Prev Discussion  Next Discussion  Send Replies to My Inbox
Reply
    
Recommend      Message 1 of 1 in Discussion
From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 4/19/2005 12:59 PM
18.04.2005
Licensed to kill?

In January 2002, Russian soldiers killed six innocent Chechen civilians. During their trial for murder, they said they were just following orders — and were acquitted by the jury. But now a retrial has been ordered which could result in members of the Russian government being tried for crimes against humanity.

Dusk had begun to hang heavy over the remote Chechen village of Dai, when the radio crackled into life. «You have six 200s," the officer told Captain Eduard Ulman from Russia’s elite special forces. Ulman asked the officer to repeat himself, holding the receiver out for his colleagues to hear. «You have six 200s," the voice allegedly intoned.

The phrase — military slang for «six corpses» — spelled death for the Chechen civilians cowering in the farmyard ditch below Ulman’s men. The unit had held them there in the snow since mistakenly shooting up their bus when it approached their checkpoint that morning, on January 11 2002. Ulman’s men calmly handed out ammunition among themselves and then told the civilians to walk out of the ditch towards the mountainous road. Then they opened fire. A final shot to each head ensured Ulman soon had «six 200s», as apparently ordered.

The trial of Ulman and three colleagues for premeditated murder in 2003 was supposed to be a rare example of Russia holding its troops to account for their numerous and mostly unchronicled excesses in the war-torn republic. But three years later, Ulman’s unit remains unpunished. The case has instead become the focus of critics of the Putin administration, recently accused of «crimes against humanity» by Human Rights Watch because of their apparent complicity and indifference towards ongoing brutality in Chechnya.

Ulman and his colleagues confessed to the murders, but took the Nuremberg defence of saying they were following orders, and were subsequently set free by a Russian jury. The military supreme court overturned the verdict in August on a technicality and this week their retrial continues, again in the military town of Rostov-on-Don. For many it has become a test case for both the Russian government and — now with the recent introduction of jury trials — the Russian people, as to whether they think the Chechen people, dogged by two wars with Moscow in a decade, have the same right to life as ethnic Russians.

Oleg Orlov, from the human rights group Memorial, says: «This is an unprecedented case. The first jury thought Russian soldiers are «ours guys» and the Chechens are the enemy. [The case] will either show that Russian soldiers can kill peaceful citizens and go unpunished if they say they were following criminal orders, or show that it is not a crime to refuse a criminal order."

Blood was running hot that January morning in 2002. Unit 513 of Russia’s super-elite GRU (Chief Intelligence Directorate) had been scrambled in pursuit of Chechen rebel leader Khattab and 15 of his men. The Saudi-Jordanian mercenary — before his death later that year from a poisoned letter — was one of Russia’s most wanted men. He was moving slowly through Chechnya’s rugged hills after being wounded in a recent clash. Ulman’s 12-strong unit was one of 10 being coordinated from the hilltops by their commanders, and was ordered to set up a checkpoint on the road into Dai.

The bus that approached the makeshift checkpoint, according to Ulman’s lawyers, looked like a military vehicle. Ulman rushed towards it, witnesses told the court, waving his arms at it to stop. The defence claims he then saw what appeared to be the barrel of a gun emerging from a door at the back of the bus. He sprayed the side of the bus with gunfire, killing its oldest passenger Said-Magomed Alaskhanov, the director of the village’s school. Two others were wounded, one of them, a pregnant mother of seven, Zaynap Dzhavat’hanova, who apparently died of her wounds.

A brief check of the passengers’ documents revealed to Ulman and his men their error. They led the civilians into a nearby farm, and Ulman radioed in. «I have one frozen and two warm," he said, slang for one dead and two wounded, and allegedly asked for a helicopter to evacuate the wounded. Yet he was simply told to await further orders. Ulman’s unit bandaged the wounded, clearly reeling from their blunder.

During the day, the unit held their position, but their mistake attracted attention. Local military officer Major Nevmerzhitsky passed the checkpoint, noticing Ulman’s men were interrogating the bus passengers.

As dusk fell, Ulman radioed in to Major Alexei Perelevsky, who was directing the operation to catch Khattab from a nearby hilltop. It was then, claimed Ulman’s defence counsel, that Perelevsky gave the order to execute the five survivors.

The defence for Ulman, and two of the other accused, Lieutenant Alexander Kalagansky and Sergeant Vladimir Voevodin, has at times referred to the secretive operations code for Russia’s special forces in which they claim soldiers are trained to leave no trace of their actions behind them, even if that includes killing witnesses. Yet Perelevsky’s alleged order was, according to Ulman’s defence, strange enough for Ulman to ask for clarification. Ulman claimed he asked: «So what, you want me to wipe them out?» Perelevsky, who is also on trial alongside Ulman, allegedly replied: «Yeah, wipe them out." Ulman further claims Perelevsky said, «Good lad. Everything was done properly; go rest», when he learned the order had been fulfilled.

Ulman had his men prepare the civilians, telling them they were going to be released and that they should walk back to the bus. They loaded a machine gun and a pistol. One of the unit refused to help and another ran away.

It was then they opened fire, using a special-issue silenced machine gun. The deputy director of the local school Abdul-Wahhab Satabayev, forester Shakhban Bahayev and the bus’s driver, Hamzat Tuburov, were killed, but young villager Magomed Musayev fled into the woods but died later from loss of blood.

The bodies were dragged to the bus and stripped of the bandages Ulman’s unit had given them. The prosecution claims Ulman initially hoped to make it look as though the bus had hit a landmine. They tried to blow up the vehicle and set fire to the corpses. The relatives of the six dead say the bodies were so badly damaged they were returned for burial in «small packets», not coffins.

Soon afterwards, Major Nevmerzhitsky passed again. He called in prosecutors who, according to Tikhomirova, did an «excellent» job collating evidence. In preparation for the trial, 36 hours of video evidence from the nine other troops there were taken. Radio operators have confirmed the orders relayed from Perelevsky to Ulman. It seemed an open and shut case.

Yet in April last year, the lengthy trial collapsed when a jury acquitted all four men. The prosecution blamed the composition of the jury, still a novel juridical concept in Russia, only introduced in 1994 and not expected to be widespread until 2007. Half the jurors were middle-aged women from the town of Rostov-on-Don, a military hub where mothers often grieve for their sons lost to the conflict with the «barbaric» Chechen people. Tikhomirova said: «They think the Chechens at day are peaceful and at night become militants. This is a very widely held opinion. It’s the only way I can explain why seven of the jury applauded when they announced a not-guilty verdict."

The new trial jury has been drawn from across southern Russia, although Tikhomirova still fears they may sympathise with the soldiers and return the same verdict in the next fortnight. Such a verdict would fuel claims by groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) that, because Moscow now admits the existence of abuses in Chechnya and appears to do little to prevent them, it is in fact complicit in them. HRW last month said this amounted to a «crime against humanity», a drastic claim that could, if recognised, legally see any member of the Putin administration stand trial in a foreign state. HRW has said it will push the US and German governments to take action, increasing the significance of trials such as Ulman’s.

But for Koka Tuburova, 49, the bus driver’s sister, only this culture of impunity is to blame. She says: «Federal troops usually work according to their own initiatives, knowing they will be unanswerable for their actions."

Nick Paton Walsh / The Guardian
http://www.chechentimes.org/en/press/?id=28179