#11
The Guardian (UK)
February 19, 2003
Russian MP says Kremlin sanctions Chechnya killings
BY NICK PATON WALSH IN MOSCOW

A leading Russian MP and human rights activist has severely embarrassed the Kremlin by holding briefings for senior US officials in Washington in which he has accused Moscow of complicity in the murder of its opponents by "death squads" in Chechnya.

Sergei Kovalyov, who spent 12 years in a Soviet labour camp after campaigning for political prisoners in 1975, has told US Senators and influential policy bodies that civilian mass graves being found across Chechnya are the result of highly organised operations that the Kremlin is either sanctioning or ignoring.

Mr Kovalyov's near-legendary status as a human rights campaigner in Russia will make his accusations smart all the more inside the Kremlin walls, particularly with Washington days away from listing some Chechen separatists as terrorists, a propaganda victory for Moscow.

"We are always finding, all across Chechnya, mass graves of civilians," he told the American Foreign Policy Council, a US think tank, on Friday, referring to the work in Chechnya of the human rights group Memorial.

"Sometimes it is not even a grave, but a heap of bodies. Whenever we can identify the bodies, it turns out each grave or heap contains people who had been detained at different checkpoints in different areas across Chechnya. Yet somehow they are turning up together, often quite far from where they were detained."

He said this pattern ruled out the typical Kremlin excuse that massacres were carried out by troops out of control. "If that were the case, the corpses would be from one area and would be near those troops."

In January alone, 61 people were detained in Chechnya, of whom 29 disappeared, he said. In the same month, 22 corpses were discovered. "How many belonged to the ranks of the 29 disappeared? At this point we can only guess."

He added that most of the corpses found recently had been blown up. He said this made identification much harder and that it was happening all over Chechnya, "indicating a coordinated policy".

Mr Kovalyov added: "If [senior government and military officials] know of these deaths, then why are they keeping silent? And if they don't know of these death squads, the question is: why?"

One of Russia's most respected human rights campaigners, Mr Kovalyov was encouraged to stand as an MP by the leading dissident Andrei Sakharov, and first conducted surveys into the civilian death toll caused by the carpet bombing of Grozny.

He fell out with President Boris Yeltsin over the Kremlin's "authoritarianism" and has persisted in his work, despite criticism from parliament and state.

The Kremlin has lobbied Washington for support in its fight against "international terrorism" in Chechnya.

Although Washington still insists on a political solution in the republic, Moscow had seemed days away from using the current standoff over Iraq to secure one US concession -the blacklisting of three groups linked to the separatist leader Shamil Basayev.

Blacklisting would bolster Moscow's arguments that legitimate separatism has been usurped by al-Qaida-funded extremists.

Mr Kovalyov's allegations will detract from Moscow's claim that life in Chechnya is nearly enough normal for a referendum to be held on a future constitution on March 23.

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