Daymokh web
site says Russians mining Chechen cemeteries
[BBC Monitoring]
31 January: A powerful explosive device was discovered at a cemetery in Groznyy's Leninskiy district on 30 January. According to some reports, the capacity of the home-made bomb was equivalent to several kilograms of TNT. It is not known who planted the mine and why.
The information centre of the Council of NGOs reports that this is not the first time that cemeteries have been mined in Chechnya. A few days ago, an explosive device was discovered at a cemetery in the village of Vedeno. It consisted of two F-1 hand grenades. Local residents believe that Russian invaders from the so-called "death squads" are involved in planting explosive devices at the cemeteries.
Officials` pressure compels refugees to return to Chechnya
web site [BBC Monotoring]
Council of Non-governmental Organizations web site on 1 February:
On 31 January, several families of displaced people went to Chechnya from the Chechen refugee camp Satsita, located on the outskirts of the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya in Ingushetia's Sunzhenskiy District. According to the residents of this temporary accommodation centre, constant pressure from officials of various agencies and departments forces them to go home although there are no personal security guarantees. Now they are using new methods of pressure on intractable refugees.
According to the refugees, one of the representatives of the multiple army of officials engaged in "solving the problems of Chechen refugees" recently stated that soon there will be no transport for driving people to their permanent places of residence. Since it has been ordered that the Chechen refugee camps be closed down by 1 March this year, people will have to hire vehicles to transport their property only at their own expense. For fear that this will really happen, many inhabitants of the refugee camps have applied for assistance in moving to Chechnya.
Human rights organizations says they are
concerned by continuing rights abuses in The war between federal forces and Chechen
resistance fighters is now in its fifth year, and it is the civilians
who suffer most. It is not known how many civilians have been kidnapped,
tortured, or killed in the republic. But the Council of Europe said
last week that the Chechen office of the Kremlin's special rights
envoy -- a post the Kremlin abolished last week -- received nearly
10,000 complaints of rights abuses between 2000 and April 2003. Kenneth Roth is the executive director
of the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch. He tells RFE/RL's
Russian Service that the Russian military is "regularly torturing,
kidnapping, and killing people." Roth says Human Rights Watch is deeply
concerned about what he calls "war crimes" committed by Russian troops:
"We don't even differ with the Russian government's choice of military
means to deal with the rebellion. What we do object to is the Russian
government's use of atrocities to fight that war. The fact that people
continue to be picked up, tortured, and disappear is something that
is a blatant crime, a war crime in that war context." However, Roth says Chechen rebels have
also committed atrocities, including "indiscriminate bombings and
attacks on Russian civilians" -- most notoriously, the Dubrovka Theater
hostage crisis in Thomas de Waal is a Caucasus expert at
the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in De Waal says it is still Russian troops
who hold the greatest responsibility for the atrocities in the republic.
But he says Kadyrov's forces are now clearly more and more involved
in perpetrating the violence. De Waal says the Kremlin is seeking to
hand more power to the local administration. Not only has the Kremlin
handed responsibility to rights-related issues to Kadyrov, it has
given his security forces what de Waal says is free rein to terrorize
civilians in order to achieve its ends: "The new policy is one of
'Chechenization,' which is to give more power and more responsibility
to Kadyrov, which means that he, and his men, are now doing many of
the things that Russian soldiers did before." The director of RFE/RL's North Caucasus
Service, Aslan Doukaev, agrees. He says he has the impression the
Kremlin wants to deal with the continued resistance by inciting Chechens
to fight against Chechens: "There's increasing evidence that the Kadyrov
security forces are getting increasingly active, and it's very difficult
to say who perpetrates most of the violence but it seems that the
Russians are pinning great hopes on the Kadyrov security force in
dealing with the resistance. Of course the Russians would love to
turn this conflict in an inter-Chechen conflict." Doukaev says modest estimates put at least
4,000 fighters -- many of them former prisoners -- under the command
of Kadyrov and his son, Ramzan, who heads the force. Doukaev says
Ramzan Kadyrov has been accused of masterminding numerous kidnappings
and torture of civilians, and is also believed to operate a private
prison in his ancestral village. His forces are widely feared in The legal status of Kadyrov's special forces
is unclear. Doukaev says there are no legal precedents for the president
of an autonomous republic within Steve Crawshaw, the director of the He says Human Rights Watch has tried to
convey this message to the Russian government, but with little results:"My
colleagues in Crawshaw
says Russian society has yet to understand the wide-reaching impact
of the violence in
Rights Activists Say Abuses Continue in Chechnya