HATTAB GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO KILL THE INJURED
Recently the General Staff of federal troops in the North Caucasus
has been summing up the results of many days of the operation in several
eastern regions of Chechnya. The INTERNET newspaper UTRO
has reported that only in the vicinity of the Kurchaloi village over 20
militants have been killed and another 14 arrested. The servicemen allowed
several groups of extremists to unite in one place, the native village
of Aslan Maskhadov-Alleroi. Numerous purges in the villages of Tsotsin-Urt,
Bachi-Urt and Kurchaloi compelled the group of militants under Maskhadov's
command to leave those places and move towards Alleroi. There is information
that smaller groups of several field commanders also entered that village.
After that the village was blocked by the military and policemen. A check-up
of passports that followed caused a shooting that continued for two weeks.
A spokesman for the federal security service, Ilya Shabalkin, said that
special groups comprising investigators were sent to check up accommodations.
The bandits opened fire on them. One policeman was killed and several others
injured. Some 60 persons were detained. The interrogation allowed the investigators
to get information about the whereabouts of the storage for medical equipment
and arms. Dozens of sub-machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars and ammunitions
were presented to journalists.
Field commander Saifutdin Ibragimov fell into the trap. Militants Khanpasha
and Ilkor Zagidulin were arrested together with him. They are members of
the field commander Rabbani's group subordinate to Hattab. As for Saifutdin
Ibragimov, his name became notorious after Basayev's and Hattab's intrusion
in Dagestan.Quite a few natives of Dagestan were fighting in the Rabbani's
group that operated in the Novolaksk and Botlikh regions of the republic.
At present Rabbani's militants attack federal troops' convoys and mine
mountainous roads in the Nozhai-Urt and Vedeno regions of Chechnya.
According to news agencies, Rabbani's arrested militants told about
five camps of Basayev and Hattab in the mountains which were subjected
to air strikes. The department of the federal security service for Chechnya
has reported that in one of the camps five militants were killed and other
three injured. In a camp near the village of Ersenoi in the Vedeno region
of Chechnya a group of 20 militants was shelled. Information of the militants'
heavy casualties has been confirmed by radio intercepts. After the bombing
the commander took his group of militants out of the region since a search
group of Russian commandos was sent there. By radio he contacted with his
superior saying he was compelled to give the order to kill all badly wounded
since no medical aid could be given to them under the circumstances.
As is known, at a conference of the leaders of extremists on the 10th
of this month Hattab gave instructions to launch more attacks on regional
offices of military commandants since they accumulate information which
is used by the federal aircraft and artillery and special groups of the
Defense Ministry and the Interior troops. Militants' casualties have increased.
In the previous week alone, over 50 militants were killed and over a hundred
detained.
Chechnya's Grimmest Industry
Thousands of people have been abducted by the war-torn republic's kidnapping
machine. Tales of the survivors read like relics from a barbaric past.
By ROBYN DIXON, Times Staff Writer
NALCHIK, Russia--As awkwardly as a newborn foal struggling on spindly
legs, Lena Meshcheryakova is learning how to curl her lips up at the corners
to make a smile.
Drifting just beneath the surface of her 5-year-old world are the memories
of a darker place: the cellar in Chechnya where she was held prisoner by
kidnappers for nine months.
When she was freed at age 3, she had forgotten how to smile. She could
barely even speak. But she knew how to pray like the devout Muslim Chechen
men who had imprisoned her. The words she kept shouting out were "Allahu
akbar!" (God is great!)
Lena, kidnapped from her Russian mother's home in Grozny, the Chechen
capital, was a victim of Chechnya's most voracious industry, the trade
in hostages and slaves. Thousands of people have been gobbled up by the
Chechen kidnapping machine, which has ravaged Russia since 1994.
The stories of survivors are like the relics of some wild, half-forgotten
era of warlords and lawless barbarism. Victims have been kept in earthen
pits or small cells that are often scrawled with the initials of hundreds
of earlier captives. They have been used as slaves to dig trenches or build
large houses for relatives of the kidnappers.
