Thirty-two-year-old Umar Mantsigov recently got a job with Chechnya's
police force.

He was tasked with guarding a four-storey temporary settlement centre in
the Zavodskoi district of Grozny, which was home to several hundred
refugees recently returned from neighbouring Ingushetia. It is hard to find
a job in the shattered Chechen capital, so his friends and relatives
thought him a lucky man.

But at dawn on January 29, a minibus with no number-plates drew up outside
the centre, and a group of armed men wearing masks and camouflage fatigues
burst in and took Mantsigov away. Since then, his police colleagues and
relatives have searched for the missing man - with no success.

Mantsigov's family believe he was snatched because after the first Chechen
conflict of 1994-96, he had several pictures taken of himself in the
company of rebel fighters. Photographs such as this and even old newspapers
from the period between 1991 and 1994 when Jokhar Dudayev was president,
have reportedly been used to identify and target people in abductions and
disappearances.

Arbitrary arrests and abductions, torture and killing are continuing in
Chechnya, say witnesses and human rights monitors, although both the
perpetrators and the methods they used have changed.

The abuses are often more covert, but are still being recorded every day -
challenging the Russian federal government's assertion that Chechnya is
undergoing a "normalisation process" and daily life is improving.

On January 21, Moscow abolished the post of Russian presidential special
representative for human rights in Chechnya, and sacked the incumbent
Abdul-Khakim Sultygov.

Alexander Cherkasov, a leading expert on Chechnya with the Russian human
rights group Memorial, said that Sultygov had been an official appointee
who had done nothing to defend human rights. "The abolition of this post is
just a confirmation of the existing reality," he told IWPR by telephone
from Moscow. "Nonetheless, a disgraceful situation is continuing there and
there is a need for particular and heightened attention to Chechnya, which
is not forthcoming from the Russian state.

"The situation remains very alarming. People are still being abducted, they
continue to disappear."

Memorial's office in Ingushetia says that the numbers of abductions and
killings it recorded in Chechnya in 2003 was less than the year before, but
the change was not a significant one. In 2002 they recorded 729 killings of
civilians and 537 people who were abducted and disappeared without trace.
Last year the figures were around 500 killed and more than 470 disappeared.

These figures are incomplete, stresses Memorial's Shakhman Akbulatov, and
the real numbers could be much higher.

"Our organisation is able to cover only about 25 to 30 per cent of the
territory of Chechnya," he said. "The remaining regions, including the
mountains, are inaccessible to our researchers.

"Even in the regions covered by our monitoring, Memorial cannot draw up an
exhaustive report. Our rough estimates suggest that the total number of
crimes committed against civilians in the Chechen Republic could be two or
three times higher than the information we have at Memorial."

The manner of the abuses has changed. The "mass cleansing operations"
experienced by Chechen villagers two or three years ago, when the Russian
military would arrive in force at a village and close it off for several
days, are now a rarity. More common are now are what are described as
"targeted cleansing operations", when a group of armed men snatch one
person at night - as happened with Mantsigov. In the majority of cases the
abducted men are never seen alive again.

The infamous "filtration camps" at Chernokozova, PAP-1 (a former bus garage
in Grozny) and the Khankala military base, where large numbers of Chechen
men were detained and tortured, have virtually ceased to operate.

They have been replaced, however, by a series of underground pits, known as
"zindans" (prisons), located at almost all military bases in the republic,
including Khankala. These appear to be the destination of most of the
abducted men - but few get out alive, and those relatives who do manage to
extract their loved ones from a "zindan" are reluctant to speak about it.

The pro-Moscow government of Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov also now runs a
series of small "private prisons" across the republic. One of them is in
Tsentoroi, Kadyrov's home village of Kadyrov, and is under the charge of
his son, Ramzan. Two others have been set up in Pobedinskoe and Krasnaya
Turbina outside Grozny, run respectively by Kadyrov's security chief
Movladi Baisarov and Russian special forces commander Said-Magomed Kakiev,
who is a Chechen. Another special forces officer, Sulim Yamadayev, runs a
"private prison" in the town of Gudermes.

The prominent role now being played by Kadyrov, who was elected president
of Chechnya in October, has contributed to another major change in the
republic. Many ordinary Chechens say that as well as special Russian
military units - dubbed "death squads" by locals - they fear operations
carried out by Kadyrov's commanders.

Detachments of "Kadyrovtsy", as these units are known, operate throughout
Chechnya. On January 28-29, a joint force of"Kadyrovtsy" and police carried
out a rare "mass cleansing operation" in Alleroi, the native village of
rebel president Aslan Maskhadov. Two days later Sultan Dadayev, who led the
operation, and four of his men were shot dead in Alleroi by pro-Maskhadov
fighters.

The Kadyrov administration insists that the human rights situation in
Chechnya is improving. A senior official in the interior ministry, who
asked not to be named, said that, "the situation in the Chechen Republic is
constantly improving. We can see a radical change for the better in
comparison with 2000 and 2001."

However, Kadyrov himself told a government meeting on January 23 that he
was "concerned about the continuing abductions and disappearances".

Both he and the Russian military blame Chechen pro-independence and
Islamist fighters for the abductions.

Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, a senior Russian commander in charge of the
"anti-terrorist operation" in Chechnya, said that the rebels were dressing
up in military uniforms to carry out abductions and killings.

"They are doing this primarily to sow distrust of federal and local
officials among the population, and to discredit the process of political
settlement in Chechnya," Shabalkin said. "Often they use fake documents
from members of the security forces. There is plenty of proof of this."

Shabalkin cited a case from mid-January when he said Russian troops had
found "high-quality" fake identity documents for the Chechen police force
and Kadyrov's security service in a house near the village of Tangi-Chu.

While there is plenty of evidence that Chechen rebels have killed civilians
in suicide bombings and raids, human rights monitors challenge the
assertion that they are behind the abductions. They say that these raids
are almost always carried out at night, during curfew hours, when large
numbers of fighters could be easily spotted. The attackers are usually
heavily armed and have special equipment, such as helmets with radio links
and automatic weapons with silencers, which the rebel fighters do not have.

"Practically all the abductions, murders, robberies and looting happen at
night and are carried out by men in masks and military uniforms," said
Alkhazur Suleimanov, a former Chechen policeman. "In most cases the bandits
arrive in armoured vehicles or several cars. And only soldiers or employees
of the security services can travel freely in Chechnya by night, when there
are checkpoints at every step of the way. It's obvious they wouldn't clash
with their own people."

Another worrying phenomenon is the increased targeting of Chechens living
in Ingushetia. On January 12, Khamzat Osmayev, a 50-year-old doctor who had
lived in the neighbouring republic since the conflict began, was abducted
from his office in the village of Plievo.

Two weeks later, Osmayev was dumped in wasteland near Ingushetia's Magas
airport. He told Memorial that he had been beaten and tortured by a group
of men demanding information about Chechen fighters. The only explanation
he could give about why he was targeted was that in a wedding photograph
taken in 1999, he had shared the frame with Chechen warrior Shamil Basayev.

Osmayev believes he was held either in the Russian military base at
Khankala or in Grozny.

Anna Neistat, who researches Chechnya for Human Rights Watch in Moscow,
says she will remain pessimistic unless and until the Russian justice
system changes its attitude on Chechnya.

"We can only begin to say that the problem is being solved when all the
cases of abductions and disappearances are investigated and brought to an
end, and not as now, when the prosecutor's office opens criminal charges on
an abduction and then closes it a couple of months later," she said.
"Serious changes for the better will only begin when the disappearances
become very rare, they are all investigated and those responsible end up in
court."