A “Reign of Fear” Grips Chechnya

The New York Times reports:

Bearded police in camouflage clothes, carrying assault rifles and long daggers, stop cars with tinted windows in the rebuilt Chechen capital — their latest ploy in the hunt for Islamist fighters.

As one car pulls over, a policeman jerks open the back door, slides in and slashes the dark tinted film off the car windows with his 10-inch (25 cm) dagger.

“If you don’t like it, take it up with the president. Militants could be hiding behind these,” he snarls at a pair of nervous passengers, exposing a row of sparkling gold teeth.

Russia’s Dirty Caucasus Secrets

SBS Dateline has produced a documentary film about Russia’s secret dirty wars in the Caucasus.  Watch it here.  The following is a transcript ,which could not be more timely as Maksharib Aushev, just murdered as noted in our Special Extra below, is quoted extensively:

In the Caucasus Mountains along Russia’s southern fringe, a hidden war is escalating. Moscow says it’s battling militant Islam in the tiny republic of Ingushetia. But people here say hundreds of innocent civilians are being tortured and murdered.

REPORTER: He says, “We can no longer walk. “Our teeth have been broken, our jaws are broken. “We desperately need some help.”

They say they live in terror of a Russian security apparatus out of control.

We arrived in Nazran, the largest town in the mainly Muslim Russian Republic of Ingushetia. We were taken to a house, where we were met by a crowd of grieving women. Just a few days earlier, at 5:30 in the morning, 400 heavily armed Russian soldiers had surrounded the house.

REPORTER: And then what happened?

Babitsky on Chechnya

Andrei Babitsky

David McDuff says this is Andrei Babitsky writing under a Georgian pseudonym for Prague Watchdog:

Andrei Soldatov’s recent article in Yezhednevny Zhurnal [about Moscow’s alleged ceding of control of the counter-terrorist operation to Ramzan Kadyrov, see the link (tr.)] left me with mixed feelings. I do not consider myself too proficient a judge of the control structures of the security agencies in Chechnya, and am therefore always interested to read what the experts have to say on this subject. Soldatov is without any doubt a highly informed specialist in this field, so anything written by him is likely to help one towards a better understanding of what is taking place in the republic. However, it seems to me that in the conclusions it makes his article repeats the stereotypical fears that are characteristic of Russia’s liberal community.

Let me explain what I mean.

How the Armenians see the Caucasus Quagmire

Writing on Hetq Online, an Armenian-American freelance journalist analyzes Armenia’s position in the Caucasus quagmire:

Russia will be well along the road to total defeat by the US and NATO in the Caucasus and beyond if the recently proposed Armenian – Turkish “Protocols” are ratified.

Within two months after ratification, Turkey would be required to open its border with Armenia. Subsequently, or perhaps simultaneously, the Azerbaijani – Armenian border will open if, as appears increasingly possible, an Artsakh (Karabagh) peace agreement is signed.
Regardless of whether the Azeri border opens, a fully open Turkish – Armenian border would inevitably result in US and NATO penetration and subjugation of Armenia.

Let us look at US and Russian policy in the Caucasus, both past and present.

EDITORIAL: The Latest Barbaric Outrage from Russia’s Man in Chechnya

EDITORIAL

The Latest Barbaric Outrage from Russia’s Man in Chechnya

Last week, Russia was formally convicted after a trial once again for barbaric abuses of human rights in Chechnya by the European Court for Human Rights.  Last year, Russia was convicted more than 200 times for everything from kidnapping to murder by the ECHR, and already this year it has been ordered to pay more than $700,000 to its victims in the Caucasus region.  But the Kremlin, of course, goes right on flouting international law, and it’s only response to the convictions has been to threaten to reject the court’s jurisdiction.

That is, until recently.  In the past few months the Kremlin has hit upon a new masterstroke:  Blame the CIA.  That’s right, the CIA.

