Chechnya Watch / Shah Graves
Bernstein, Jonas
Shali Graves by Jonas Bernstein B ouncing down a road on the outskirts of Nazran in a Russian jeep filled with four drunken Ingush teenagers (one of them at the wheel), and a reggae singer shouting...
...Indeed, at the first Russian post, an Interior Ministry officer—surprisingly friendly this time—told us that four of his comrades at the checkpoint had been severely wounded several days earlier in a hit-and-run attack...
...The middle-aged Chechen who was our host guided the bus to his home on the edge of town...
...We have reached the conclusion that the only way to save the Chechen people is through resistance...
...Her eyes now failing, she cried as she recalled Jonas Bernstein is a program officer with Freedom House in Moscow...
...I saw Chechens give them their bread...
...how the Ingush were shot, burned alive, and decapitated...
...on the tape player—this was not how I imagined I'd spend Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan...
...He was in Shali to gather "scrap metal," as he called it—fragments of shrapnel and bomblets from cluster bombs—for Kovalyov's commission and Memorial, the human rights group...
...She was a refugee from Grozny...
...Three of them were confiscated by a KGB officer at a Russian checkpoint...
...When Chechen forces were driven out of Grozny southward to towns like Shah, these mothers had followed (some forty captured Russian soldiers were being held in Shali...
...T he shelling of Argun stopped around midnight, allowing us a few hours of relatively peaceful sleep...
...The women cursed Boris Yeltsin and defense minister Pavel Grachev, and praised the locals for having looked in on them during the shelling to make sure they were safe...
...Some Cossacks, their anger fueled by territorial disputes with Chechnya, have volunteered to fight the Chechens: not Kosov...
...When she broke into tears, so did the three Russian POW mothers...
...But the Communists wiped this concept out of the heads of the Russians...
...When the Chechen events began, it was already clear that there wasn't democracy in our country," he said...
...the others escaped detection...
...Kosov goes back and forth all the time, getting information on Russian and Chechen POWs and bringing in food and medicine for the civilians...
...Denouncing the conflict as a "purely colonial war," a continuation of the effort byczars and commissars to subjugate the ethnically and culturally distinct people of the Caucusus, this Russian asked: "Where is the document by which the Chechens agreed to become part of Russia...
...There will be peace only when the last Russian soldier leaves this territory...
...Nazran had donned its Sunday best to celebrate the end of a month of self-abnegation...
...Now it is destroyed, of course...
...When I expressed surprise, he said: "There are 100,000 people still in Grozny...
...There was no gas, a clear sign, a neighbor said somberly, that an attack was imminent...
...They now realize that whether they're armed or not, they'll be destroyed in any case...
...others whipped by in Ladas with green, pink, or white flags streaming out of windows...
...CI The American Spectator May 1995 61...
...In the square in front of the buildings, fighters were pulling up in cars and donning their Islamic-green headbands: one of them was no more than twelve years old...
...hospital officials later told me that among the dead were a woman and two children...
...For all the festivities, though, Ingushetia doesn't have much to celebrate...
...Five were women...
...Several hours later, the four drunken Ingush teenagers were depositing me at the front door of my host's house in Nunn...
...Kosov got us through the two Russian posts just east of the Ingush-Chechen border without problems...
...The people have seen what's going on in the occupied regions of the Chechen republic," he said...
...He has good relations with field commanders on both sides, and always takes along a bundle of the day's edition of Izvestia to give away: it is a prized possession in Chechnya, which is under a Russian information blockade...
...constant bombing rumbled in the distance as, 20 km to the north, the Russians were pounding Argun...
...all her possessions were in a bundle tied together by a shawl...
...E arly in the morning on the day before Eid al-Fitr, I hitched a ride into the zone on a bus chartered by the Ingush government's Ministry for Emergency Situations...
...The war can be stopped only through war...
...A series of Chechen checkpoints began at the town of Samashki, just 3 km past the second Russian post, and extended all the way to Shali...
...A large, unexploded artillery shell that had come through the wall days before lay in his courtyard...
...Yet even in a "conflict zone," life goes on...
...Wearing a lambskin hat, Abdukhadzhiev was preparing to record a message to the people of Shah...
...it is possible to live there...
...He had spent the better part of two months in Chechnya...
...There we met Aslambek Abdukhadzhiev, the huge, bearded 34-year-old commander of the Shall region...
...Pyotr Kosov, the Cossack adviser who arranged the trip, said the conflict was already entering phase two: a protracted guerrilla war...
...Meanwhile, Aminov's friend Marat, a young Bashkiri journalist who has made many trips to Chechnya, went to the hospital and picked up Natassia, a twelveyear-old Chechen girl who had been shot in the head by a sniper in Grozny at the end of January...
...The night before our trip, Kosov compared the war in Chechnya to what happened to the Cossacks at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1921-1922...
...But the many roofless houses made it equally clear that the Russian strategy was to bomb and shell indiscriminately...
...As I stepped out of the jeep, one of them shouted: "Tell America we want Stingers...
...Located in a small basement, it looked like an under-equipped college station, although it had its own generator...
...In Achkoy-Martan, which had been bombed the previous night and was with60 The American Spectator May 1995 out electricity, shoppers were out in droves in the central bazaar...
...We passed four cemeteries, each with rows of fresh graves...
...Besides the stream of Chechen refugees, there are other daily reminders of the latest Caucasian war: each morning, Chechnya-bound Russian army helicopter gunships fly low over the Ingush capital, while trucks and armored personnel carriers ferry fresh troops into what the Russians call "the conflict zone...
