Desecration of the Dead

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers burned the bodies of the Chechens they had killed, cut off the ears of the dead, secretly buried bodies in unmarked graves and did not give them back to the families.

Russian servicemen killed detained Chechens and secretly buried the bodies near their positions, and such graves were often mined^[1]. The occupiers did not let relatives onto the grounds of their units, and families found the graves only when the unit had left^[1][2].

In captured villages, Russian soldiers threw the bodies of the Chechens they had killed into houses they had set on fire, or doused them with gasoline and set them alight^[3][4]. The occupiers cut off the ears of dead Chechens^[5][4].

Russian servicemen brought bodies in a "Ural" truck to the Karpinsky cemetery in the west of Grozny from the checkpoints and from the filtration camps to which the occupiers took detained Chechens. Gravediggers laid them in fresh pits, three to five in each^[2]. At the start of the war, the Russian army took some of the bodies to Rostov, a city in the south of Russia, to the refrigerator railcars of its 124th medical laboratory, and did not give them back to the families of the dead^[6][4].

On 17 December 1994, Russian soldiers in armored personnel carriers shot up a column of cars with refugees from Grozny near the border with Russian-controlled Ingushetia and killed ten people. The occupiers took the bodies away, and the Russian police in Ingushetia found only one of them^[1]. On 31 December 1994, the occupiers detained two young Chechens in the basement of a hospital in Grozny, where they were hiding from the shelling. The parents of one of them later collected his body from a morgue in Moscow and buried him at home, while the relatives of the other had still not found him by 2015^[7]. From December 1994 to May 1995, the occupiers detained 27 Chechens in Grozny and took them to the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, and by April 1996 their bodies were brought back from there. Those whom the Russian escort shot or threw out of the vehicles on the way to Mozdok were buried unidentified by villagers, and relatives later found them by descriptions of the bodies and clothes^[4].

On 28 January 1995, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) led two brothers, aged 18 and 21, under escort through their unit on Mayakovsky Street in Grozny, shot them and secretly buried them in the yard of a house on the grounds of the unit. On 2 April, when the unit had left, their father Khusein Khamidov found the grave from a neighbor's account, took the bodies out of the ground in the presence of a forensic doctor and buried his sons by his house^[1][4][8]. At the end of March 1995, criminal investigators from Moscow began opening the pits with bodies at the cemetery near the cannery in the Zavodskoy district of Grozny. Forensic doctors of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs recorded the cause of death as shooting, death by fire or knife wounds, and some of the bodies had no head^[2][4].

On 7 April 1995, the occupation troops stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. On 7 and 8 April, Russian servicemen went from house to house and killed Chechen civilians (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). The 1995 report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations says: "Numerous accounts by witnesses have been recorded of the deliberate burning by Russian servicemen of the bodies of dead residents." The Mission named 13 people whose bodies the occupiers had burned. On the evening of 7 April, Russian soldiers killed Ali Sugaipov, Emin Nadyrov, Khamzat Kharkharoyev and his son Akhmed, and on the morning of 8 April fellow villagers found their burned bodies in one yard^[3]. Russian tank crews wounded 62-year-old Dogu Tsatishayev, and soldiers shot him dead at point-blank range with an automatic rifle in house 93 on Sharipov Street, poured gasoline over the body and set it on fire^[3]. On 20 April, Tamara Mutiyeva from Samashki told observers of the Russian human rights organization "Memorial" that Russian servicemen had killed and burned her half-sister. Andrei Blinushov, one of the observers, recorded in his diary: "To this day the sister and mother of the murdered girl are collecting pieces of her bones in the ruins of the house"^[9].

On 9 May 1995, soldiers of the 503rd regiment of the Russian army unlawfully detained at a checkpoint Ayub Domayev, Aslambek Suleimanov and Shamkhan Tashukhadzhiyev from Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, and killed all three (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees"). Vladimir Yemelyanenko, a correspondent of the Moscow weekly Moskovskiye Novosti, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow on 21 February 1996 that the military did not let the relatives onto the grounds of the regiment and in answer to their questions "said that no such people had passed through here"^[2]. On 3 June, the 503rd regiment left its camp in a field near Shali, and a conscript soldier who had fled the regiment showed the families where the soldiers had buried the three Chechens. Near the camp of the reconnaissance company, at a depth of two meters, the relatives found the bodies of Ayub Domayev and Aslambek Suleimanov. In another place in the field they dug up the car in which the three Chechens had been traveling, crushed by tank tracks. On 6 June, the body of Shamkhan Tashukhadzhiyev was found at the cemetery on the outskirts of Shali^[1][2].

