#9 - JRL 8304 - JRL Home
From: Lawrence Uzzell (Lauzzell@aol.com)
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004
Subject: Reply to Robert Bruce Ware/8300

Robert Bruce Ware's criticisms (JRL 8300, July 21) of my recent article about the Ingushetia raid in the Jamestown Foundation's Chechnya Weekly (JRL 8276 July 1) depend on an exaggerated distinction between the military and the police. Dr. Ware equates the latter with "civilians." But in fact, the "militia of the former Soviet Union's various interior ministries in many ways have more in common with military units than with western-style police forces. Often they are equipped for full-scale combat operations, and in Chechnya they have played a major role in combat against the rebel guerrillas. Under Ingushetia's president Murat Zyazikov (himself a veteran FSB officer), the local security agencies have played a substantial role in brutalizing Chechen refugees.

Consider the following observations from Human Rights Watch:

--Human Rights Situation in Chechnya: Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper to the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, April 2003, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/chechnya/unchr-chechnya-04.htm): "In recent months, Ingush police have intimidated displaced people in a number of spontaneous settlements by conducting law enforcement operations there that strongly resemble abusive operations Russian forces conduct inside Chechnya. On January 6, 2003, Ingush police detained four men at Satsita tent camp, later returning the mutilated dead body of one of them, Visadi Shokarov (b.1972), to the settlement. Police claimed Shokarov had died in a car accident while being transferred from one detention facility to another. However, a Human Rights Watch researcher who saw the body noticed bullet wounds on his legs, casting doubt on the official version of events. After Shokarov's detention, his brother, Visit Shokarov, went to the local police station to inquire about his fate. Two policemen took Visit Shokarov inside and he has not been seen since. In another example, police rounded up dozens of young men in the Radiozavod and ORS settlements in Malgobek on February 10, 2003, without so much as checking their identity. Although most were later released unharmed, the displaced people interpreted the incident as a warning that Ingushetia would no longer be safe for them."

--Spreading Despair: Russian Abuses in Ingushetia, September 2003, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/russia0903/index.htm: "In January and February 2003, Ingush law enforcement agencies (apparently supported by the FSB) conducted at least three operations targeting Chechen displaced persons. After one of these operations, conducted in early January in the Satsita tent camp, one person 'disappeared' and another's mutilated corpse was later returned to relatives."

Dr. Ware misrepresents my article for Jamestown (as well as distorting reality) when he writes that "as the Jamestown essay reports, 98 civilians were killed and 104 civilians were wounded." In fact, my article did not refer to the 98 dead as "civilians." According to numerous media reports, most of the dead were servicemen of various security agencies; for example, Nabi Abdullaev wrote in "Transitions Online" (June 28, 2004) that "sixty of the dead were local police and other law enforcement officials whom the rebels said they killed for collaborating with Russian security services in extrajudicial detention, torture, and murder of Ingush civilians suspected of sympathizing with the rebels."

Dr. Ware ignores a feature of last month's raid which deserves special notice: the substantial evidence that the raiders went out of their way to target higher-ranking security officials and to spare civilians and even rank-and-file police personnel­for example, releeasing traffic patrolmen and private security guards once it was clear who they were. (Among the journalists reporting the raiders' selectivity was Izvestia's Vadim Rechkalov, who is hardly pro-separatist: He calls both Chechen and Ingush guerrillas "bandits.") The contrast with Budennovsk-style raids, suicide bombings and other attacks which deliberately target civilians is striking and important.

This is not to say that 100 percent of Chechnya's and Ingushetia's guerrillas are 100 percent innocent of atrocities; ever since I interviewed Shamil Basaev at one of his mountain hideouts in 1995 I have routinely described him as a "terrorist." But today's Russian authorities use the label "terrorist" the way their predecessors used the term "enemy of the people"in the Stalin era­as a way of disscrediting all resistance to their policies. By equating last month' Ingushetia raid with the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Dr. Ware is promoting both analytical and moral confusion.