Shortly after a bomb derailed a Moscow-St Petersburg express train on Monday night injuring 60 people, the Director of Russia's Federal Security Service, Nikolay Patrushev, was quick to announce a crackdown on terrorists in the Caucasus.
What worries many is the form this crackdown will take. The actions of Russia's military in the Caucasus are already lawless and shambolic. Masked and often drunken soldiers snatch villagers from their homes in unmarked cars in the dead of night.
The soldiers know they act with impunity and human rights abuses including rape, murder and torture are endemic in the region. Even children and old people are abducted. There have been 5,000 abductions since August 1999.
It is dangerous work documenting these human rights abuses. One of the few people who are brave enough to do it is Lidia Yusupova, a |
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gavin knight talks to a human rights lawyer determined to record Russian crimes in the Caucasus |
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lawyer and human rights campaigner who directs the Grozny office of Memorial, one of the last NGOs still operating in Chechnya. Yusupova (left) is suspicious when I call her. Last year, after she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she received death threats by phone.
"In Russia today you have no right to be a human being," she tells me. "No right to live, tell the truth, plead for justice. You only have the right to be a slave. When power is used for self-interest it is not legally a state, it is just an organisation of criminals."
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has made 13 rulings against the Russian government on Chechen cases. In July 2007 the ECHR ordered the Russian government to pay €143,000 to the villagers of Novy Alde for an atrocity carried out in February 2000, where 56 people were killed.
One claimant, Malika Labazanova, 52, was
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The truth can be fatal in Putinland
One down, 62 to go...
Press freedom on trial in Russia
