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Стaтья про Чeчню из "Los Angeles Times" ч 4
Denis is a major with the elite police forces. He is a training and morale officer, and he accompanied a contingent of his
men to Chechnya last winter.
He acknowledges that servicemen don't have much to fear from the military procurator and other investigators.
"It's easy for a person to get away with almost everything," he says. "You take this wretched Chechen down into a
basement or a cellar under the guise of checking his documents in a quiet place. And then you just knock him off the way you
want. There are no eyewitnesses, and no one will say anything.
"Usually it happens like this: You walk along the street and see a house with a basement. Why stupidly enter it? Why risk
your life for nothing if you can avoid it? At best you just spray gunfire around, at worst you throw a couple of hand grenades
into the basement. . . . In a war, you have to do your job and stay alive. If I walked into every single basement I had to check
before securing the place by throwing in grenades, you would not be talking to me now."
Denis took photos of one incident. His unit was preparing to lift off in a helicopter when the troops were warned that a
Chechen sniper was in the area. They found him hiding in the bushes near the helicopter pad, armed with an antitank grenade
launcher.
"We did not talk much," he remembers. "The officers began to try to convince the soldiers not to execute the guy without a
trial, but the soldiers said, 'No way.' . . . They took him to the side and unloaded their clips right into his body--90 bullets
altogether.
"I took photographs of him before the execution, and I also photographed his dead body afterward. Boy, he looked
terrible--the bullets broke his fingers and disfigured his palms. They turned his face and head into a bloody mess. He looked
like a pile of fresh meat clothed in blood-soaked rags."
When he returned home, Denis printed the photos.
"Sometime later I took a look at them and thought to myself: 'Why on earth do I need these pictures? Who am I going to
show them to?' "
So he destroyed them.
Denis says he was troubled by that incident and others. But that's the kind of thing that happens in a war.
"Any war is a legitimized right granted by the government to one person to decide on the life and death of another person. .
. . When soldiers go to Chechnya for the first time, they are afraid of that responsibility just as they are afraid to die. But as
time goes by, they look at other soldiers who are on their second or third trip and they change. They come to understand that
they have much broader powers than back home. This power intoxicates them--in fact, they can do whatever they want when
no one is watching, and they will get away with it.
"But war crimes have no expiration date," he concludes. "And every one of us knows that if you do something bad, you
will have to live with it for the rest of your life. And when you die, you will have to answer to God."
* * *
Fighting 'Total War'
The Soviet Union signed the Geneva Conventions after the end of World War II. Officially, that means that Russia's armed
forces are obligated to abide by the principles of the accord: that civilians and combatants who have surrendered should be
treated humanely and that violence of any sort or execution of war prisoners is forbidden.
But in a guerrilla war, experts say, it is nearly impossible to separate combatants from noncombatants.
"In a partisan war, it's hard for even the best armies to maintain standards of conduct," said Jacob Kipp, a professor at the
University of Kansas and an expert on the Russian army.
All the same, Kipp and other analysts say, the Russian armed forces have a few cultural features that make wartime
atrocities more likely than in Western armies.
First of all, public debate over the morality of a war focuses on whether it was right to begin
hostilities in the first place; unlike in the West, there is no tradition of asking whether the way the
war is waged is also moral.
"Russians come from a tradition that all war is 'total war,' " Kipp said. "After you've made the
decision that it's right to start a war, there isn't any notion that there can and should be limits on
how you conduct the war."
Second, the Soviet army tolerated a higher level of casualties than Western armies, a mind-set
that continues. Some servicemen said they were convinced that their commanders considered
them expendable.
"In Russia, winning wars has always been a matter of quantity, not quality," said one
conscript. "They don't even count us as losses. We're just meat. A conscript is nothing in the
army. It's like a chain--the generals don't value our lives, so we don't value the lives of the
Chechens."
Third, the Russian public has been overwhelmingly in favor of the war. For most of the past
year, polls reported that between 60% and 70% of Russians supported continuing the hostilities.
In such a climate, the subject of atrocities committed by the Russian side is all but taboo in
Russian society. However, not a single person interviewed on or off the record for this story--not
high-ranking officials and not low-ranking servicemen--denied that Russian troops in Chechnya
have committed war crimes and violated human rights.
"It's a real problem, and you're right to bring it up," war spokesman Yastrzhembsky said. "It's
well known in the army. The command is working on it. But it's a difficult issue that doesn't lend
itself to a quick solution."
Finally, a major difficulty Russia faces in addressing the issue of atrocities is that the Russian
armed forces--unlike Western armies--have no effective system of accountability for wartime
conduct.
