Chechnya continues to be plagued by abductions, torture, killings and other violations, a think tank said in a report published Monday, calling the scale of human rights violations there monstrous.
Despite the Kremlin's effort to portray the region, devastated by more than a decade of fighting between federal forces and separatist rebels as returning to normal, "nothing has really been normalized," said Tatiana Lokshina, head of Demos, a Moscow-based human rights think tank.
Some 3,000 to 5,000 people have been abducted since the start of the region's second post-Soviet war in 1999, mostly by federal forces or their local allies, Demos said in the 13-page report. Most abductions took place in Chechnya, but some in neighboring provinces such as Ingushetia.
The statistics were obtained by analyzing data provided by several human rights groups operating in Chechnya, Lokshina said. She contrasted the reported abuses with a rebuilding campaign that is transforming Chechnya's main cities.
"Yes, we can and we should be happy for the new freshly painted buildings and the clean streets and the fountains built in Grozny .... but despite all that the human rights situation there remains monstrous," Lokshina told The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Kozak, President Vladimir Putin's envoy to the part of southern Russia that includes Chechnya and neighboring provinces, acknowledged Monday that the region remains volatile and put much of the blame on corruption.
"The main factor destabilizing the situation in southern Russia today and containing economic growth is corruption," Kozak said at a meeting with scholars in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
"Nobody is concerned any longer about terrorist activity and crime levels -- everybody is afraid of extortion on the part of authorities, their prejudice, their bias," Kozak said.
But deadly violence persists in Chechnya and other parts of the poor, largely Muslim region known as the North Caucasus.
In Chechnya, three Defense Ministry troops on patrol in an eastern district were killed when they came under heavy fire from between eight and 10 militants, Chechen law enforcement officials said.
One of the militants later killed himself with a grenade blast that also fatally wounded another soldier, the Interior Ministry said. Troops were searching for the remainder of the group, it said.
In Dagestan, on the Caspian Sea adjacent to Chechnya, police and security agents clashed with gunmen holed up in a village early Monday, a law enforcement official said.
A group of two to four militants were believed to have entered Kosyakino from Chechnya, regional Interior Ministry spokeswoman Anzhela Martirosova said.
Fighting broke out before dawn when police and security agents confronted the gunmen and ordered them to surrender, she said. She initially said at least one gunman was killed, but later retracted that statement.
Source: AP
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