Despite Akhmad Kadyrov's striking success in winning what amounts to monopolistic personal control over Chechnya's internal political institutions, he still has strong opponents in the federal power structures. Last week President Vladimir Putin's personal representative to the southern federal okrug joined his voice to those... MORE

Lecha Islamov, a Chechen gangster and former rebel guerrilla commander now serving a ten-year prison sentence, died on April 21 after having been hospitalized in Volgograd with a mysterious illness, the Gzt.ru website reported on April 23. Sources close to the convict told the online... MORE

Is Abu Al-Walid finally dead? Over the years the Russian media have repeatedly announced the destruction of this man, who is said by some to be one of the leading Arab adventurers fighting alongside separatist Chechen guerrillas. The announcements of Al-Walid's death have repeatedly turned... MORE

The Kadyrov administration is issuing increasingly self-confident predictions about the imminent demise of the rebel guerrillas. These predictions might come back to haunt them in the future if Russia and Chechnya should experience a revival of genuinely independent, aggressively skeptical mass media - a development... MORE

"Neutralizing a [separatist] field commander - whether by killing him in battle or by persuading him to surrender - gives [the federal forces] a result which can be shown triumphantly on television. It has long been known, however, that such a result can hardly be... MORE

--LAST REFUGEE CAMP BEING DISMANTLED The long foreseen and feared dismantling of the last refugee camp in Ingushetia has now begun. According to an April 21 report from Prava cheloveka v Rossii ("Human Rights in Russia"), the Satsita camp still had, as of that day,... MORE

Dissident journalists in Russia have written a number of articles about federal soldiers being denied the combat pay to which they are legally entitled for having served in Chechnya and other “hot spots.” An April 15 article on the Grani.ru website confirmed that this abuse... MORE

A Russian aircraft killed a Chechen woman and five of her children in the southern highland village of Rigakhoy, according to a report distributed on April 13 by the Russian human rights center Memorial. The woman, Marit Tsintsaeva, had tried to shelter the children in... MORE

Hints continue to emerge from the administration of Akhmad Kadyrov about the possible “voluntary surrender” of Aslan Maskhadov, the head of Chechnya’s underground separatist government. Andrei Riskin noted in the April 16 issue of Nezavisimaya gazeta that “lately not one day has gone by without... MORE

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which in recent years has been dominated by nations that are themselves notorious violators of human rights, voted as expected on April 14 to reject a resolution about human rights violations in Chechnya. The proposed text, sponsored by... MORE