January
6, 2003
Chechnya:
Brutality and Indifference
"It
was Thursday, 24th October the second day of the Nord-Ost
hostage crisis. Around three in the afternoon, six men in balaclavas
kicked down the door and burst into our home. They were armed and
wearing camouflage fatigues with the insignia of the Russian interior
ministry. Without a word they seized Ahmed, my twenty-two year old
eldest son, and dragged him outside. They tied him to a telegraph
pole. Then they shot him to pieces and vanished. I had to go and
pick up scattered bits of his brains." The hollow-voiced speaker
is Fatima, thirty-seven, a mother.
This
horrific scene took place in the village of Kalinina, a section
of Grozny. The entire family (the mother, four daughters, and two
other sons less than ten years old) witnessed the killing of Ahmed,
yet they have all kept silent, overwhelmed. What can they say? What
can they do? What legal recourse could they hope to have? Operations
of this sort, undertaken by "death squads", have become
commonplace in Chechnya, where nothing shocks anybody any more.
"They didnt explain a thing, and I cant prove it
even happened. Ill never know why my boy was killed when he
wasnt a soldier," says Fatima simply.
Ive
been to Chechnya many times since the beginning of the war more
than three years ago, and it is always the same: the drone of distant
bombers, the dirty and dusty armoured cars posted along the roads,
the indolent yet always arrogant way that the soldiers stop any
vehicle and ask for documents from the drivers, but above all the
accounts of the "zatchiski", the violent mopping up operations
carried out by the Russian forces among the civilian population.
According to Aslan Maskhadov, the separatist president whom I interviewed
yet again in July, "nobody really knows what the raids are
for, and the effect is counter-productive: every zatchiska adds
to the numbers of the resistance! The will to fight, to kill and
avenge the blood of our fathers and mothers and sisters increases
all the time. Those who until a short time ago were still loyal
to Russia now see the true face of the enemy, and understand that
Chechnya can never be subject to Russia again. We have nothing in
common. After the shameful barbarism that weve witnessed,
what human relationship could we conceivably have?"
Since
the Nord-Ost hostage-taking, the tolls at road crossings have doubled,
and the raids have become more dangerous and more frequent than
ever. At a public call box in the capital, which I visited precisely
to garner this kind of information, I overheard a Russian non-commissioned
officer tell his wife shamelessly, "Well be back when
only skirts are left in this place". In the queue of Chechens
waiting, like him, to call their loved ones, there was no great
reaction just a few ironic smiles. At least his answer was
clear. A good half of the population, convinced that it will set
back the Chechen cause, are critical about what took place at the
theatre. Others have some difficulty hiding their sympathy for an
act which, while certainly barbaric, did no more than "do to
a handful of Muscovites what Chechens have endured routinely for
three years".
Rumour
has it that Movsar Barayev, the leader of the unit that seized the
theatre, simply could not have acted alone, that he must have had
accomplices among the ranks of high Russian officials. Although
this hasnt been reported in the Russian media, the word is
that Zelimkhan Yandarbiev (the separatist president from 1996 to
1997, now fled to Qatar) and Shamil Bassayev had for a long while
been looking for someone to lead such an action in the hope of persuading
the Russians to agree to peace talks. Barayevs team, it is
said, would have accepted to do it for $600,000. The unit apparently
expected that they would not be killed by the Russians this
would explain why they refrained from killing the hostages when
the gas was first let in to the building, although they would have
had the time to do so. Bassayev, long suspected of having links
with the FSB, the former KGB, had apparently promised them that
they would emerge unscathed.
More
worrying still, personal statements that I have collected make clear
that, two months before the hostage-taking, the GROU, the secret
service of the Russian army, had announced Barayevs arrest.
