Immediately linked with the zachistki was the installation of so-called filtration points (filtratsionnye punkty). These were temporary detention points. They were installed as an answer to national
and international protests against torture practices in the official detention center
in Chernokozovo. In the decentralized and ad hoc organized filtration points these
torture practices could continue, but were no longer hindered by critical witnesses.
“Torture was a routine practice at the temporary filtration points,” wrote Gilligan.
“Unlike at Chernokozovo, torture was practiced in specially equipped wagons, in tents,
or in fields. The torture wagons were the ultimate symbol of impunity—they were linked
to neither a legal detention point nor possible witnesses. The most common forms of
torture practiced included the following: electric shocks to the genitals, toes, and
fingers with a field telephone . . . ; asphyxiation with plastic bags; cutting off
ears; filling mouths with kerosene; setting dogs on the legs of the detained; knife
cuts; and carving crosses in the back of detainees.”[28] In 2000 there were about thirty filtration points in operation where somewhere
between ten and twenty thousand detainees were held.[29]
Forced Disappearances and Blowing Up Dead Bodies
Sweep operations by masked men, temporary filtration points set up for a few weeks,
one week, or even a few days, in an empty factory hall, a school, a tent, or a bus,
gave the torturers carte blanche, free from the risk of being disturbed by witnesses. The Russian Special Forces that
were involved showed an extreme need for secrecy. There was, first, the need to hide
one’s own identity; second, to hide the identity of the army unit or government agency
one belonged to; third, there was the need to hide the acts one was committing; and,
fourth, and last but not least, there was the need to hide the results of these acts. This brings us to another feature of this war that fully justifies
the name it was given by Anna Politkovskaya: “A Dirty War.”[30] The sweep operations in the first year of the war led to mass executions of civilians.
When, later, mass graves were discovered, it was possible to establish the identity
of a number of the bodies. The dead body of an executed civilian, discovered in a
mass grave, was the material proof of a war crime. Even if the perpetrators of the
crime could not be identified (and the police and judicial instances were not very
cooperative in identifying, finding, and prosecuting them), there always remained
a certain risk of being identified later.
This led to a new practice. People started to disappear. They were taken away from
their homes by armed, masked men in armored patrol vehicles, and their families were
not informed where they were being held or what had happened to them. By 2002 the
disappearance rate was more than a hundred civilians per month.[31] According to estimates by Amnesty International, published in 2010, between three
thousand and five thousand people had disappeared since the beginning of the Second
Chechen War. They added, however, that the actual number would be higher, due to the
fact that, in the generalized climate of fear, not all cases had been reported to
the police.[32] Mass graves, when they are discovered, are embarrassing facts for the perpetrators.
To conceal the killings of abducted people the perpetrators took care, therefore,
to have the corpses disappear also. “Blowing people up, dead or alive . . . is the latest tactic introduced by the federal
army into the conflict,” wrote the correspondent of The Guardian in October 2002. “It was utilised perhaps most effectively on 3 July [2002] in the
village of Meskyer Yurt, where 21 men, women and children were bound together and
blown up, their remains thrown into a ditch. From the perspective of the perpetrators,
this method of killing is highly practical, it prevents the number of bodies from
being counted, or possibly from ever being found.”[33]
