Authorities refuse to give relatives bodies of guerrillas killed in Chechnya By Ramzan Akhmadov
CHECHNYA – The practice of refusing to return the bodies of guerrillas killed in battle continues in Chechnya. The families of four guerrillas – Ruslan Seriyev, Viskhan Yedilbayev, Zelimkhan Shuipov and Lyoma Khamzalatov – who were killed late last week during an exchange of fire with law enforcers in Chechnya’s mountainous Shatoysky district are still unable to make arrangements for their burial.
"For several days now the relatives of Ruslan Seriyev and Vishan Yedilbayev have left no stone unturned in their efforts to persuade the heads of various police departments to return the young men’s bodies for burial according to Muslim custom. But these efforts have brought no result," a friend of the Seriyev family who lives in the Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny told Prague Watchdog’s correspondent. "At one moment they promise to return the bodies, then they refer the relatives to another office, then they issue threats, then they think up something else. In my opinion the family are simply being mocked."
"I don’t approve of the guerrillas’ actions, of course, but I condemn barbaric methods like the withholding of the bodies of the slain even more. That doesn’t correspond to any law – Muslim, Christian or other. Each person bears responsibility for his actions before God. For any parents, their son or daughter, who are called by the authorities militants, terrorists and so on, is above all their child. The son’s or daughter’s actions may be right or wrong, but no one has the right to deprive them of a humane burial," the man believes.
On February 15, after an attack on Russian soldiers in the Shatoysky district, government forces surrounded and killed four young men, residents of the city of Grozny and Chechnya’s Groznensky district. One of those killed – 18-year-old Ruslan Seriyev – was named by the law enforcers as the “emir” of the Itum-Kalinsky, Shatoysky and Sharoysky districts, located in southern Chechnya. Some people believe that this practice is almost invariably employed by the security forces.
"You see, if you liquidate a few guerrillas and then report it, it's just a routine special operation. But if you announce that you’ve destroyed an ‘emir ‘, a ‘sector commander ‘, a ’group commander’ or a ‘front commander’, a ‘close assistant of Dokku Umarov', a ‘North Caucasus Al-Qaeda representative’, or, if the worst comes to worst, an ‘Arab mercenary’, it changes things entirely. In such a case the representatives of our valiant ‘authorities’ can count on obtaining new titles, awards or promotions. That's why there are these constant reports of ‘emirs’ being killed in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan and elsewhere. The number of these slain ‘emirs’ is probably by now several times higher than the number of ordinary guerrillas," says a member of a local human rights organization who wishes to remain anonymous.
After the Dubrovka theatre crisis in Moscow in 2002, when a group headed by Movsar Barayev took many civilians hostage, Russia passed a federal law which stipulated that the bodies of guerrillas involved in acts of terrorism were not to be returned to their relatives for burial. As expected, the new law has been interpreted and used by the Russian authorities in any way they please. The Russian authorities even refused to give up the body of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who was democratically elected in 1997 but was killed during a special operation by the Russian special services, even though many people thought there were no grounds for accusing him of terrorism.
Other former well-known Chechen leaders whose bodies were buried in accordance with this law are the field commanders Khamzat Gelayev, killed in Dagestan in 2004, Shamil Basayev (killed in Ingushetia in the summer of 2006), and Salman Raduyev, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in a Russian prison under strange circumstances in December 2002. (Translation by DM) (T)
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