The implication is that he would have been held until his "release"
to lead the hostage taking at the Doubrovka theatre. At Assinovsski,
a village close to the border with Ingushetia, which is where two
of the units women came from, their mothers say that they
had been arrested and taken to an unknown destination at the end
of September. Secretive in the presence of the outsider that I am,
and still considerably shocked, they wont say more. "Barayev
was specifically sent to Moscow to discredit us in world opinion
by making plausible links between al-Qaeda and our fight for freedom,"
storms Daoud, 55, a refugee in Ingushetia recently forced to come
home. "They made him believe that hed be a hero, a peacemaker,
and the idiot believed them!" On the same tack, nobody quite
manages to believe that there were fifty hostage-takers "given
that we were never shown more than six or seven corpses," as
Daoud puts it. "As for the explosives strapped around the waists
of the women, they hardly seemed real. And whats more, they
never used them."
At
Grozny, as elsewhere, every night crackles with almost uninterrupted
machine-gun fire after seven in the evening. Fired at random, for
no reason, by bored soldiers from a nearby position who have nobody
to fight. In the morning, at Novye Atagui, waiting to board the
bus for Chali, the passengers hesitate to get on as a tank has blocked
the centre of the road and is moving forward at walking-pace. Two
soldiers accompany it and empty their magazines into the houses
beside them. "Are they drunk, or what?" somebody asks.
At his wheel, the driver volubly annotates the political situation:
"Everything has always been done to keep us Chechens down.
Its not to the advantage of anybody, in the Kremlin or anywhere
else, that this situation should end!" The old women bow their
heads, reflectively. As they go past the graveyard they open their
palms in the sign of prayer and murmur a few verses of the Koran.
Outside, a group of kids, each equipped with a fifty-litre jerrycan
on wheels, is off to get water from the well. Since the shops have
been destroyed, there are only a few scrappy notices on the walls.
"Video tapes," they say, "drinks for 6 roubles, radiators
repaired, wedding dresses." Mercedes cars, Volgas, Ladas, and
BMWs keep each other company on roads each in worse repair than
the next, without any visible rules of the road. Young soldiers,
seemingly with nothing to do, gather around makeshift braziers not
far from their armoured vehicles, which are hunkered down on the
roadside verges. " Thats how they protect us!" one
young woman comments ironically, before undoing her blouse to offer
her breast to her howling child. Behind her, not far off, helicopters
at daisy-cutter height fire a few rockets
In
Grozny, on a Monday at the end of November, its hard to carve
a path between the shoppers crowding around the stalls of the central
bazaar even though the aisles were widened last summer. But
the market remains a dangerous place, where one can sometimes pick
up the latest number of Ichkéria, the banned journal of the
separatist government, and where one also comes across large numbers
of "narks", the plainclothes Chechen policemen whose job
is to denounce "any individual whose behaviour or appearance
might be suspect". At the end of an aisle, Ramzan, an ex-boyevik
or Chechen fighter in his thirties, has made a new career with his
wife, selling socks: "Those who are still in the mountains
still believe in it all, but Ive let it all go", he says,
constantly checking to make sure hes not overheard. "Fighters
even give each other away for a hundred dollars," he sighs.
"Last week, when they heard that a boyevik was here, the OMON
[special units of the official Chechen police] arrived and killed
him right in front of everybody! " According to Ramzan, the
Chechen people are exhausted "they turn a blind eye
to everything," and in so doing put up with Russian authority.
On
what used to be Lenin Avenue, now Liberty Avenue, an army of old
women in turbans picks up the dead leaves as municipal workers re-lay
the tarmac here and there. Close by the town hall, the seat of the
Russian-appointed mayor of Grozny, Oleg Zhidkov and formerly
the palace of Aslan Maskhadov a few pavements have been relaid
and a few buildings given a coat of paint. Their pastel colours
make a stark contrast with the prevalent dirty grey. Theres
even a park of thuja trees being constructed next to the town hall.
Recently,
a huge traffic roundabout has appeared in the middle of the Minoutka
crossroads, even though the conical piles of debris all around have
not yet gone. The novelty is that, in the absence of traffic lights,
traffic policemen in brand-new uniforms have started appearing there.
