Oral intervention on item 11 "civil and political rights including the questions of: torture and detention, disappearances and summary executions, freedom of expression, independence of the judiciary, administration of justice, 4impunity, religious intolerance, states of emergencies, conscientious objection to military service"

Delivered by Omar Khanbiev
Genève, le 5 avril 2001

Mr. President

I have the honor to take the floor on behalf of the Transnational Radical Party. I am one of the physicians that have worked in Grozny during the bombing occurred at the end of the resistance of the town. On 2 February 2000, together with 18 members of our medical staff and 75 wounded, I was arrested in the Alkhan-Kala municipality. The hospital was bombed. In the night between 2 and 3 February, we were taken to Tolstoï-Iourt. After having been beaten and mistreated, we were thrown into a deposit, where six of our wounded died because of the beating.

It is difficult for me to speak about this. I will only say that those were the most difficult hours of my life: the cruelty and inhumanity towards wounded defenseless people has shocked me. I am haunted by the terrible screams of those people wounded by the explosions of landmines that destroyed their hands and feet. I still see their faces transfigured by the pain they were suffering. During an interrogatory, when I expressed my indignation to one of the officers he replied: "you can be a physician, you can be God himself, that does not change a single thing. You are a Chechen and we can kill you".

For three weeks we lived our hell in a filtration camp. Only a sick spirit can be capable of inventing those types of tortures and humiliation that are carried out there. After that period, I spent eight months hidden in a little village in the mountains, without papers - they did not give them back to me when they released me from the camp. I treated the wounded until I also fell ill as a consequence of the tortures suffered in the filtration camp. As of today, there are more than 800 between filtration camps and filtration points in Chechnya. The most known is the one of Chernokozovo, which has now become a "Potemkine" camp, the real camps have been moved more inside Chechnya. They are run by the forces of the ministry of interior, security and the army - all places were people taken in the rastrellations are tortured or killed. If a ransom is not paid within 3 or 4 days the detained disappear without traces. Those who are lucky to remain alive are sent, without investigations nor trials, from one prison to another all over Russia or are kept at Chernokozovo to be "sold". Those who do not find parent-buyers, can start the tour all over again. I myself, helped the relatives of 2 members of our medical staff to buy back their family members from Chernokozovo. These cruelties, these tortures to push the buying of prisoners, constitute a mechanism, a system established by the Russian forces and structures for their own enrichment and to destroy the Chechen population.

The result of this system: over 20,000 people disappeared without trace and almost the same number are currently detained in the "filtration" centers. The bodies recently discovered at Khankala constitute only a little part of the activities carried out by the Russian army in Chechnya. One day the rest will be discovered.

The decision by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which on 25 January granted back voting rights to the Russian delegation, has been perceived by the Russian military as the mere acknowledgment of the destruction of the Chechen population. Military leaders cynically declare to their victims that Europe gave them the right to kill. Summary executions and disappearances have increased as have refugees. This is why the inhabitants of Chechnya are asking not to send visitors under Russian control that once there, issue irresponsible declarations on the improvements of the situation in Chechnya.

According to some estimates of the Chechen Ministry of Health, as of august 2000, 87,000 people have been killed and 200,000 wounded; over 30 % of the population has been displaced and 90 % of medical institutions destroyed.

This is the result of a war that is neither anti-terrorist, nor religious, but colonial, in which there is a systematic use, against a small Republic, of an immense military force accumulated by an ex-super power to rival NATO. Almost all forms of weapons are employed: I have treated wounds of ground to ground missiles, as well as grad, ouragan, burratino, skelet, and bombs with a depression and fragmentation effects; but also landmines and chemical bombs containing neuroparalyzing effects. I have reasons to believe that there are preparations to use bacteriological weapons too.

In this tragic situation of my people, where humanitarian medical organizations that independently work have been forced to stop their activities in Chechnya, where Human Rights organizations are paralyzed, where democratic leaders show their flexibility towards the Kremlin to have its gas, I can only call on the international community to assist those who are still alive in Chechnya and those who are displaced abroad with some medical assistance.

This humanitarian help is fundamental, but it can only be of little use if this catastrophe is not stopped at its source. To speak the language of physicians, the United Nations should play a therapeutic role, to treat the disease and not its symptoms that continue to progress. For all these reasons it is indispensable for the UN to:

open a serious negotiation process, monitored by intermediaries, between Russian authorities and the legally elected President of the Chechen Republic Aslan Maskhadov for a political solution of the conflict.
Send a special rapporteur to asses the massive violations of human rights in Chechnya.

I trust your wisdom. I hope that you will listen to a person that knows the situation for having lived it personally from the inside.

I would like to end my intervention with a sad and unfortunate announcement: yesterday, Dimistry Neverowsky, a member of the Transnational Radical Party died under unclear circumstances. Neverowsky refused to take part in the regime of terror against the Chechen people and decided to go to jail to defend his ideals, we cherish his memory and the one of people like him.

I thank you.