COMMENT :: General Vladimir Shamanov, as mentioned in this article on Russian POWs and MIAs, is the Co-Chair of thhe US-Russia Joint Commission.
MISSING AND FORGOTTEN
PRACTICALLY NO ONE IS SEARCHING FOR SERVICEMEN REPORTED MISSING IN CHECHNYA
Vladimir Mukhin
The military defies the presidential decree on searching for missing servicemen.
The Russian Defense Ministry published a report on the losses in Chechnya the other day. According to official estimates, ten servicemen perished in the line of duty in January and February 2007. Total losses since the onset of the counter-terrorism operation in the Caucasus in the autumn of 1999 are estimated at 3,613 men. This number does not include soldiers and officers of the Internal Troops, officers of the Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, or servicemen who died in hospitals.
According to official reports, 57 servicemen of the Defense Ministry were killed and one was reported missing in the territory of Chechnya in 2006. Police Colonel General Arkady Yedelev, Deputy Interior Minister and Chief of the Operational Headquarters in Chechnya, says that 239 servicemen of the regular army and Internal Troops and officers of law enforcement agencies were killed in the Caucasus last year - a lot of them on the territory of Dagestan. "We lost 195 comrades in 2006, and 534 since 1999," said Police Lieutenant Colonel Abdurashid Bibulatov, former acting commander of the 2nd Regiment of the Dagestani Police Force.
The question of searching for the missing servicemen remains open. On February 20, 2003, the Presidential Commission for POWs, Interred Persons, and Missing Persons announced that 832 servicemen were missing after two Chechen campaigns (590 of them from units of the regular army, 236 from the Internal Troops, and 6 from other security structures). There is no saying if the number includes the 266 servicemen whose remains defied identification efforts of the Rostov Forensic Laboratory of the federal Defense Ministry and were interred as unidentified on Bogorodskoye Cemetery in Noginsk near Moscow.
Regrettable as it is, there is every reason to suspect that the list of the missing servicemen in Chechnya continued to grow after 2003. The Presidential Commission in the meantime was disbanded. Who is performing this function - if anyone - is anybody's guess.
ÊValentina Melnikova, of the Union of Committees of Mothers of Soldiers, compiled a list of no less than 800 missing servicemen, most of them probably long dead. According to Melnikova, the Defense Ministry has a special map of at least 200 burial sites. The problem was put in the lap of the government of Chechnya which even received 40 million rubles from the federal budget for the purpose. Judging by what the Union of Committees of Mothers of Soldiers is told by the locals, however, "no work is being done there."
All of this is certainly odd. Presidential Decree No 480 (April 30, 2005) makes the federal Defense Ministry responsible for its dead. The same document reconstituted the Interdepartmental Commission for POWS, Interred Persons, and Missing Persons (a clone of the previous presidential commission) under defense minister's aide Lieutenant General Vladimir Shamanov. Shamanov himself said the other day that looking for servicemen killed in Chechnya was not his job. He added that the Commission had not begun its work for lack of "the provision on the panel and its composition." "It is Presidential Envoy Dmitry Kozak who is coordinating the search for the missing servicemen on the territory of the Southern Federal Region," Shamanov said.
Melnikova maintains that the Defense Ministry defied Presidential Decree No. 480 and therefore no work is under way. "Two years after the decree we are informed that its clauses, which demanded that the provision on the Interdepartmental Commission and its composition be drafted and presented to the head of state within two months, have all been ignored," Melnikova said.
In the meantime, Shamanov said that his Commission will certainly find something to do - abroad. According to the general, the Interdepartmental Commission will approach the leadership of countries including Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and so on where Soviet and Russian servicemen fought in hostilities at one time or other.
Defence & Security
March 28, 2007
Issue 33, Section: LOCAL CONFLICTS