The kidnappers have been known to mutilate their captives, even children,
severing their ears or fingers. Gangs have sent videotaped recordings of
mutilations and beheadings to relatives to terrify them into finding the
ransom. Russian authorities have used the gruesome videos to feed anti-Chechen
sentiment and boost public support for Moscow's latest war in the separatist
republic.
When the kidnapping industry reached its peak a few years ago, there
was even a relatively open "slave market" in Grozny, near Minutka
Square, where the names and details of human livestock circulated on lists
for interested buyers. Gangs often traded hostages or stole them from one
another.
In the years between Russia's first war in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996,
and Moscow's launch of a new war against Chechen rebels last fall, kidnapping
was one of the biggest sources of enrichment for criminal gangs in an economy
that had little else to offer but oil theft, arms trade, counterfeiting
and drug smuggling.
The highly organized gangs hunted for victims among the wealthy clans
from Chechnya and neighboring republics in southern Russia. Foreigners
and Russian television journalists were in high demand.
There were even professional go-betweens who took a commission on ransom
deals, visited victims in their cells and dictated the despairing letters
that captives sent to relatives pleading for the ransom to be paid.
Nearly a thousand hostages are still being held or are dead, according
to Russian Interior Ministry figures.
Most of the victims were kidnapped in Chechnya or nearby. But dozens
of people were seized in Moscow and other cities and traveled under guard
to Chechnya in trucks with hidden cells, buried under potatoes or furniture.
In at least one case, a hostage was doped and transported in a suitcase.
Piecing Together a Child's Lost Months
In her new hometown of Prokhladny, near Nalchik in southern Russia,
Lena Meshcheryakova is rediscovering a childhood world of smiling suns
painted on kindergarten doors, posters with cotton ball sheep and lunchtime
milk ladled from an enamel pail. Her mother, Tatyana, 44, is gradually
putting together the jagged puzzle of what happened to Lena in the lost
nine months of her captivity.
Back in her Grozny neighborhood, Tatyana Meshcheryakova, a kindergarten
director, was resented as a Russian woman teaching the children of Chechens.
She thinks that her family was a target for Chechen extremists because
of it.
At 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 1998, she awoke to the sounds of the neighborhood
dogs barking. Then four armed men were in her room. They took away her
child and a pair of inexpensive gold earrings.
The initial ransom, $15,000, might as well have been a million dollars
for a woman who hadn't been paid in four years. Nine months later, it had
fallen to $1,000, and neighbors, colleagues and friends helped scrape together
the money to buy her child's life.
Before Meshcheryakova was reunited with Lena, doctors warned her to
show no emotion and to get no closer than a handshake, in case of infection.
"But I decided to hug her, and when I did she was just skin and
bone," Meshcheryakova says. The child had lost all her hair. "She
was a pitiful sight, all covered in scabies, her skin hanging loose. She
had deep bedsores and could barely move. She weighed 9 kilograms [20 pounds]
at 3 years of age."
Lena couldn't tell her mother the story. It finally emerged in painful
scraps. She spoke of people named Ruslan and Shamil, who carried machine
guns, and a bad-tempered woman called Larisa.
Lena's ear was ripped, and she had a deep scar on her finger. "Larisa
hit me with a knife for losing a slipper," Lena explained to her mother.
She was terrified of people in camouflage and burst into tears whenever
she saw a cellar. When her mother asked why she was always sitting with
hands behind her back, Lena told her she was wearing handcuffs. She would
greedily pounce on any crumbs that fell to the floor and lick the last
tiny scrap from her plate.
Russian Soldiers See a Cause to Fight For
The kidnapping industry reached its crescendo in the lawless chaos
after Russia was defeated in the first Chechen war. The kidnappings gave
Russian soldiers a cause to fight for--which they lacked in the first war--and
made it easy for them to hate all Chechens.
Despite the fact that Russia has captured most Chechen territory, there
were still 73 kidnappings in southern Russia near Chechnya in the first
half of this year.
According to the Interior Ministry's organized-crime department, 1,807
people have been kidnapped since 1994. The figure excludes the thousands
of Chechens abducted within the separatist republic and the many other
people who didn't go to the authorities for help.
