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On December 11, Russian troops invaded Chechnya from the north, the east, and the west.The first two months of the war in Chechnya -- the nature and scale of the fighting makes "war" the appropriate term -- was reported in detail by television and the press both in Russia and abroad, although coverage has fallen off sharply since January 19, when Russian troops occupied Grozny's Presidential Palace.
Despite forecasts of a quick victory, Russian troops made slow progress in advancing on Grozny, held up by unarmed civilian protesters as well as by Chechen troops and a lack of supplies and seasoned soldiers. The Chechen forces are made up of the National Guard and other regular army units, including many soldiers with Afghan war experience; the volunteer militia, subject also to central command and discipline, in which a great proportion of able-bodied Chechen males participate, some on a part-time basis; and "the avengers," individuals or small groups, whose relatives have been killed, and who, acting on their own, seek blood vengeance in accord with Chechen custom. The Chechens' weapons, which include some artillery and armor and plentiful supplies of sophisticated anti-tank weapons, Kalashnikov automatic rifles, ammunition, and grenades, are Russian in origin. They were handed over to the Chechens in 1991, seized during raids on Russian arms depots in 1992, or bought at various times from corrupt Russian officers and other arms dealers. The Chechens lack American Stingers or equivalent Russian anti-aircraft weapons; this leaves them vulnerable to Russian helicopter gunships.
Russian air raids and artillery fire have been employed, in accord with traditional Russian military doctrine and practice, to prepare the way for ground offensives against Chechen positions. Initially, their use was relatively restrained. As Chechen resistance stiffened, however, the bombing and shelling of Grozny and of other population centers (including some in Ingushetia), as well as of military and industrial targets, escalated. Frederick Cuny, in his article Killing Chechny (The New York Review, April 6, 1995), describes the Russians' tactics: "To put the intensity of firing in perspective, the highest level of firing recorded in Sarajevo was 3,500 heavy detonations per day. In Grozny in early February, a colleague of mine counted 4,000 detonations per hour. Only in early March did the Russians diminish their shelling and adopt a strategy of starving out the local population."
An all-out Russian assault on Grozny was launched on December 31, but it failed to achieve its main objective, the taking of the President's Palace. Russian armor and troops found themselves trapped in the city streets, leading to fierce battles and heavy casualties --many Russian soldiers were trapped in armored personnel carriers and incinerated.It was not until January 19, after more than a month of hard fighting and the total destruction of central Grozny, that Russian troops were able to occupy the President's Palace. After another three weeks of combat, the Russian command claimed that it controlled the city of Grozny, but its control is tenuous and is contested nightly by Chechen snipers and patrols. In mid-February, a brief respite was arranged, after which the war resumed. On Monday, February 13, in Ingushetia, MVD Colonel General Anatoly Kulikov, commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, and Russian army commander General Anatoly Kvashnin met with Dudaev's chief of staff, Colonel Asland Maskadov, and agreed on a heavy weapons cease-fire. In further meetings, on February 15 and 17, the two parties negotiated a 48-hour total cease-fire permitting an exchange of prisoners, recovery and burial of the bodies of dead Russian and Chechen soldiers, as well as the first delivery of humanitarian aid to Grozny by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on February 18.
Unfortunately, hopes that this limited truce might become a starting point for a settlement of the conflict were dashed when talks were broken off. Chechen forces regrouped to the east of Grozny around the towns of Gudermes, Argun, and Shali, and also in the hills to the south of Grozny. Until mid-March, fighting was sporadic, with Russian forces slowly consolidating their positions, sometimes by negotiating agreements with local Chechen authorities, sometimes by air and ground attacks on Chechen positions. On March 20, Russian forces began a new offensive to take Shali and Argun; heavy bombing, strafing, and shelling of Chechen positions in and around the towns were followed up by tank and infantry attacks. If the road junctions of Shali and Gudermes are captured by the Russians, the Chechens' access to Dagestan will be seriously reduced. Even if the Russians' present offensive succeeds, however, Cuny (in the article cited above and written on March 9) notes that at some point "the Russians must turn south ... and confront the Chechen forces massed in the south. Undoubtedly, the Russians can inflict major damage on the Chechens. The question for Yeltsin is how far he is prepared to go ... to win, the Russians will have to force half a million or more people into the mountains, cut off their food supplies, and starve them into submission."
