Oleg Orlov is one of the leaders of Memorial, Russia’s leading human rights organization. He visited Chechnya most recently in February 2003. This interview was conducted by Alice Lagnado in Moscow on March 27, 2003

On what scale are war crimes being committed in Chechnya?

War crimes are committed on a regular basis, but they have changed in character during the course of the conflict. During the first stages of the conflict, when a large-scale military campaign was being fought, war crimes were mainly committed when, for example, no measures were taken to safeguard the civilian population from artillery and bombing, or sometimes when artillery or bombing was directed at villages that were full of people, that had not yet been abandoned by civilians. Or the bombing of cars when it wasn’t clear whether rebels or civilians were inside. Or, a perfect example, the missile strikes that hit the centre of Grozny, killing large numbers of civilians.

When the military campaign became a low-level guerrilla war, fewer people died from bombing or shelling, though some continued to die. War crimes were still committed, in our view, since throughout the war, the safety of the civilian population was simply not a consideration. Ordinary Chechens were not protected, and this was not just by chance. The Russian military could not have been unaware that deaths among the civilian population would be unavoidable as a result of their actions.

As the situation in Chechnya changed, so did the type of war crimes that were committed by Russian troops. Let’s take the ‘zachistki’ or sweep operations. A zachistka is when a town or village is completely surrounded and blocked off, and house-to-house searches and ID checks are conducted. The house searches are not sanctioned by the prosecutor’s office. Those who are under suspicion of involvement with the separatist campaign are detained.

These operations are usually accompanied by crimes against the local population. Robberies on a mass scale are the most common and basic form of war crime. This doesn’t just mean that the troops or police take people’s money. These are organised operations in which, quite openly, right in front of the local population, people’s property is loaded onto trucks or armoured personnel carriers. This is not just a matter of a few undisciplined soldiers and clearly sanctioned by the officers. For the military, it’s a business.

But far worse crimes than robbery are committed. People are arbitrarily detained and taken away from their villages to so-called temporary filtration points.

Filtration points are absolutely unlawful; they are places not sanctioned by any law, without any sanction of a prosecutor or court, where people are interrogated. No records are kept of who is being detained in these places.

After being questioned, those who are still under suspicion are taken somewhere else so investigations can be continued. The Russian forces try to extract evidence against people who live in the same village as the detainee, against their neighbours and even relatives, and try to establish who supports the rebels in that village.

A large number of detainees are freed but some are taken to official temporary detention centres. Others simply disappear. This is also a war crime: these people disappear without trace. Officials will take no responsibility for these people and will even refuse to admit they were arrested in the first place.

When a detainee disappears completely it may mean they have died during the course of interrogations at the filtration point; more often it means the detainee is suspected of having ties to the rebels. They are suspected of knowing more than they say they know and so Russian forces continue to work with them. Work, in the sense of brutally interrogating them.

If the bodies of these detainees are found, they usually bear the marks of torture and violent death; it’s clear that they were brutally tortured in order to try to extract information from them before they died. Sometimes, particularly over the past few months, security forces blow up the bodies in order that they cannot be identified. But in some cases they still can. When 10 bodies were found in January, in the outskirts of Grozny, two of them were positively identified and it was established that they had been detained earlier by federal forces.

The Russian Prosecutor’s office has told us that it recognises that people are sometimes detained by federal forces and that they sometimes disappear during zachistki.

For example, in April last year there was an infamous zachistka in the village of Naskir Yurt. Many people were arrested by unidentified armed men in camouflage uniform and disappeared. When we questioned the Prosecutor’s Office they were forced to admit that there were records showing that several people had been detained during a special operation. In some cases the records said they were taken away for document checks and in some cases it said they were taken to filtration points. So the Prosecutor’s Office did admit that this type of thing goes on. Guerrillas and bandits would hardly take people to filtration points, would they? But then they said they would not be able to find those guilty of committing these crimes. The investigation was closed.

About filtration points: at this point in the second war in Chechnya there are no permanent detention centres. These existed in the first period of this war, but are now all temporary, they are called temporary filtration points and are used for a day, a week or more. They are guarded areas – perhaps a disused factory or farm or just a bit of land enclosed with barbed wire, perhaps even tents, sometimes people are just detained in the open air but in an enclosed area which is called a filtration point.

The detainees are brought in, undergo checks, may be tortured, are interrogated and very often held in covered vehicles. They bring the detainees in one at a time for questioning, they torture them, usually using electric shocks, they let them go, or sometimes they don’t, they take them away and bring in the next ones. When they finish their work they leave, it’s a temporary set-up.

