This year 143 People have been kidnapped in Chechnya, 54 of whom have disappeared and the bodies of eight others have been found with evidence of torture and violent death, the Memorial Human Rights Center reports.

All told, Memorial has records of 1804 kidnappings, in which 986 of the victims have disappeared completely and 181 of them were later found dead.

In the report published by Memorial and the International Federation for Human Rights entitled “Torture in Chechnya: ‘Stabilization’ of a Nightmare,” it is noted that that organization’s monitoring covers 25-30 percent of the territory of Chechnya. The real number of the kidnapped and murdered is much larger.

The circumstances under which those people disappeared – the use of armored vehicles, the unimpeded movement of the kidnappers through checkpoints and similar circumstances – points to the involvement of representatives of federal forces or pro-federal Chechen groups in the absolute majority of cases.

In June 2006, a senior officer in the criminal police in Chechnya told a Memorial employee in a private conversation that that agency had not received information about a single instance of kidnapping by militants, and, he added, enforcement bodies were involved in the majority of such crimes.

The report notes that the massive scale of disappearances in Chechnya is even more obvious if the number of the kidnapped and disappeared is compared to the number of people living in the republic, slightly over 1 million, according to official statistics – over 800,000 in reality.

The so-called Chechenization of the conflict, that is, the formation in recent years of enforcement bodies made up of ethnic Chechens that are given significant authority to carry out illegal violence, does not change the nature of the crimes being committed, nor alter the issue of the responsibility of the Russian government and military leadership, the human rights activists say. They mention that the protection of civilians from torture and abuse is a direct responsibility of the state.

In addition, the majority of divisions of militarized “ethnic Chechens,” the names and hierarchy of which are constantly changing, are under the command of Russian enforcement bodies.

The activities of these groups are coordinated from the “center” and their lawlessness is made possible only by their direct support from Moscow, the authors of the report emphasize.

The report has been presented to the UN Committee against Torture as part of the consideration of the fourth periodic report of the Russian Federation on its implementation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment and given to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who was to visit Russia, including the North Caucasus, in October of this year.

Popularity: 1% [?]