Chechen Refugees Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops Villagers Tortured, Killed In Assault, Reports Say By Sharon LaFraniere Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, June 29, 2002; Page A16 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63823-2002Jun28.html NAZRAN, Russia -- Kuslum Savnykaevna has no intention of heeding the Russian government's wish that she abandon the converted car repair shop where she and her five children live in Ingushetia and return to their former home in neighboring Chechnya. And if she ever had any doubt that they must remain refugees in this impoverished region in southern Russia, she said, what she witnessed in the last month erased it. In mid-May, Savnykaevna went to visit her parents in Mesker Yurt, a village of roughly 2,000 about seven miles east of Grozny, the ruined capital of Chechnya, where separatist rebels have been battling the pro-Russian government. She had not been there long when Russian troops suddenly surrounded and closed off the village to conduct a zachistka, or cleansing operation, that lasted three weeks. She said she saw some of the victims of the operation after their relatives carried them back from a field the soldiers had occupied at the edge of the village: a man whose eye was gouged out; another whose fingers were cut off; a third whose back had been sliced in rows with the sharp edge of broken glass, then doused with alcohol and set afire, according to his relatives. Her brothers and nephews were spared, she said, only because her family paid the soldiers a $400 bribe not to hurt them. "I have never imagined such tortures, such cruelty," she said, sitting at a small table in the dim room that has housed her family here for nearly three years. "There were a lot of men who were left only half alive." The troops left the village on June 10, and so the full story of what happened at Mesker Yurt is not yet clear. But Aslanbek Aslakhanov, Chechnya's elected representative to the Russian State Duma who brought eight victims to the hospital, said, "Every rule and law that could be broken was broken." Memorial, a Russian human rights group that is investigating the military's actions there, said at least eight villagers died and 20 more are missing. Savnykaevna said she attended 25 funerals, and others in the village at the time estimated the death toll at 20 or more. Russia's military commander in Chechnya, Col. Gen. Vladimir Moltenskoi, told the Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda earlier this month that the mop-up operation was conducted properly and found a large cache of weapons and evidence of a school for rebel snipers. "Mesker Yurt is a pro-bandit village. A group of at least 50 fighters was active here," he said. A Russian colonel in Grozny told Russian Tass, the semi-official news agency, that soldiers killed 14 rebels who put up armed resistance during the zachistka. Human rights investigators said the zachistka in Mesker Yurt is the latest example of a pattern of killings, torture, rape and extortion by the Russian military since it began a campaign to subdue militants in Chechnya in October 1999. Russian President Vladimir Putin insists that the conflict is over, that life is slowly returning to normal in Chechnya, and the 147,000 refugees camped out in tents and abandoned buildings in nearby Ingushetia should return and begin to rebuild their villages and towns. But the accounts of residents, evidence collected by human rights groups and the Russian military's statistics suggest the opposite. Investigators for Memorial said Russian soldiers are killing Chechen civilians in greater numbers than before -- a trend some attribute to dwindling criticism of Russia's actions from such Western nations as the United States. Memorial said it has documented proof that 946 innocent Chechens died at the hands of Russian troops in just three of Chechnya's most populated districts during a 14-month period that ended in November. Another 1,200 to 2,000 are listed as missing, the group said. Meanwhile, the rebels, who try to blend into the general population, continue to kill an average of one to two Russian soldiers every day. Ingushetia, a tiny region of 300,000 people on Chechnya's western border, has provided a safe haven for those fleeing the violence for nearly three years, housing 32,000 in tent cities and another 115,000 in everything from old cow barns to abandoned factories. Provided with gas, electricity, water and some food from international aid groups, and protected from the Russian military's dreaded raids, the refugees have been demonstrably better off than the population in Chechnya, estimated to number between 800,000 and 1.1 million. But with the recent replacement of Ingushetia's independent-minded president with a Kremlin-friendly leader, the refugees here are feeling more vulnerable. Murat Zyazikov, a general in Russia's security service, was elected in April in a runoff vote that critics charged was tainted by fraud. He said in a radio interview earlier this month: "We do not intend to chase out the refugees." And on Monday, a U.N. representative, Olar Otunnu, said Russian officials had promised him they would not force the Chechens to return home. Still, the recent detention of half a dozen refugees, including a Chechen dentist arrested about 10 days ago, has stirred fears that Ingushetia's new government is allowing Russian soldiers a freer hand. Some advocates for the refugees see the Russian government's halt of bread distribution to the camps as another form of pressure. Mikhail Ejiev, deputy director of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, a human rights monitoring group partly funded by the U.S. government, said as long as refugees remain in Ingushetia, Chechnya will command some measure of international attention. "If they go back home, they [Russian authorities] can say the problem is over," he said in an interview in the Nazran office of the society. "But the refugees will stay, because they don't want to die." The refugees are unsure how long their welcome will last. But those interviewed last week said they would not return to their homes -- what's left of them -- unless the