Chechnya mass graves
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Dozens of mass graves containing at least hundreds of corpses were uncovered since the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999. These include the 2001 discovery of 51 corpses in premises of the main Russian military base, an incident which sparked an international outrage.
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[edit] Overview
In March 2001 Human Rights Watch has documented eight unmarked graves, all found in 2000 and 2001. It has also documented eight cases when dead bodies were simply dumped by roadsides, on hospital grounds or elsewhere, and the Memorial Human Rights Center has documented numerous additional cases. The majority of the bodies showed close range bullet wounds, typical of summary executions, and signs of severe mutilation. Examinations by medical doctors of some of these bodies have revealed that some of the deliberate mutilations were inflicted while the detainees were still alive. [1]
On March 29, 2001, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, called for a thorough investigation of the mass grave site in a statement to the 57th session of the UNHCR; Robinson stated that "cases such as the mass grave in Zdorovie discovered earlier this year, less than a kilometer from the main military base in Chechnya, must be followed up and thoroughly investigated." Three weeks earlier, the authorities buried the rest of the bodies without prior notice and without performing adequate autopsies or collecting crucial evidence that would have helped to identify the perpetrators. [2]
In 2003, residents and human rights campaigners said fragments of blown-up bodies are being found all over the war-ruined region. Rather than put a stop to human rights violations, the military appears to be doing its best to hide them, critics said. [3]
On March 31, 2003 Russian government's human rights commissioner Oleg Mironov has called on the authorities to open mass burial sites in Chechnya to identify the bodies and establish the reasons for their deaths. "It is necessary to open a number of graves in Chechnya and see why the people died, carry out necessary expert examinations, and then bury them as humans deserve," Mironov told a news conference in Moscow. At the same time, Mironov rejected the proposal by Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to establish an international tribunal to investigate alleged war crimes committed in Chechnya.
On June 16, 2005, the local pro-Russian government announced there are 52 mass graves in Chechnya. The chairman of the Chechen government committee for civil rights, Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, was quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency as saying the graves have not been opened, so the total number of dead is difficult to determine. Nukhazhiyev had earlier said that up to 60,000 people had lost a relative or friend in the disappearances that have blighted the republic for the past five years.
In 2005 up to 5,000 people who had dissapeared since 1999 (2,000 according to the Russian government) remained missing. [4]
[edit] Major discoveries
[edit] 2000
- April 30, 2000 - Eight decapitated bodies were found in a fresh burial place near the village of Dargo, Vedensky District in southern Chechnya. They were identified as three OMON and three regular police officers, and one military conscript; all had been missing in action for weeks.
- July 27, 2000 - The bodies of about 150 people are reported to have been found in a mass grave near the village of Tangi-Chu, Urus-Martanovsky District in southern Chechnya. 74 bodies, mostly men, were removed from the grave. As many as 80 more remained; people who happened to witness the exhumations said later that the hands of the killed had been tied with barbed wire. An official of the republic's Moscow-approved government said about half the bodies were wearing Chechen rebel uniforms. The rest were civilians who, he said, appeared to have no marks of violence on them.
[edit] 2001
- February 21, 2001 - 51 bodies of men and women, showing signs of torture and military-style execution, were uncovered across from the main Russian Khankala military base at Zdorovye, near Grozny. Some bore signs of mutilation, including stab wounds, broken limbs, flayed body parts, severed fingertips and ears cut off, and many had their hands tied behind them and had been blindfolded. Of the nineteen victims whose corpses were identified by relatives, sixteen were last seen as Russian federal forces took them into custody. Human rights groups suggested that Russian servicemen at the Khankala base used the Dachny (also called Zdorovye) dacha settlement as a disposal site for executed prisoners. At the beginning of the second Chechen war, numerous unofficial places of detention existed throughout Chechnya, many of them in the form of earth pits, and the biggest such facility was located on the territory of the headquarters of the federal army in Khankala.
- April 10, 2001 - Pro-Moscow Grozny Mayor Bislan Gantamirov announced 17 bodies with gunshot wounds had been found in the basement of a bombed-out dormitory next to Oktyabrskoye city district police station, manned by the OMON troops from Siberia's Khanty-Mansiysk. An initial examination of the corpses showed that a majority of those killed were middle-aged men and that the bodies were approximately six months old. "We long suspected federal troops [of such crimes]. The mayor's office has hundreds of inquiries from city residents asking to find out about relatives who have disappeared. An especially high number of complaints concerned Oktyabrsky city district police station where detainees often disappeared without a trace," Gantamirov noted. The place was then cordoned off by the military, and the basement was soon destroyed in an apparent cover up. Gantamirov himself did an about-face and joined the chorus of federal officials denying the findings; OMON officer in charge of the station claimed the unit had nothing to do with the disappearance of local residents, adding that mass graves in Chechnya are commonplace.
