TITLE: Anguish at Every Turn in Ruined Chechen City

AUTHOR: Patrick E. Tyler

PUB: The New York Times

DATE: January 20, 2001

When the new year arrived, Malika Dakayeva had already spent eight anxiety-filled days looking for her only son, Kazbek, age 15, among the ruins of the Chechen capital. It would take six more days of searching before his torn and lifeless body came back to her from the minefield where he and a friend had inexplicably strayed and died. Her tears were streaming as she recounted the terror of not knowing, and her story ended with the solemn events of Jan. 7, the day Kazbek's body was washed and buried under a mound of earth in the Muslim cemetery on the banks of the Sunzha River. "He was my hope," she told a visitor to her darkened apartment. It has been nearly a year since Russian military forces stormed and destroyed much of Grozny. As Moscow prepares to put a new government in place in the devastated Republic of Chechnya, life here carries on in various states of terror for the nearly 200,000 residents who have come back from tent cities and other temporary shelters they occupied during the most recent war. There is the terror that a child will disappear, as young Kazbek did, or that a son or daughter will be beaten or humiliated at one of hundreds of military checkpoints that enforce an undeclared martial law. There is fear of soldiers sweeping into homes for peremptory searches, taking away young Chechen men who return bruised or psychologically battered, and sometimes only after ransom is paid. A 41-year-old man named Ismail, returning to Chechnya to check on his aged father this month, was seized, blindfolded and taken to a so-called filtration camp, where he was beaten for five days, he said in an interview. During interrogations to elicit whether he was aiding the rebels, a needle was pushed under his fingernail, and on three occasions during questioning, he said, his Russian interrogator "warmed him up" by sending electric current through his finger. The soldiers took more than $300 from him, he said, and then dumped him on a road leading out of the republic. He never reached his father's village. Last week at Hospital No. 9, or what is left of it, Tumisha Maulatova, 53, lay in a green nightgown staring out a window and recovering from the head wound she suffered on Dec. 20. A mortar round had flown through the window of her home while she and her only daughter, Zarima, 24, were making pastries to sell at market. No one has told her that her daughter died that day. "She thinks Zarima has gone to a village to stay with relatives," said her sister Leana, dressed in black. The shrapnel that killed Zarima came from one of 100 to 150 artillery and mortar shells that rained down for more than two hours on Grozny's university district on the morning of Dec. 20, panicking hundreds of students who had come to school to take exams. As a group of 10 dashed between buildings, one incoming round exploded in their midst. "I only remember the sound of the explosion in my head," said Medina Atabayeva, 20. "I fell down and began to shout because we were taught that you should open your mouth and yell to avoid shell shock." Covered with dirt, Ms. Atabayeva realized she could not move her leg, where shrapnel had crushed her shinbone. Young women lay motionless nearby. Others were hysterical as mortar rounds kept dropping around them.Three young women and two young men died in the attack on the campus, while the other five in the group were wounded. The city's three university presidents appealed by telegram to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to bring criminal charges against the military commander responsible, but all the Kremlin has done is blame the rebels. The elderly also live in terror, not just from the shooting that fills the night, but from isolation enforced by Moscow's policies, which have kept Grozny in the dark and without communication. Here, if illness strikes at night, an ambulance won't come. There is no telephone service, no help line. To venture onto the street after the 7 p.m. curfew is to risk being shot without question."If something illegal occurs at night, we cannot go out or we will be shot at," said Imran U. Makuyev, a Chechen police commander. "It is like sitting in a cage." In the Leninsky District, Roza Khasanova is 60 and alone. She and her neighbors have spray-painted their apartment buildings with survival graffiti: "Don't shoot. People live here." The image of a child's face punctuates the message."Every night there is some shooting," Ms. Khasanova said, adding, "We have prepared the basement in case of an emergency." For the 7,000 Russian soldiers who garrison the city, standing behind concrete barriers in heavy flak jackets and helmets, there is the terror of holding a hostile civilian population prisoner while the Russian Army tries in vain to capture or defeat the last rebel commanders and their guerrilla forces. Snipers strafe the checkpoints at night and lay mines on the roads used by military convoys. Last week, at least five Russian Interior Ministry police officers were killed, three of them when rebels fired a grenade into their car as it escorted a military convoy in the Oktyabrsky District of the city. And the rebels have stepped up a campaign of assassination against Chechens working with Russian authorities to restore order, or who support Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen cleric appointed by Moscow last spring to build a postwar government without secessionist aspirations. In a wave of ambush attacks from Jan. 6 to 9, village clerics in Urus-Martan and Germenchuk were gunned down, and relatives of a third cleric who supported Mr. Kadyrov were also killed in Urus-Martan. The pro-Russian police