The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was, for Chechen citizens, a court
of last resort to correct the corrupt judiciary in Russia. The majority of the cases
have been won by the plaintiffs. On January 26, 2006, Russia was for the first time
condemned for a case of torture.[53] The Russian authorities obediently paid the fines, but they refused to change the
judicial system according to the obligations Russia had accepted when it became a
member of the council. Because the European Court of Human Rights abstained from obliging
the Russian government to open new judicial inquiries, punish the perpetrators, and
present public excuses to the family, this has led to a cynical system—resembling
the medieval salic law (lex salica)—in which, in the case of a condemnation a kind of “tax” is paid by the Russian state
to the families of the victims who had been killed. As a rule, “the disappearance
of a human being costs 35,000 euros.”[54] Although for the plaintiffs these rulings are “better than nothing,” they do not
really restore their violated sense of justice. As concerns ordinary Russians, for
them the Strasbourg rulings are only another proof of Europe’s negative feelings towards
Russia. “Europe,” wrote the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda, “has always disliked Russia, but has never been straightforward about it. Just google:
‘European court in Strasbourg Chechens’ and you will see how many cases against Russia
have been won. Many of those cases are based on doubtful facts.”[55] There is another side to the coin: the flood of complaints is totally disrupting
the court in Strasbourg, which is drowning under the overload of cases. Attempts,
however, to reform the court to make procedures more efficient were blocked by Russia.
Its own solution to diminish the flow has been to exert a growing pressure on the
lawyers of Russian and Chechen plaintiffs, who are harassed by the authorities to
discourage citizens from seeking justice in Strasbourg.
A Genocide?
The Second Chechen War was characterized by an endless series of crimes, many of which
certainly deserve to be qualified as war crimes and crimes against humanity: from
the indiscriminate bombardments of Grozny and the use of forbidden fuel and cluster
bombs in the first months of the war, to the summary executions of civilians during
the zachistki, the torture, the forced disappearances, the blowing up of bodies, the organized
looting, and other acts of state terror. Another important question is whether the
Russians committed genocide. There are no precise data available for the number of people killed, only estimates
that vary according to the sources. Uwe Halbach wrote in February 2005—this is four
years before the official end of the “counterterrorist operation”—that according to
estimates, “between 10% and 20% of the population of Chechnya died in both wars, so
after 1994. For the first war the numbers vary between 35,000 and more than 100,000
victims. . . . As concerns the second war . . . , in the late summer of 2002 human
rights organizations calculated the [number of] victims in the Chechen population
at 80,000 dead.”[56] Five years later Jonathan Littell gave for both wars a total number of two hundred
thousand victims.[57] According to another author, “figures range to 300,000 killed,” adding that this
“is probably an exaggeration.”[58] The last figure, apparently, does not take into account the refugees who fled the
republic, whose numbers could reach one hundred thousand. It seems plausible, therefore,
to estimate the total number of killed Chechens in the two conflicts between 150,000
and 200,000. These include men, women, and children, the great majority of them noncombatant
citizens. Before the first war started the population of Chechnya was roughly one
million. This means that possibly between 15 to 20 percent of the Chechen population has been exterminated.[59] To put this number in a historical perspective: Daniel Goldhagen has estimated
that “Pol Pot [killed] the highest percentage of the inhabitants of any country, more
than 20 percent of the Cambodians, totaling 1.7 million.”[60] Pol Pot was, indeed, a ruthless mass murderer. And the number of people killed
by his regime is tenfold of the Chechens killed in Chechnya. But the percentage of the population killed in these two cases, by Pol Pot on the one hand, and by the
masters of the Kremlin on the other, are quite comparable. The question of a genocide
committed by Russia in Chechnya is therefore fully on the table.