Every day we see planes dropping bombs on residential areas with complete impunity. Every day we see the bodies of civilians torn apart by these bombs, some without heads, others without legs. Many places in the city of Grozny resemble the section of Stalingrad left unrepaired in order to serve as a war memorial. There was a military hospital next to the building where we slept in Grozny before the December 31 attack. The hospital's head doctor told me that a shell had come through the roof during the attack. Fortunately, no one was killed directly. They had to interrupt an operation to amputate the arm of an elderly Russian woman who had been badly wounded by shrapnel, but they managed to complete the surgery later in a make-shift operating room in the basement. Other patients who couldn't receive necessary treatment because of the attack on the hospital died. By the time we returned to the site, it was too late to see anything -- the hospital had burned down.Boarding school 2 was hit, but fortunately all 43 children were in the basement. None were hurt, and they were evacuated to the village of Stary Atagi. I hope they'll be all right there, but according to recent unconfirmed reports, Stary Atagi has been bombed. Many other Chechen villages have been bombed, including, Urus-Martan which is sheltering more than 1,000 refugees.Anna Volkova, a very old woman, is sitting on the sidewalk with the few possessions she saved from her fourth floor apartment which was destroyed by a bomb. Next to her lie the bodies of her son and daughter-in-law covered by a blanket. Volkova is sitting on a stool behind a small cart covered with a flannel blanket -- passersby leave money for the funeral on it.During the attack, a house on Central Square, not far from the President's Palace, was set on fire. Alexander Pavlovich, a World War II veteran, managed to lower himself on sheets from his fourth-floor apartment to the third floor where he was saved by Chechen militiamen. Neither he nor the militiamen were able to rescue his wife, who was paralyzed. She cried out: "Save me! Save me!" before she burned to death.Grozny's ruins are overloaded with bodies -- the bodies of Russian soldiers. Stray dogs gnaw at the dead.
Kovalev returned to Moscow on January 5 to describe directly to President Yeltsin the observations of his group. On January 10, he submitted a report to the Russian State Duma, detailing the group's "finding that gross violations of human rights and the norms of humanitarian law have been committed in the war zone on the territory of Chechnya and in parts of Ingushetia," and adding:
On the basis of our analysis of information gathered, together with official communiques, eyewitness testimonies and documents published by the media, we can responsibly assert that: 1. In the war zone, the Russian side is conducting military operations using modern heavy weapons and aircraft for indiscriminate attacks which are causing a) large-scale death and maiming of the civilian population in Chechnya; b) the destruction of housing and other civilian objects indispensable for survival; c) damage to and disruption of medical institutions, the destruction of ambulances and other medical conveyances, including some marked with the Red Cross insignia; d) the destruction of cultural objects; e) serious damage to installations involving potential hazard to the environment. 2. Necessary measures for the protection and evacuation of the civilian population located in the war zone are not being taken by either side; 3. The Russian side is not taking adequate measures for finding, removing, and burying the dead; 4. The Russian side is obstructing shipment to the war zone of humanitarian assistance, including lifesaving medical supplies needed for the wounded; 5. The Russian military authorities, officials, and government-controlled information services are unreasonably withholding information and conducting a campaign of deliberate disinformation, which is spreading such evident lies about events in the Chechen Republic as: a) false information about the time and nature of military operations, leading to civilian victims and the destruction of civilian targets ... c) the lie that there have been no rocket or bomb strikes ... d) concealing military losses and the names of those killed, wounded, or missing in action, and those taken prisoner. The Chechen side has also falsified information for purposes of propaganda. 6. The Russian side has continually hindered the activity of correspondents in the war zone, in a manner unrelated to the legitimate protection of military secrets. In addition, a number of credible eyewitnesses have reported that force has been used to interfere with reporters, as well as other instances of mistreatment of journalists, threats to them, and confiscation of their materials. Facts have become known about coercion of the press in Moscow as well....The Russian federal authorities are refusing to recognize that the events in Chechnya constitute a "non-international armed conflict." Their actions on the territory of the Chechen Republic are grossly violating the norms of international humanitarian law, and in particular, the June 8, 1977 Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. The Russian Federation is a party to Protocol II, which relates to the protection of victims of non-international armed conflicts.The use of military weapons and the conduct of military operations as noted above, which have led to the death and maiming of many civilians; to the destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the destruction of irreplaceable cultural objects; the military authorities' obstruction of the shipment of humanitarian supplies to Grozny; and the failure to take measures for finding, removing and burying the dead are gross violations of Articles 4, 8, 13, 14, 16, and 18 of Protocol II.
