Risk of mass civilian deaths in Russia jumps: study

LONDON (Reuters) - A military strike by Russia against Islamist militants in its North Caucasus region is much more likely this year than last and would threaten the lives of scores of civilians, a report showed on Tuesday.

Violence has escalated in the past year in Russia's mainly Muslim provinces of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, and suicide attacks that killed 40 on the Moscow metro last month turned the global spotlight on the long-running conflict.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said the culprits behind the bombings must be scraped "from the bottom of the sewers."

Minority Rights Group International (MRG) said in a report: "The combination of circumstances is dangerously close to those that prevailed in 1999 before the start of the second Chechen war, which caused the deaths of at least 25,000 civilians."

The report forms part of its annual index of countries where civilians are most at risk of genocide, mass killings or violent repression.

In those three turbulent regions of Russia, at least 862 people were killed last year in clashes, bombings and gun battles, according to internet news agency Caucasian Knot.

Russia has jumped up seven places to rank 16th in the 2010 index of 70 countries, calculated on the basis of 10 indicators such as measures of conflict, governance and economic risk.

"There is a significant danger that we will see an escalation of the conflict in the North Caucasus and, unless the Russian armed forces employ very different means and approach to those employed in the second Chechen war, we will see mass deaths of civilians. That is the fear," MRG Executive Director Mark Lattimer told Reuters.

Rights groups accused Russian troops of using indiscriminate force in Chechnya in the second campaign, launched by the Kremlin in 1999 to seize control from separatists who had forced out Russian forces in a war in the mid-1990s.

The Islamist militants say they want a sharia-based, pan-Caucasus state independent of Russia, a struggle whose foundations were laid over 250 years ago.

RISK HIGHER IN YEMEN

Danger to civilians has also increased in Yemen, which went up five places to rank 20th in the MRG index.

"The Yemeni government called on the West for more help to fight al Qaeda at the end of the year (2009), although its greater security concerns stem from the conflict with al Houthi rebels in the north, a group pushing for autonomy for the Zaydi Shia community," said the report, now in its fifth year.

It singled out the minority belonging to the Zaydi school of Shi'ite Islam as the group most at risk of violence in the impoverished Arab country.

Yemen's government agreed a truce with the rebels in February to halt the continual outbreaks of war since 2004 that have displaced 250,000 people.

The ceasefire has largely held but unrest has risen in recent weeks. Previous truces have not lasted and analysts are skeptical whether this one will either, so long as Shi'ite complaints of discrimination by the state remain unaddressed.

Somalia, Sudan and Iraq in that order topped the 2010 MRG index, unchanged from last year bar Sudan's overtaking of Iraq. They were followed by Afghanistan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Chad in the top ten.

The index measures danger to civilians but "it is unfortunately a feature of mass killing around the world that very, very often it is targeted at minorities or specific ethnic or religious groups," Lattimer said.