"It's not just a disorganized bunch of cutthroats. It's a highly
organized, well-oiled machine, and they've got contacts all over the North
Caucasus," says Mikhail Brenner, 45, a road construction engineer
who was kidnapped in Ingushetia, a Russian republic neighboring Chechnya,
in October 1998 along with four of his colleagues.
In the year of his captivity, dozens of people passed through his cell,
with its filthy mattresses and bloodstained walls.
One of the five, Victor Zinchenko, 53, whose mother was a poverty-stricken
widow, was beheaded in a green forest glade. The video of his death has
been played countless times on Russian television, but the part never telecast
shows his executioners kicking his severed head about like a football,
says Brenner's wife, Tatyana, who got the full version of the video in
a parcel from the kidnappers.
Local Authorities Were Often Involved
After the withdrawal of the Russians from Chechnya in 1996, Moscow
was impotent to stop the kidnappings or free the victims. The local Chechen
government's security service was no help, afraid of sparking clan vendettas.
In fact, the Chechen authorities were often involved in kidnappings.
Aslanbek Kharikhanov, 31, of Mairtup village, left the Chechen police force
in disgust because so many police cooperated with gangs or became kidnappers
themselves. Chechnya's customs service often kidnapped people while inspecting
trains or buses.
Even ordinary Chechens played a role in the crimes.
Victims such as Brenner, who was guarded by old men with machine guns
as he worked as a slave building houses, concluded that every Chechen supports
the kidnapping industry. But ordinary Chechens are also terrified of the
warlords and their armies.
Siryazhdin Idrisov, 37, a farmer from Mairtup, kept a man in his basement
in the summer of 1997. The man, who looked about 45 and Russian, was brought
to him by a warlord.
"What could I do? I couldn't say no to a warlord," Idrisov
explains. "He said I would answer for the prisoner with my head or
with the heads of my family members, and I knew he was serious. I suspect
many other people in the village had the same problem, but we never shared
it. We were just terrified, that is all.
"I was afraid the man would run away, so I kept the basement closed
at all times. I fed him well; I gave him the same food my family had. I
never spoke to him. But I felt sorry for him. He looked very sad and frightened
at all times. I was quite relieved when the warlord came after 12 days
and took him away." The man's fate is unknown.
Idrisov wouldn't give the warlord's name, saying, "I don't want
him to come and kill me." The heart of the industry was the town of
Urus-Martan, about 15 miles southwest of Grozny, controlled by the notorious
eight Akhmadov brothers, including Uvais Akhmadov, the town's police chief.
Kirill Perchenko, 22, the son of a Moscow art dealer, was kidnapped
in August 1999 from one of Moscow's fashionable streets and trucked to
Grozny. He was sold to Ramzan Akhmadov, one of the brothers, and saw hundreds
of names, going back to 1992, scratched on the walls of the warlord's cells.
The Akhmadovs had many rules for their prisoners. They had to keep
their eyes down and weren't allowed to meet a Chechen's gaze. They worked
at cobbling shoes, carrying water and other chores.
Several times, Perchenko was given 100 strokes with wooden sticks for
using bad language. After the first month of frequent hard beatings, he
says, he began to get used to the pain.
The beating that really sticks in his mind wasn't the most painful
one. A few Chechen boys, aged 5 or 6, were encouraged to hit him while
a woman stood nearby, laughing.
He says that during his captivity he watched seven men being executed
by his captors. One of his friends was bashed to death.
Once, a hostage, a Russian officer, attacked and wounded one of the
guards with a knife. Punishment was immediate.
"They put him on the ground, and four hostages had to hold his
arms and legs," Perchenko remembers. "They took a two-handed
saw and killed him. He was lying on his stomach screaming. They cut from
the back. From the back you hit the spine first, and it's very painful."
"The next day they took us all out of our cell and cut off the head
of an 82-year-old man they had taken in Grozny. They just took it off with
a knife and said, 'For Allah,' before killing him. They put both [men's]
heads on poles. And they took out the heart of the old man and nailed it
to a tree."
Perchenko managed to escape after six months in captivity.
