Of course there is the famous question of intent that, according to international conventions, must be proven in order that an act
can qualify as genocide. Did the Russian government intentionally kill such a great proportion of the Chechen population? This cannot be proven as
long as there are no records (texts of the orders given by the political leadership
to the military commanders, minutes of the Security Council of the Russian Federation,
etcetera) that provide undisputable proof. But is such a proof necessary? Daniel Goldhagen
denies this requirement. According to him, “intent should not be a criterion for determining
what instances qualify as genocide.” And he added: “If a large number of people, except
through defensible military operations, are eliminated in any manner, why should this
not be part of a study of genocide, which rightly becomes a study of mass murder,
which rightly becomes a study of mass elimination?”[61]
It is quite clear that in Chechnya such a large number of people could not have been
eliminated “through defensible military operations.” If one estimates the total number
of Chechen fighters in both wars at around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand, this
means that for each killed Chechen fighter the Russians killed nine to ten Chechen
civilians. This indiscriminate mass killing of civilians cannot, under any circumstance,
be qualified as collateral damage. The human rights activist Sergey Kovalyov wrote
in February 2000, during the bombing campaign of Grozny:
The Russian army is quite prepared for genocide. This was demonstrated in the previous
war; it was proven again recently by events in the village of Alkhan-Yurt, where professional
soldiers shot around forty unarmed inhabitants—for no reason. It has already been
confirmed by official announcements that vacuum bombs are being employed in Chechnya—terrible
weapons that kill every living thing over a wide area, including people in shelters.
What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry
out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.[62]
Goldhagen is quite clear on the Chechen case. “States and their leaders often give
tacit support, remain silent, or make quiet pro forma objections when allies or other
important countries commit mass murders or eliminations. Aside from a few tepid and
oblique objections, this has characterized virtually every state’s stance toward the
Russians’ mass murdering and vast destruction in Chechnya.”[63] The likelihood of members of the Russian government being pursued for war crimes
and crimes against humanity is not great. The juridical instruments, however, are
in place. On the table is an important verdict of the European Court of Human Rights
in the case of Akhmadov and others v. Russia. This concerns an attack on October 27, 2001, by Russian soldiers, firing from helicopters
on people, harvesting in the fields near the village of Komsomolskoye. The court decided
that the attack violated article 2 of the Convention (right to life). In the explication
of the verdict the court spoke of an “armed conflict” in Chechnya. This was the first
time the court used the expression “armed conflict.” In all former verdicts the court
had spoken about the “repression of an armed rebellion.” Amnesty International has
stressed the importance of this verdict: “to agree that in Chechnya exists an armed
conflict is of great importance for the international legal and penal qualification
of human rights violations. The existence of an armed conflict is the necessary condition
for the application of norms concerning war crimes that, let us remember, are imprescriptible.”[64] Another hopeful initiative was the adoption of a resolution on April 2, 2003, by
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) asking for the establishment
of an international tribunal for crimes committed in Chechnya. Unfortunately, this
initiative remained without follow-up.[65]
