Crime Reports Defy Russian Claims of Greater Calm in Chechnya

By MICHAEL WINES The New York Times

MOSCOW, April 13 — Statistics that came to light today about violence  in the Russian republic of Chechnya and related crime reports detail  a parade of disappearances, killings and beatings that run contrary  to Russian government assertions that life in Chechnya is slowly returning to normal.

The civilian murder rate in Chechnya is at least two to three times as high as in Moscow and the abduction rate is almost double the murder rate, according to the previously unreleased statistics compiled by the region's pro-Moscow government.

The statistics do not include deaths in the region's low-level guerrilla war, in which roughly a dozen to two dozen Russian fighters and an unknown number of antigovernment guerrillas die each week.

The crime statistics, ostensibly public information but never formally released, were provided by a person close to the pro-Moscow government who disagrees with the government's assertions.

Chechnya's pro-Russian leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, is reported to have begun circulating similar reports in high levels of the Russian government in an effort to win support for reining in the patchwork of militias, special police forces and military units operating there.

According to the reports, 70 murders of civilians were recorded in Chechnya in the first two months of 2003. That translates to an annual murder rate of 38 to 60 killings per 100,000 Chechnya residents, depending on the republic's population. By comparison, the murder rate in Moscow is about 18 per 100,000 residents.

Russia's recent census placed Chechnya's population at nearly 1.1 million, but many experts place the actual number closer to 700,000.

During the same two months, the Chechen report states, there were 126 abductions, 19 reports of missing persons and the discovery of 52 "fragments of bodies."

A separate tally from the republic's emergencies ministry records the unearthing of the bodies of 2,879 civilians in apparently unmarked graves in 49 locales, ranging from the discovery of 699 bodies in the village of Goyskoye to one or two dead in places like the former Soviet Collective Dairy Farm No. 15 and the hamlet of Orekhovo.

The data is presented without comment, making it impossible to determine how the civilians died or who might have killed them.

In recent months, the Russian government has claimed to have all but wiped out organized guerrilla resistance within Chechnya and has said it is beginning a large-scale program to restore life in the region to normal. Many thousands of refugees in nearby Ingushetia are being prodded to return, sometimes under protest. The government said Chechens voted overwhelmingly in favor of a pro-Russian constitution re-establishing civil rule in Chechnya in a referendum in late March.

In an interview today, Oleg Orlov, an official of Memorial, a Russian human rights group, said that his organization had seen the crime reports and that the data, while accurate, failed to include a number of crimes documented by rights workers in the same two-month period.

Taken as a whole, he said, the reports "describe a region where there is a guerrilla war in full swing, with all the accompanying horrors."

"In my view," said Mr. Orlov, "this region is, unfortunately, not on the path to peace."

For that, he said, both Russian and guerrilla fighters are responsible, for both have engaged in crimes and acts of retribution that have kept a low-level war seething long after the major conflict had ended.

A sheaf of individual crime reports provided with the statistics suggests as much. The reports briefly describe scores of incidents in late 2002 and early 2003, some of which bear the earmarks of Russian military forces, and others suggesting activity by guerrillas or criminals.

On Feb. 2, for example, the Chechen police were told that 15 to 20 men in camouflage and masks and riding in armored personnel carriers burst into a house in Grozny's Staropromyslovsky District at 3:20 a.m. and abducted a 30-year-old man.

Two more armored vehicles, again carrying men in camouflage and masks, carted away another 30-year-old man in Grozny's Zavodsky district the next night.

Such disappearances are an almost nightly occurrence in Chechnya. The use of armored vehicles, which are all but unavailable to guerrillas, points to abductions by the Russian or Chechen military, human rights workers say.

But guerrillas also appear to engage in kidnappings, as on Feb. 5, when unidentified men in Russian jeeps broke into a house in Pervomayskaya, outside Grozny, and took away two brothers.

The United States has frequently criticized Russia's conduct of the war in Chechnya, citing reports linking pro-Russian forces to human rights abuses. But the State Department said on Friday that it would break with past practice and decline to sponsor a resolution criticizing Russia when the Chechnya conflict comes before the United Nations Human Rights Commission this week.

An official of the monitoring group Human Rights Watch called the decision "shameful" and charged that American officials had "muted their own moral clarity."

A State Department spokesman said that the United States had yet to decide whether it would vote in favor of a resolution censuring Russia, but that it believed that the referendum last month on re-establishing civil rule in the republic offered at least a chance for progress toward a political solution to the conflict.