Only about 10% of hostages were freed by Russia's organized-crime force,
according to former Maj. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a crusading journalist from
the Novaya Gazeta newspaper who has devoted himself to tracing and freeing
hostages. Most were bought, a few escaped, and some were abandoned by gangs
when Russia started bombing towns and villages after the second war began
last fall.
With 950 unaccounted for in the Interior Ministry figures, it's not
clear how many died in Russia's ferocious bombing campaign.
"Hostages say the most terrible thing they experienced was the
Russian bombing," says Izmailov, who believes the number of hostages
is much higher than official figures suggest. The least "lucrative"
hostages are soldiers, says Mikhail Suntsov of the ministry's organized-crime
department.
Roman Tereshchenko, a 22-year-old soldier, was sold into slavery in
Chechnya by another soldier, Vasily Pinigin, for a few hundred dollars
in June 1998. Pinigin was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to
eight years in prison. It was the only trial of its type, although there
were several cases in which soldiers betrayed colleagues to kidnappers,
either for money or to avoid being kidnapped themselves, Suntsov says.
The ransom for a soldier was usually $2,000 to $10,000, he says, and 10
times more for an officer.
Although kidnappings have been going on in Chechnya for centuries,
the trade really took off in September 1996, when Russia ran out of captured
Chechen rebels to exchange for Russian POWs.
The Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, passed an amnesty enabling
convicted Chechens serving time for various crimes in Russian prisons to
be swapped for captive Russian civilians and soldiers. A similar amnesty
was passed late last year. Izmailov, who arranged many of the swaps, set
a minimum of three Russians for every Chechen released. The problem was
that the rule implied that one Chechen life was worth three Russians. It
was like pouring gasoline on the flames.
"Of course it helped create a market. But the people who split
the atom did not know it would result in a nuclear bomb," Izmailov
says. "What other option did I have?"
Standing Blindfolded in a Self-Dug Grave
Telling their stories means reliving their captivity for men such as
Maj. Vitaly Khapov, whose kidnappers clamped open his jaw and ground his
teeth down with a metal file, or Brenner, who had to dig a grave and stand
in it blindfolded while gunmen fired bullets past his ears.
Oscar Wilde wrote in his story "The Happy Prince" that there
is no mystery so great as misery--but equally mysterious is the will to
survive it.
All but one of Brenner's teeth were knocked out in vicious beatings.
The kidnappers' aim was to break him.
"People like that can't break your spirit," Brenner says.
"They could hardly even read or write properly. When a beast like
that is beating you up, you try to watch in a detached way, thinking that
this person being beaten up is much higher than the person beating him.
He's just a killing machine, beating you up.
"You feel hatred for them, of course, but all the time you have
a feeling of derision. You try not to succumb to the pain."
Brenner escaped last fall and walked for five days to neighboring Ingushetia,
just in time to be asked to identify Zinchenko's decomposing head, which
had been found two weeks earlier under a bridge.
In November 1997, Vitaly Kozmenko, 73, was seized in Grozny by three
men in camouflage and was held in several different cells and pits.
He spent two months in a grave-size pit under a house high in the southern
Chechen mountains. His hands were painfully cuffed and his feet were chained,
but he could walk a few paces.
The owner of the house was always masked. He was curt and cruel but
brought a bucket for Kozmenko to relieve himself into and a few boards
for him to sleep on. After three days in the pitch blackness, Kozmenko
began having hallucinations and he explained the problem to his guard,
who softened.
"I said, 'What do I call you?' He said, 'Call me Sonny,' and he
called me Grandpa. I said, 'Sonny, can you bring me a light?' "
With light he was able to write. Kozmenko still has a small scrap of
worn cardboard, folded many times, that is covered in tiny illegible writing
and hieroglyphics, his diary of two months in the pit.
Later, he was moved to a cellar in Mairtup village, where he was chained
to a couch. Kozmenko's limbs were so confined that he was almost sleepless,
tormented by thoughts of being able to just rest one hand on his thigh.
Somehow he persuaded his newest captor, Lechi, to unchain him for a night,
despite the Chechen's fear of reprisals if Kozmenko escaped.
After that, "I said: 'Lechi, unchain me, open the door and leave
the house. I'll not run away.' . . . He said, 'To hell with them,' and
unchained me for good. And I started to learn to walk again."
