Samashki massacre

N.B. As per the disclaimer , neither the ICRC nor the authors can be identified with the opinions expressed in the Cases and Documents. Some cases even come to solutions that clearly violate IHL. They are nevertheless worthy of discussion, if only to raise a challenge to display more humanity in armed conflicts. Similarly, in some of the texts used in the case studies, the facts may not always be proven; nevertheless, they have been selected because they highlight interesting IHL issues and are thus published for didactic purposes. On December 9, 1994, the President of the Russian Federation issued the Decree on Measures to Stop the Operation of Illegal Armed Formations in the Territory of the Chechen Republic and in the Ossetian-Ingush Conflict Zone. The decree instructed the RF government to “use all means available to guarantee state security, lawfulness, rights and freedoms of citizens, the guarding of public order, the fight against crime, the disarming of all illegal armed formations”. On December 11, 1994, Ministry of Defence and MVD units began to enter the territory of Chechnya. Chechen armed formations resisted federal forces, and an undeclared war was under way in the Northern Caucasus. The authors of this report consider the wide-scale military activities that followed this decree a non-international armed conflict, whose victims must be protected by strict observance of Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 and Protocol II additional to them. In accordance with these instruments, parties to the conflict are obliged to respect these and other laws and customary law on the conduct of war. [...] OM [Observer Mission] members visited Samashki in May and August and received additional testimony necessary for the preparation of this report. [...] When the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was split in 1992, the village of Sernovodsk, located 9.5 kilometers to the west of Samashki, went to Ingushetia and Samashki became a border village within the Chechen Republic. [...] The pre-war population of Samashki counted about 14,600 people. With the commencement of military activities, Samashki began to receive displaced people from Grozny and villages that either became conflict zones or were shelled and bombed. In addition, beginning in February 1995, some refugees left Samashki. The village’s elders estimated that toward the beginning of April approximately 4,500-5,000 people remained in the village; according to the village administration, this figure was between 5,000-6,000. [...] While Russian troops were sent to Chechnya with the proclaimed goal of “restoring constitutional order and disarming illegal formations” in the republic, Russian military planning concentrated first and foremost on controlling Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. To this end, the command tried not to divert great force on bringing “constitutional order” to other parts of the republic, and troop deployments along the borders created “neither peace nor war” zones. For a certain period, one such zone was western Chechnya (Achkoi-Martan, the district center, and the villages of Samashki, Assinovskaya, Melkhi-Yurt, Novyi Sharoi, and Zakan-Yurt along the border with Ingushetia, where tens of thousands of refugees from Grozny had amassed. [...] On December 12, columns of federal troops were shelled in the village of Assinovskaya, and in the village of Novyi Sharoi a crowd of residents from nearby villages blocked the road. Further troop movements would inevitably have led first, to firing on unarmed residents, which at the time soldiers and officers were not prepared to do, and second, to skirmishes with partisan fighter units, which every village had. These units were armed with automatics, machine guns and grenade launchers. Self-defense units based in the area south of the village of Bamut had armored vehicles. Federal forces were consequently reinforced along this conditional border area near the villa