A temporary filtration point is the official name given to such set-ups by the federal forces, although there is no understanding of such a concept in any Russian legislation. We have spoken to the Prosecutor’s Office during a number of meetings they have held with human rights organisations, and they say yes, these zachistki do not figure in any legislation, but they do go on.

Who commits the war crimes?

The zachistki are carried out both by contract soldiers and ordinary conscripts, and also by police who have been brought to the region from all over Russia. There are less contract soldiers now in Chechnya because they have gained a bad reputation among the local population. They are known to be more brutal and to carry out more robberies from people’s homes because they have come to Chechnya in order to make money.

The men who beat up detainees at filtration points, however, are professionals, not young conscripts or contract soldiers. These men work for the Interior Ministry and the FSB [the main Russian successor agency to the KGB].

Then there are the death squads and the men who kidnap civilians at night-time. The men who carry out kidnappings of civilians at night-time are organised groups from the Interior or Defence Ministries or from the FSB. It’s not a matter of a few undisciplined soldiers.

We know this because when we have found the remains of local people in mass burial sites, these are people who have been taken away from their homes, not people killed during fighting. They have been brought there at different times and from different towns and villages, but buried together in one place.

You visited Chechnya in February. Are zachistki still prevalent?

Recently Russian forces have used different methods to detain people. They don’t block off entire villages but go to the houses of specific individuals, using information they have obtained earlier.

Nothing so awful about that, it might seem, all within the boundaries of the law, but unfortunately it’s not that simple. They come at night in armoured personnel carriers or trucks and no one knows who they are – police, soldiers, FSB.

These armed men, often masked, surround a house, they don’t show the villagers any ID, though according to the law they must show ID and have papers authorising a house search. But we all know that it is only Russian soldiers who travel around in armoured personnel carriers.

When they get inside the house, they act with absolutely no regard for the law. They carry out a thorough house search, detain people and take them away. In the best-case scenario they tell the detainees’ relatives where they’re going. Mostly they don’t bother.

It’s amazing – the authorities know who directed the zachistka, which federal forces carried it out, which precise military or police unit, but they say they can’t find the guilty parties. It’s clear they simply do not want to find them.

Recently there have been less zachistki, possibly because of the referendum, and President Putin did himself say that the practice of large-scale special operations, i.e. zachistki, should be stopped. But they do continue – in January, for example, there was a very brutal zachistka during which people died.

But the practice of kidnapping people during the night and ‘disappearing’ them is on the rise. It’s not only our research that shows this – it has been confirmed by the Moscow-backed administration in Chechnya, headed by Akhmad Kadyrov. Last December officials of the Kadyrov administration, Chechen ministers and regional officials wrote to Putin complaining precisely about this matter and requesting the president to protect them from this violence.

The increase in these night-time operations coincided with the first discussions on the referendum in early December. Nothing changed as a result of the letter – in fact, the opposite happened. These operations continued on a large scale during January and February. We’re talking about hundreds of cases.

I would like to add that for Chechens living in the mountainous regions of southern Chechnya things are very hard right now. Since last autumn people have simply been fleeing their villages in the mountains to get away from the serious guerrilla war there. There are extra troops there, there are zachistki, shellings, and people are fleeing to the plains in the north. We and the international community have some information in what’s going on in the plains but we only get information about the situation in the mountains after a significant time-delay. The mountains of Chechnya are cut off, it’s hard to get out, and hard for us to get there, and we only find out what is going on there late or not at all.

I’m talking about Vedensky region, where there are major clashes continuing between Russian forces and Chechen rebels, also Nozhai-Yurtovsky region, and to a lesser extent Shatoisky region.

To a considerable extent the Chechen fighters are responsible for this situation – they start to attack the Russian forces and mine APCs, and the federal forces strike back, and usually it’s the local population, the civilians, that suffer most of all.

Where do the mountain villagers flee to?

To the plains: to the Gudermes, Grozny, Selsky and Shalinsky regions. Naturally they all want to get to the northernmost parts of Chechnya – the Sholkovsky, Naursky and Nadterechny regions, where it is most peaceful. But we know that the local authorities there are not willing to take them in. They tell them straight: we won’t register you here.

Local officials have a simple explanation: they say these people have come from areas where the guerrilla war is still raging and that perhaps some of them support the rebels. The local authorities fear that these people will bring the zachistki with them. So these people who have fled from the mountains are left without any legal documents and therefore cannot receive any kind of official benefits.

