CAUCASUS : Cemetery Lays Bare Atrocities of Russians’ Chechen Conquest : War: Those searching for relatives come daily to walk among bodies on display. Officials fear spread of disease--and enmity.

Like abscesses on this wounded city that will not heal, the graveyards of Grozny keep thrusting up their dead.

At a cemetery in a northern neighborhood, officials have unearthed a huge grave where unidentified bodies were tossed helter-skelter after Russian forces seized control of the rebel capital of Chechnya in late January.

Today the cemetery has become a magnet for the living, who tramp through the fields day after day, desperately searching for the thousands of people who have disappeared in this urban war zone.

It is a ghoulish showcase of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian population of Grozny--and of the festering enmity that has been bred in the survivors as a result.

Now the graveyard, where hundreds of decomposing bodies lie in an open field for inspection, has also become a rebuke to the victors, who have not yet managed to supply the conquered with such basic public health services as water, electricity, sewerage or burial.

“I am afraid,” said Lecha Musayev, a forensic expert with the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, the agency responsible for rebuilding Grozny. “I don’t want to criticize, but to leave these people here under the hot Caucasian sun is extremely, extremely dangerous. . . .

“What the war did not do, cholera might,” Musayev said. “In these conditions, people cannot even wash their hands.”

The real death toll in Chechnya may never be known. Investigators working for President Boris N. Yeltsin’s embattled human rights adviser have estimated that 25,000 civilians have died, a figure that cannot be verified. Russian officials said this week that 2,000 military personnel have died since Yeltsin ordered troops into the secessionist Muslim republic Dec. 11.

As the war enters its fifth month, Russian and Chechen officials agree that disease is likely to claim even more lives.

Musayev said he has brought more than 1,000 unidentified corpses from across the city to the cemetery in the last three months. Most of them have been claimed by relatives.

But one afternoon last week, more than 150 of the corpses--found in basements or under rubble, or unearthed from courtyards where neighbors buried them hastily when bombing was too heavy to conduct funerals--still lay out for inspection. Alongside them lay 64 bodies unearthed from the mass grave weeks ago.

Musayev drove up in an Emergency Ministry truck and unloaded five new victims. All had been shot in the head at point-blank range and dumped in the basement of an apartment building not far from the Presidential Palace downtown.

One of the victims was a young Chechen or Ingush woman whose body bore evidence that she had been raped before she was shot. One was a Russian man. The other three were white-haired.

“Look at them, these people were all civilians,” cried Zoya Ismailova, 45, who had come to the cemetery in search of her missing husband and son. “None of them were fighters.”

Musayev said nine out of 10 of the bodies he finds are civilians. Some have died recently, such as the 38-year-old man who set off on his bicycle March 5 to visit relatives and never returned. Officials found his body with six others in a middle school basement. All had been shot in the head.

“The scariest thing is that people are still disappearing in this city,” Musayev said. “They go somewhere to the outskirts of the city and vanish.”

By no means are all of the missing Chechen males of fighting age. One was an old man who traveled to Grozny from the countryside shortly after the bombing ended to see whether his house was still standing. He was never seen again, Musayev said.

“I don’t know what’s happening to them,” he said. “I only see the corpses. Who’s killing them, and why, that I don’t know.”