In early August few knew that only two months hence the Russian government would again send the army into Chechnya. It was clear, however, that relations with that republic and, more importantly, within Russian society itself could hardly he described as normal.
25 July 1999
Yury Plotnikov has just returned from his latest expedition to Chechnya and, alas, he has come back empty-handed. He was shown four corpses, dug out of the scorching hot Chechen soil near Grozny but not one was handed over. Instead the local committee for locating those missing in action (a body set up by the Chechen government) added these wretched bodies to eleven other captive corpses dug up some time earlier, and then, before Yury's eyes, locked them all away. We forbid you to take these exhumed corpses out of Chechnya, they told him: if you meet some of our conditions, then maybe we'll think again.
Plotnikov is a member of the working group set up by President Yeltsin for the exhumation and identification of soldiers killed during the Chechen war (1994–6). All he brought back to Moscow this time was the news that 15 bodies, identified as Russian soldiers, are being deliberately held hostage in Chechnya. Again we are forced to bargain, and this time it is the most outrageous of all the trades known to mankind, when the goods up for sale are a pile of decomposing human remains. What is going on here? Why do the Chechens behave with such insolence? Are they doing so of their own accord . . . or perhaps there are other reasons?
"To whom does a dead body belong?" Ask any normal person and they will answer without a moment's thought: "To the relatives, of course, and no one else."
Try as he might, Colonel Slipchenko could not clearly formulate an answer to this question. He is the general director of Military Commemoration Ltd; not long ago he was a colonel serving on the General Staff. Today the remains of more than 400 soldiers and officers are still lying in unmarked graves somewhere in Chechnya, and several hundred other corpses are awaiting identification at Forensic Laboratory No 124 in Rostov-on-Don, but Slipchenko, a military man himself, finds nothing particularly shocking about this.
"So they're lying there! We must work effectively, and not rush things. It'll take many years yet to finish the job," Slipchenko assured us.
He quickly changed the subject and began to talk about the American experience. Even today, he believed, not all the US participants in the Vietnam War had been found and identified. As a businessman, though, Slipchenko's odd attitude is entirely understandable. The longer the process of exhumation continues, the more profit there is for him. He earns his money from the exhumation and identification of those officers and soldiers of the Russian armed forces who died in Chechnya; his firm, Military Commemoration Ltd, where this interview took place, is located in the same Moscow building as the Chief Military Prosecutor's office. It is, to be sure, a very curious kind of commercial enterprise. And there is, of course, nothing accidental about their proximity. The Military Prosecutor's Office, as we all know, bears part of the responsibility for locating the unmarked graves. It should be doing this job during working hours and is paid to do so. But it cannot always find the time.
Military Commemoration Ltd
Military Commemoration Ltd was formed in 1997 by the Ministry of Defence to organise the burial of servicemen and women killed in action. Formerly the Armed Forces Statute laid this responsibility on the military unit in which the individual had served. Now the task has been entrusted to these new businessmen and they make money from the location, transfer and burial of such remains.
Naturally, profit is the purpose of all business. In this case, however, it has come into blatant conflict with common sense and the Armed Forces Statute. The money for each buried serviceman comes from the budget, and the total sum allocated to the nation's defence is, in turn, confirmed each year in closed session by the Duma. Who are the deputies trying so hard to help with these funds? A private company, it would seem.
The state allocates funds for exhumation and identification and these are then transferred to the accounts of Slipchenko, among others. That was the decision of the Ministry of Defence. These sums, if you remember, were provided only after extraordinary efforts on the part of various non-governmental organisations, above all the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers. Thanks to them this item of expenditure was specified in the 1999 Budget.
The exhumation work is based on Government decree No 1052, dated 20 August 1998, and should follow an action plan approved by Deputy Prime Minister, Gennady Kulik. The plan obliges the Ministry of Defence to identify, receive, conserve and treat the remains, to ensure their despatch and burial and, finally, to erect memorials. Article 103 of the 1999 Budget, Appendix 23, details the financing of this work. The full title of the article reads: "The Search for those Missing and Killed in Action, the Exhumation and Identification of the Deceased, the Official Publication of Lists and Informing of Parents, and the Burial of those Identified." The total sum available is 109,654,600 roubles [almost $4 million, Tr.]. This was intended for the excavation of approximately 500 burial sites and the identification of more than a thousand bodies.
In a poor country where pensioners go hungry and thousands of children are under-fed, 109 million roubles is no mean sum, and it demands the most careful and scrupulous accounting. We asked Slipchenko about this:
Q. Sergei Iosifovich, during the period that you have been receiving budget funds has your company buried a single one of the soldiers whose remains were exhumed in Chechnya?
