An International Tribunal for Chechnya

Emma Gilligan, Assistant Professor of History, is the author of Terror In Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War, which will be published by Princeton University Press in November 2009. A scholar of Russian history and member of the Human Rights Institute faculty at the University of Connecticut, Gilligan examines both the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers against the civilian population of Chechnya and the crimes of the Chechen resistance.

Several months ago, Natalia Estimirova of the well-known Russian human rights organization Memorial was murdered. On July 15, 2009 her body, with bullet wounds in the head and chest, turned up in the village of Gazi-Yurt in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. Less than one month later, two local humanitarian workers, Zarema Sadulayeva and Umar Dzhabrailov, suffered the same fate. They were discovered dead in a Grozny suburb in the trunk of a car.

Since the second war in Chechnya ended in 2005, uncertainty in the region continues. Two wars between the separatist government, led by Aslan Maskhadov, and the Russian armed forces have left the region in a catastrophic condition. The Russian government has managed to suppress the separatist cause, and it has installed Ramzan Kadyrov, a thirty-two year old president, who saunters around the republic in nylon track suits, surrounded by his private guard, the Kadyrovtsi. “Chechnya is now the world’s most peaceful place,” Kadyrov boasts. “Not just in Russia, but in the world.” (A. Seierstad, The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War [London: Virago Press, 2008], 219.)

But the deaths of Estimirova, Sadulayeva and Dzhabrailov illustrate the ongoing problems in the region. The massive human rights violations that took place during the wars in Chechnya from 1994 to 2005 have never been adequately scrutinized in a legal setting. Crimes against humanity took several forms during those conflicts: disproportionate bombing by the Russian side in 1994-1995 and again in 1999-2000; the zachistki or sweep operations, which involved surrounding villages and conducting raids on individual homes; and the "disappearance" of some 5,000 civilians. As for the Chechen side, the radicalization of many within the separatist government led not only to a ruinous division within the secessionist forces but also to extreme acts of revenge by the radicals, most notoriously in the taking of hundreds of theatre-goers in a Moscow Theatre (also known as the Nord-Ost siege of October 2002) and the seizure of hundreds of school children in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia in September, 2005.

The problem now rests with the Chechenization of the conflict. And the situation has turned from a struggle for national independence into a civil war. The internal conflict is muted, conducted by a few recalcitrant radical separatists. Yet the new government of Ramzan Kadyrov continues to treat its opponents or perceived opponents with brutality. It "disappears" people, tortures others in private prisons, and threatens their families. As Muslim Khuchiev, the Mayor of Grozny warned in a public television address last year, “The evil which is done by your relatives in the forest will return to you and your homes. Each of you soon will feel it on your skin.” (“To Smother Rebels, Arson Campaign in Chechnya,” New York Times, September 28, 2008.)

While Kadyrov mounts a propaganda campaign to promote a Chechnya with "No Traces of War," human rights activists in the region concentrate on uncovering past abuses as well as current ones. And this is a dangerous course. In 2009, the case for An International Tribunal for Chechnya was set forth for the first time in a two-part volume written by Usam Baisaev of Memorial and Stanislav Dmitrievskii and Olga Chelysheva of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. Based on existing records, it documents the violations of humanitarian and human rights laws in the course of both the 1994-1996 and 1999-2005 armed conflicts. The aim of the compilation is to detail events and to set out a legal rationale for establishing an international tribunal. A criminal tribunal may be a still born idea, but gathering support for a non-governmental tribunal is a proposition many are now considering. How - and if this will evolve - remains to be seen.