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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Up to 160,000 civilians and troops have died or gone missing in the two wars Russia has launched in rebel Chechnya, but only a quarter of them were ethnic Chechens, a top pro-Moscow official said on Monday. "Between 150,000 and 160,000 dead - this is the death toll of the two campaigns," Interfax news agency quoted Taus Dzhabrailov, 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 Itar-Tass news agency. Dzhabrailov 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. 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. It has been even more reticent about the death toll in the botched first war, described by current Kremlin leaders as a "national shame". Civilian losses in the Chechen wars have never been calculated and official statistics seem to be targeted at hiding the truth rather than revealing it. Critics have branded as unrealistic the returns of the 2002 national census, which showed that Chechnya's one-million-strong population has remained effectively unchanged since 1989 despite the deaths and the departure of hundreds of thousands of refugees, who have fled fighting and economic collapse. According to estimates by human rights organisation Memorial, published in December 2004, the number of killed or missing civilians was up to 50,000 for the first Chechen war and up to 20,000 for the second. According to official figures around 5,000 servicemen were killed during the first war and around the same number during the second. Dozens of servicemen and Moscow-controlled Chechen security forces die every month in rebel attacks. Unofficial estimates by experts and rights campaigners put Russian military losses in both campaigns anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people.
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