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War lingers on in Chechnya
High in the hills of Chechnya, the father of two of the Beslan hostage-takers, including the only one captured alive, counts off on his fingers the fate of his sons."I had seven at the start of the war," says Aburkash Kulayev. "Now I have four. One died here fighting the Russians. Khanpashi died in Beslan. Nurpashi, the youngest, he went to Beslan and was captured." Echoes of that grim arithmetic are heard across Chechnya, a tiny Muslim province in the Caucasus mountains. Russia's two wars to crush a separatist rebellion in Chechnya over the past decade have killed, by various estimates, at least 50,000 - possibly far more than 100,000 - of the 1 million people. Almost every Chechen family has suffered a loss, leaving the entire population traumatized. The attack last year by 32 hostage-takers on School No. 1 in Beslan, just to the west of Chechnya, was the latest and most horrific evidence of radicalization among rebel groups that have been battling Russia's army for years, but are now turning increasingly to terrorism. When Russian rescuers tried storming the school, 318 of the hostages held by the Chechen-led group in an explosives-rigged gymnasium were killed in the crossfire. More than half were children. In his ramshackle cottage in the village of Engenoi, deep in Chechnya's mountainous, pro-rebel south, Kulayev, 70, expressed sorrow, but no remorse, for Beslan. "Whatever happened, happened. In Chechnya, thousands of children have died," said Kulayev, who has a thick white beard and wore threadbare clothes. "War above all destroys the weak and helpless." Many Chechens feel the same way. They looked on the massacre at Beslan with horror - and deja vu. In the past decade, Russian aerial bombing and shelling, firefights and rebel killing of "collaborators" have devastated this small ethnic group, which fiercely resisted Russian colonization in the 19th century and was repressed en masse under Stalin. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people simply have "disappeared" - usually after being detained by Russian soldiers - in the past five years, the leading Russian human rights group Memorial says. In three major battles for the capital Grozny, Russian bombing, rocketing and shelling targeted everything from hospitals to crowded streets and - in one case witnessed by this reporter - an orphanage. What was once a major industrial city now looks like post-World War II Stalingrad. The human damage has been as extensive. A survey last year by the aid group Doctors Without Borders found that 90 percent of Chechens had lost someone close and that 16 percent had witnessed such a death. More than 65 percent said they never feel safe. Although Moscow claims the war is over, several Russian servicemen, or their locally recruited police allies, are killed or wounded daily by Chechen guerrillas in small ambushes similar to those made by Iraqi insurgents against U.S.-led forces in Iraq. About 10,000 Russian soldiers have died in a decade, officials say; independent observers say the number is at least 20,000. Many insurgents are young men seeking vengeance against Russia. Others have been seduced by extremist Islam, which is increasingly tapping into anti-Russian and anti-government sentiment in the North Caucasus region. Their most deadly commander, Shamil Basayev, claimed responsibility for Beslan. A year later, he remains at large, warning he will stop at nothing. At an orphanage in Grozny run on foreign donations and the sheer willpower of its Chechen husband-and-wife directors, the children have distant, adult eyes. One, Ben-Murad Mustiyev, 18, used to live with his mother in an apartment on the city's edge. One day in 1996, he says, "Mama came in and gave me and my sister ice cream, then went out to her job at the cafe. 'Tomorrow, we'll go out together,' she said. Those were her last words." That day, soldiers raided the cafe, with no explanation, and dragged away several women, including Mustiyev's mother. Her body, along with three others, was found several days later outside a nearby village. "My mama had been stabbed nine times in the chest and back," he said in an interview last week. Today, Mustiyev and his sister Belkis, 17, are among about 40 children at the orphanage. They all refer to themselves as siblings and the directors as parents. Discussing his newfound talent for woodcarving, Mustiyev smiles shyly. But his climb to recovery is steep. He didn't complete his first year of school until he was 11 and he's still too frightened to visit his mother's grave. "There are Russian soldiers" stationed nearby, he said, almost inaudibly. "Almost all children who stayed [in Chechnya] during the war are mentally unbalanced. Even babies are born stressed," said the orphanage director, Khadizhat Gatayeva, 40. "They are the young who have paid and will keep paying for the sins of adults." Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-09-07 |
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