Civil Society, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS: EU Urged to Step Up Pressure on Chechnya

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Apr 8 2008 (IPS) - The European Union has been urged to use its influence with Russia’s new president to insist that human rights abuses in Chechnya are thoroughly investigated.

Over the past three years, Russia has been found guilty of serious abuses in Chechnya a total of 25 times by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. In each of the cases concerned – which relate to extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances – the Russian authorities were shown not to have carried out proper investigations.

Human rights activists are asking that Chechnya should be considered as paramount in the EU’s dealings with Dmitry Medvedev, who will succeed his mentor Vladimir Putin as Russia’s President May 7.

While relations between Putin and several EU governments have been frosty lately on issues ranging from food safety to alleged espionage, the Union has indicated it wishes to be on better terms with Medvedev.

Following a recent telephone conference with Medvedev, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, current holder of the Union’s rotating presidency, stated that he wished to see the bloc’s ties with Moscow being deepened. Marc Franco, head of the European Commission’s office in Moscow, has also said that he can envisage that talks will get under way this year aimed at reaching a political and cooperation agreement that would put EU-Russia links on a more formal footing.

Despite evidence of large-scale state-sanctioned atrocities in Chechnya, EU leaders have shown themselves either reluctant to raise these with Moscow in recent years or have offered support for Russian policy. The latter approach was most blatant when Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s prime minister, concluded an EU-Russia summit in 2003 by claiming to act as “President Putin’s defence lawyer.”

Anxious to avoid any such repetition, a number of human rights groups called Apr. 8 on the EU to insist that perpetrators of attacks on Chechen civilians are brought to justice.

“The EU can play a crucial role in pressuring the Russian government,” said Tonya Lokshina from Human Rights Watch, speaking at a seminar in the European Parliament. “Russia finds its relationship with the EU to be very important. So the European Union has a lot of leverage.”

Thousands of civilians died in Chechnya during 1999 and 2000 as a result of a military onslaught launched purportedly against those wishing the republic to secede from the Russian Federation. Although initial operations in the so-called Second Chechen War were directed from Moscow, a policy known as Chechenisation, whereby local authorities were charged with nominal anti-terrorist activities, was launched in 2003. Up to 5,000 people are estimated to have been forcibly ‘disappeared’ by the Chechen security services, yet not one official has been held to account so far.

In a judgment last year, the European Court of Human Rights upheld a complaint lodged by Arbi Chitayev against Russia.

Accused of being a rebel fighter, Chitayev was held in the Chernokozovo detention centre in the Chechen capital Grozny, after he was arrested along with his younger brother Adam. According to Chitayev, the beatings he sustained there even happened during supposed recreation times, when inmates were forced to run around a yard, with their arms outstretched while guards hit them with sticks.

Chitayev insisted that he had not committed any crime and that no weapons were found when he was arrested following a search of his family’s home. The police who carried out the arrest were “sadistic”, he alleged. “Twelve of them were beating us up. They seemed to enjoy the process. It looked like they were boasting; each of them wanted to beat us in a better way than his colleagues.”

Another of his siblings, Rashid, paid an emotional tribute to the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006. “Anna Politkovskaya was one of the few sources you could trust about Chechnya,” he said. “She identified criminal acts and the dates of criminal acts (perpetrated by state forces). Never were any of these taken up by the criminal prosecutor.”

Two wars occurred in Chechnya during the 1990s. A new study by the Norwegian Refugee Council says that over 13 years since the first war broke out in 1994, some 139,000 Chechens remain displaced in the Russian Federation. Officially, the Russian authorities claim it is safe for them to return but the Refugee Council disputes this assertion, insisting that killings and disappearances persist, albeit less frequently than when the conflicts were at their fiercest.

Svetlana Gannushkina from the Russian Civic Assistance Committee said that Chechens living in mainland Russia have to contend with rising xenophobia. Returning home is fraught, she added, because jobs are scarce and obtaining residence permits can be a bureaucratic ordeal.

She also appealed to EU countries not to expel Chechen asylum-seekers living on their soil. “Russia is a strong country,” she said. “It is difficult to counteract what happens there. However, if you provide refugee status to people (from Chechnya), you are seeing that Europe is expressing its opinion independently of Russia.”

A surge in the number of Chechens seeking asylum in the EU has occurred over the past few years. In Poland, for example, almost 2,300 Chechens filed asylum bids in December last year, though new applications have now shrunk to about 300 per month, according to data published by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) last week.

Hélène Flautre, a French member of the European Parliament, described the stance towards asylum-seekers taken by the authorities in her country as “scandalous”. France, which will assume the EU’s presidency during the second half of 2008, has denied Chechens aid or permission to work.

 
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