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Russia “Thins Out” Chechens With Executions: Report
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“The numbers of disappeared Chechens in recent months indicate a continuing assault against the Chechen people that borders on genocide”
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MOSCOW,
July 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The head of a top world
rights watchdog on Tuesday, July 23, accused the Russian military of
executing up to 80 Chechen men a month to “thin out” the
republic’s adult male population in a war of attrition.
“The
process by which young Chechen men are being abducted and murdered...
is claiming more lives than the bombing campaigns of the two wars,”
said the executive director for the International Helsinki Federation
for Human Rights, Aaron Rhodes, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
“If
you look at the evidence from reliable, non-partisan human rights
organizations, between 50 and 80 people are being murdered every
month,” Rhodes told reporters on his return from a three-day visit
to Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia.
Rhodes
said that given Chechnya’s relatively small population - estimated
at between 300,000 and 600,000, but impossible to verify - the scale
of killing in the republic is almost unprecedented.
“This
violence is on a huge scale in the world context. It is difficult to
find an analogy to this,” he said. “We have a very hard time
finding such numbers in other historical cases.”
Russian
troops stormed into Chechnya in October 1999 in a self-declared
anti-terrorist operation after the predominantly Muslim republic in
the turbulent north Caucasus won de facto independence in a first war,
which lasted from 1994-96.
Noting
that some rights organizations refer to “disappearances” of
civilians, Rhodes remarked: “Let’s call a spade a spade -
(disappearance) means death.”
The
Chechens who vanish are “generally speaking men in their productive
years,” Rhodes said. “This can be considered a process of a
thinning out of a population of young men.”
Rhodes
said “the numbers of disappeared Chechens in recent months indicate
a continuing assault against the Chechen people that borders on
genocide.”
“The
Russian forces are often beheading, burning, mutilating, and otherwise
destroying bodies in an effort to conceal this process, which is
claiming more lives than the bombings during the two military
campaigns. But corpses are also often dumped alongside
highways,” the report said.
“Many
of the disappearances occur when men are hauled off during “mop up
operations” (zachistki), which are aimed at “screening” or
“cleansing” the population of “illegal combatants (boeviki).”
Entire villages are surrounded and systematically “checked.” “
The
Kremlin office responsible for relations with Chechnya refused to
comment on Rhodes’ accusation despite repeated requests from AFP.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin discussed Chechnya with Federal Security
Service chief Nikolai Patrushev, who is heading the military operation
which he said Tuesday will end “within a certain time.”
In
April, Putin declared the war in Chechnya as over and won, while later
criticizing the conduct of Russian troops in so-called “mopping
up” operations in which rights activists allege hundreds of
civilians are tortured and killed.
The
Helsinki group accused the West of standing idly by while Russia -
which has emerged as a key ally in the U.S.-led
"anti-terror" war - continues its brutal campaign.
“The
West is not conducting itself properly. It must know what is
happening,” said the Helsinki group’s representative Vladislav
Weisman.
Rhodes
and his colleagues further condemned Russia’s decision to close most
of the Chechen refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia by the end of
the year, saying that conditions were not right for civilians to
return to the ravaged republic.
“We
did not speak to one person who was willing to return to Chechnya
under these conditions,” Rhodes said.
Some
140,000 Chechens have fled the fighting to neighboring Ingushetia and
some 36,000 of them live in makeshift camps along the border between
the two republics.
Earlier
this month, Russia confirmed that it had shut down the Znamenskoye
camp in northern Chechnya, repatriating more than 2,000 civilians to
the war-ravaged rebel capital Grozny and other towns where sporadic
fighting still rages on a daily basis.
The
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights was established 20
years ago as a watchdog of the governments of the former Soviet Union
and the Warsaw Pact bloc.
Its
U.S. branch has since been renamed Human Rights Watch.
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