Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

The “victory” proclaimed by the Russian government in the spring of 2009, after having formally ended the war, soon turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. Not only because Moscow was gradually losing its grip on Kadyrov—a fact that Russian analysts also recognized^[45] —but because the conflict began to spill over into the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, where a ruthless guerilla war was raging. “The [Chechen] conflict has splintered and metastasized,” wrote Foreign Policy four months after the official “end” of the war in Chechnya.^[46] Also Chechnya itself was far from being pacified. This became clear from a report by Thomas Hammarberg, the Human Rights Commissioner of the Council of Europe. Hammarberg wrote that in Chechnya in 2009 an increase in terrorist acts, murders, and abductions could be observed in comparison with 2008.^[47] The most famous case was the murder of Natalya Estemirova, representative of the human rights organization Memorial, who was kidnapped and murdered on July 15, 2009. Despite the harsh repression rebel forces remained active. On August 29, 2010, a surprise attack took place on the house of Ramzan Kadyrov in his home village Tsentoroi, followed by a suicide attack on the Chechen Parliament on October 19. The first attack was called by a Russian commentator “out of the ordinary,” because “this latest attack strikes a blow at the very heart of the Caucasus vertical power structure.”^[48] And he added that “the attack on Tsentoroi has shown the vulnerability of the Kadyrov regime, which many consider the most successful in the North Caucasus.”^[49] Kadyrov’s vulnerability shows at the same time, behind the apparent strength of the Kremlin’s “power vertical,” the vulnerability of Putin’s regime. Interviewed on the situation in the Caucasus by the French paper Le Monde the well-known Russian analyst Lilia Shevtsova said that “everything in the region is getting out of control. We find there a non constitutional entity, Chechnya. Nobody talks about it, but it is a real humiliation for the federal authorities. You have there a feudal and ‘sultanist’ regime, which means: clannish and authoritarian, that is supported by money from Moscow. . . . It produces resistance in the young generation against this regime and against the federal forces. The terrorist attacks take place almost on a daily basis.”^[50]

The War in Chechnya and the European Court of Human Rights

A final difference between the First and the Second Chechen War was that during the second war the Russian Federation was a fully fledged member of the Council of Europe, one of the most prestigious intergovernmental human rights organizations in the world. Russia had become a member on February 28, 1996, when the First Chechen War was beginning to unwind. One would have expected that the council would have condemned the war crimes committed in Chechnya, but, unfortunately, the reaction of the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe was rather muted. Apart from a temporary suspension of its voting rights in the Parliamentary Assembly for some months in 2000, Moscow escaped any sanction.^[51] The European Court of Human Rights, however, was still able to play an important and useful role, because a rapidly growing number of cases of Russian—also Chechen—citizens was brought before the jurisdiction of the court. In the beginning of 2007, 19,300 allocated applications against the Russian Federation were pending, which represented 21.5 percent of all cases from all forty-seven member states. By the end of the same year the total number of cases against Russia was over 20,000 and represented 26 percent of the total. By the end of 2008 the total number of cases against Russia had grown further to 27,246, which was 28 percent of the total.^[52]