- April 23, 2001 - A Russian reconnaissance unit has found the remains of at least 18 people in a mass grave near a rough mountain road in southern Chechnya. The victims appeared to have been killed in 1996, but it was not immediately clear who they were, said a spokesman for Kremlin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky.
[edit] 2002
- April 9, 2002 - A mass grave containing remains of about 100 people was found in a mountain cave in Achkhoy-Martanovsky District. Local people who discovered the grave said the skulls and bones make it easy to define the age of the victims; some bones reportedly prove there are children aged 10-12 among the bodies, all reportedly beheaded. Lieutenant-General Vladimir Moltenskoi, who commanded combined federal forces in Chechnya, promptly announced the bodies might be of Russian soldiers captured by Chechen fighters in 1994-96 and held in an alleged "death camp". However, eyewitnesses say stewed-pork tins and bottles of vodka found on the spot prove roistering Russian soldiers stayed there, and local people say as early as in December 2000 several Russian military columns with Chechens detained during "mopping-up" operations, including children aged between 10-14, were stationed in the area of the caves.
- September 8, 2002 - Police from Ingushetia have discovered a common grave near Goragorsk, on the border with neighboring Chechnya, containing the bodies of 15 ethnic Chechen men who had been last seen being taken into custody by the Russian troops at different times and in different places. The grave was reportedly found after relatives of the victims paid some Russian soldiers a large amount of cash for information.
[edit] 2003
- January 13, 2003 - Ten blown up corpses were discovered near Grozny and later taken to a mosque in the Tolstoy-Yurt for identification. On the next day the attorney-general of the Chechen Republic, Vladimir Kravtshenko, said that the bodies belong to people who had earlier been abducted by Chechen fighters. However, the three identified bodies belonged to inhabitants who had been taken into custody by federal forces in the end of 2002; after the blast only fragments remained of the other bodies. A week later on January 19 the remains of three blown-up bodies were found on near a pond in Kulary in Achkhoy-Martanovsky District. According to local inhabitants, the remains of human bodies had been strewn over an area 150-200 metres in diameter; the remains of the unknown bodies were buried at the local cemetery.
- April 6, 2003 - Police in Chechnya said they had discovered four graves filled with disfigured bodies over the past 24 hours. Three sites were found in the northern Nadterechny District, usually a relatively peaceful area, Chechnya's Emergency Situations Ministry said. The heads and arms had been cut off of the corpses, which were stacked in a shallow grave and covered with soil, the ministry said. It did not say how many bodies were in the graves.
[edit] 2004
- October 9, 2004 - A mass grave containing six unidentified bodies has been discovered in the capital Grozny during excavation work at a building site, Russia's NTV television said. The agency said on Saturday that the six had apparently been shot and buried about three months ago.
- November 20, 2004 - A mass grave containing the bodies of eleven unidentified young people, aged 12 to 20, was discovered near Gudermessky District village of Dzhalka. On November 16, local residents in the Grozny rural district discovered three bodies in the vicinity of residences located near a dairy farm; the victims, males aged 20-40, showed multiple signs of torture.
[edit] 2006
- April 02, 2006 - 57 bodies were discovered in unmarked grave in the Sergey Kirov Park in Grozny. [5] Valery Kuznetsov, the Chechnya's prosecutor, said an examination of the corpses buried in unmarked grave indicated that they belonged to "ordinary citizens" who had died from explosions of artillery shells and bombs during siege between 1999 and 2000; he said there will be no investigation on the finding. On the site of the former Kirov Park, where in April-May of 2000 nine graves were uncovered, the local authorities plan to build a large entertainment centre which will bear the name of Akhmad Kadyrov. [6] The graves were discovered during de-mining work in the park.
- In June 2006, Russia's human rights groups has produced a documentary evidence of a secret torture and murder cell in the basement of a former school for deaf children in Oktyabrsky district of Grozny. According to Memorial, Russian police used the dungeon to torture and murder hundreds of people, and was decommissioned only last month, when the federal Russian police unit occupying the building withdrew. According to the republic's prosecutor, Valery Kuznetsov, several criminal cases involving the disappearance of people allegedly dispatched to the "temporary holding cells" are being investigated. But Nurdi Nukhajiev, Chechnya's government-appointed representative for human rights, said: "I am not saying that the people [policemen] were ideal individuals. But this is 2006 and they weren't so stupid as to leave evidence of torture and murder behind." Memorial says it collected the evidence just in time and that the building housing the cellar has since been demolished in a crude attempt at a cover-up. [7]
- June 27, 2006 - A grave containing the bodies of nine federal soldiers and local supporters executed by Chechen rebels in 1996-1997 has been discovered in the republic, a spokesman for the FSB branch for Chechnya told Interfax. The grave was found on the premises of a destroyed militant base, he said.