Kovalev's testimony on the war's human cost was echoed in the observations of a 5-man fact-finding mission to Moscow and Chechnya (January 23-29) under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and led by Istvan Gyarmati, Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office. His 20-page report includes the following comment: The humanitarian situation is a catastrophe of serious proportions. According to General Babichev 150,000 people, predominantly Russian, old, sick, women and children, are trapped in the ruins of the city. The Russian forces cannot cope with the situation without help from civilian Russian authorities and international humanitarian aid. The need for humanitarian aid is very large in all parts of Chechnya and the neighboring regions. Detained Chechens in the prison wagons in Mozdok we met had been badly beaten and were in urgent need of medical care.There have been other allegations of torture and summary execution of Chechen civilians detained by the Russian army and sent to screening facilities in Mozdok and elsewhere in the region. There are also credible reports that Russian soldiers were guilty of looting, indiscriminate shooting and other violence during the siege and taking of Grozny.
Lorenzo Amberg, from the Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs, led a second 5-man mission to Moscow, Chechnya, and North Ossetia (February 22-March 1) under OSCE auspices to investigate the humanitarian and human rights situation. The summary of the Group's Report states "that the most urgent problems are the distribution of relief goods and access of the ICRC to Chechnya, the security of the civilian population and refugee problems. The Mission believes the fundamental issue remains a negotiated ceasefire as the condition for any substantial improvement."
Pressed by the West, the Russian government has agreed in principle to a continuing OSCE presence in Chechnya and the adjacent region, but the terms of reference for the mission have not been published. Based on statistical analysis of refugees' eyewitness reports, Edward Gelman, a member of Kovalev's staff, has estimated as many as 24,000 civilian deaths between November 25 and January 25 due to the war; he estimates that 19,000 of them were the result of bombing and shelling. Civilian deaths in all Chechnya during that period may have exceeded 30,000.In an interview on March 23, Col. General Kulikov reported that 1,253 Russian army soldiers had been killed and 3,563 wounded during the war up to that date; 132 Ministry of Interior troops had been killed and 876 wounded. In addition, an earlier report had acknowledged 400 Russian soldiers missing in action. Several sources have issued substantially higher estimates for Russian casualties -- Frederick Cuny, for one, believes more than 5,000 Russian soldiers have been killed. So far, no reliable figures on Chechen army casualties have been published.
James Collins, a US State Department official, in his testimony given to the US Helsinki Commission on January 27 cited estimates of 455,000 persons displaced by the fighting, of whom some 260,000 are in Chechnya proper, 130,000 in Ingushetia, 45,000 in Dagestan, and 20,000 elsewhere. The cost of reconstruction of housing, essential infrastructure, and industry has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000. Jonas Bernstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal (March 20) that Grozny's "city center now resembles Dresden 50 years ago, and the Russian government ministers who recently inspected the damage there say it is beyond repair." The city's infrastructure -- water, gas, and sewage lines -- has been severely damaged as well as the housing stock. The recent Russian offensive may have inflicted comparable damage on Argun and Shali.
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