Translated material
Costs
Mostly there were unjustified detentions, when innocent people had to spend several days in police stations. “A good friend of mine, a Chechen by nationality, a young, intelligent girl, was detained allegedly for “coarse obscene language in public places,” says Svetlana Gannushkina, chairman of the human rights committee “Civic Assistance”. “Moreover, the time of detention was indicated in the protocol in such a way that it appeared as if she was swearing right at the police station.” Drugs and ammunition were planted on many Chechens. Human rights activists know of a case where charges were brought against a young man, next to whom only on the fifth day of detention a bag of heroin was found on the floor. “As far as I know, there were no acquittals in cases of this kind at all,” says Svetlana Gannushkina. A similar fate befell, for example, the cousin of the wife of the current Chechen envoy to the Russian President. A relative of Mr. Beno, who was passing through Moscow, was charged under three articles of the Criminal Code, two of which are storage and transportation of drugs and firearms. “They simply threw in what they had at the moment,” says Mr. Beno. “Everything ended relatively well - the case was taken to court, they were sentenced to six months of suspended imprisonment - but for this they had to collect and pay 15 thousand dollars. I had to pay off often. The representative office of the republic is still collecting data on victims during measures to ensure the security of the city last fall; at least forty criminal cases have been opened, and in half of the cases the case ended with simply the transfer of two to three thousand dollars.”
According to Moscow human rights activists, during the “counter-terrorism operation” at least thirty thousand citizens were persecuted in one form or another. However, the Chechen representative office estimates the total number of victims more restrainedly than human rights activists - they put the figure at 800 people.
The old Maskhadov representative office of Chechnya in Moscow cited data on the death of 20 people as a result of beatings and ill-treatment by the police. The current representation confirms the fact of two deaths. There is currently no talk of any compensation from law enforcement agencies.
“There is nothing surprising in these murders,” says Svetlana Gannushkina. - They happen all the time, it doesn’t matter here whether they are Chechens or not. This way of behavior is simply a characteristic of our law enforcement agencies. They are used to working this way. At the same time, there are no consequences for the violators themselves either in the police or in the prosecutor’s office. In contacts with us, they admitted all the facts of arbitrariness that we brought to their attention. But not a single one was officially recognized.”