aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] JUGGLING THE NUMBERS OF LIVING AND DEAD IN CHECHNYA

[Taras Kuzio <t.kuzio@utoronto.ca>]

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION of RFERL.


RFE/RL (Un)Civil Societies
Vol. 3, No. 40, 2 October 2002



IN FOCUS

JUGGLING THE NUMBERS OF LIVING AND DEAD IN CHECHNYA.

Salambek Maigov of the Chechen Antiwar Congress has claimed that
80,000 people have died in the second Chechen war, now heading into
its fourth year, ntv.ru reported on 17 September, purporting to cite
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Memorial Society's Human Rights
Center. The statement prompted Abdul-Hakim Sultygov, the new
presidential human rights representative in Chechnya, to complain,
"All the numbers which human rights organizations are coming out with
now are subjective estimates, not having any relationship to the real
situation," ntv.ru quoted him as saying on 18 September. Yet both
human rights organizations have countered Maigov's claims,
describing his figure of 80,000 as too high, and said Sultygov's
concerns about "subjectivity" are misplaced.
    HRW has said the figure of 80,000 is "unreliable." And in a
report released on 1 October in Nazran and distributed via e-mail,
Memorial said figures of both civilian and military deaths have been
exaggerated and manipulated on all sides of the conflict for
political purposes. A census is planned in the coming weeks, notes
Memorial, yet even this exercise is unlikely to put to rest the
constant speculation over the number of people who remain alive in
the Chechen Republic, or the number killed in the current armed
conflict, let alone the last one. "Three years ago in 1999, officials
lowered by half the number of people living in Chechnya at the
outbreak of the second Chechen war and today they are inflating the
figure of the population by 150 percent," said Memorial.
    The inflated numbers appear tied to Moscow's effort to
portray the war as "finished" with only final skirmishes with Chechen
rebels said to be entering the republic from neighboring Georgia, and
to portray massive efforts to get refugees who had fled to nearby
Ingushetia to return to their original homes in Chechnya. "The
bureaucrats are not really concerned with living people, evidently;
the news of their numbers is a political football and a lever for
pumping financial aid to the region. As for those killed in the war,
they prefer not to recall them at all," says Memorial.
    Memorial points to the official estimate of the number of
civilians killed made to them in meetings with General Valerii
Manilov, the Russian Army's deputy chief of staff, in August 2002
and with Chechen Republic Prosecutor Nikolai Kostyuchenko. Those
Russian federal officials said about 1,000 civilians were killed in
the "counterrevolutionary operation," as it is officially designated.
    Memorial believes General Manilov's figure of 1,000 to be
substantially lower than the actual number killed. They note that HRW
estimated about 6,500 to 10,500 civilians killed during the first
nine months of the second war alone, a figure said to be derived from
extrapolation from the sampling of 1,300 deaths for which detailed
information was available. Memorial itself, since July 2000, has been
maintaining a log of the killings called "Chronicle of Violence"
distributed via e-mail and on their website in Russian at
http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/northkavkaz.htm. By the spring of
2002, Memorial had tracked the circumstances of the killing of more
than 1,000 civilians, yet they characterized their records as
incomplete because they are only able to monitor about a quarter of
Chechen territory. They believe the numbers to be much higher, but
they report only what they have documented themselves, in many cases
examining bodies in morgues or mass graves which they have helped to
uncover. 
    Based on their experiences, they believe the figure of
civilians killed in the current war to be "more than 10,000" but
"clearly less than 20,000." Of this number, they and other human
rights groups have detailed information about 2,500 civilians killed
-- far more than the figure indicated by General Manilov but less
than the one cited on Interfax of 80,000. Possibly, Memorial
concedes, the general meant that there were at least 1,000 files open
on deaths of civilians, and there was more than one death in each
file.
    Memorial is the first to admit that their figures cannot be
accurate because they cannot get access to certain areas nor access
to information. It is not known how -- or whether -- the Russian
armed forces in Chechnya and political leaders in Moscow are counting
the dead. In some other situations in the Soviet past, as in Nazi
Germany, the state kept careful records of its plans for atrocities
and its execution of them. In other situations, it deliberately
avoided chronicling them or destroyed records to maintain plausible
deniability. In the chaos of the Chechen conflict, it is difficult to
know which factors are at work.
    Memorial counts deliberate gunpoint executions of civilians,
torture deaths in prison, killings caused by excessive use of force,
i.e. artillery attacks from a helicopter in the sky against villagers
walking down below. They do not attempt to count newborn babies or
old people who die of malnutrition or disease induced by war and
poverty, nor young or middle-aged people dying ahead of their time
from stress, or all the prisoners in detention pits or jails who die
of exhaustion. They cannot be expected to track the persecution or
killings of people who were trying to reach them to tell them of
others' murders and who might have suffered retaliation.
Journalists have had a terribly difficult time functioning in the
area particularly in the second war, with dozens of detentions and
shootings by Russian soldiers and kidnappings and disappearances by
Chechen fighters to deter them from practicing their profession
freely or safely. The scant international presence in Chechnya is
escorted by armed guard provided by the Russian federal government
and it is doubtful that many Chechen citizens are willing to run that
gauntlet to describe killings of civilians.
    The demography of death is an admittedly imprecise science,
and the only way to get a handle on the numbers would be to allow a
combination of impartial and skilled international and domestic
investigators total, untrammeled access to every kind of demographic
information available in Chechnya and elsewhere in Russia: birth and
death certificates kept in hospitals or by local heads of
administration, prison records, military records, passport records,
etc. Such investigators would also have to be allowed to do all kinds
of cross-checking of these documents, and to interview people freely,
and be assured that their civilian sources or whistle-blowing
officials in possession of damning information files were not harmed
for telling the truth.
    These conditions simply do not pertain in Chechnya, nor are
they ever likely to be secured in the future. Investigation of
massacres in the world's other hellholes can encounter
resistance, but there is a peculiar Soviet specialty in blocking the
news and reporting of such grisly realities which was honed to a fine
edge in the years of the Lenin- and Stalin-era massacres and
regrettably is maintained to the present day in Russia, where the
lack of developed civil society, travel and communication
infrastructure, and foreign languages still impede transparency.
    At the other end of the equation, concerned human rights
activists and international officials try to count how many people
remain alive in Chechnya today. It might seem a relatively simple
affair first to calculate the prewar population, then count the
existing people who remain, and finally arrive at some sensible --
yet indeed appalling -- figure of civilian war dead. And yet, with
populations scattering into nearby republics, hiding from officials
whom they view with suspicion, and the inability to obtain normal
record keeping during armed conflict and refugee flight, this is not
an easy task. Can a state which has tolerated so many civilian deaths
with impunity be expected to conduct an honest census?
    Memorial reports that Lord Judd of the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe (PACE) was recently told on a fact-finding
mission by the Chechen administration that numerous persons
previously displaced to Ingushetia had successfully returned,
bringing the total figure of the Chechen population today up to
900,000. Memorial and other humanitarian groups have serious reasons
to doubt this figure. They say that if the republic's population
stood at 750,000 on the eve of the second war, and if the population
did not really return in full, so that some 137,000 Chechen residents
still remain in Ingushetia and about 10,000 in Daghestan (and 150,000
in other neighboring regions not originally counted) then there are
more likely 600,000 in Chechnya today. Memorial notes that the
Chechen administration has given this figure of 600,000 to the local
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in
Chechnya, but the higher figure of 900,000 to Lord Judd. The
discrepancy could only be sorted out if war were to stop and
reconstruction could truly begin. CAF