Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

the companies, as opposed to the individuals that work for them, do not fall within many aspects of international law and would not, for instance, come within the Statute of the International Criminal Court. . . . Governments may see in PMFs [private military forces] not only a means of saving money but a way to use a low-profile force to solve awkward, politically sensitive, or potentially embarrassing situations that develop on the fringes of policy. Since PMFs are willing to go where the government would prefer not to be seen, they offer a way to create conditions for “plausible deniability” and may be used to carry out operations that would be expected to meet with public or legal disapproval, or operations that sidestep legislatively imposed limits on military operations and force levels. . . .^[11] [This includes, however,] the risk that PMF employees can get away with murder, sex slavery, rape, human rights abuse, etc.^[12]

This risk became a fateful reality in the Second Chechen War. The introduction of kontraktniki had a deep impact on the character of this war. Conscript soldiers were certainly no innocents or angelic young lads. They included the average number of sadists that can be found in the general population. But the great majority of them were normal guys, mostly from modest provincial homes, trying to uphold a minimum of decency amidst these events. The kontraktniki were of another kind. According to Pavel Felgenhauer, “many kontraktniki enlisted, but the process of screening volunteers for Chechnya was superficial and they were sent into combat without any further selection or training. Many of these volunteers have been drunks, bums and other fallouts of Russian society.”^[13] The contract soldiers were not given military uniforms. Soon they developed their own private dress codes: “the bandanas [pirate’s scarves], the fox tail hanging down the back of the neck, singlet tops, sunglasses, and tattoos—all of these were emblems of their status and self-aggrandizement.”^[14] Thomas de Waal, who actually met them at checkpoints in Chechnya, described them as follows: “They were often ex-criminals with tattoos along their arms and bandannas [sic] on their heads, creatures more of gangland than a modern European army—and no friends to journalists.”^[15] The contract soldiers soon got the reputation of brutal killers, but also of thieves who openly carried out their robberies from people’s homes.^[16]

Zachistki

: The Purges

Together with the Special Forces (Spetsnaz) the kontraktniki would play a leading role in sweep operations by the Russian army in occupied territory, the so-called zachistki. These operations were sometimes conducted at night or early in the morning, sometimes also during the day. The army would encircle a village and hermetically seal it off from the outside world. Thereupon small groups of six to nine men enter the village and conduct street-by-street searches of homes. There were no official witnesses, no search warrants, and the faces of the soldiers were, as a rule, covered by masks or blackened to avoid identification. For the same reason the registration plates of the military vehicles were covered. Hiding their identity was a priority for these troops to carry out the most hideous acts. The official reason for these sweep operations was to control the identity papers of the Chechen population and to identify members of “illegally armed formations.” But in practice these zachistki degenerated into summary executions, torture, arson, and looting. A notorious case was that of the village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, when soldiers threw grenades into basements full of civilians and set houses alight with the inhabitants still inside.^[17] During the same operation fifty-six civilians were summarily executed. The word zachistka became one of the Russian catchwords in the winter of 1999–2000. In December 1999 the weekly Moskovskie Novosti published a list with “words of the year.” The word zachistka was number one on the list.^[18]

Emma Gilligan has analyzed how the word zachistka made its way into the Russian media.