The BBC has shown extremely disturbing video sequences which it claims to be the first visual evidence of Russian war crimes in Chechnya. The video was shot by a German journalist unhindered by Russian soldiers who objected to the orders they were asked to carry out.
The video evidence includes shots of a body wrapped in a carpet being thrown into a mass grave containing the bodies of Chechen fighters. According to the BBC's reporter Jonathan Charles, videos not shown on TV include sequences of bodies tightly-wrapped in barbed wire, some with their ears cut off and others with obvious marks of torture.
Official Russian sources say that allegations of torture, rape and murder by Russian forces in Chechnya are "concoctions unsupported by fact or proof". Journalists from Russia and other countries are severely restricted in their coverage of the war and one journalist, Mr Andrei Babitsky of Radio Liberty has been missing since arrested by Russian forces last month.
The images shown on last night's BBC Nine O'Clock News support accusations made by groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the French organisation Medecins du Monde and will cause severe embarrassment to the Russian government.
Many international figures including the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, have called for a full international investigation of the events. Russia is unlikely to agree to this and can point to a reluctance by many countries, including the United Kingdom, to allow international investigations into allegations of criminal activities by armed forces.
Meanwhile, a Russian news agency reported yesterday that the missing Russian journalist Andrei Babitsky is in the hands of Russian special services and not with Chechen rebels as acting President Vladimir Putin has claimed. Agenstvo Pechati Novosti (APN), quoting Interior Ministry sources, said Mr Babitsky was being held in either Dagestan or Ingushetia, Russian republics bordering Chechnya.
Mr Putin told the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cooke, in Moscow this week that Mr Babitsky was alive and well and had been given to the Chechen rebels at his own request.
The Babitsky case has aroused a storm of protest from human rights agencies throughout the world and the APN report comes at a time when former Soviet dissidents and leading newspaper editors have launched strong criticism of Mr Putin's administration. APN claims that Mr Babitsky is being interrogated after spending some time as a reporter behind Chechen lines.
In an open letter to Western governments, a group of former dissidents associated with the late Andrei Sakharov and led by his widow, Yelena Bonner, has described Russia as suffering from "a modernised form of Stalinism".
"Under Stalin, about 20 million people were shot or perished in labour camps, in exile or from starvation over a period of 25 years. Today, because of the dreadful living conditions, the population is shrinking by one million people a year. Add to that the victims of the two Chechen wars. Plus the Mafia terror throughout the country. Yet today, all the citizens of the country are free people and may even freely go abroad," the letter claimed.
"Under Putin," the open letter says, "we see a new stage in the introduction of modernised Stalinism. Nationalist and anti-Western propaganda is increasing. Such hostility toward the West both in the mass media and among the population did not even exist in the Soviet era."