In September 1995, Chechen women from Grozny found by the fresh pits at the Karpinsky cemetery five green military shell boxes containing bones and ashes, and handed them over to the OSCE mission. According to the expert examination, one of the boxes contained the remains of people aged 20-23, burned, doused with sulfuric acid and broken into small pieces^[2]. In early October 1995, the Czech journalist Petra Procházková filmed at the Orthodox cemetery in Grozny pits with several dozen bodies, to which the occupiers brought new bodies at night in their vehicles, and reported this to the OSCE^[4].

At the end of February 1996, Russian servicemen killed the detained Sharip Batayev, a Chechen from Arshty, a village in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, and buried the body at a depth of 20 centimeters on a hillside below the trenches of the reconnaissance troops of the 693rd regiment of the Russian 58th Army. On 20 March, investigators from Ingushetia dug up the body, and on the same day it was buried according to Muslim custom^[4]. From 3 to 9 March 1996, Russian troops stormed Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and burned the mosque there, to which on 4 March villagers had brought the bodies of Chechens killed by the occupiers in order to bury them later^[10]. On 11 March, women from Sernovodsk, whom the occupiers had let home for a few hours, found seven burned bodies by the burned-down mosque^[4]. During the assault on Sernovodsk, the crews of Russian helicopters wounded an elderly Chechen with rockets at the resort near the village where refugees lived, and the wounded man died on the threshold of his room. The occupiers searched the resort, and after that only burned remains were found where the body had been^[4]. On 20 March 1996, Russian soldiers who had landed from a helicopter near a dairy farm by Nagornoye, a village next to Grozny, shot detained unarmed Chechens there: two according to Human Rights Watch, five according to the Chechen women's committee. The killers cut off the ears of the dead and slit their stomachs with a knife^[5][4]. On 12 May 1996, Russian troops captured Kharsenoy, a mountain village in the south of Ichkeria, and shot seven young Chechens from the village. Fellow villagers buried one of them, while the bodies of the other six the occupiers never gave back to the relatives^[4]. On 15 July 1996, in the northwestern suburb of Grozny, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs from two armored personnel carriers shot unarmed people in passenger cars. The occupiers set fire to the cars with the bodies, and cut off the ears of some of the dead^[11][1].

The 1997 report of Human Rights Watch says that from March 1995 to January 1997 the "Victims of War" society headed by Khusein Khamidov helped recover 926 bodies from mass graves in Ichkeria. Forensic doctors in Rostov established the names of 426 of them, and about 80 more mass graves had not been opened by January 1997^[5].

In June 1996, the prosecutor's office of the administration installed by Russia in Grozny handed over to Russian prosecutors 342 cases on crimes of the occupiers, among them on cut-off ears and on bodies thrown from helicopters. Russian prosecutors returned more than half of the cases for further investigation, and closed or did not consider the rest (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[5]. On 3 October 1996, a month after the peace agreements in Khasavyurt, Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria, signed a statement in Moscow. Under it, Russia undertook to open access to burial sites for examination and excavation at Ichkeria's first request^[12]. By mid-October 1996, Russian officials, contrary to the statement, were not letting the "Victims of War" society open the graves: they said they had no bodies, or demanded bribes^[5].

In December 1997, several dozen bodies of Chechens, wrapped in blankets, still lay in the refrigerator railcars of the 124th laboratory of the Russian army in Rostov. A delegation of Ichkeria came to Rostov and asked for them back, but the laboratory staff did not return a single body^[6]. In 2019, Alexander Cherkasov of "Memorial" reported that several years earlier about a hundred unidentified remains from the time of the war had been taken out of the refrigerators of the 124th laboratory: some were sent to the Chechen Republic, others were buried under numbers in cemeteries in Moscow^[13].

In 2014, Russian servicemen found in the Oktyabrsky district of Grozny a mass grave from the first war with the remains of more than 160 people and took them to Rostov for examination. According to the experts, apart from two Russian servicemen, those lying there were most likely civilian men, women and children. On 31 December 2016, the remains of 109 people from this grave were brought from Rostov to Grozny. Relatives identified two of them by genetic profiles and took them, while the other 107 were buried in two temporary mass graves at the cemetery near the village of Pobedinskoye outside Grozny, and the relatives received no lists of the dead^[14][15].