Russians in Chechnya 'murdering and raping'

By Marcus Warren in Moscow
Electronic Telegraph
Saturday 22 January 2000

RUSSIAN soldiers in Chechnya were accused yesterday of raping local women and killing at least one of their victims.

Chechen refugees told a human rights organisation they had spoken to rape victims in Russian-controlled Chechnya. Other refugees said they had been forced to hide their daughters from drunken soldiers. The true scale of the violence against the women of Chechnya may be hidden by the local taboo on sexual assault, a report by Human Rights Watch said.

Chechen women who survive rape are liable to be divorced if married or never to find a husband if single and the strict rules of conduct for sexual relations in the strongly Muslim region deter victims from speaking out. The allegations are thus unlikely to be proven, but they tally with accounts of widespread looting, harassment and cases of arbitrary shooting of Chechen civilians in Russian-held territory.

One 23-year-old pregnant woman was raped and murdered in Shali last month, a neighbour told Human Rights Watch. When local people prepared her body for burial they found it scarred by bruises and toothmarks.

According to Human Rights Watch researchers, several women, aged from 20 to their 50s, had been raped by soldiers in Alkhan Yurt, scene of an alleged massacre after troops took the village at the beginning of December.

One woman from Alkhan Yurt disclosed that she and a neighbour hid their five daughters in a pit covered with earth and with a pipe to supply air for several days to protect them from soldiers hunting for young girls.

Paramilitaries in the Balkans in the Nineties raped systematically to terrorise civilians, but there is no evidence that Russian soldiers' attacks on Chechen women are part of such a campaign. Indiscipline is acute in the Russian army and violence against the local population is often colluded in by officers unable or unwilling to rein in their men.

Some civilian officials have even justified the looting of bed linen, mattresses and rugs on the grounds that soldiers have not been supplied with proper bedding.