Russian soldiers depart. "You can go into any tent, and you will hear the same thing," said Maldat Shabazava, whose tent in the Sputnik camp is lined with metal bunk beds for seven children. "We are afraid for our male population, afraid we will have no husbands or sons." Oleg Mironov, Russia's human rights commissioner for Chechnya, acknowledged that there are "systemic and massive violations of human rights" there. But other Russian officials insisted the government was taking corrective steps, including a regulation issued in March that requires soldiers to identify themselves and be accompanied by civilian officials when they check documents of people living in Chechnya. But Aslakhanov, the Duma deputy, said any improvement was short-lived, and brutal zachistkas are again the rule -- as he saw when he traveled to Mesker Yurt this month. In interviews last week, residents and visitors who were trapped in Mesker Yurt described what took place in the 21 days that the village was shut off from the outside world. The interviews were conducted in Nazran, less than 10 miles west of the border with Chechnya, where some residents of the village traveled at the request of a reporter. Others who talked were refugees living in Ingushetia who had been caught in Mesker Yurt during the cleansing operation and returned to Nazran to tell their stories. Their accounts could not be verified immediately, and some Chechen residents have exaggerated the degree of abuse by Russian troops. One person interviewed said there were, in fact, at least two people in the village who served as financial couriers for the rebels. But the villagers said the arrests in Mesker Yurt were not targeted at individuals, but involved dozens of civilians with no known links to the guerrillas. They insisted they were describing only what they had witnessed personally, and their descriptions fit a pattern of lawless behavior by the Russian military that has been extensively documented by human rights organizations and journalists. The trouble in Mesker Yurt started on May 18 when a group of men abducted a 36-year-old Chechen named Sinbarigov, who some villagers said worked for Russia's Federal Security Service. The next day, his head was found on a stick next to the village administration building, according to Memorial. The Chechen rebels' Web site said the man was executed because he had helped the Russian authorities. The following day, Russian troops circled the village and blocked the roads with armored vehicles. Savnykaevna, the Ingushetia refugee, said residents decided their only defense was to send every male resident from the ages of 13 to 35 to the red brick mosque in the center of the village. She said 200 to 300 men fled there. She and the women of the village surrounded it, trading places when they grew tired of standing in front of the soldiers' pointed guns. After three days, she said, the men went back to their houses, because the soldiers threatened to blow up the mosque. "Then on the fourth day, after lunch, they started arresting, killing, torturing," she said. More than a dozen soldiers rushed into her parents' house, she said, and slipped black masks over the heads of her three brothers and her nephew. They demanded 12,000 rubles -- about $400 -- to let them go, she said. Other men were dragged off to the field where the soldiers had camped and were tortured, villagers said. When the streets were clear of soldiers, Savnykaevna said, she visited the homes of her parents' neighbors. Three brothers from one family were arrested, she said. "They brought back only a bag with their bones inside," she said. A worker from the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, who visited the village, identified the brothers as Apti, Adam and Abu Didishev. In another house, Savnykaevna said, two brothers lay in bed, one with an eye plucked out, the other with four fingers of one hand missing. She said his parents told her both had been tortured with electricity, leaving dark marks on their faces and arms. She said she saw soldiers beating the bare feet of one man with an iron pipe while the man's legs dangled outside the opening of a tank. Later, when she visited his home, she said his relatives told her the soldiers had sliced his back with broken glass, rubbed salt in his wounds, then doused his back with alcohol and burned him. The family of Said Abubakarov, 19, found his shirt with his fingers in the pocket, according to the account provided to the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society. Three miles away, in the town of Argun, Zena Gazihanova, 50, heard about Mesker Yurt and organized busloads of women who protested for days outside the headquarters of the pro-Russian government in Grozny. "We were screaming very loudly," she said. "Release our sons and brothers! Stop the genocide!" Word leaked to Moscow, where angry Chechens filled the office of Aslakhanov, the Duma deputy. He flew to Ingushetia and drove to Mesker Yurt on June 9, the day before the Russian troops left. With him was a civilian prosecutor and military prosecutor assigned to Chechnya. At the village, he said, he found representatives of numerous Russian military and law enforcement agencies. They refused to let them enter the village, he said, telling him it was too dangerous. "They humiliated me, a colonel, a deputy, when they didn't let me in," he said, in a telephone interview from Moscow. "Everything that concerned Chechnya is a lie sitting on a lie," he said. "The worst part of this story is that there is no way to find the guilty ones." While Aslakhanov cooled his heels, the soldiers prepared to depart. Asmalika Ejieva, 41, said the soldiers told the villagers to show up at the field at 8 the next morning and their relatives would be released. The next morning, the field was deserted, she said. In freshly dug pits, she said, they found parts of bodies that appeared to have been blown up with explosives. Ejieva said people are terrified that if they describe the horror, they will be killed. Some are leaving for the relative safety of Ingushetia, she said, because the Russians left with a promise: In 10 days, they would come back. © 2002 The Washington Post Company |