MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya, of the Russian Human Rights Group “Memorial,” provides an analysis of the situation in Grozny today. She discusses the living conditions in the city of Grozny, the spillover of violence in the region, Chechen leadership, and the everyday choices civilians in the region face.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Ekaterina Sokiryanskaya. She is with the Russian Human Rights Group, “Memorial,” and teaches History at the Chechen State University in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The Holocaust Museum put Chechnya on its genocide watch list in 2000 based on violence directed against civilians, a history of persecution of Chechens as a group and the demonization of Chechens in Russian society. Ekaterina is joining us by phone from Saint Petersburg to give us an update on the situation. Ekaterina, welcome to the program.
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Hi Jerry, thank you for having me here.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me just begin by asking, what is Grozny like today? A few years ago there were pictures that came out where it looked like a wasteland. Most of the buildings had been destroyed as a result of the war that was fought there in 1999; all of the services were destroyed. What is the situation in Grozny today?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Grozny, indeed, was destroyed, almost fully bombed out during the war, according to the official data; seventy-eight percent of the city was damaged, however, it is almost ninety percent. Grozny, more or less, looks the same today; it is still lying in ruins, although this last year, Chechnya looked a bit better. The thing is that people have returned to Chechnya, IDP camps have been closed in Ingushetia so people had no choice but to return, and Grozny is bustling with people now. As you drive towards the city center, you will see shops, open cafes, beauty parlors, and the ground floors of the buildings are being restored, and people are opening small businesses and offices there. The university also has two newly refurbished buildings and there is a pretty garden on the main campus now. The young people sitting in the cafes and the gardens, speaking on cell phones and drinking Coke—so it looks a bit different—there is now a taxi service with yellow taxis, just like in New York or in Washington. It looks as if Chechnya is recovering and on is on the way to a more peaceful life. Some changes are positive indeed, like now daily routine has become better organized, but in fact, this vision is very illusive in a sense because the reconstruction of living quarters is going on very slowly, housing is mainly restored by the people themselves according to their very different incomes—mostly those who are employed in security agencies or in the government can afford to restore their living quarters and the rest are somehow learning to cope in the given conditions. The state-sponsored reconstruction is carried out on the administrative buildings or elite housing for Chechen nouveau riche, or the objects of government PR, for example. Let me give you one very recent example; off the central avenue in Grozny, called Prospect Pobedy. Recently Ramzan Kadyrov, who is actually the person who has most of the power in Chechnya today—officially he is a vice prime minister of the Chechen government—he visited the Prospect in mid-December and he was indignant about why the main Prospect looked so bombed out still, so he ordered to restore it by the end of the year and he announced that funds were allocated from his private fund to this, but in fact, funds were extorted from local businesses. For two weeks, the people were working there day and night—really twenty-four hours a day—and they cleaned the streets, they planted new trees, and they put new glass windows in the ruined buildings—the buildings have no roofs, they have no walls sometimes, but they have windows.
JERRY FOWLER: They are still destroyed buildings but they have the façade of—
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: What they have done is just restored the facades and put the windows there to put it on main television channels, which is real Potemkin village in a sense. If you walk one hundred meters from the Prospect Pobedy, the city is still lying in ruins, the water supply is still a big problem in the city—you have to buy water, and the waste management is really a big problem as well. In six years of war there have emerged huge mountains of garbage dumps, and there are rats, and it is really un-hygienic. I wish Ramzan Kadyrov had spent this money for taking care of waster or for restoring the sewage systems in one of the districts of Grozny, but unfortunately, this is not happening.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me pursue that a little bit. Water is still a problem. When you say that you have to buy water, do you have to go to a central location to get it? Or is there a water system that is distributing water throughout?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: There are some wells. In certain areas there are wells where you can come and pick up water yourself. In other areas and districts of Grozny, there is a special water truck which is bringing water, usually once a day, usually in the early afternoon, so if you work it is really very difficult for you to physically buy it. Just a couple weeks ago, before New Years, I remember there was no water for three or four days in certain areas of Grozny. This was really difficult, especially if you have big families like Chechens do. You need a lot of water for cooking, for washing, for doing the laundry, and if you have to buy it and then carry it to multi-story buildings without elevators, this is hard work.
JERRY FOWLER: What about electricity and gas for heating?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Electricity and gas supplies have been normalized more or less. There are some cut-offs of electricity from time to time, but this is typical of the region generally.
