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Chechen official puts death toll for 2 wars at up to 160,000

MOSCOW — Two wars against separatist fighters in Chechnya have left 160,000 combatants and civilians dead, a top official in the local government loyal to Russia said Monday.

"Between 150,000 and 160,000 dead - this is the death toll of the two campaigns," Interfax news agency quoted Taus Dzhabrailov, the head of Chechnya's interim Parliament, as saying.

"Rough estimates show that between 30,000 and 40,000 ethnic Chechens have died in the republic in both campaigns," he said, according to the Itar-Tass news agency, adding that about 100,000 of the dead were ethnic Russian servicemen and civilians.

He did not explain the gap of at least 20,000 in his tally.

Dzhabrailov also did not explain why he believed ethnic Chechens made up such a small proportion of the death toll, but in the absence of reliable Kremlin figures his remarks came as a rare official assessment of the price of Moscow's drive to reinstate its grip on the North Caucasus province.

The first war lasted from 1994 to 1996 and the second, which began in 1999, continues today.

About 1.2 million people lived in Chechnya before the start of the first war. A large portion of the approximately 400,000 to 450,000 people in the capital, Grozny, were ethnic Russians. The city was devastated by Russian air and artillery bombardments, resulting in massive civilian casualties.

"They never thought they would have bombs dropped on their heads or be shot at by heavy weapons," he said.

Official military death tolls for the two wars come to about 10,000 Russian soldiers, although independent estimates are at least twice that. At the lower figure, Dzhabrailov's statistic would suggest that about 90,000 ethnic Russian noncombatants died in Chechnya.

Human rights groups cast doubt on the credibility of the figures, saying that Russian officials are not known for giving accurate accounts of civilian or military losses in Chechnya.

Alexander Cherkasov, a Chechnya expert at the Russian human rights organization Memorial said that following the first war the state statistics office published an estimate of 30,000 to 40,000 civilians killed. Memorial estimated the figure at 50,000.

Accurate figures have been even harder to come by during the second war, during which access for journalists and independent researchers has been tightly restricted.According to Cherkasov, figures from the U.S. organization Human Rights Watch and from Memorial show that in the second war about 25,000 civilians have been killed.

Russia suffered a humiliating defeat in its first military campaign in Chechnya in 1994-96. Troops sent to the region in 1999 ended its short-lived independence but have yet to defeat separatist fighters.

The government has never published conclusive figures of military losses in the second Chechnya campaign, whose widely advertised success is among the key factors of President Vladimir Putin's popularity.

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