chief of Kargalinskaya was killed, along with his son, in a road ambush. Even Western relief organizations have not been spared. On Jan. 9, the American coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, Kenneth Gluck, was abducted by unidentified armed men as he traveled in convoy with other aid workers and security guards a dozen miles south of the capital near the village of Stariye Atagi. Western aid groups have since pulled their workers out, inciting fears among Chechen authorities that the cutting of critical supply lines for medicines, fuel and food will cause more suffering and death. "There are 9,200 people over 60 who get bread every day," said Taisa Batriyeva, a social service director. "I don't know what we would do on our own. We don't even have pencils." Ruslan Shavkhalov is director of Hospital No. 9, where Mr. Gluck's organization has rebuilt trauma wards and supplied a diesel generator or operating theaters, and was also equipping a new vaccine center. For him, Mr. Gluck's kidnapping was "a deadly blow at all of us." "We are praying for him," Mr. Shavkhalov added. But terror arises from all sides. Chechen officials allege that Russian military units retaliate for mine and sniper attacks with random artillery, mortar and helicopter attacks against civilian neighborhoods - even schools, as on Dec. 20. "All we demand now is our safety," said Aslanbek Khasbulatov, a historian and deputy rector of Grozny University. All three of the capital's higher education institutions suspended classes after the Dec. 20 shelling and have delayed the start of spring semester to March 1. "When they begin to shell and shoot at us, how can we trust anyone?" asked Khava Tasayeva, 19, who missed a year of college because of the war and feels she is now risking her life to attend classes. Esmira D. Alisultanova is dean of the computer sciences faculty of the Petroleum Institute, which teaches only the theory of computing because there are no computers on Grozny's campuses. "After the students were killed," she said, "many parents will not let their children attend classes, saying that safety is more important than education." .As Anzur Bisultanov, 20, put it, "The only thing more terrifying than exams is a soldier at a checkpoint pointing a gun at you."The snapshots of Grozny remain grim. Horizons of rubble lie under a blanket of frost, undisturbed since last spring. The city remains without electricity and other basic services - except gas supplies, the only source of heat - and even those were cut off by sabotage during three days in late December. Volunteers are sweeping the street in front of a new town hall reclaimed from the wreckage of two banks. The city's markets are a sea of mud on most days, under a sky darkened by the fires of 38 oil wells, which the Russian military refuses to extinguish. During a four-day visit to the city, artillery and small-arms fire erupted sporadically and echoed through the ruins as the population waited in a kind of hopeless squalor for Mr. Putin to make good on promises that aid and reconstruction are coming. "We are still in a state of absolute lawlessness and people are shooting all the time," said Shama B. Magomaev, deputy to Grozny's mayor. Mr. Magomaev was speaking in the new mayor's office, where the temperature hovered around freezing, where the windows consisted of plastic sheeting and a telephone on the desk had been assigned a number, though phone service does not exist. "We are pinning all our hopes on improvement when the new government begins its work," he added. The new government, by all accounts over the last week, will be headed by a Russian, Stanislav Ilyasov, the former head of regional government in nearby Stavropol. Mr. Ilyasov will not replace Mr. Kadyrov, the current head of Chechnya's "civil administration," but the appointment of an outsider as chief executive is a clear indication that Moscow is feeling the pressure to move forward with the long-promised reconstruction.Mr. Magomaev said city officials had been told that the Russian budget would allocate more than $60 million for Chechnya this year, with $16 million for housing reconstruction in Grozny during the first quarter. This will be a modest start, and no money has arrived yet. One morning this week, the eighth- grade class of School No. 56 filed into Mrs. Dakayeva's small apartment to express their condolences over the loss of Kazbek. No one has been able to explain how he and his friend Magomed Ibragimov, 16, wandered into the well-marked minefield adjacent to the Oktyabrsky District police station in central Grozny sometime after they disappeared on Dec. 23. Dozens of Russian Interior Ministry police officers at the Oktyabrsky headquarters heard the explosion that killed the boys, but for the next two weeks the police walked past the bodies, doing nothing to retrieve or identify them, or protect them from scavenging dogs. "I demanded his body every day," said Ms. Dakayeva, who went to the police station on the suspicion that the boys were being held. Finally, she said, Gen. Nikolai G. Golovanov, deputy commandant of Russian forces in Chechnya, who grew up in Grozny in a military family, took an interest in the case, and forced the police station to open its cells and show its registration books to families. During these inspections, a Russian police commander mentioned the bodies lying in the minefield next to the station. General Golovanov climbed into a destroyed five-story building and, using binoculars, scanned the minefield until he located them. He then ordered sappers to clear a path to them, family members said. "He kept his word," Ms. Dakayeva said of the Russian general. "He went there himself, and if it had not been for him, the bodies would still be there." END top