Chechnya was a failing state in the interim period between the first Chechen war (1994–96) and the beginning of the subsequent conflict in September 1999. When Russia’s armed forces entered the small republic for a second time that autumn, they were penetrating a politically fractured and economically deprived region, struggling to overcome its isolation. While the Chechen separatist movement had, for all intents and purposes, won the first Chechen war and elected a new president, Aslan Maskhadov, the question of Chechnya’s status within the Russian Federation was still unresolved. The Khasaviurt Peace Treaty signed by Lieutenant General Alexander Lebed...

THE ATMOSPHERE OF FEAR manifested by the winter bombing campaign took on a different shape beginning in the spring of 2000. Chechen civilians inherited a new stage of warfare, embodied in the ubiquitouszachistka,or sweep operation. Officially deployed to root out separatist forces in population centers—whether through killing or detainment—thezachistkaand its side effects soon displayed all the traits of a collective punishment campaign.¹ The sweeps in the village of Alkhan-Iurt in December 1999 and in the Staropromyslovskii district of Grozny over December 1999–January 2000 illustrated how punitive and violent the sweep operation could be....

THE VISUAL HALLMARKS OF THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR manifested in thezachistka—the sealed villages, trucks laden with looted property, and temporary filtration points on the outskirts of villages—began to diminish by the summer of 2003. Under growing pressure from the Council of Europe, the Russian government was forced to ease the large-scale sweep operations in an effort to rein in the impunity. The worst appeared to be over. But this picture of growing calm was highly misleading. Large-scale sweep operations were gradually replaced by an increasing number of targeted sweeps (adresnaia zachistka), nighttime abductions, and disappearances.¹ As one...

THE BOMBING CAMPAIGN over the winter of 1999–2000 resulted in the displacement of more than 250,000¹ Chechen civilians across the border into neighboring Ingushetia. This mass exodus quickly brought into question the verynatureof the Russian government’s “antiterrorist operation” inside Chechnya. Claims of precision strikes directed at terrorist bases were undermined by the presence of thousands of civilians, in cars, in trucks, and on foot, waiting anxiously near the village of Assinovskaia. The displaced population of Chechnya soon became the most important source of information for journalists and human rights monitors, who were prohibited from entering the region...

RETALIATION FOR THE AGGRESSION imposed on Chechnya by the Russian armed forces took various forms and the Chechen separatist movement was far from innocent in its response. Its acts of revenge were at once provocative, desperate, dramatic, and cruel. Such acts evoke little sympathy and can only be condemned as part of a broader landscape of violence bereft of the crucial principle of distinction. By 2002,currentswithin the movement had abandoned the self-image of a national separatist movement and began to adopt an increasingly strong Islamist discourse couched in the language ofjihads,caliphates,jamaats,andamirs.¹ Whether this...

CIVIL SOCIETY IN MOSCOW and Chechnya faced a challenge of a different order when the second Chechen war broke out in September 1999. Without the mass public support that had defined their protests during the first war, Russia’s burgeoning civil society encountered the dark side of the growing authoritarian regime. The first war had been shaped by protests on the street in Moscow and a civil society that sought to defend its nascent freedoms from the dominance of the state. The reasons for this desperate response were clear. Three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian public...

RELATIONS BETWEEN WESTERN EUROPE, the United States, and Russia did not fundamentally change over the course of the second Chechen war. There were many platitudes and forthright condemnations regarding the indiscriminate violence being used by the Russian armed forces and the retaliation by the Chechen separatist movement. Yet no dramatic measures were ever taken. There were several developments that require elucidation here, however. Not only for the sake of amplifying the integrity of the actors behind them but for what they exemplify about the Russian government’s engagement with international human rights bodies, and about its return to and perpetration of...

CHECHEN CIVILIANS HAVE FACED a distinct pattern of discrimination in the Russian legal system. The explanatory framework forhowandwhythis is taking place is complex and must be sought on multiple levels. The picture of a systemic failure to prosecute perpetrators of massive human rights violations, however, is clear. Every case before the European Court of Human Rights bears new evidence that the Russian authorities, whether local or federal, military or civilian prosecutors, were opening criminal cases, then “playing ping-pong” with investigation files, shifting them back and forth between various officers from the Achkhoi-Martan District Prosecutor’s Office to...