Crisis in the Caucasus

Paul Goble reports:

The recent increase in attacks on religious leaders and ordinary citizens in the North Caucasus, the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta say, highlights a dangerous new development in that region: the increasing role of radical extremists who do not feel themselves limited by any moral considerations.  As a result, the Moscow paper says in an unsigned editorial, the conflict in the North Caucasus bears all the signs of “a civil war” in which everyone is a potential victim, a development, the paper continues, that Moscow in recent months appears to be almost entirely oblivious.

Kadyrov’s “Robespierreian” State

Islam Online reports:

When Russia announced an end to its near-decade, long “Counter-Terrorist Operation”(CTO) in Chechnya last April, many observers were taken by surprise. The decision to call an end to this security regime was taken by senior Russian officials at the orders of Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov.

Over the past several years, Kadyrov has overseen the relative stabilization of the security situation in Chechnya, compared to the increasingly chaotic state of affairs in neighboring republics such as Ingushetia and Dagestan. Kadyrov claims that his militias have all but eliminated militants based in Chechnya. Those who have managed to survive, he claims, have fled to Ingushetia and Dagestan where they have taken advantage of less stringent security regimes to regroup and reorganise.

EDITORIAL: Putin slithers Around Kadyrov

EDITORIAL

Putin slithers Around Kadyrov

No rational person, of course, could expect the malignant ruler of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to criticize the campaign of mass murder being waged by his hand-picked Frankenstein ruler in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.  After all, to publicy admit fault by Kadyrov would be to acknowledge his own failings as well.

But it’s one thing for Putin to avoid criticizing Kadyrov as he murders political enemies left and right, quite something else entirely to rush to Kadyrov’s defense. Yet that’s just what he did earlier this week, achieving yet another loathsome new low in the modern history of Russia.  We condemn his outrageous misconduct, and even more do we condemn the craven people of Russia for allowing this repugnant reptilian dictator to represent them before the gaping, slack-jawed world.

EDITORIAL: Russia Faces the Apocalypse

EDITORIAL

Russia Faces the Apocalypse

One of the bicycle bomb scenes in "pacified" Grozny last week, courtesy of the Moscow Times

Last Friday, a pair of bombings swept through the Chechen capital of Grozny while the streets were full of people eating their lunch.  Each bombing was carried out by a suicide attacker on a bicycle riding up to a police checkpoint.  Four more police officers were killed, making a total of sixteen over the course of a week.  Add to that the massive car bombing in Nazran, Ingushetia which killed two dozen and injured well over a hundred, and you have a clear picture of apocalypse in Russia.

And that was only the beginning.  The same day that the cyclists were doing their bloody work in Grozny, something even more terrifying happened.

EDITORIAL: The Putin Kremlin is Clinically Paranoid

EDITORIAL

The Putin Kremlin is Clinically Paranoid

We reported last week on the insane ravings of Vladimir Putin,  statements so detached from reality that they could only come from the mouth of a neo-Soviet lunatic.  But no sooner had we done so than Putin’s man in Ingushetia was spewing paranoia so demented it made Putin look like Gandhi.

The indispensible Paul Goble reports that Yunus-Bek Yevkurov believes he had discovered the identity of those who are relentlessly gunning down his cabinet members and police officers.  Islamic radicals? Of course not!  The culprits are America, Britain and Israel.

EDITORIAL: Russia’s Caucasus Policy comes Unwound

EDITORIAL

The Caucasus are Burning

Sure, the friends of democracy are getting liquidated in Josef Stalin’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia left and right, and the homicidal Kadyrov regime is openly threatening more reprisals.  Indeed, they make no effort to hide their crimes because they know they have the Kremlin’s blessing.   But if you think the only people getting killed in the Caucasus these days are Putin’s enemies, think again.

Now we’ve Seen it ALL!

Now we’ve seen everything.

