living islam _ Islamic tradition

Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 02:14:09 -0500

The Chechens know they have been forgotten by the West.
By Anne Nivat
Wednesday, August 21, 2002; Page A17

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42397-2002Aug20.html

The dramatic crash of a Russian military
helicopter in Chechnya this week, in which more
than 100 members of the armed services were
killed, was a reminder to those in the West of
something many of them have forgotten in recent
years: The Chechnya war goes on. It may be
worse then ever.

Over the past three years, I have traveled
extensively throughout the tiny, mountainous
republic, determined to report fairly on this
forgotten conflict, which the Kremlin would
like very much for the rest of the world to
ignore. The West needs to know that the real
and intended casualties have mostly been
Chechen civilians, local independence-minded
governments, the Chechen economy and the
people's nonaggressive Sufi Muslim culture.

The Russians, lacking dramatic military
successes, have managed to defuse Western
criticism by designating the conflict an
"anti-terrorist operation." They have depicted
the Chechen people as bloodthirsty terrorists
who would impose Islamic law on other Caucasian
republics. Today even educated Muscovites
commonly say there is nothing wrong with
killing Chechen noncombatants, even babies.

Returning to Chechnya in June, I was hoping to
find that the situation was "under the process
of normalizing," as the Kremlin puts it.
High-ranking military officials have repeatedly
said the "military phase has been over" in
Chechnya since March 2000. Instead I found that
the situation was deteriorating.

Many Chechens are preoccupied with planning
ways to avoid the "zachistkas," the
frightening, out-of-control raids of villages
by masked soldiers searching for young Chechen
males. These operations are conducted every day
by the Russian army. Afterward, families search
out the fate of loved ones who were dragged
off. In every village, young men have
disappeared. Some lucky ones return after their
families pay for their release. Many never come
back. Chechens with whom I survived long hours
of aerial bombardment during the peak of the
war in winter 1999-2000 talk of their fear that
any male between the ages of 12 and 60 can now
disappear without a trace at any moment.

I traveled in the garb of a Chechen peasant
woman, a scarf tied around my head, a long
skirt brushing my ankles and a satellite phone
strapped to my belly. From the start, I had
declined to participate in the
Russian-organized tours. One day in 2000, while
my colleagues visited a flower market in the
capital city, Grozny, with a government escort,
I was able to make my own way to an arms market
a few yards away. The Russian secret services
eventually found me in February 2000 and sent
me back to Moscow, but I was able to return
clandestinely later.

The Chechens know they have been forgotten, and
they no longer expect a Western intervention
like that in Kosovo. They know that Western aid
organizations consider the region too dangerous
to venture into because of the continuing
fighting and the risk of kidnapping. Food,
shelter and medicine are delivered in
insufficient quantities and at irregular
intervals.

The Chechens have become obsessed with three
things: how to survive in such a hostile
environment, how to pass safely through the
many Russian military checkpoints on the roads
and how to save their young men from being
kidnapped. "We are the lost ones," Tabarka
Lorsanova, 46, told me when I saw her again in
June.

She had said much the same thing when we first
met in November 1999. She had fled Grozny for a
nearby village in the south of the country,
which she thought was safer. Now, back home in
the capital, she was trying to rebuild her life
from piles of rubble where shops had once
stood, now without electricity, heat or running
water.

Tabarka has only one son and doesn't want to
lose him. In April 2001, he disappeared during
a raid at the University of Grozny, in an
operation that left most of the students in a
state of shock. The mother remembers how she
argued with the Russian soldiers who had
encircled the building and prevented her from
entering. After insisting for two hours, she
finally made her way through with a group of
other outraged parents.

Ten students had been arrested, one of them her
son, for the simple reason that he "didn't look
like his passport picture." All ended up being
released, but two had to pay a ransom of $1,800
each. Tabarka summarizes well the perplexity of
the Chechen population regarding the behavior
of the Russian military machine: "As soon as
Putin announced that the war was finished, we
understood that on the contrary the situation
had gotten worse. After so many horrors, how
can we possibly trust them anymore?" For many
Chechens, the Russian president's declaration
marked the beginning of "the era of the
zachistkas."

I arrived in Meskert-Yurt, a large village of
5,000 inhabitants, two days after the end of
one of these "mopping-up" operations, an
exceptionally long one lasting from May 21 to
June 11. What I saw defies description. In late
May, in a scenario that replays itself over and
over, the village was sealed off -- encircled
by masked Russian soldiers. Although an order
from the Kremlin known as "Decree Number 80"
forbade masks and mandated identification of
the soldiers and of the raid's purpose, it was
ignored by the perpetrators.

