MOSCOW, July 23: The head of a top world rights watchdog on Tuesday accused the Russian military of executing up to 80 Chechen men a month to “thin out” the republic’s adult male population in a war of attrition.

“The process by which young Chechen men are being abducted and murdered... is claiming more lives than the bombing campaigns of the two wars,” said the executive director for the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, Aaron Rhodes.

“If you look at the evidence from reliable, non-partisan human rights organizations, between 50 and 80 people are being murdered every month,” Rhodes told reporters on his return from a three-day visit to Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia.

Rhodes said that given Chechnya’s relatively small population — estimated at between 300,000 and 600,000, but impossible to verify — the scale of killing in the republic is almost unprecedented.

“This violence is on a huge scale in the world context. It is difficult to find an analogy to this,” he said. “We have a very hard time finding such numbers in other historical cases.”

Russian troops stormed into Chechnya in October 1999 in a self-declared anti-terrorist operation after the predominantly Muslim republic in the turbulent north Caucasus won de facto independence in a first war, which lasted from 1994-96.

Noting that some rights organizations refer to “disappearances” of civilians, Rhodes remarked: “Let’s call a spade a spade — (disappearance) means death.”

The Chechens who vanish are “generally speaking men in their productive years,” Rhodes said. “This can be considered a process of a thinning out of a population of young men.”

The Kremlin office responsible for relations with Chechnya refused to comment on Rhodes’ accusation despite repeated requests from AFP.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Chechnya with Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev, who is heading the military operation which he said Tuesday will end “within a certain time.”

In April, Putin declared the war in Chechnya as over and won, while later criticizing the conduct of Russian troops in so-called “mopping up” operations in which rights activists allege hundreds of civilians are tortured and killed.

The Helsinki group accused the West of standing idly by while Russia — which has emerged as a key ally in the US-led “anti-terror” war — continues its brutal campaign.

“The West is not conducting itself properly. It must know what is happening,” said the Helsinki group’s representative Vladislav Weisman.

Rhodes and his colleagues further condemned Russia’s decision to close most of the Chechen refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia by the end of the year, saying that conditions were not right for civilians to return to the ravaged republic.

“We did not speak to one person who was willing to return to Chechnya under these conditions,” Rhodes said.

Earlier this month, Russia confirmed that it had shut down the Znamenskoye camp in northern Chechnya, repatriating more than 2,000 civilians to the war-ravaged rebel capital Grozny and other towns where sporadic fighting still rages on a daily basis.—AFP