Chechen Rebels, 150 ‘Volunteers’ Leave in Convoy

Having forced the Russian government to bow to their demands, Chechen guerrillas ended their six-day siege of terror here Monday, rolling out of this heartbroken little town in a bus convoy with about 150 “volunteer” hostages to guarantee them safe passage back to Chechnya.

Thousands of frantic residents waited an agonizing 11 hours outside the sealed hospital compound where hundreds of hostages were held while Chechen and Russian negotiators rounded up volunteers to travel in the convoy.

At last, seven buses with their windows shrouded in black blankets and one refrigerator truck carrying the corpses of Chechen dead began to rumble down the sunbaked street. Some of the hostages could be seen waving goodby.

The convoy’s passage was marked by the wails of a young woman who spotted her father’s face through a bus window and began to slam her body against the side of a house.

“They will kill them all!” she howled as relatives rushed to restrain her.

“No, no, it’s good that he is alive,” the women told her. “It’s going to be all right.”

As more than 700 dirty, traumatized hostages poured out of the hospital compound into the arms of their sobbing relatives, Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin reassured his people that everything would indeed be all right. He said that Russian forces would not attack the buses until the guerrillas reached their unknown destination inside the rebel republic of Chechnya.

But after that, Chernomyrdin warned, “Mercy will not be shown to anyone.”

The convoy traveled south unimpeded as far as the border with the North Ossetia republic, where the Chechens were told to change their route and head directly for Chechnya rather than go through the volatile Caucasus region.

Later, the buses stopped near Kurskaya, 50 miles south of here, when one of the vehicles broke down. Several Russian helicopter gunships circled low around the column during the stop, and Russian troops were seen digging in about two miles from the buses.

The convoy then moved. The buses crossed into Chechnya this morning. Interfax news agency, quoting a North Caucasus police department, zsaid the convoy had crossed the border near Khasavyurt and had headed south into the hills. The rebels were believed to be heading for the small area in southeastern Chechnya still held by the secessionist fighters who have been driven from the rest of the republic by a brutal six-month Russian military campaign.

Bowing to the guerrillas’ key demand, the Russian government Sunday ordered a halt to all military activity in Chechnya and opened peace talks Monday morning in the Chechen capital, Grozny, and agreed to continue them today.

Russian authorities hastily arranged the Grozny talks--the first since May 25--in line with Chechen demands.

But Chernomyrdin stopped short of promising a pullout of Russian troops and told reporters there would be no concessions to Chechen demands for independence.

Sandor Meszaros, chief of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s mission in Grozny, which is mediating, observed, “I am quite satisfied with the process of negotiations and with the results today.”

Chechnya’s former prosecutor general, Usman Imayev, who headed the rebel delegation, said, “I have the same impression.”

Despite the cease-fire ordered by Russian commanders Sunday as part of the agreement, four border guards were killed early Monday when 80 Chechen rebels attacked a border post between Chechnya and the Russian region of Dagestan, Russian news agencies reported.

The Budennovsk siege by Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev followed a string of military defeats suffered by rebel President Dzhokar M. Dudayev’s regime.

At least 140 people were killed in the six-day crisis, including 110 civilians. Many of the dead were hostages felled by Russian weapons when troops fired cannons from armored personnel carriers into the barricaded hospital, then launched two failed attempts to storm the building. Eleven Russian hostages--including pilots and police--were coolly executed by the Chechens; 150 hostages reportedly agreed to escort 73 of their former captors across the Chechen border. These “volunteers” included six doctors from the Budennovsk hospital and a number of women.

Four Russian lawmakers and 13 Russian journalists also willingly joined the convoy, signing government waivers saying they took full responsibility for their decision.

Those released from the hospital Monday insisted that the “volunteer hostages” had not been coerced and were, indeed, acting of their own free will. “Our volunteer hostages wanted to save us and to repay the Chechens for their mercy,” said Antonina Semyonova, 67, calling the volunteers “heroes.”

Others said that more had volunteered to go but that the Chechens rejected them.

Some of the hostages freed over the past six days have described terrifying treatment by the Chechens; a pregnant woman said she suffered gunshot wounds when the guerrillas forced her and other women to stand in the hospital windows as human shields against the Russian assault.

But most of those released said that while the Chechens had been brutal in rounding up their victims--beating residents with rifle butts, kicking them, dragging the elderly from their homes by their hair and shooting soldiers and police on sight--they did not mistreat people at the hospital.

Paradoxically, the overwhelming majority of hostages blamed Russian authorities--not the Chechens--for the worst of their ordeal. “I feel we were taken hostage by our country, by our own soldiers and government,” said Valerya Golubeva, 60. “Our soldiers--our children--were shooting at us. We shouted at them, ‘Please boys, don’t shoot, save us!’ But we knew if the Russian soldiers had gotten into the building, they would have finished us off together with the Chechens.”

She concluded, “I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

The Russian government has long been viewed by its citizens as Byzantine, all-powerful and often brutally indifferent to their well-being.

After four years of economic collapse, political violence, social upheaval and a punishing war in Chechnya, it is difficult to imagine that President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government would conceivably make itself still more unpopular.

But it has, judging from the number of hostages and their families who said they felt “betrayed” by their government’s bungling reaction to the crisis.

Some of the hostages were so ardent in defense of their Chechen captors as to prompt speculation that they were suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome,” named after the Swedish hostages in 1972 who sympathized with their terrorist jailers and grew hostile to the authorities trying to free them.

Some said they had not fully realized the brutality of the Russian military campaign in Chechnya until they heard their captors explain what had happened to themselves and their families.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.