Kremlin officials say they are doing all they can to find and punish servicemen guilty of human
rights abuses.
"Neither I nor the president has ever said there are no violations of human rights in Chechnya.
. . ," said Vladimir A. Kalamanov, President Putin's special representative for human rights in
Chechnya. "We are working as fast as we can so that these violations of human rights will
disappear from the political map of the Chechen republic."
But the interviewed servicemen painted a different picture. Not only do the authorities not
make a serious effort to investigate war zone misconduct, they said, but they also sometimes go
further. The 23-year-old army officer recounted how investigators from the military procurator's
office and the Federal Security Service, or FSB, helped his unit cover up war crimes such as the
summary execution of detainees.
"The FSB officers would always write in their reports: 'Killed in cross-fire,' " he said. "They
would never give away our soldiers. There's always been mutual understanding. It's the same as
if your son kills a bandit--would you go and report him to the police? Of course not. The same
with the FSB. They were on our side. They understood us and supported us."
The military procurator's office, which operates today much as it did in Soviet times, tends to
focus on misconduct within the ranks--offenses such as hazing and selling service weapons--not
the treatment of civilians and enemy fighters. The military procurator's headquarters in Moscow
and its North Caucasus department in the southern city of Rostov denied The Times' repeated
requests for an interview or written information.
Yastrzhembsky and Kalamanov acknowledged that only a fraction of investigations of crimes
involving servicemen has been completed. They provided the following figures: Of 467 criminal
investigations opened by the military procurator since the start of the war, only 72 have led to
indictments. Only 14 are for crimes against civilians. None has gone to trial.
Moreover, that's only half the story. The military procurator has jurisdiction over only the
federal forces. Misconduct by servicemen under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry is
handled by the civilian general procurator's office.
For instance, according to documents obtained by The Times, investigation of the largest
massacre allegedly committed by Russian troops--the killings of at least 62 civilians in the
Grozny suburb of Aldy on Feb. 5--was transferred from the military procurator to the general
procurator's office last spring because police troops allegedly were involved.
It is unclear how actively the general procurator's office is pursuing such investigations. In
written responses to The Times, the general procurator's office said that, since the start of the
war, it has indicted 179 servicemen for crimes of all sorts, from minor military infractions such
as mishandling weapons to murder.
The chief spokesman for the general procurator's office, Leonid Troshin, said he couldn't say how many of the servicemen
have been charged with serious crimes or crimes against civilians, or whether any of them had been convicted. And he
declined to provide an update on the progress of investigations into the Aldy massacre or other incidents documented by
human rights groups.
"The number of crimes committed by [rebel] fighters by far surpasses the number of crimes committed by Russian
servicemen," Troshin said when asked by telephone to elaborate on his written statement. "This is exactly what we have been
trying to prove."
One of the few people who have broached the subject of Russian atrocities in public is Aslambek Aslakhanov, a retired
police general who was elected Chechnya's deputy in parliament in an August ballot that many viewed as a Kremlin
propaganda exercise.
But his descriptions of what he calls Russian troops' "arbitrary violence and unlawfulness" have gone unreported in the
state media and were reported only cursorily in the independent media. Aslakhanov says that's because it's hard for
anyone--in either the government or the public at large--to face the truth.
"One's ears love to hear that things are going well. It's hard to believe what is happening, that this could be taking place at
the end of the 20th century," he said. "If Russian society knew the truth about what was happening in Chechnya, they would
completely change their minds about Chechens as a people, and they would take steps to remove this pain, to right this
wrong."
Aslakhanov said he fully supports the use of force to rid the republic of the rebels, who he says have brought his people
nothing but ruin. But he also insisted that war zone misconduct and atrocities are unworthy of Russia. And they risk
undermining whatever victory is eventually achieved in Chechnya--both by earning the enduring enmity of the Chechens and
by besmirching Russia's reputation around the world.
"There are many people even among the military who say this must end," Aslakhanov said. "But it is like dirty laundry that
they don't want to air in public.
"But you have to learn the truth before you can solve anything."
Russian servicemen warn that the large amount of bespredel on the Russian side is not only harming Chechens, it's also
creating a new generation of troubled Russian men with deep psychological problems, many of whom are violent. Many of the
returning servicemen said they were experiencing symptoms such as nightmares and an inability to control their anger. Many
said they or their comrades were drinking heavily.
One 40-year-old police officer warned: "There are not enough psychologists in all of Russia to treat those who are
returning."