A. No.
Q. So what have you been doing with those funds?
A. We are in possession of the entire database for soldiers missing in action [soldiers lying in unmarked graves are officially considered "missing in action", AP]. We drew up the lists ourselves, after securing the agreement of executive agencies: in 1998 this was the presidential staff and in 1999, the Ministry of Defence.
Q. Could we take a look at your database?
A. No, it's a commercial secret.
Q. And how much money have you and your company already received from the budget without even beginning to do your job?
A. That's also a commercial secret.
As well as creating this database, Military Commemoration Ltd is helping to construct an enormous cold storage facility, capable of holding up to 500 bodies, at Laboratory No 124 in Rostov-on-Don. This work is also financed from budget funds. We ask Slipchenko: Whatever was the need for such an enormous cold store? Wouldn't it be better to speed up the identification and burial of those being found? His answer is firm and categorical: "The more morgues we have, the better." In other words, the dead soldiers of the future guarantee that his company will never go out of business.
The number of war casualties used to be a military secret, now it's a commercial secret. The strictly confidential information about those missing, presumed dead, is today an entirely tradeable commodity: it can be sold, when and to whom you wish. One of the Chechen conditions for the release of the exhumed bodies, according to information obtained by the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, is that Moscow gives them a copy of the database. Why, you wonder? In order to get the addresses and telephone numbers of those families who are still waiting, perhaps, and who would gladly give any amount of money in return for supposed sightings of their captive son?
"And just what business is it of yours, how we're spending this money?" The man at the Ministry of Defence, Sergei Aksyonov, is furious. He heads the special department for exhumation and identification work.
It proves quite pointless to ask him for detailed information. How is an exhumation actually carried out? As of today how many bodies have been found? In what Chechen village is a grave being opened at the moment? Although his department only came into being (and is now successfully expanding) thanks to those same 109 million budgeted roubles, and despite the fact that exhumation is his direct responsibility, he has no idea.
So what is his department actually doing? It's engaged in the usual pen-pushing and intrigues, allocating resources and creating new jobs – acquiring fax machines, telephones, photocopiers and so on. Aksyonov's staff cannot offer society any direct evidence of their activities. But we know what their department's only job should be: the dignified burial, with military honours, of the identified bodies of officers and soldiers.
In fact, the figures are as follows.
Since the beginning of the year, only 21 bodies of the estimated 500 servicemen and 1,500 civilians buried in Chechnya have been exhumed (figures as of I July 1999). Of those 21, not one has been buried. For 1998 and 1999 a total of 108 bodies have been exhumed, but only nine have been transferred from Grozny to the Central Laboratory for Identification Studies (Laboratory No 124) in Rostov-on-Don.
One telling detail: engrossed in its own reorganisation and expansion, the Ministry of Defence has not met its minimal obligation. In the budget allocation it was clearly specified that funds should be set aside for the publication of official lists, confirmed and authorised by the State, of those conscript soldiers who died in Chechnya. This is of the utmost importance. Yet Aksyonov did not even manage to make public these lists. "The Ministry has got its hands on most of this money and is simply spending it on itself," concludes Valentina Melnikova, a leading member of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers who also sits on the presidential human rights commission. In a joint letter to the President, the Prime Minister and the country's Security Council, the Soldiers' Mothers appealed for help: "The Ministry of Defence is continuing to spend budget funds for purposes other than those intended."
"Cynical Time-Wasting"
In Colonel Konstantin Golumbovsky's opinion all unidentified soldiers could be buried within a year. He is Yury Plotnikov's superior and heads the presidential working group on the exhumation and identification of soldiers killed in action. Much must be changed and very rapidly, however, if this aim is to be achieved, he says. A major reason for the present cynical time-wasting and misuse of funds, Golumbovsky believes, is the attitude of Vladimir Shcherbakov, the head of Laboratory 124:
"Shcherbakov should spend day and night doing nothing but identification work. I am deeply convinced that now is not the time to write dissertations, conduct scientific research, engage in administrative reorganisation or pursue personal ambition. That can all come later. Now we should only be identifying bodies and burying them! And if there is a chance to identify every single one within a year, then you must postpone these other activities. Yet what is happening is quite different.
"The system of identification proceeds as follows. First, they identify those who can be recognised from their external appearance; then dental records, bones and fingerprints are used; the next category require more specialised methods. Finally there are remains that can be identified only by using a sequencer, a special piece of equipment for delicate genetic investigations. While Shcherbakov was lobbying in Moscow to reorganise the laboratory and purchase a sequencer, 25 of the bodies in Laboratory 124 degraded from the category of those suitable for identification to those that are unsuitable. Twenty-five bodies!
