Details of kidnappings of Chechen residents made public on Day of Victims of Enforced Disappearances

Relatives of three young people kidnapped in Chechnya during the second Chechen military campaign claim they are still not aware of their fate. According to various sources, from 4000 to 7700 people are listed as missing in the republic, reports the “Legal Initiative”* in its material, timed to coincide with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance.

The “Legal Initiative”* project produced a multimedia longread on the topic of violent detentions, which, according to the material, was the most common form of human rights violations during the second Chechen military campaign. The material “Missing in Detention. Stories of People Kidnapped during the Second Chechen War (1999-2009)” has been posted on the “Takie Dela” website today.

According to the material, the estimates of the number of missing people vary. So, the list of the Centre for Civil Assistance to the Search for Missing Persons in Northern Caucasus under the General Lebed Peacekeeping Mission contains 7770 names, while according to the statistics from the office of the Ombudsman in Chechnya, about 4000 people disappeared during the second Chechen military campaign.

The website of the project contains stories of the relatives of three young people kidnapped in Chechnya in 1999-2009.

One of the stories reports about student Imran Djambekov, who was detained by soldiers in 2002 in his own house in the village of Goity.

Since then, relatives have not received any information about Imran. “I cannot count the number of identifications of dead bodies and remains in which I participated. [...] After all the information that we have absorbed about what was happening then and what they were doing with them, I hope that he is not alive. I do not wish him such a life as spending almost 20 years somewhere in a basement or behind bars. Although I want, I really want to see my son,” said Zainap, a mother of Imran Djambekov, as quoted in the material made public by the project.

* The organization is included by the Russian Ministry of Justice (MoJ) in the register of NCOs-foreign agents.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on August 30, 2021 at 01:42 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.