of a power change in the Kremlin against the background of explosions.”[38] Arriving at a similar conclusion, Arkadi Vaksberg, member of the Duma investigation commission, wrote: “Murders and attempted murders that, judging by the traces they left behind, had been ordered by the Kremlin and the Lubyanka [FSB], happened, one after the other, [they were] sometimes of a surprising scale and cruelty: I’m thinking especially of the apartment explosions at the eve of the election of our beloved president.”[39] David Satter expressed himself even more clearly. He wrote: “Both the logic of the political situation and the weight of the evidence lead overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the Russian leadership itself was responsible for the bombings of the apartment buildings. This was an attack in which many of the victims were children whose bodies were found in pieces, if at all. There can be little doubt that persons capable of such a crime, regardless of how they present themselves, would not give up power willingly but would react to a threat to their position by imposing dictatorial control.”[40]
Chapter 12
The Second Chechen War
Putin’s War
The Second Chechen War started on September 22, 1999. On this day Russia began an aerial campaign over Chechnya, which was followed by a ground invasion at the beginning of October. Almost ten years later, on April 16, 2009, the Russian government officially declared the war to be over and won—although there was still some fighting going on. The war took almost a decade, roughly the same time as the war in Afghanistan. The war in Chechnya, however, was not called a war, but a kontrterroristskaya operatsiya, an “anti-terrorist operation,” or KTO. This second war would be fought in an even more violent and ruthless way than the First Chechen War. On the Russian side there existed a clear urge to take revenge and punish the Chechen people for the lost first war. It led to an all-out war with little or no respect for the rules of war or for human rights, least of all the right to life of the Chechen civilian population. The actions of the Russian army can be listed under six headings:
• Bombardments
• The use of contract soldiers (kontraktniki)
• The conduction of sweep operations (zachistki)
• The installation of so called filtration points
• Forced disappearances
• Chechenization
BOMBARDMENTS: THE MASSIVE SLAUGHTER
In the First Chechen War the Chechen capital Grozny was heavily bombed for months, which led to a death toll second only in recent European history to the death toll of Dresden during World War II. In the first war also the Russian army suffered important losses. In the second war the Russian commanders had learned the lessons of the NATO actions in Kosovo some months before. Their new strategy was this: bomb until victory and conduct a war at distance without heavy casualties. The NATO war against Serbia, however, relied on a strategy of precision bombardments and the availability of smart weapons that minimized collateral damage and victims in the civilian population. Such a strategy, however, was lacking in the Second Chechen War. “Collateral damage in Chechnya was of little interest to the Russian public and to international audiences (aside from human rights organizations, which had little influence in Russia), and consequently Moscow did not take them into account.”[1] According to the Russian defense expert Pavel Felgenhauer,
The loss of life, mostly civilian, and the damage to property was terrific…. In many instances Russian troops committed appalling war crimes, deliberately attacking the civilian population in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. There is credible evidence of use of the so-called Heavy Flamethrowing System (TOS-1)—a fuel bomb land-based multiple launch delivery system, also known as “Buratino” among the Russian rank and file—against Chechen towns and villages during the winter campaign of 2000. The third protocol of the 1980 Geneva Convention strictly forbids the use of such “air-delivered incendiary weapons” in populated areas, even against military targets.[2]
The effects of these fuel bombs are described as follows:
A typical bomb consists of a container of fuel and two separate explosive charges. After the munition is dropped or fired the first explosive charge breaks open the container at a pre-determined height dispersing the fuel as a fine mist over a large area. This mixes with atmospheric oxygen and flows into and around structures. The second charge then detonates the cloud creating a massive blast wave. This pressure wave kills people even in cellars or bunkers. If people are not killed by the blast they are incinerated.[3]
The Russian forces also used “Tochka” and “Tochka-U” ballistic missiles. These missiles have a radius of 120 km and on impact can cover up to 7 hectares with cluster shrapnel. According to Felgenhauer, “the use of such mass-destruction weapons as aerosol (fuel) munitions and ballistic missiles against civilian targets was undoubtedly authorized by Moscow and may implicate the President Putin personally, as well as his top military chiefs, in war crimes.”[4] According to Jacob Kipp, an expert on the Russian army at the University of Kansas, the Russian army has certain peculiarities that make it more prone to commit war crimes than Western armies. “The Russians have a tradition in which every war is a ‘total war.’ …When the decision has been taken to start a war, there is no feeling for the fact that there can be limits and should be limits how this war is conducted.”[5] The Russians call this situation bespredel, which literally means “without limits.” It implies torture, cruelty, and gratuitous acts of violence which remain, as a rule, unpunished.
38
Natalie Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoyée,” in
1
Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,”
2
Pavel Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya,”
3
Jonathan Marcus, “Russians Urged to Stop ‘Vacuum’ Bombings,”
5
Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,” in