Lechi borrowed several books for his prisoner, facing embarrassment
when a suspicious friend asked him why he had suddenly become so interested
in reading.
"A man should not lose his spirit and should struggle to the end,"
Kozmenko says. "I suffered a lot of excruciating pain, but I survived
because I said to myself life is given to man just once. You should do
all you can to stay alive."
He was released after his wife, a lawyer, agreed to defend the case
of a rich and powerful politician who was charged with inciting a coup
in Dagestan, a republic neighboring Chechnya. After 14 months in captivity,
the first thing Kozmenko did when he got back to Moscow in January 1999
was to go to an ice hole in the frozen Moscow River and plunge in for an
exhilarating dip.
'Let There Always Be Blue Sky'
In Lena Meshcheryakova's kindergarten, the words of a Russian nursery
song decorate one wall: "Let there always be sunshine. Let there always
be blue sky. Let there always be Mama. Let there always be me." For
all the other children, it's just a pretty song, but for Lena the implied
alternative is quite real.
Lena still has rings under her eyes, and her solemn little face rarely
lights up. She still wakes up screaming about people coming to get her.
She is often anxious and irritable, and whenever she sees Grozny mentioned
on television, she begs for the promise that she will never have to go
back there.
Lena and her mother, a widow, have been staying with a relative for
months. Lately, there have been hints that it's time to move on from the
house in Prokhladny, but the mother can't afford to buy her own place.
As Tatyana Meshcheryakova tells the story of her daughter's survival, Lena
plays nearby. She lets a ladybug run along her finger, then is chagrined
by its apparent death due to her attention. She gently places the tiny
insect on a matchbox.
Gradually, Lena is recovering. "Now she has even started to be
naughty," her mother says gratefully. "Thank God she was born.
Thank God she's here."
"It's moving! Look, Mama! It's moving!" Lena shrieks excitedly
as the ladybug picks itself up and begins to scurry away. And suddenly,
Lena is smiling.
* * *
Sergei L. Loiko of The Times' Moscow Bureau and special correspondent
Mayerbek Nunayev contributed to this report. Dixon reported from Nalchik,
Rostov-on-Don and Moscow. Nunayev reported from Mairtup.
According to journalists, 1,094 people were kidnapped by more than
60 Chechen criminal gangs in 1997 and 1998. And more than 270 people have
been abducted in the areas neghbouring on Chechnya since early 1999.
The ORT Moscow-base TV Channel journalists Roman Perevezentsev and
Vladislav Tibelius were seized in Chechnya on January 19th, 1997. But following
the lengthy effort to locate their whereabouts and just as lengthy talks
they were set free.
Mauro Galligani, journalist of the Italian weekly "La Panorama"
was kidnapped in Grozny on February 23d, 1997. The abductors demanded a
ransom of 1 million dollars, yet Mauro was released on April 12th with
no ransom paid for him.
On March 4th, 1997 three staff members of the "Radio Russia"
radio company were seized in Grozny - correspondents Yury Arkhipov and
Nikolai Mamulashvili, and space communication engineer Lev Zeltsin, and
also the correspondent of the ITAR-TASS news agency Nikolai Zagnoiko. All
were set free on the night of June 5th.
The shooting group of the NTV television company - the special correspondent
Yelena Masiuk, cameraman Ilya Mordiukov and sound recordist Dmitry Olchev
- were seized near the Chechen village Samashki on May 10th, 1997, and
were released on August 18th.
The ITAR-TASS correspondent Sayed Isayev - the only Russian media staff
journalist to work in Chechnya on a permanent basis - was kidnapped in
Grozny on March 30th, 1999. Released on June 19th.
On July 19th 1999 the ITAR-TASS photo-journalist Vladimir Yatsina got
lost when on his way from Ingushetia's capital Nazran to Chechnya. The
ITAR-TASS correspondent Sayed Isayev was again seized in Grozny on October
10th, 1999, but managed to escape from captivity a week later. In late
October 1999 Chechen fighters abducted the French photo-correspondent Bruce
Latier. (All information comes in a review by the "Modernization"
Centre).
