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In 2003 blowing up corpses had become a systematic practice. “[R]esidents and human rights campaigners say fragments of blown-up bodies are being found all over the war-ruined region. Rather than put a stop to human rights violations, the military appears to be doing its best to hide them, critics say. . . . Lawmaker and rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov theorizes that the intent is to make it difficult for independent investigators to connect the corpses to the soldiers who allegedly arrested them.”^[34] Stalin has been credited with the phrase “no person, no problem” (net cheloveka, net problemi). Stalin liquidated his problems by liquidating the people. In Chechnya the Russian Special Forces cynically changed Stalin’s adage into “no corpse, no problem.” “The analogies to Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ were by no means unfounded,” wrote Gilligan. “The tactics grew increasingly reminiscent of those of Jorge Videla’s military government from 1976 to 1983.”^[35] During Videla’s dictatorship, between nine thousand and thirty thousand people disappeared. During vuelos de la muerte (death flights) many were pushed out of planes into the Atlantic Ocean and the Rio de la Plata. The same happened in Chechnya, but over land. One of the Russian soldiers interviewed by Maura Reynolds told her: “We also threw rebels out of helicopters. It was important to find the right height. We didn’t want them to die immediately. We wanted them to suffer before dying.”^[36]

According to Article 1 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted on December 20, 2006, by the General Assembly of the United Nations, “1. No one shall be subjected to enforced disappearance. 2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.” Article 2 states that “for the purposes of this Convention, ‘enforced disappearance’ is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” Article 5 states that “the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity.”^[37] Equally, Article 7, Paragraph 1 (i) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines the enforced disappearance of persons as a crime against humanity. The crimes committed in Chechnya, the site of such “widespread and systematic practice of enforced disappearance,” unambiguously fall under the definition of both the UN Convention and the Rome Statute that determine them to be crimes against humanity.

The Process of Chechenization

In October 1999 (then) Prime Minister Putin promised that the war in Chechnya would be short and casualties would be low. It would be the Chechens themselves, he said, not the Russians who would be fighting the bandits and terrorists. Pavel Felgenhauer commented: “It actually seemed at times that Richard Nixon was back, talking of the ‘Vietnamization of the war.’”^[38] The Chechenization, announced by Putin, was, indeed, another difference with the First Chechen War. The second phase—in which local Chechen allies of the Russians would play an increasing role—began on October 5, 2003, when Imam Akhmad Kadyrov (the father of the present leader Ramzan Kadyrov) was installed as president by the Russian government. It had a profound impact on the way the war was conducted. In all the villages Kadyrov’s men had their local informers. The sweep operations could therefore become more focused. From now on zachistki became adresnye zachistki: targeting only selected addresses. Consequently, the number of victims gradually decreased. The struggle of Chechens against Chechens, however, was not less violent, but it lacked the clear racist undertones that characterized the Russian offensive of the first two years.

Jonathan Littell, a French-American author and winner of the prestigious French literature prize Prix Goncourt, who worked in Chechnya for a humanitarian organization in the 1990s, revisited Chechnya in 2009. He was impressed by the totally rebuilt center of Grozny.