Chechen Village Massacre by Russians Cited

At least 47 civilians were massacred last weekend by Russian soldiers who bombed and ravaged the village of Samashky in southwestern Chechnya, leaving behind burned bodies and used syringes, Russian lawmakers and human rights activists said Thursday.

Some reports put the death toll at 250.

The last rebel fighters had left the village two days earlier under pressure from civilians who feared Russian reprisals if the guerrillas were allowed to remain, witnesses said.

The attack on Samashky appears to be part of a systematic Russian attempt to crush any remaining resistance in Chechnya before President Clinton and other world leaders arrive in Moscow for a May 9 summit.

According to witnesses, the Russian soldiers, many of whom had injected drugs and left their syringes behind, began the killings Friday. That was the same day that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, on a pre-summit visit to Moscow, was being assured by Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin that Russia was seeking a peaceful solution to the 4-month-old war in Chechnya.

President Boris N. Yeltsin’s embattled human rights adviser, Sergei A. Kovalev, said Western leaders bear some responsibility for events in Chechnya because their consent to visit Moscow next month has been taken by the Kremlin as tacit approval for a scorched-earth policy in the secessionist Muslim republic.

“By May 9, it must be possible to throw up one’s hands and say, ‘Yes, all kinds of things happened in Chechnya. Of course, we deeply regret that, but the war is over now,’ ” Kovalev said. “The war is not over yet and will not be over in the near future.”

As Kovalev spoke, Russian forces were launching an all-out offensive against the village of Bamut, about seven miles from Samashky, the Itar-Tass news agency reported, describing Bamut as the last pocket of separatist resistance in western Chechnya.

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The Russian Parliament has generally watched passively as Russia’s fighting force in Chechnya swelled to 58,000. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for December, however, and on Thursday lawmakers took action aimed at holding the Kremlin accountable for the war.

The upper house of Parliament voted 97-1, with two abstentions, to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on whether Yeltsin’s decision to send troops to Chechnya was legal.

Russia’s constitution, adopted 16 months ago, says the army may be used only to repel external aggression or take part in international peacekeeping operations, but may not be deployed in internal conflicts.

On Thursday, 38 lawmakers from the Duma, or lower house of Parliament, signed a statement demanding an immediate halt to hostilities in Chechnya.

“We are convinced that, if the war is continued, the unpunished barbaric elimination of residents of the village of Samashky may be repeated,” the statement said.

A day earlier, the Duma passed a bill requiring the withdrawal of all army troops from Chechnya and immediate negotiations with Chechen military commanders, though there is little hope that such a law will be obeyed.

Russian officials have said they will not negotiate with rebel President Dzhokar M. Dudayev but would be willing to discuss the terms of surrender with his top field commanders.

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On Thursday, Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev announced that Dudayev had been killed or wounded.

A few hours later, Chechen intelligence chief Ruslan Mosayev told Itar-Tass that Dudayev and his entourage had escaped unscathed from a Russian artillery attack on the house where Dudayev had been staying in Serzhen-Yurt in southern Chechnya.

Reports from Samashky have been slow to filter back to Moscow as journalists, Russian lawmakers and the International Red Cross were denied access to the village for days.

The Red Cross, whose representative was allowed in Monday, estimated that at least 250 people had been killed.

Russian activists from the human rights group Memorial said they had received unconfirmed reports that Samashky women had been told to dig 211 graves. A correspondent with Reuters news service reported seeing more than 100 fresh graves Thursday, and villagers were still burying charred corpses.

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Memorial’s list of 47 includes only the dead who could be immediately identified. It begins with 17-year-old Khava Gunasheva, slain with her father and burned in a basement, and ends with 70-year-old Abdulkhadzhi Nurtazaliyev, who was fired on by an armored vehicle.

Lawmaker Anatoly Y. Shabad said the goal of the killing was “the intimidation of the Chechen population to break its will to resist.”

Survivor Sodulla I. Yusupov, 57, said the Russian commander had given Samashky an hour and a half to surrender 264 rifles or face attack--but that since the fighters had left with their guns, villagers did not have the weapons to surrender.

Troops began to bomb and shell the village of 5,000 to 7,000 people on Friday afternoon. In the morning, they stormed in, shooting, looting, burning houses and people with flame-throwers, rounding up all male survivors, beating them and then hauling them off to detention centers, according to Yusupov and other survivors.

The soldiers appeared to be Interior Ministry troops, but they screamed obscenities and nationalist slogans, had the kind of tattoos often sported by ex-convicts and were seen injecting themselves with drugs, witnesses said. Villagers later found large numbers of ampuls, needles and syringes. “They were all shooting up drugs,” survivor Fatima Zagayeva told Reuters. “It was like they were in a trance.”

Russian officials have said that Samashky was a hotbed of resistance and that they captured more than 100 pro-Dudayev fighters there.