The method in all these operations is the same:
Under the pretext of searching for rebels, the
military enters each house, terrorizes every
family and drags away one or more civilian men,
mostly very young ones, even if their documents
are legitimate. A few days later, some of the
families of the disappeared are informed by
intermediaries of the possibility of
"repurchasing" their loved ones with money or
rifles.

In Meskert-Yurt the majority of the houses are
farms, sheltering geese, hens and turkeys,
sometimes cows or horses. On a sunny Thursday
afternoon, the only thing I could see were the
stupefied inhabitants of the village, searching
the fields and ditches in all directions around
their farms to recover the bodies or body parts
of their loved ones. When I met Maaka, 43, a
mother of six, she couldn't even manage to cry
anymore. Her three sons, Aslan, 15, Makhmud,
13, and Rashid, 11, had been killed by enraged
soldiers after being horribly mutilated. She
showed me their bodies lined up beside many
others. I saw no military attire among the
broken bones and shreds of flesh, but I did see
a woman's scarf and a teenager's basketball
sneakers. Eyes protruded, bloody flesh hung
from crushed skulls, sometimes enough to show
the expression of terror at the moment of
death.

On the sixth day of the blockade, some grimly
determined women succeeded in passing an SOS
letter to inhabitants of the nearby city of
Argun, who transmitted it to the kommandantura
(Russian headquarters). Alerted, the head of
the Chechen administration, Akhmed Kadyrov,
then tried to go to the site but was not
allowed to enter. Then it was Aslanbek
Aslakhanov, the single Chechen deputy of the
Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament),
who took a turn to try to force the blockade.
On foot, through fields, he managed with great
difficulty to enter the village. Four days
later, the zachistka ended. Forty people had
disappeared.

This is the new Russian military strategy: to
avoid formal combat and air bombardment and to
multiply the clandestine raids under the
pretext that terrorists hide in these villages.

The Russians have identified four principal
"terrorists" who need to be captured to end the
war. I have interviewed all but one, and I had
little trouble getting to their hide-outs. In
three years of war, only one of the four has
been eliminated, a Saudi-born commander who
called himself Khattab and who died last April.
In Chechnya, nobody believes Khattab was killed
by the Russian secret services. It is said he
was a victim of other fighters who may have
wanted to remove evidence of an al Qaeda
connection or who simply didn't need him
anymore.

The Russian army must know exactly where the
rebel leaders are, thanks to information from
intercepted satellite phone calls, aerial
photographs and paid or tortured informants.
Yet there has been no move to kill or capture
any of them. Why? Perhaps because as long as
the war goes on, underpaid Russian military
personnel can augment their incomes by preying
on the civilians. It has now become impossible
to cross any checkpoint in Chechnya without
bribing a soldier, usually a young draftee. And
the benefits are shared with officers. When a
car stops, the driver is asked for "the form
number 10," which means a 10-ruble note folded
inside the passport. Sometimes the soldier may
ask for quite a bit more, "form number 50"
perhaps. Because of this situation, fewer
civilians can move around. People stay at home,
even when the zachistka threatens.

There is no outcry in the West about a war
fought on the very edges of Europe. We seem to
have heeded Russia's justification for it: that
this, too, is a war on terrorism. President
Vladimir Putin is welcomed as a colleague and
treated as a friend -- especially after Sept.
11 -- by heads of state across Europe and in
the United States. But by showing its
willingness to wipe Chechen civilization off
the map in order to prevent a people's
independence, Russia tells us a great deal
about how it might behave with its own citizens
under the pretext of "maintaining order."

For the time being, Tabarka, Maaka and the
thousands of other mothers, elderly people and
children of Chechnya wait. They have no other
choice. Tabarka is living in two tiny rooms of
her house in one of the most devastated
neighborhoods of Grozny. A professional
accountant before the war, she would like to
find a job in the Kremlin-appointed Chechen
administration, but that is possible only by
bribing officials, and she has no money left.
Her son, now 24, is in Odessa, Ukraine, trying
to make a living while waiting for the war to
stop. For now, she has forbidden him to return
home.

Anne Nivat is a Moscow-based writer. Her book
"Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the
Lines of the War in Chechnya" won the 2000
Albert Londres Award in France.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company