Chechens Endure ‘Ghastly Abuse,’ Study Concludes

Russian forces routinely and illegally imprison, beat and torture civilians in the rebel republic of Chechnya, and the Russian government has made no concerted effort to investigate or prosecute the abuses, a human rights group said in a report released today.

The study by Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with 35 former detainees, details a “ghastly cycle of abuse” at the hands of Russian servicemen that includes electric shock and other forms of torture, systematic beatings, arbitrary imprisonment and frequent extortion of money from prisoners’ families.

The report includes witness accounts of several deaths of prisoners from injuries inflicted during detention by Russian forces.

“The extent of the misconduct is staggering--staggering in its wanton cruelty and staggering in its scale,” said Rachel Denber of the group’s Europe and Central Asia division. “Torture occurs all the time in Russia, and if it’s common in peacetime, it’s more so in wartime.”

Russia’s special human rights representative for Chechnya, Vladimir A. Kalamanov, issued a statement Wednesday declining to comment on the report.

Human Rights Watch said some of the abuses occurred in formal detention facilities such as the Chernokozovo filtration camp, where prisoners were forced to run or crawl a gantlet of guards who would beat them with clubs.

Several former detainees described how soldiers forced a man with a head injury to run the gantlet, striking him on his wound until he collapsed.

“They started beating him. . . ,” one witness told the group. “They just pulled him like a dust broom and just threw his body away, in front of us. It was useless even trying to bandage him. He was dead.”

The Human Rights Watch study corroborates accounts of widespread war crimes and human rights abuses reported by the Los Angeles Times and other publications. It notes that fear of arbitrary detention and mistreatment is a central reason that Chechen refugees remain in refugee camps and refuse to return to their homes in the separatist republic.

“We’ve spoken to refugees, and they say uniformly that they are afraid for their sons, afraid for their fathers, afraid for their husbands,” Denber said.

The report said that in most cases, there is no due process for detainees, who are usually freed only after their families pay bribes for their release.

“In fact, extortion of payment in return for releases occurs in so many cases, detention itself appears to have been motivated exclusively by the promise of financial gain,” the report said.