...Kosov compared the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs—whose spetsnaz have carried out illegal detentions, beatings, and torture in Chechnya—to the Stalin-era NKVD, and said that "no fewer than 30,000 civilians" were killed in the siege of Grozny...
...Kosov noted that Slovakia and the Czech Republic managed their break-up in a civilized manner...
...He expressed his disgust for the whole bloody business...
...He allowed that Chechnya would always be economically dependent on Russia, but that some kind of special status for the republic could be negotiated...
...One woman was pulling a cow...
...Inside the house were three Russian POW mothers who were staying with him...
...they had been searching for their sons for more than a month...
...He was in no mood to discuss the prospects for a negotiated settlement of the conflict...
...W e visited the security headquarters of the Chechen forces, in the center of town across the road from the prison where Russian POWs were being held...
...Whether one or two, however, they are all well-versed in the agonies of displacement...
...In 1992 she and her family were forced out of their new home in North Ossetia...
...Armed fighters mixed with women and children...
...The women, their faces etched with stress and fatigue, decried the previous day's bombing of Shali in which five people died...
...It was evident that the Russians did not control this part of Chechnya...
...After several hours of discussions with Chechen military officials, including Abu Asayev, head of security in Shall, he won a small victory...
...I had heard these words before: seven years ago, from Afghani mujahedeen in Peshawar...
...The mother of my Ingush host described how her family was herded onto a train bound for Kazakhstan in 1944, when Stalin deported every Chechen and Ingush man, woman, and child from their homeland...
...that only the Almighty—he is known by different names, according to different religions—will decide when you will die...
...He is unreservedly critical of the war...
...The next day, however, had a tense start...
...In a village just beyond Achkoy-Martan, women sold liter-bottles of Pepsi and cartons of Marlboro at roadside stands, while men hawked auto parts and gasoline, or washed their cars in a nearby stream...
...Despite their overwhelming advantages, he said, the Russian soldiers "have only one thought: not to die...
...As we escorted the boy, Asayev was softly singing, "Svoboda ili Smert"—Freedom or Death...
...For breakfast we made do with Spam and bread without tea...
...On this day the destination was the town of Shah, located some 25 km southeast of the Chechen capital of Grozny...
...1 n Shah, the atmosphere was much more like that of a war zone...
...It was a regular run, organized by Pyotr Kosov, adviser to Ingush president Ruslan Aushev and deputy ataman of the All-Great Cossack forces of the Don...
...After a few minutes, two young European-looking men stepped out of a car—Russian soldiers who had joined the other side...
...Freshly scrubbed young kids carried bags of candy they had collected door-to-door in a Moslem version of trick-or-treat...
...If there was no attack on Shah, Mironov said, he would make his way to Argun...
...Finland had a parliament, in Poland there was a Sejm, in the Don region there was an ataman...
...Sergei Kovalyov, Yeltsin's human rights commissioner, has estimated the death toll at 24,000...
...They are, everyone insists, one people...
...Now this poor republic is housing and feeding tens of thousands of its displaced Chechen cousins...
...Yes, but you had a choice, I countered...
...The town's hospital, however, was almost without supplies and under constant threat of bombardment, so Marat had decided to take her back to Bashkhortostan...
...In 1991 it began giving refuge to tens of thousands of its ethnic brethren fleeing neighboring North Ossetia to escape the Russian-armed Ossetian militias...
...With us was Renat Aminov, a businessman from Bashkhortostan who had embarked on a personal crusade to free Russian POWs and bring the two sides together at the negotiating table...
...a weak, dazed, and injured Russian soldier, young enough to be my son, was taken to our bus...
...After an operation, she had been taken to Shali...
...Suddenly, a spry, elderly Chechen woman entered the house looking for our host...
...I talked to many of them, mostly ethnic Russians...
...Once a strong supporter of Boris Yeltsin, he does not mince words about the current Russian leaders...
...But many told me, `It is better to die here.' And these Russians were treated equally like insects by the Russian troops...
...Shali Graves by Jonas Bernstein B ouncing down a road on the outskirts of Nazran in a Russian jeep filled with four drunken Ingush teenagers (one of them at the wheel), and a reggae singer shouting "Hello, Afreeka...
...We, on the other hand, know that death is in the hands of Allah...
...Even in the Czarist empire, different regions were handled differently," he remarked...
...By mid-afternoon, we were heading back toward Ingushetia with our two young victims...
...Kosov called Clinton's support of Yeltsin "bankrupt...
...Kosov insisted there must be negotiations between Yeltsin and Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, something the Russian president has adamantly refused to consider, despite Yeltsin's insistence that he is seeking a political solution to the war—and that these talks must have "international participation...
...They had a choice, too, at least at first," he replied...
...They had everything they owned there...
...Both Ingush and Chechens say the distinction between them is an artificial one, imposed by their Russian conquerors in the nineteenth century...
...Neatly dressed men, young and old, promenaded—or staggered—through the city center...
...A mild-mannered intellectual who looks like a Berkeley professor, Mironov—like Kovalyov—was in Grozny during the height of the bombardment there...
...He did, in fact, and found six cluster bomblets which he defused for transport back to Moscow...
...Andrei Mironov came by...
...In the evening, we made our way through darkened streets to Shali's TV studio...
...Adictatorship was already in place, and this dictatorship is returning our country to the Stalinist period...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