JERRY FOWLER: Turning to the security situation; obviously in 1999 and 2000 there was massive violence which resulted in the destruction of Grozny and other towns and villages. After that there was a period of total lack of security, disappearances of civilians; how do things stand today?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: You are very right that the Chechen conflict is a very dynamic conflict and the tactics of war and the patterns of violence have been changing repeatedly, even during these last six years of the second war which started in 1999. We, indeed, can trace several phases in the conflict. As you remember, it started with large scale violence, warfare and bombing of Chechen settlements. The second phase was starting in 2000 with indiscriminate bombing, when indiscriminate bombing was replaced by large scale mop-up operations, then large scale mop-up operations, under the pressure of the international community were replaced by so-called targeted operations when masked service men arrived at specific houses and abducted specific people, many of whom subsequently disappeared. Now we speak of a new stage which started probably in late 2004, and it is another phase of the military confrontation which brought about new patterns of rights abuse, but which maintains the same level of violence. This phase is associated with what we call the Chechenization of the conflict and it is characterized by the change in agency of the so-called anti-terrorist operation on the federal side—from mainly Russian federal soldiers to mainly pro-federal Chechen paramilitaries. Now they have been mostly legalized within the federal security structures. This new phase is characterized by the installment of a judicial system which operates under the control of executive power and often fabricates criminal cases against alleged combatants. The functions of government have been also transferred to the republican institutions. Chechnya now, in this new stage, has a president and parliament, but in fact, the power is controlled by these Moscow-backed warlords like Ramzan Kadyrov and his army of several thousand people who commit the gravest human rights abuses. The novelty of this situation is that the level of violence is very high but it is covert. It is hidden from the outsider’s view. It is polished and covered by the façade of pseudo-post-conflict reconstruction and the imitation of political process, but under this façade, the security agencies—now mainly local but functioning under the control and support of the federal center—commit grave human rights abuses such as kidnapping, summary executions, torture, but also new types of crimes such as hostage taking, abuse of official powers to commit vendettas or eliminate enemies. Violence against women and children is also becoming more common. The danger of this situation is in two main things. First, such anti-terrorist measures, and you remember that the war in Chechnya is called an anti-terrorist operation; they do not combat, but they produce terrorism. Secondly, the current state of the conflict, with a very high level of violence, risks being institutionalized and becoming perpetual. We have approached a very crucial point in time; Russia has won the war in its conventional sense. The federal troops have based on the entire territory and Russian state institutions manned by Chechens have been installed, but these institutions are in fact elements of this smoothly functioning, repressive, functioning machine of now Chechens against Chechens, which is less visible to outsiders but is definitely launching some very threatening processes within Chechen society, which can destroy the already shattered society and cause some social pathologies which will be very hard to cure. At the same time, this protracted conflict in Chechnya, it spilled over into the entire North Caucasus and to Russia at large. I think the current situation is probably even more dangerous than three or four years ago, and the stakes are very high at this point to close the eyes on this problem.
JERRY FOWLER: I wanted to explore that point that you brought up about the conflict spilling over into the rest of the region. There has been violence in neighboring Dagestan. I understand, correct me if I am wrong, that there has also been increased violence in Ingushetia, both of which are neighboring areas to Chechnya. What is driving that spillover?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: It is a protracted, unresolved conflict. It is like cancer which is spreading throughout the republic in the one sense. Then, generally, the policy of the federal center in the Caucasus is not a problem solving approach. There are a bulk of problems in each republic which have been accumulating for decades in the Soviet Union and in the subsequent years which are not being resolved, but mainly supressed, and the similar repressive machines of anti-terrorist operations the way I described them in Chechnya, they have been launched in the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkariya as well. The terrorist networks, or combatant networks that employ the local grievances, included local districts to recruit young men into their networks, and indeed the war had spilled over into Ingushetia obviously, basically, there is no full blown military confrontation in Ingushetia, but there is very intense guerilla warfare. This situation is very similar to Chechnya, just without bombing and military. In 2004, on June 21/22, at night, there was a major insurgency of combatants into Ingushetia—
JERRY FOWLER: These were combatants coming from Chechnya?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Some of them came from Chechnya, but many of them were local Ingush, and I think that this is quite interesting. They controlled the republic for four hours and they summarily executed about one hundred representatives of security forces of Ingushetia. Then they left, unobstructed. After that, this conveyor of violence, as we call it, this repressive machine with young men being detained, tortured, and forced to confide into crimes that they did not necessarily commit; it was put into motion in Ingushetia. Violence produces violence, and now, Ingushetia is a hot spot as well.
The situation is very similar in Dagestan and also in Kabardino-Balkariya. On October 15, there was an insurgency similar to the one that happened in Ingushetia in the town of Nalchik. The young men that participated in that insurgency were locals as well; they were local, very young men, many of them students, many of them from the middle class. They were all Muslim. It was a very strange episode because they just came out, in the broad day light—nine o’clock in the morning—and they attacked very well armed, and very well trained, security forces located in Nalchik and most of them were simply killed. Many of these young men—as the witnesses say—we were in Nalchik several days before it happened-could hardly handle guns. It looked very much like some kind of collective suicide; they just went out there to die, more or less, because it was obvious that they had no way to retreat after this strange attack.
If we look at the situation in Kabardino-Balkariya, in the recent years we will see that there was a very strong wave of repression and prosecution against Muslims in this republic. Several big mosques were closed, and in many small villages the mosques would only be open by local policemen for one hour on Friday, for Friday prayer, and then closed by the same local policemen. The police brutality was really infamous in this republic and highly corrupted government. All of this led to these very unfortunate developments.
