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]
THE WAR IN CHECHNYA AND THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS
A final difference between the First and the Second Chechen War was that during the second war the Russian Federation was a fully fledged member of the Council of Europe, one of the most prestigious intergovernmental human rights organizations in the world. Russia had become a member on February 28, 1996, when the First Chechen War was beginning to unwind. One would have expected that the council would have condemned the war crimes committed in Chechnya, but, unfortunately, the reaction of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe was rather muted. Apart from a temporary suspension of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly for some months in 2000, Moscow escaped any sanction.[51] The European Court of Human Rights, however, was still able to play an important and useful role, because a rapidly growing number of cases of Russian—also Chechen—citizens was brought before the jurisdiction of the court. In the beginning of 2007, 19,300 allocated applications against the Russian Federation were pending, which represented 21.5 percent of all cases from all forty-seven member states. By the end of the same year the total number of cases against Russia was over 20,000 and represented 26 percent of the total. By the end of 2008 the total number of cases against Russia had grown further to 27,246, which was 28 percent of the total.[52]
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was, for Chechen citizens, a court of last resort to correct the corrupt judiciary in Russia. The majority of the cases have been won by the plaintiffs. On January 26, 2006, Russia was for the first time condemned for a case of torture.[53] The Russian authorities obediently paid the fines, but they refused to change the judicial system according to the obligations Russia had accepted when it became a member of the council. Because the European Court of Human Rights abstained from obliging the Russian government to open new judicial inquiries, punish the perpetrators, and present public excuses to the family, this has led to a cynical system—resembling the medieval salic law (lex salica)—in which, in the case of a condemnation a kind of “tax” is paid by the Russian state to the families of the victims who had been killed. As a rule, “the disappearance of a human being costs 35,000 euros.”[54] Although for the plaintiffs these rulings are “better than nothing,” they do not really restore their violated sense of justice. As concerns ordinary Russians, for them the Strasbourg rulings are only another proof of Europe’s negative feelings towards Russia. “Europe,” wrote the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda, “has always disliked Russia, but has never been straightforward about it. Just google: ‘European court in Strasbourg Chechens’ and you will see how many cases against Russia have been won. Many of those cases are based on doubtful facts.”[55] There is another side to the coin: the flood of complaints is totally disrupting the court in Strasbourg, which is drowning under the overload of cases. Attempts, however, to reform the court to make procedures more efficient were blocked by Russia. Its own solution to diminish the flow has been to exert a growing pressure on the lawyers of Russian and Chechen plaintiffs, who are harassed by the authorities to discourage citizens from seeking justice in Strasbourg.
A GENOCIDE?
The Second Chechen War was characterized by an endless series of crimes, many of which certainly deserve to be qualified as war crimes and crimes against humanity: from the indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny and the use of forbidden fuel and cluster bombs in the first months of the war, to the summary executions of civilians during the zachistki, the torture, the forced disappearances, the blowing up of bodies, the organized looting, and other acts of state terror. Another important question is whether the Russians committed genocide. There are no precise data available for the number of people killed, only estimates that vary according to the sources. Uwe Halbach wrote in February 2005—this is four years before the official end of the “counterterrorist operation”—that according to estimates, “between 10% and 20% of the population of Chechnya died in both wars, so after 1994. For the first war the numbers vary between 35,000 and more than 100,000 victims…. As concerns the second war…, in the late summer of 2002 human rights organizations calculated the [number of] victims in the Chechen population at 80,000 dead.”[56] Five years later Jonathan Littell gave for both wars a total number of two hundred thousand victims.[57] According to another author, “figures range to 300,000 killed,” adding that this “is probably an exaggeration.”[58] The last figure, apparently, does not take into account the refugees who fled the republic, whose numbers could reach one hundred thousand. It seems plausible, therefore, to estimate the total number of killed Chechens in the two conflicts between 150,000 and 200,000. These include men, women, and children, the great majority of them noncombatant citizens. Before the first war started the population of Chechnya was roughly one million. This means that possibly between 15 to 20 percent of the Chechen population has been exterminated.[59] To put this number in a historical perspective: Daniel Goldhagen has estimated that “Pol Pot [killed] the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.”[60] Pol Pot was, indeed, a ruthless mass murderer. And the number of people killed by his regime is tenfold of the Chechens killed in Chechnya. But the percentage of the population killed in these two cases, by Pol Pot on the one hand, and by the masters of the Kremlin on the other, are quite comparable. The question of a genocide committed by Russia in Chechnya is therefore fully on the table.
45
Cf. Sergey Maksudov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Aleksey Malashenko, and Nikolay Petrov, “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri” (Moscow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010). In this interview, in which the authors discuss their book of the same title, they say “that at this moment in this space [Chechnya] has formed a half-independent vassal government (
47
Piotr Smolar, “En Tchétchénie la violence augmente, selon un rapport,”
48
Aleksey Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Commentary (August 30, 2010).
50
Piotr Smolar, “Le maire de Moscou, Iouri Loujkov, a été évincé car il n’appartenait pas au ‘cercle du pouvoir,’”
51
Cf. Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoilée,” in
52
Cf. Katlijn Malfliet and Stephan Parmentier, “Russia’s Membership of the Council of Europe: Ten Years After,” in
54
Kirill Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” in Nougayrède,
55
Andrey Bortsov and Vadim Trukhachev, “Poland Ascribes Non-existent Genocide of Chechens to Russia,”
56
Hallbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” 18.
58
Martin Malek, “Understanding Chechen Culture,” in
59
Russian sources give other figures for the civilian war dead. Sergey Maksudov, for instance, gives a total number of Chechens killed in
60
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,