In Chechnya today there is a growing gulf between those have been
able to find some kind of governmental work, in the pension administration,
the railways, the schools or in various institutes and the others,
those who still arent working, not knowing how to choose between
"joining the police and becoming a traitor or going on the
building sites and not getting paid", in the phrase used by
several of those I spoke to. "Our wages are paid, our pensions,
theres electricity and gas, and the zatchiski are now after
specific people. What more can one ask for? Sure, its still
war. Sure, its inhumane and ought to be stopped
But meanwhile,
life has to go on", wearily explains Medina, 50, and married
to a teacher. She adds that during the three days of the hostage
crisis, people were frightened that Putin would agree to make a
deal with the hostage-takers, in the manner of what happened after
the hostage incident at the Boudyonnovsk hospital in 1995, which
could have resulted in the formation of a "weak" government
like that of Maskhadov in the period between the wars, "when
nobody was paid".
According
to Biboulat (48), Medinas husband, forty-eight schools are
operating today in the capital and about twice that number are needed.
He teaches in school 44, which re-opened in the spring of 2000.
There are 280 pupils, compared with 150 last year, and all classes
take place in Russian (but there is a Chechen language class). "The
state gives absolutely no help at all. Neither books, nor heating,
nor tables and chairs nothing," the teacher observes
bitterly. "The only thing that comes from the state is our
wages, 4000 roubles (125 Euros) a month."
In
the October district, one of the worst affected by the destruction,
the army quite openly does business. Every day, soldiers methodically
dismantle the houses in whichever street they have previously closed
for the purpose, and sell the "spare parts" (windows or
doors, tiles and so on) for modest prices. Their behaviour shocks
even the few Russians in the district, who know how difficult it
is to protect property from marauders. As for the buyers, they,
too, are well aware of where the merchandise comes from. They too
have been dispossessed the minute their back was turned.
After
the group under the warlord Ruslan Gelayev returned to Chechnya
from Georgia hes currently receiving medical attention
in the mountains several hundred boyeviki scattered over
the west of the country, not to mention over the border into Ingushetia
. Khamzat, 35, is one of them. Temporarily based in Ingushetia,
he moves around at night and never stays in the same place two days
running. "The local authorities over there were beginning to
take notice of our presence," he explains. "Thats
why we left." According to him, when they first reached the
gorges in May of 2000, his group numbered some 300. Now, he reckons
they are more like 700. In all the time they were there, the Georgian
authorities, and indeed the Russian ones, "knew we were there
but took no measures against us." "The fighters were spread
over several villages in the Pankisi valley, where we set up four
separate training camps," he explains. "Some of the youngsters
from other republics such as Kabardino-Balkaria or Ingushetia did
not really know how to handle arms and werent in good physical
condition. We had to teach them. It took us three exhausting months
on the march to come back, during which we suffered very much from
lack of provisions. We only met Russians at Galashki, in Ingushetia,
and there it was very bloody. They lost many more men than they
let it be known in the media." Today, Khamzat and his group
(perhaps thirty boyeviki) are "hibernating" while they
wait for precise orders from the "high-command" of Aslan
Maskhadov.
Also
in Ingushetia, some very peculiar negotiations have been known to
take place. On Thursday November 28, near the border, I chanced
upon a scene which is not all that unusual. A car containing two
Russian conscripts, prisoners of war, awaited the arrival of another
car bearing officers of the FSB. As soon as the Russian secret serviceman
had handed over, in cash, $2500 for the return of each prisoner,
the soldiers furtively switched cars. The following day, Rossia,
the number two Russian television channel, announced the "heroic"
liberation of these prisoners with no mention of the ransom. For
many Chechens, this kind of trade is good proof that those who profit
from the war are working hand in hand with a single shared purpose:
that the war should not end.
Translated
from the French by Francis Hodgson.
Anne
Nivat is the Moscow correspondent of Le Nouvel Observateur and
author of "Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines
of War in Chechnya".
This
article is taken from a forthcoming collection of pieces about the
Chechen conflict, which will appear on this site shortly.
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