Chechens Accuse Russians of ‘Death Squad’ Attacks

The grisly evidence still adheres to the brick wall of 38 Petropavlovskaya St.

The building’s residents urgently pulled visitors Thursday to the spot in the courtyard where they said two brothers accused of backing the Chechen rebels had been gunned down the day before by men in the camouflage uniforms of Russian Interior Ministry forces.

“They just took them both out and shot them, not for anything,” neighbor Dagmara Ankayeva said. “They’re beasts, beasts.”

With this smoking, half-demolished capital of breakaway Chechnya all but conquered, Russian troops are entering a nasty new phase of their offensive. Commanders must now impose control over the territory they have taken, over the largely hostile Chechen civilians and over their own battle-drunk troops.

“Our No. 1 task now is to work with the population,” said Col. Vladimir Mamontov, one of the top Interior Ministry officers in charge of the troops, from their headquarters in a shot-up dairy plant in northern Grozny.

Russian officials--right up to President Boris N. Yeltsin--said this week that with the main fighting in Chechnya probably over, the battle for the mountainous republic of about 1 million people--largely Muslims--must shift from the regular army to police units, and from fighting to “working with the population.”

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The question is how. Residents at 38 Petropavlovskaya said the Russians had sent a “death squad” to show people what will happen to those who continue to support Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev and the militants who still control much of southern Grozny.

Accounts also circulate among Chechen refugees and officials about Russian soldiers who threaten to throw grenades into basements where women and children have taken shelter unless the women hand out their gold jewelry and other valuables. Looting is reportedly widespread, and Chechens say Russian troops routinely grab possessions from Chechen homes to sell for whatever they can get.

Mamontov said he had received “serious accusations” of Russian marauding from Chechen civilians. He allowed that they could be true but said none had been proven.

“War is war, but until you’re caught, you’re not a thief,” he said, combining two Russian cliches. “Someone wants to insert a wedge between the army and the people.”

Vladimir Moiseyev, an armored-personnel-carrier commander who gave two reporters a lift into town in his APC and stopped at 38 Petropavlovskaya for a chat with the “peaceful population,” said the “death squad” had probably been made up of Chechen bandits who crept out of the nearby woods. They could easily have bought Russian uniforms and donned them as a provocation, he said.

“You Americans don’t like Muslims much either, do you?” he asked. “They are a sly people.”

Mamontov and other officers at the dairy plant, where key areas were barricaded behind giant rolls of paper wrappers reading “cream” and “milk,” claimed that residents of northern Grozny were so sick of the fighting that they had begun to betray the whereabouts of Chechen fighters and hand in their weapons.

“We’re hunting the bandits by their addresses,” Mamontov said.

However, the Russian officers were clearly deluding themselves--or their listeners--about the hearts and minds of most Chechens.

Chechen fighters encountered outside Grozny were just as defiant as ever, still sporting the green ribbons that meant they had vowed to fight to the death and still saying they would persist to the last man--or woman.

“We’ll give up only when Russian submarines come up the Sunzha River,” said pro-Dudayev fighter Oleg Chelnov, referring to a shallow stream that runs through central Grozny.

In the nearby village of Achkhoi-Martan, field nurse Rozet Arkayeva said simply, “I am not afraid. We are defending our families.”

In rare agreement, both Chechen and Russian officers said Grozny is now split between the Russian-held territory to the north and west of the Sunzha and the Chechen-held blocks to the south. And both sides estimate that the heavy fighting in Grozny will only last a few more days before the out-gunned Chechens head for the hills.

The presidential palace that was so much the focus of the first weeks of fighting has now become irrelevant as the front has moved to the river, they said.

It is on what will happen afterward that they differ.

Mamontov is planning the martial rule he will help impose after most of the regular army’s work is done--the curfews, restrictions of movement and special passes that will help him hunt down rebel fighters.

Chechens say they are planning a few weeks of lying low, melting into the civilian population. When the weather gets warmer in March and the icy mud now making the roads impassable dries up, they will launch what they expect to be years of guerrilla war against the Russian troops.

Already, even in the areas of northern Grozny that are fully held by Russians, Chechen snipers keep the Russian troops nervous.

Mamontov said aside from working with the Chechen population, his main concern now is to clean out snipers’ nests and cut off the flow of arms and fighters into Grozny.

Attempts at blocking the arms traffic into Grozny are clearly succeeding in at least one sense--it has become an exercise in frustration to try to get into the Chechen capital because nearly all the bridges within dozens of miles have been bombed to smithereens or mined by the Russians. The trip from Khasavyurt in Dagestan westward to Grozny that once took just over an hour now takes about five hours, so many bridges are down and roads blocked.

Their supplies and ability to commute from home to the Grozny battlefield vastly reduced, the Chechens are weakening by the day.

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Already, Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Sergei Golikov said he can feel that “the main fighting is over. The rest is just small change.”

He was looking out from the roof of the dairy plant onto a landscape of urban demolition. Nearly every building in sight had shattered windows and blackened walls. Buildings that had housed snipers had jagged holes blown in their top floors.

For Golikov, the worst was over. For the residents of 38 Petropavlovskaya, the worst appeared to be only beginning. Their building lost its glass in the shelling that still constantly rocks Grozny, but they had known no real trauma until the death squad arrived.

“They came to our house and told us to get on our knees,” Zoya Aburashidova said. “We called the soldiers brothers, and they said, ‘What are you to us?’ They said their friends had been killed here. But what are we guilty of?”

The building’s residents led reporters to a makeshift cemetery nearby where they had buried seven neighbors, all civilians, in the last few days, they said.

A couple of men had been killed on their way home from work, and five people had been killed when some militants--it was not clear from which side--took up a position on the second floor of a neighboring dormitory and began to shoot up 38 Petropavlovskaya indiscriminately. The graves of the two executed brothers were the freshest.

“This is all not human, but animal,” said Abdullah Magomedov, an ethnic Avar who also lives in the building.