During a passage in the mountains near the Shatoi gorge the fighters
killed the ITAR-TASS photo-correspondent Vladimir Yatsina in cold blood
just because he had grown so weak he couldn't keep going by himself. That
was revealed at a meeting with journalists at the Federal Security Service
headquarters by Alisher Orzaliyev
who was another hostage in the group and who was liberated by a counterintelligence
task force. Alisher Orzaliyev, 22, was born in Kazakhstan, seized by Chechens
last spring and found himself in a basement room of a house in Urus Martan.
There were other hostages in the room, and one of them was Vladimir Yatsina,
whom Orzaliyev describes as a very nice, communicative and cheerful person.
Alisher Orzaliyev shared the bunk with Vladimir for four months and said
that the journalist even converted to Islam. When Russian artillery and
aircraft stepped up their attacks on the terrorists, the hostages were
moved to the mountain village Shatoi, in the Shatoi gorge. The hostages
walked in small groups, and Vladimir Yatsina was part of one of them. According
to Orzaliyev, Vladimir's legs were all aches and pains, and he couldn't
walk. He only had to cover 5 kilometres to their destination but the fighters
shot and killed him. True, Orzaliyev did not bear witness to the proper
act of Vladimir Yatsina's execution, but he has no doubt that the journalist
was killed. "We came to Shatoi and were to stay there, he says, but
Russian planes started bombing the village, so we had to rush back to the
forest down the mountain". And when they were running for their lives,
Orzaliyev saw it with his own eyes that Vladimir's dead body was lying
prostrate among the boulders.
The 22-year Muscovite Kirill Perchenko,
released from Chechen captivity by Federal Security Service commandos on
February 23d, told a news conference on March the 1st that Yatsina had
indeed been killed. According to him, bandits drove a group of 16 hostages,
Vladimir included, along a mountain road to Shatoi on February 20th. Due
to his poor condition Vladimir lagged behind, and two fighters shot and
killed him.
After the events of 1995-1996 and the withdrawal of the Federal forces
from Chechnya under the Khasavyurt Agreements, the Russian inhabitants
of that republic  became
the main target of the permissiveness-crazed secessionists. Many gifted
scientists, physicians, engineers, and teachers - over 350 ifaiam thousand
people in all - had to flee their homes. Those who remained suffered great
humiliation and oppression.
More than 21 thousand Russians were executed in Chechnya, according
to the official figures released by the Ministry for Ethnic Groups and
Regional Policy. The bandits seized more than 100 thousand apartments and
houses that belonged to Russians,and also to Ingushes and Daghestanis.
Upwards of 50 thousand of their  neighbors
were turned into slaves by the bandits. Slaves were used in the construction
of the mountain road across the Main Caucasian Range from Georgia, at improvised
factories with their health hazards, and to cultivate the poppy and hemp
plantations belonging to the Basayev brothers and Khattab.
More than 60 Chechen armed bands, numbering a total of over 2500 men,
are engaged in kidnapping. By November of last year, 1289 people had been
abducted in  the Horth
Caucasus. In the vast majority of cases, the hostages were^ held by the
criminals in Chechnya, Since January 1997" 61 foreigners have been
kidnapped, 50 have been freed, and four have been killed, (l"rom a
report by Nikolai Morozov, who heads the Main Directorate for Countering
Organized Grime within the InteriorMinistry of the Russian Federation.
From a manual of Khattab's subversion center: "Parallel with the
construction of new bases, we must work to establish research and production
centers for developing weapons of effective warfare and thereby eliminate
the' problem of the supplies of captured weapons, Por these purposes, it
is necessary to form small but highly mobile groups to identify specialists
in this area. They must be either hired or taken prisoner and made to work
for the defense of Daghestan. Chemists, physicists, mechanics, and skilled
workers are needed to create various types of gun-powders, easily transported
cannons, and explosives. It is necessary to form subversive groups and
organize high-precision subversive operations in places where bands of
the colonialists are concentrated, blow up sewage systems, heating systems,
tunnels and cable communications, set fire to factories, mills, and forests,
and set off explosions on bridges, at airfields, and railaroad stations.
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