EDITORIAL: The Beast of Chechnya

EDITORIAL

The Beast of Chechnya

It’s almost as if Ramzan Kadyrov, designated and decorated as a national hero of Russia by Vladimir Putin, wants to help us folks here at La Russophobe prove conclusively what an inhuman neo-Soviet monster he is.  Why else, we can’t help but wonder, would he publicly say this about Natalia Estemirova:

She never had any honor, dignity or conscience. Why should Kadyrov kill a woman whom nobody needs?

Yes, he referred to himself in the third person.  Yes, he accused this single working mother who laid down her life for her beliefs of having no honor.  Yes, though she worked tirelessly and selflessly to protect the rights of the defenseless, he said she had no conscience.  Yes, he displayed for all the world his absolute contempt for her, confirming his motive to kill her.  Yes, he ignored her international reputation and many awards for journalistic and human rights achievement, something very few other Chechnya activists can boast of, and still claimed she mattered to nobody — ignoring too the hundreds of newspapers articles that deluged the worldwide media after her brutal killing.

Well, all we can say is “thank you, Mr. Kadyrov.” You’ve made our argument with your own words far better than we could ever dream of doing.  And, of course, the continued support of our maniacal, malignant, homicidal regime by the Moscow Kremlin tells the world all it needs to know about that regime as well.

Radio Free Europe has more analysis of the psychopathic ravings of this bloodthirsty, homicidal maniac who is Russia’s “hero.”

SPECIAL EXTRA: Natalya Estemirova shot and Killed in Chechnya

Natalya Estemirova

No sooner had we published special issue devoted to exposing the extent to which Vladimir Putin has failed and lost control in the Caucasus than an exclamation point was added painted in the blood of yet one more fallen Russian patriot.

 Prize-winning Russian journalist Natalya Estemirova, who may be viewed as a successor to Anna Politkovskaya, has been murdered in Chechnya in order to silence her fearless reporting on human rights abuses by the Kremlin in that tortured region.   In October 2007, she spoke for Politkovskaya on the pages of The Nation magazine.  Today, the magazine is eulogizing her.

Estemirova was kidnapped and then shot in the head in the manner of a mafia contract hit, her body dumped in the gutter like a piece of garbage.

She is the latest in a long line of political murders obviously carried out by the Kremlin to silence its critics (the Kremlin’s puppet in Chechnya had openly threatened her life), a history that dates back to Vladimir Putin’s first months in office with the liquidation of human rights activist Galina Starovoitova.

Once again, the Kremlin will remain silent at this barbaric outrage. Once again, no killers will be brought to justice. Once again, we will ask how many heroic Russians must give their lives before the American administration will stand up for democracy and justice in Russia.  The European Union has spoken out strongly, we await their plan of action. If President Obama remains silent on this killing, his silence will be even more reprehensible than that of her Kremlin killers and history will condemn him.  Mr. Obama has no more time to wait. He must speak now, and then he must act.

Annals of Sochi 2014: Russia’s Ski Resort Time Bombs

Mairbek Vatchagaev, writing on the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor:

Today, the northwestern part of the North Caucasus region (comprised of the republics of Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Adygeya) is increasingly becoming one large battlefield. An affluent resort area during the Soviet period, today the region attracts very few Russian visitors, primarily due to its instability. According to the most optimistic estimates, tourist traffic to the world-renowned ski resort of Dombai in Karachaevo-Cherkessia alone declined by 70-90 percent last winter (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, December 31, 2008), and the number of foreign visitors substantially decreased. The summer season is unlikely to bring changes for the better, as the entire region is affected by the large-scale military drills that were conducted along the length of the border it shares with Georgia. Russian First Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Kolmakov described the current maneuvers as the largest in the area since the Soviet Union’s collapse (www.skavkaz.rfn.ru, May 19).

