Imperialist *non*intervention in Chechnya

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The appeasement of Nazi Germany by Britain and France before the Second
World War, was the result of their imperialist nature.

Similarly now, the refusal of the West to put pressure on Putin's Russia to
observe democratic rights in Chechnya is a fruit of their imperialist
desire *in these circumstances" to compromise with the creation of  the
oligarchs who was inaugurated in the throne room of the Czar,

Below is an example of the report that is being little prominence by the
western media, because there is an assumption that nothing very much can be
done, or should be done.

Chris Burford

London

John Sweeney reports on the horror of a Russian prison camp in Chechnya

Special report: Russia Special report: crisis in Chechnya

John Sweeney Observer

Sunday October 15, 2000

Inside the prison camp at Chernokozovo, they call it the 'elephant'. 'They
put a gas mask on your head. Your hands are cuffed behind your back, so
there is nothing you can do. And then they close off the breathing tube and
you start to choke.'

The torture victim, a small, wiry Chechen man, knelt down and made the
sound of a man suffocating: 'The "elephant" was the worst.'

A second victim spoke of a refinement of the 'elephant': 'Once the gas mask
was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they
would let go and you would breathe in deeply. And then they would squirt CS
gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask
in the room would make people confess to anything.'

The 'elephant' is just one instrument of torture used by the Russian
occupation forces in Chechnya, revealed today in a joint investigation by
The Observer and the BBC's Radio Five Report.

Russian security forces have mounted a series of cover-ups to hide evidence
of abuses from the Red Cross and the Council of Europe. In the small
Chechen village of Katyr Yurt, a torture victim blinded in one eye spoke of
the screams he heard each night while inside Chernokozovo. The screams were
so bad local people were forced to move away because they found them
unbearable.

'At night,' he said, 'the things you heard were just terrible. Every night
they would take people out of the cells. They screamed. They had their
teeth bashed in, their kidneys smashed in. You could hear them being beaten
from the cell. So then they would turn the music up loud, so you couldn't
hear the screams.'

The youngest victim we met was 17. He was living in a refugee city in
Ingushetia, next door to Chechnya. We shall call him Peter. He sat in front
of us, head bowed, terrified of eye contact: 'They handcuffed your arms
behind your back and hooked the cuffs to a chain so you were suspended from
the ceiling, with all your weight bearing down on your hands and shoulders.
And then they would use you like a punchbag. They called this "the
swallow". They'd hold you for half a day like that.'

But this wasn't the worst torture for the teenager: 'They put me in a cell.
There was something chemical in there. They cuffed my hands behind my back
and said, "Go on, swim". I practically lost my sight when they shoved my
head in there. There was also something else, a barrel full of water with a
cage on top. You couldn't get out of there.'

Peter drew us a map. Painstakingly, Chernokozovo came to life. Barbed wire,
steps down to his cell, the punishment tank where he was dunked in the
chemical that left him blind for days.

The second victim - Richard - corroborated much of Peter's story and added
his own account of agony: the 'meat-rack'. 'They crank a pulley to stretch
you with chains attached to your legs. While they stretch you, they hit you
with rubber truncheons, bottles full of water, targeting the kidneys.'

He also underwent 'the swallow' and electric shock torture. Richard said
that one day in the summer a Red Cross representative - a French woman
called Catherine - came to Chernokozovo. Could he tell the Red Cross about
the beatings and torture? 'No, the guards had come round before and told us
we would be tortured if we did.'

The Red Cross has confirmed that one of their delegates visited
Chernokozovo; her name was Catherine and she was Belgian.

Our third witness is a man of 20 who has the voice of an 80-year-old. He
screamed so much when he was being beaten that his vocal cords snapped. In
a pitiful whisper, he too spoke of the usual welcome at Chernokozovo, the
beatings, having to crawl into the interrogation room and ask for
permission to enter.

While he was there a man was beaten to death: 'I don't remember the date,
but they took him out of the cell one evening. We heard them shouting
"Crawl, crawl". They were beating him and we heard him screaming. Then, the
next morning, they led four of us into his room. His body was lying there.
They'd broken all his ribs. They forced us to carry him out and dressed the
body in the Muslim manner. We dressed the body, covered up with sacks, and
they took us back to the cells. I don't know what they did with the body.'

All of our witnesses were interviewed separately. Although the Chechens,
who have lost the war against Vladimir Putin's greater forces, have every
reason to blacken the name of the Russian occupiers, the victims
independently supplied such detail of torture that their evidence must be
conclusive.

Another witness, Paul, 22, spent a month in Chernokozovo, where he says
rape was commonplace, until his family bought him out for $500 (£340) - a
year's pay. He had been put in the fridge, where they had to stand without
moving a muscle. If they twitched, they were beaten. Paul suffered broken
ribs, a cracked vertebra and a mock execution: 'They led me to the
corridor. One of them cocked his sub-machine gun. They'd taken the first
bullet out of the clip. They put the gun to my temple. As one pulled the
trigger, the other clubbed me down. The others could see this from their
cells. I'm already dead in their eyes. Then they dragged me out.'

The torture described is so systematic it cannot be the work of a rogue
unit acting on its own. Following allegations of torture at Chernokozovo by
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe was
allowed to inspect the camp in March. At the same time, torture victims
were taken out of Chernokozovo and put on a prison train that ran up and
down branch lines. None of the survivors who were held in the basement -
where the worst atrocities were carried out - saw anyone from the
international agencies below ground. Neither Amnesty nor the Council of
Europe mentions the basement at Chernokozovo - indicating the prison
authorities kept it hidden.

The latest dispersal technique is to dump prisoners in pits - holes in the
ground where the bitter cold of winter is a torture in itself.

One witness who had been held in a pit last month said: 'It was freezing.
At night they would chuck in smoke canisters and let off CS gas. They threw
stones down on us. It was the contraktniki - mercenaries - who did it.'

His family paid a ransom of $1,300 (£900) and they let him go. The Russians
kicked him out of an armoured personnel carrier in the middle of Grozny
with a bag on his head, leaving him for dead.

Putin - whose style has been admired by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as
'open and refreshing' - has denied that torture is used by his forces in
Chechnya.

Our last witness was eight months pregnant when thrown into a pit. 'They
left me there for two or three days. There was no toilet in the pit. They
urinated on me. They had stripped me down to my underwear; it was freezing,
with snow on the ground.' They beat her repeatedly, she said, because she
had helped the fighters in the First Chechen War, which ended in 1995.

When the baby was born, she said, its face was bruised black and its skull
deformed.