Human rights abuses in Chechnya remain rampant despite a highly touted referendum
staged last month by the Russian government to ease the political and humanitarian
crisis in the breakaway republic, Chechen advocates said yesterday.
"Unfortunately, one can easily see that the situation has not changed for
the better" since the March 23 referendum on a new constitution, said Eliza Moussaeva,
an official of the Memorial Human Rights Center. Memorial provides legal aid to
the nearly 100,000 Chechen refugees who have fled the brutal war and now live
in the neighboring Russian province of Ingushetia.
"Why did we even need to have the vote if it wasn't going to change the situation
for the better and bring reform?" said Mrs. Moussaeva, who spoke at a Capitol
Hill briefing arranged by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an independent U.S. agency
that monitors human rights in Europe and Russia.
The Chechen conflict, closely identified with Russian President Vladimir
Putin, began in 1999 as a bid by Moscow to crush once and for all ethnic
Chechen separatists who had resisted central authority.
But Russian forces have been able only to establish shaky control in Grozny and
a few other Chechen cities, and the conflict has degenerated into a grinding guerrilla
struggle with both sides accused of atrocities.
In Moscow yesterday, the Chechen interior minister in the pro-Moscow government
administering the province said 46 persons were abducted in the month since the
referendum, in which the new constitution was overwhelmingly approved.
Interior Minister Ali Alkhanov and his aides told a Moscow news conference that
Russian troops and pro-Russian police officers in Chechnya were responsible for
many of the illegal detentions and disappearances.
Maureen Greenwood, advocacy director for Europe and Eurasia at Amnesty International,
said at the Capitol Hill hearing that the Chechen struggle had become a "forgotten
war," overlooked in the international focus on Iraq and in the absence of independent
international observers to report on the conflict.
The Bush administration supported a resolution that the European Union presented
last week before the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva to condemn violations
by Russian military and security forces in Chechnya. But the U.S. declined to
co-sponsor the measure and it was narrowly defeated.
Ambassador Michael Southwick, chief U.S. delegate to the Geneva gathering, said
the Chechen population had experienced "unendurable suffering" in the war, but
also held out hope the referendum "will enable a political process to take hold
that produces a lasting reconciliation in the area."
Bela Tsugaeva, information manager for the Ingushetia-based human rights
roup World Vision, said a potential humanitarian crisis looms for about
92,000 Chechen refugees living in temporary camps, private houses and even abandoned
industrial sites in Ingushetia because of the violence across the border.