"That means that 25 families and 25 mothers cannot bury their sons. Now they have been told they must wait, indefinitely, until a decision has been taken about the sequencer. I have the unpleasant feeling that this may have been deliberate. When the other bodies can no longer be identified by methods now available in our country then Shcherbakov will get his sequencer. There's a word for this kind of behaviour: blackmail.
"Until recently no one gave Shcherbakov more consistent support than the members of our group. But then we found out that even the most basic physical measurements and features were not being recorded. And at the same time Shcherbakov was busy trying to get Laboratory 124 transferred from the North Caucasus Military District to the direct control of the Ministry of Defence in Moscow. I simply cannot understand it. Shcherbakov now has almost 70 permanent members of staff, but only seven of them are engaged in identification. What can be the justification? If you have 70 people under your command and your main task is to identify bodies then, in my view, all of them should be involved. If you can't manage in the course of a year to alleviate the suffering of those mothers then you should report to your superiors and say: 'I can only identify 25 bodies with my present laboratory, please help me.' The State could give you the two sequencers it already possesses, and then you'll get on with the job. "That's what someone who is really concerned about his work should do. If Shcherbakov is now merely career-building then this is amoral behaviour. Our hospitals are starved of funds, and children in children's homes don't have enough to eat, so if the country has provided money for identification then you must get on with it and do the job! Take the lead – don't use the publicity to create a laboratory for yourself that will be the best-equipped in the world."
Unfortunately, Colonel Golumbovsky's view is supported by certain documents that have come into our possession. For example, a "Note on the Receipt and Use of Budget Funds Assigned for Specific Purposes" provided by Military Commemoration Ltd. The financial details here are quite involved: the Ministry receives the funds for a defined purpose, hands them on to Military Commemoration Ltd which, in turn, transfers them to Laboratory 124. Every conceivable item has been bought for the laboratory, as the note confirms: the usual chairs, stools and lamps, a binding machine, and computers have been purchased; a construction contract has been paid, and a security system, safes, and a digital camera, have all been acquired. Only one of the 13 listed items of expenditure is something of direct use: the chemical reagents necessary for identification tests.
The other document is even more revealing. This is the laboratory's plan of immediate expenditure, as approved by Shcherbakov. Of the budget funds at his disposal, the head of the laboratory intends to spend 10 million roubles on scientific research, 11 million on new buildings and only I million on identification. Yet the entire sum was allocated for this last activity. At this rate the laboratory and its staff will be fulfilling their obligations to the families of the bereaved for many years to come.
The fate of those abandoned soldiers' graves in Chechnya remains unclear, but three years after the war ended this situation continues to pay dividends for the generals. The more unidentified corpses, the better. The war itself was a disgrace. How much more disgraceful it is to halt the exhumations for commercial reasons.
And that is one reason why the Chechen side behaves so insolently. You only respect those who respect themselves. The Chechens look at us, and they see a demonstration of the most fantastic cynicism at the highest level. We were the first to trade and barter human remains. We are no worse and no better than they are: the Chechens are merely playing along with the Ministry of Defence.
Ultimately everything we see today goes back to our total failure to regulate and define relations between the armed forces and civilians. We still do not have basic medical cards for all of our citizens. We don't even possess a database of identification samples for people in high-risk occupations. Nowhere do those sent on dangerous missions (to Chechnya, for instance) leave biological samples, physical measurements, fingerprints or a single drop of blood before they go. Had that elementary work been undertaken at the outset, our present financial schizophrenia would have been impossible. Only once was there a display of enlightenment. In the very last days before our forces were sent to Kosovo the main military-medical directorate and Konstantin Golumbovsky's group made enormous efforts to ensure that a doctor accompanied the troops. There, in Kosovo, and for the sake of experiment, he would begin to collect those crucial samples (albeit on a semi-legal and voluntary basis). Not one NATO officer or soldier crosses into that unsettled region without giving such samples.
Perhaps things will be better in the future. But that doesn't help Yury Plotnikov who, once again, must find something to say to families who have now been waiting for several years for their sons' remains to return home. Again he must disappoint them, and bear responsibility for the entire State. I have a suggestion. All involved in the division of budget funds should, for the good of their souls, meet one of these mothers at least once a week. If they were obliged to look them in the eye, answer their questions, and say something in their own justification, that would be a great help. They would stop imagining that they could avoid having to answer for themselves.
MOSCOW
*
That was how things were presented in Moscow. A month later, when the fighting in Daghestan was just beginning, Anna Politkovskaya went to Rostov-on-Don to see Laboratory 124 with her own eyes. The situation she found there was rather different.