Fighting flared in Chechnya yesterday on the eve of a visit there by the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson. Russia confirmed it had lost contact with 39 soldiers caught in an ambush that killed at least four.
Tomorrow Mrs Robinson will become the most senior Western official to visit Chechnya since the start of the six-month war. The former president is due to investigate reports of atrocities and visit some of the notorious Russian-run "filtration camps". "I want to reinforce the culture of human rights," Mrs Robinson said after her arrival in Moscow yesterday.
The Russian authorities have been strongly critical of Mrs Robinson's attitude to the human rights situation in Chechnya and are expected to present her with a document which is critical of human rights under the region's president, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, but which does not deal with alleged abuses on the Russian side. The Russian authorities have refused The Irish Times permission to travel with the United Nations group.
The New-York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) organisation issued a statement yesterday accusing Russian troops of summarily executing seven people in the Chechen village of Geki-Chu last month.
HRW also alleges that large numbers of Chechen women have been raped by Russian soldiers. A Russian colonel has been arrested for "humiliating" and then murdering a local woman.
The confusion over the death toll has proved an embarrassment to Russian officials. Reports yesterday said all Russian journalists in Chechnya have been barred from releasing any information that has not been first confirmed by the Kremlin.
Russian military sources say there are 3,400 rebels operating in Chechnya at the moment: 2,000 in the southern mountains, 1,000 on the northern plains and 400 in Grozny, mainly in the industrial district. In recent days a Russian column was attacked twice. Three soldiers were killed. The Defence Ministry in a statement issued yesterday said 2,036 members of Russia's armed forces had been killed in the current conflict and more than 6,000 had been wounded.