That doesn’t mean that things are quiet in northern Chechnya. It’s mined, APCs get blown up, there’s shelling, attacks, including in Grozny, but the more intensive fighting goes on in the mountains. Official reports say that Russian air attacks are continuing in the mountains.

Do you think there is a message from the top, sanctioning war crimes?

We do not have a final opinion on this; we can only speculate.

We do not think that there were any orders from Moscow concerning the brutal treatment of civilians. It may well have been agreed in Moscow that in principle, zachistki should be carried out, but we do not think there would have been any special orders to use torture and to kill during these operations.

The generals who oversee these operations, however, have a clear understanding of what should be done. And I do not think the overall commander of Russian troops in Chechnya is unaware of what happens during these operations. They just close their eyes to what’s happening.

Death squads are a separate issue. We do not think there are direct orders from the Kremlin for these squads to operate. But it’s possible orders could have come from structures like the Interior Ministry or the FSB – that is what we suspect, anyway.

How do you assess the recent referendum in Chechnya?

We do not consider that this was a genuine referendum. The right conditions for a referendum to be held were not there. There was no free debate about the different options on offer - primarily because it was unsafe for people to promote one point of view or another, and also because the media is strictly controlled by the authorities. There is no independent media.

Additionally, the authorities from top to bottom campaigned for people to vote "yes" and accused anyone who disagreed of assisting the rebels and wanting the war to continue. In this atmosphere of terror, no one could discuss the issue properly.

Secondly, during the referendum there were serious transgressions. For example in Grozny there were fundamental and disgraceful discrepancies between the number of people who had actually come to vote and the numbers of voting papers counted. This referendum will not bring anything good to Chechnya.

What, in your view, should Russia do to tackle the situation in Chechnya?

If Russian troops simply pull out of Chechnya there will be very serious consequences. Large numbers of people will be killed by the guerrillas and large numbers will simply have to be saved, to be brought out of the region. And what kind of regime would there be in Chechnya? It would in all likelihood be dramatically worse than the administration that we had between the wars, under Aslan Maskhadov. Chechnya would be ruled by a criminal regime.

In our view the only solution is to make a serious effort to hold talks and to compromise with the rebels. The Russian Government tries to say it is in favour of compromise and political talks. In fact it does business with people it has hired itself – i.e. the Kadyrov administration.

But talks need to be held with some of the rebels. There are very different groups among the rebels. Talks should be held primarily with Maskhadov. The international community has got to be involved in talks; and we need observers such as the OSCE.

Do you think the rebels are ready to make compromises?

They differ enormously. Some of them, like Maskhadov and his supporters, have demonstrated on several occasions that they are ready for talks and compromises. We can only find out if they are genuine by starting talks.

This idea that Maskhadov is weak and does not control any of the fighters in Chechnya is a ploy. He controls at least some of the rebels, and not just a small section either. Some of the rebels will want to go on fighting. But that’s just the reality and we should hold talks with those who are ready to do so.

More than that, starting talks with Maskhadov will strengthen Maskhadov’s standing, including among the rebels.

Why do you think the Russian Government is not holding peace talks with the rebels?

President Putin and his immediate entourage want to end the war – they don’t need it. But they don’t want to weaken their relationship with the Interior and Defence Ministries and with the FSB, which form a vital part of the president’s support base.

What should the West do?

Western politicians should take a position of principle. At the moment their position is unprincipled.

The West has always said it should not put too much pressure on Russia, that Russians will work out what to do for themselves. The West said it would pursue a policy of constructive dialogue with Russia – a critical but constructive dialogue. But what actually happened is that there was a dialogue, but without the critical part. In the end, Russia was mostly just handed praise. This was how things were even before September 11.

I have argued many times with European politicians, who promote a softly-softly approach to Chechnya. I have said that it would be in the best interests of Russia, Chechnya and Europe to have a tough, uncompromising dialogue with Russia on this.

Interestingly, without any help from Europe or the West in general, Russian public opinion has turned against the war in Chechnya. At the start of the war Europe said: the Russian authorities will not listen to us, the Russian public does not care.

In fact, most Russians are now against the war – and have reached this opinion without any help from Western politicians. The West could take advantage of this, and be extremely tough on Russia. This could force our president – who doesn’t need this war, who needed this war in order to rise to power – to start to really get his act together.

Why does Chechnya seem to provoke such strong emotions in Putin?

Putin himself probably does not know what to do and probably does not want to understand. Chechnya for him is a tough psychological issue. He seems calm and sensible, until you start talking about Chechnya. He is the same to a lesser extent when you start talking about freedom of speech.

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