Special to The Moscow Times WASHINGTON -- Russian federal forces have been
using a centrally organized system of "death squads" to kill or disappear
civilians across the length and breadth of Chechnya, says a prominent State
Duma deputy and human rights activist now making the rounds in Washington.
Sergei Kovalyov, 72 and a biologist by training, has been laying evidence
of the death squads before American audiences with the methodical calm of
an elderly scientist.
He has spoken to foreign policy experts at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and at the American Foreign Policy Council, and held closed-door meetings
at the U.S. Senate; this week he takes his grim message to academics, journalists
and politicians in New York.
Kovalyov has often demonstrated unusual political bravery. He served 12
years in Soviet labor camps for his beliefs, and in 1995 helped defuse a
hostage crisis by convincing a tense band of Chechens to accept him and
one other Duma deputy in exchange for hundreds of women and children.
That same bravery was on display in Washington as Kovalyov floated the possibility
that the death squads operate in Chechnya with the approval of the highest
levels of the military, quite possibly including commander-in-chief Vladimir
Putin himself.
"If [top military and government officials] know of these death squads,
then why are they keeping silent?" he asked rhetorically. "And if they don't
know of these death squads, the question is: Why don't they?
"We are always finding, all across Chechnya, mass graves of civilians,"
Kovalyov said during a talk Friday at the American Foreign Policy Council.
"Sometimes it's not even a grave but a heap of dumped bodies.
"Whenever we can identify the bodies, it turns out each grave or heap contains
people not from that local area, but instead from all across Chechnya. The
bodies belong to people who had been detained at different checkpoints in
different parts of Chechnya, yet somehow they are turning up in a grave
together, often quite far from where they were detained.
"This circumstance totally rules out the idea that these atrocities were
committed by soldiers who got out of hand: If that were the case, the corpses
would be from one area and would be near those troops.
"Another circumstance: Recently in particular, almost all of the corpses
we are finding have been blown up [with explosives]. This is one of the
reasons we've identified so few of the remains -- it seems they're being
destroyed to hide their identities. Corpses are being blown up all across
Chechnya -- not in just one place -- so this too indicates a coordinated
general policy."
Just in January, Kovalyov's allies at human rights group Memorial reported
at least 61 Chechen civilians had been detained, of whom 29 have disappeared
without a trace -- their relatives can learn nothing of their fate.
Also last month, some 22 fresh bodies were discovered. "Of these 22 dead,
how many belong to the ranks of the 29 disappeared? At this point, we can
only guess," Kovalyov said.
This is not the first time an observer of the war in Chechnya has claimed
death squads are active there. The Moscow Helsinki Group, respected advocates
for human rights, spoke of Russian-run death squads in its annual report
issued last summer. Anna Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta journalist, titled
her book about Chechnya "The Dirty War" -- an allusion to the disappearances
and death squads of 1970s and '80s Argentina.
But Kovalyov is putting his allegations -- alongside his own moral stature
-- directly before U.S. policy elites, at a time when the state Department is
considering a Russian request to declare Chechen guerrilla groups international
terrorist organizations.
Just before leaving for Washington, Kovalyov was admonished by the Duma
ethics commission for his criticism of Russia during previous trips abroad.
During a heated discussion of the ethics commission report on Feb. 7, Kovalyov
said the commission was "servile." In response, Deputy Speaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky
called Kovalyov "state criminal No. 1" for his "dirty slander" of Russia
in speeches abroad.
Undeterred, Kovalyov continued in Washington to challenge Russia's assertions
that Russia has made progress toward peace in the region. He called that
"a deliberate lie that's being actively disseminated."
"In what do we see this progress of which so much is said in Russia, and
in the West as well?" Kovalyov asked.
He suggested "naive people" were accepting a simplistic line of reasoning:
With carpet-bombing over, civilian death tolls are lower, so things are
better.
But they aren't, Kovalyov says, and a referendum in Chechnya, now just five weeks
off, can already be dismissed as a fraud. He said the vote will be held under
what amounts to an undeclared state of emergency -- with curfews and checkpoints
limiting movement.
There are no independent publications in Chechnya, and no assemblies or
demonstrations are allowed save those organized by the pro-Kremlin administration
of Akhmad Kadyrov.
"This ban on demonstrations is sometimes violated, for example, by women
-- they are a bit less likely to be suspected of being guerrillas -- who
spontaneously assemble after their village has been subjected to an unusually
brutal 'cleansing,'" Kovalyov said.
Kovalyov said he suspects the March 23 referendum will result in renewed bloodshed:
Pro-separatist agitators will be "disappeared" by the federals, while pro-federal
candidates and agitators will be hunted down and shot by separatists.
In the end, whatever political entity emerges from the voting will be no
more legitimate than the current Kremlin-installed regime, he said.
Rather than pursue a rush referendum, the Kremlin should accept Chechen
President Aslan Maskhadov's offers of negotiations. "World history demonstrates:
If you want to end an armed conflict, you must, whether you like it or not,
talk to the enemy," Kovalyov said.
When Boris Yeltsin ordered the invasion of Chechnya in 1994, Kovalyov, then
a top human rights official, oversaw research to estimate the death toll.
After two years of fighting, Kovalyov's team could offer their conservative,
documented estimate of more than 50,000 civilian deaths. Others put the
death toll at twice that. Today Kovalyov declines to put a number to the civilian
death toll in the current, more than four-year-old war, other than to say
it is "many tens of thousands." He says the scientific social surveys conducted
during the first war are now impossible.