JERRY FOWLER: Turning back to Chechnya, in particular, the underlying conflict was between people who are sometimes called Chechen separatists and obviously Russian security forces, and as you said the Russians have always characterized their activities as anti-terrorist. In the course of the conflict, many of the Chechen leaders who were identified as moderates have basically been killed, including most recently, Aslan Maskadov, who had been elected president of the Chechen republic. The leadership that is left seems to be gathered around Shamil Basayev, who many people would say is a terrorist. Has that led to a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the Russian authorities?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Partly yes. Indeed, if you look at the history of the conflict, the first war, which started in 1994, was called the Operation for Restoration of Constitutional Order; the second war, starting in 1999, was called the Anti-Terrorist Operation. There is no word “war” or “conflict” in the name, and this is not by chance. Systematically, in the last decade, the federal center has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the fact that it is a political conflict and they basically equaled Chechen nationalism to Chechen separatism, Chechen separatism to Chechen terrorism, and Chechen terrorism to international terror. This did have a self-fulfilling prophecy because they have systematically eliminated all of the moderate separatist leaders on the other side. Indeed we do witness jihadization of the so-called resistance and the radicalization - but the way I see it on the ground, it is very hard to study the other side because they are underground; they are not conspicuous and it is simply dangerous for a researcher, for a human rights worker to try to look into their structures or interview them for academic purposes, but from the messages that I get, there are still many people on the ground that fight for independence from Russia. They are all religious people, because there are few atheists in the trenches, but their major motif is not jihad, but independence of Chechnya from Russia. When I said that Russia won the war in a conventional sense, I meant also that now it is clear, even for the other side, that in the foreseeable future that this situation is such that Chechnya will remain part of the Russia state for some time at least. Many of these people simply resist the federal army as an invading force.
The people who fight on the other side have also changed their social make up. Many of them are very young and this is a new generation of combatants. This is a generation of war—they were eight, ten, fifteen when the war started. Many of them fight out of revenge; it is their personal blood feud or their revenge against killed relatives or their dear ones that perished in this war. Many of them joined these groups because they feel threatened to stay. It resulted in militarization of the whole population in Chechnya; you have to join either this side or the other one to feel protected. They have to join with pro-federal or anti-federal, because if you sit at home you risk being taken, put through torture, and then put in jail on a fabricated case. Many young men seek protection with the combatants.
Of course, there are terrorists there as well. The thesis that the human rights groups have repeatedly made is that these types of anti-terrorist operations produce and breed the most horrendous forms of terror. Belsan is an awful example that we were right unfortunately.
JERRY FOWLER: Is there a way out of this situation of violence where people have to choose sides between one and the other?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: It is getting more and more difficult, and the conflict is becoming more and more complicated, and now it has acquired this new dimension this inter-Chechen dimension, which I think is dangerous, but I think there is a way out. The way out is to launch an authentic political process, to finally recognize that it is a political conflict, and to first and foremost stop mass large scale rights abuses, stop abductions, disappearances, summary executions, torture, and fabrication of criminal cases by state security agencies. Second to that, start the negotiation process, which will be more difficult now that Aslan Maskhadov is gone. Many said that he was a weak politician, but he was a very good figure for negotiations because he was fighting on the ground, he had good connections with those representatives of 'Chechen resistanace' who are now abroad. Now that he is gone, it is of course more fragmented and more difficult, and there are radical elements that have strengthened their position. There are still combatant leaders—separatist leaders and combatant leaders—who fight on the ground, who have not committed war crimes such as Dokka Oumarov. Of course nobody would talk to Basaev, but people like Oumarov, who is on the ground and is very highly respected by the combatant community and who could be a part of the negotiations. He was never accused or linked to terrorism. There is this new leader of the Chechen republic, a new president who could also participate, of course, in this process. I think the negotiations will be more complicated in design, they will have to invite different leaders of different combatant groups and political fractions, but it is very necessary to launch it because it is getting increasingly difficult and all sides are getting increasingly brutal.
JERRY FOWLER: And it is spreading to the region?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: And it is spreading to the region, and it is spreading to Russia as well because there is this so-called Chechen syndrome. When the federal soldiers return from Chechnya to their native towns in Russia, they commit the same acts of brutality to their own citizens and there were several cases when these military regiments returned from Chechnya, they committed large scale mop-ups in their hometowns. The most vivid example is the twon of Blagoveshensk where in December 2004 the whole town was beaten up by a group that returned from Chechnya. Of course, demonization of Chechens results in general xenophobia against everybody who looks different especially people from the Caucuses. Racism is on the rise and there have been repeated cases of killing of people of color in big Russian cities. The unresolved conflict is very dangerous, not only for Chechnya and the North Caucasus but Russia as such. It is getting increasingly authoritarian and xenophobic and I think it is dangerous.
JERRY FOWLER: Ekaterina, thank you very much for this update and good luck when you return to Grozny?
EKATERINA SOKIRYANSKAYA: Thank you very much.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