Teaching Russians about “Citizenship”

Sergei Markedonov, head of the department of inter-ethnic relations at Russia’s Institute for Political and Military Analysis, and associate professor at RGGU and MGU, writing on Prague Watchdog:

With every day that passes, the socio-political situation in the North Caucasus increasingly gives grounds for alarming conclusions and prognostications. Possibly the only attempt in the past ten years to provide at least some kind of coherent interpretation of the North Caucasus crisis was made by President Dmitry Medvedev, who in June 2009 listed the region’s main problems, which he termed “systemic.” Among them he included unemployment, “a monstrous scale of corruption” and the inefficiency of government. As is often the case, the president’s “systemic” approach quickly became a fashion among Russian officials. Discussing the incident which took place in the Stepnovsky district of Stavropol on June 21 (a large-scale clash between Dargins and Nogays), the governor of Stavropol Kray said that “160 young people cannot have a personal dislike for each other … Specific individuals can have personal grievances, but when nearly two hundred people are involved it means there is a systemic problem.”

Endless Russian Barbarism in Chechnya

Human Rights Watch reports:

Russian federal and Chechen local authorities should immediately put a stop to the punitive house-burning and other human rights violations in Chechnya and bring those responsible to justice, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented two new cases in Chechnya in which the homes of families related to suspected insurgents were torched by local law-enforcement officials as well as a public extrajudicial killing of a man suspected of providing food to insurgents.

On July 2, 2009, Human Rights Watch published a report, “‘What Your Children Do Will Touch Upon You’: Punitive House-Burning in Chechnya“, documenting a pattern of house burnings by security forces to punish families for the alleged involvement by their relatives in the insurgency.

“We have two more houses burned and at least one person killed just in the last couple of weeks,” said Tanya Lokshina, deputy Moscow director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s time for Russia’s leaders to take a clear stand against this kind of brutal collective punishment instead of looking like they endorse it.”

No Justice in Chechnya means No Peace in Chechnya

Amnesty International has just released a review of “president” Dima Medvedev’s first year in office, in essence branding Medvedev a shameless liar for representing liberal intentions to the world when he took office.  A month ago, when Medvedev announced Russian forces would withdraw from Chechnya (and before he withdrew that declaration and ordered a major new military campaign to quell terrorism), AI condemned Russia’s barbaric history of human rights violations in Chechnya and declared there could be no peace until Russia acknowledged its culpability and paid the appropriate price:

Russia announced the end of its decade long “counter-terrorism operation” in Chechnya on Thursday, claiming that “normality” had returned to the territory. Amnesty International has warned that normalization is not possible without full accountability for the gross human rights violations of the last 10 years. “The true benchmark of a return to normality is to give people what they have been wanting for over a decade – they want the truth, and they want justice,” said Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.”They want to know the fate and whereabouts of relatives and friends who are among the disappeared, and they want those responsible brought to account. Only thorough and independent investigations into past and continuing human rights violations can bring normalization and security in Chechnya. Such investigations will be a deterrent to future violations. Opening the region to independent observers and journalists would be a signal that the authorities there are ready for transparency, but a change of status is absolutely meaningless without the political will to change reality.”

Babitsky on Chechnya

Persecuted Russian hero journalist Andrei Babitsky, writing on Prague Watchdog:

To sum up the results of a series of actions is the easiest thing to do, because the actions contain links that demonstrate tendencies, they hide the codes of a future that has not yet been fully revealed, but can be guessed. To analyze a void is not more difficult – it is not possible at all. A vacuum is aggressively silent, sending in response to all questions a guarded “I wasn’t here, am not here now, and won’t be here in the future.” Nevertheless, the upside of what happens when a void gapes in the space that is organized by human activity is that by its silence it exposes the poverty and futility of articulation.

EDITORIAL: Chechnya Explodes

EDITORIAL

Chechnya Explodes

On April 16th, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin announced the end of “counter-terrorist operations” in Chechnya.  In other words:  Mission accomplished!

Oops.  On April 24th, it reinstated them.

