ABSTRACT
On 11 December, 1994, Russian Federation forces intervened in Chechnya to ‘restore the constitutional order … by all available means’. Two years later, the results have proved devastating: the main cities have been razed, most of the villages bombed, countless homes wrecked or pillaged; tens of thousands of civilians are dead and thousands of men are missing or have been killed in mop-up operations or filtration camps. In the course of months, this simple policing operation had turned into a quagmire for federal troops and a huge sacrifice for the civilian population. This conflict, which caused over 50,000 deaths and provoked the flight of hundreds of thousands of people, has been marked by flagrant and systematic violations of international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeted, the civilian population has been forced to suffer indiscriminate and overwhelming bombardments. The situation has been made even worse by the fact that humanitarian organisations have been severely curbed in their activities and prevented from bringing assistance to civilians caught up in fighting and shelling. This pitiless war, laden with portentous consequences for the future of democracy in Russia, also tragically reveals the complacence of western democracies in the face of massive human rights violations.
