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Immediately linked with the zachistki was the installation of so-called filtration points (filtratsionnye punkty). These were temporary detention points. They were installed as an answer to national and international protests against torture practices in the official detention center in Chernokozovo. In the decentralized and ad hoc organized filtration points these torture practices could continue, but were no longer hindered by critical witnesses. “Torture was a routine practice at the temporary filtration points,” wrote Gilligan. “Unlike at Chernokozovo, torture was practiced in specially equipped wagons, in tents, or in fields. The torture wagons were the ultimate symbol of impunity—they were linked to neither a legal detention point nor possible witnesses. The most common forms of torture practiced included the following: electric shocks to the genitals, toes, and fingers with a field telephone . . . ; asphyxiation with plastic bags; cutting off ears; filling mouths with kerosene; setting dogs on the legs of the detained; knife cuts; and carving crosses in the back of detainees.”^[28] In 2000 there were about thirty filtration points in operation where somewhere between ten and twenty thousand detainees were held.^[29]

Forced Disappearances and Blowing Up Dead Bodies

Sweep operations by masked men, temporary filtration points set up for a few weeks, one week, or even a few days, in an empty factory hall, a school, a tent, or a bus, gave the torturers carte blanche, free from the risk of being disturbed by witnesses. The Russian Special Forces that were involved showed an extreme need for secrecy. There was, first, the need to hide one’s own identity; second, to hide the identity of the army unit or government agency one belonged to; third, there was the need to hide the acts one was committing; and, fourth, and last but not least, there was the need to hide the results of these acts. This brings us to another feature of this war that fully justifies the name it was given by Anna Politkovskaya: “A Dirty War.”^[30] The sweep operations in the first year of the war led to mass executions of civilians. When, later, mass graves were discovered, it was possible to establish the identity of a number of the bodies. The dead body of an executed civilian, discovered in a mass grave, was the material proof of a war crime. Even if the perpetrators of the crime could not be identified (and the police and judicial instances were not very cooperative in identifying, finding, and prosecuting them), there always remained a certain risk of being identified later.

This led to a new practice. People started to disappear. They were taken away from their homes by armed, masked men in armored patrol vehicles, and their families were not informed where they were being held or what had happened to them. By 2002 the disappearance rate was more than a hundred civilians per month.^[31] According to estimates by Amnesty International, published in 2010, between three thousand and five thousand people had disappeared since the beginning of the Second Chechen War. They added, however, that the actual number would be higher, due to the fact that, in the generalized climate of fear, not all cases had been reported to the police.^[32] Mass graves, when they are discovered, are embarrassing facts for the perpetrators. To conceal the killings of abducted people the perpetrators took care, therefore, to have the corpses disappear also. “Blowing people up, dead or alive . . . is the latest tactic introduced by the federal army into the conflict,” wrote the correspondent of The Guardian in October 2002. “It was utilised perhaps most effectively on 3 July [2002] in the village of Meskyer Yurt, where 21 men, women and children were bound together and blown up, their remains thrown into a ditch. From the perspective of the perpetrators, this method of killing is highly practical, it prevents the number of bodies from being counted, or possibly from ever being found.”^[33]