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 didn’t explain a thing, and I can’t prove it even happened. I’ll never know why my boy was killed when he wasn’t a soldier," says Fatima simply.

I’ve 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 we’ve 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, "We’ll 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 hasn’t 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. Barayev’s 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 Barayev’s 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 unit’s 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 won’t 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 he’d 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 what’s 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. It’s 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. " That’s 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, it’s 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 I’ve let it all go", he says, constantly checking to make sure he’s 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. There’s 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 aren’t 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, there’s electricity and gas, and the zatchiski are now after specific people. What more can one ask for? Sure, it’s still war. Sure, it’s 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), Medina’s 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 – he’s 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. "That’s 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 weren’t 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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