Exposing Putin’s Legions of Murderers

Jeremy Putley draws our attention to some brilliant reporting from the Times of London exposing the murdering legions of dictator Vladimir Putin:

THE hunt for a nest of female suicide bombers in Chechnya led an elite group of Russian special forces commandos to a small village deep in the countryside. There they surrounded a modest house just before dawn to be sure of catching their quarry unawares. When the order came to storm the single-storey property, dozens of heavily armed men in masks and camouflage uniforms – unmarked to conceal their identity – had no difficulty in overwhelming the three women inside. Their captives were driven to a military base. The soldiers were responding to a tip-off that the eldest of the three, who was in her forties, had been indoctrinating women to sacrifice themselves in Chechnya’s ferocious war between Islamic militants and the Russians. The others captured with her were her latest recruits. One was barely 15.

“At first the older one denied everything,” said a senior special forces officer last week. “Then we roughed her up and gave her electric shocks. She provided us with good information. Once we were done with her we shot her in the head. “We disposed of her body in a field. We placed an artillery shell between her legs and one over her chest, added several 200-gram TNT blocks and blew her to smithereens. The trick is to make sure absolutely nothing is left. No body, no proof, no problem.” The technique was known as pulverisation.

The young recruits were taken away by another unit for further interrogation before they, too, were executed.

EDITORIAL: More of Putin’s Russia at its Very Worst

EDITORIAL

More of Putin’s Russia at its Very Worst

Sulim Yamadayev

The world is being treated to yet another brutal, vivid illustration of Vladimir Putin’s Russia at its very most horrifying. Perhaps, this time, it will finally open its eyes and see Russia as it really is.

Even as the Russian blogosphere was humiliating itself by refusing to believe that Sulim Yamadayev, a staunch critic of the Kremlin’s puppet regime in Chechnya, had been assassinated in Dubai last week (LJ breathlessly claimed he was still alive), authorities in UAE were preparing an indictment charging that Yamadeyev’s killing had been directly ordered not just by the Chechen rogue regime itself but by its representative in the Russian Duma, one Adam S. Delimkhanov, one of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov’s closest adivsors.  Of course, as was the case with Andrei Lugovoi in the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London, Russia will refuse to do anything to support the investigation in Dubai even as it demands that the West extradite figures of interest to the Kremlin like Boris Berezovsky.

What’s more, Dubai police were reporting that four suspects in the killing, including three Russian nationals, had fled from UAE to Russia in order to escape arrest, while one Russian national had been arrested along with an Iranian and a Tajik.

Latynina on La Cosa Russia

Hero journalist Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

Last week, Saak Karapetyan, head of the international cooperation department of the Prosecutor General’s Office, gave an interview to Interfax in which he clarified the most important criminal cases in his agency.

It turns out that the most pressing cases are extraditing former Yevroset chairman Yevgeny Chichvarkin, billionaire Boris Berezovsky, Chechen separatist Akhmed Zakayev, former Russneft owner Mikhail Gutseriyev and former Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin. And then there is the criminal case against State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoi, who faces murder charges in Britain in connection with the 2006 poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Torture in Russian Prisons under Medvedev

Torture in a Volgograd prison, 2009

by Jeremy Putley

How Chechen prisoners are treated under President Dmitry Medvedev

It is a principle universally recognized, in countries governed by the rule of law, that imprisonment following conviction is all the penalty the law allows. Torture of prisoners is not any part of the punishment demanded by society. But in the Russian Federation, under the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, that principle apparently does not apply, considering the evidence of numerous cases of which one of the most shocking is that of an imprisoned Chechen, Zubair Zubairaev.

The War in Dagestan

The Moscow Times reports more proof of how very well Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is doing keeping the peace in the Chechnya region. Send our athletes there in 2014 for the Olympics? That would be suicide.

Three days of intense fighting between police and insurgents in a wooded area of Dagestan ended Saturday with five officers and about a dozen militants left dead, officials said.  Clashes are frequent in Dagestan, but the fighting in an area near the border with Georgia and Azerbaijan was some of the most intense in recent months. Helicopter gunships fired on the militant positions.