Chechen Crusader Puts a Face on the Horrors of War

Dead men tell no tales. So Khusein A. Khamidov still has no idea what happened to his two sons, one 18 and the other 21, when they disappeared in January 1995. All he knows is that he searched the bomb craters and smashed buildings of his hometown until he found them, dead, in a heap of corpses.

“I pulled them out. They had been executed. They had been mutilated. I buried them,” the Chechen pilot, 41, said quietly, his usually expressive face suddenly drained of emotion. “But I was luckier than most. At least I managed to find their bodies. At least I was able to bury them.”

Everyone crowded inside his tiny office nodded stoically. They share his pain because, like him, they have all lost relatives in mysterious circumstances since Russian troops marched into the Chechen capital, Grozny, 18 months ago.

Carted off to camps--known in military jargon as “filtration points”--many of the missing have never been seen again. Some of their mangled bodies have turned up in hastily dug mass graves. Otherwise, their fate can only be guessed at.

His sons’ deaths have goaded Khamidov to action. He has spent months digging up spots where he suspects Russian soldiers have created huge burial sites for camp victims. He has tracked down 67 mass graves, dug them up and photographed the remains of 921 people. He has turned a cramped room in the local Red Cross building into a clearinghouse for the dead, using it to show anxious relatives numbered photographs in the hopes they will recognize a familiar face among the dead and reclaim the remains.

“My loss was just one of many, and you could call it just a side effect of war. But my conscience won’t let me rest. If I stop, no one else will bother about these questions,” he said.

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Grozny was an apocalyptic place of snow and fire in January 1995. War was Moscow’s punishment of rebellious Chechnya for declaring independence. Deaths then, though horrific, were understandable. Under Russian shells, tanks and planes, people were being killed by the thousands.

Now, however, the terror of all-out war has passed. A compliant pro-Moscow government rules the ruins. Backed by tanks and twitchy provincial Russian conscripts with anxious eyes and dirty fatigues, Doku Zavgayev, the unpopular leader whom Moscow has installed in Chechnya, proclaims the fighting over.

But the killing continues. Fewer people are losing their lives in outright assaults. That may be, in part, because of the expedient truce, sporadically observed, that was declared from Moscow in the run-up to the Russian presidential election.

But in Chechnya, civilians still are arbitrarily arrested daily at the scattered Russian army checkpoints.

Khamidov uses his close ties with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE--an international group mediating the conflict here--to lobby for the release of those whose arrests he can prove. At peace talks, he is negotiating for information about 1,322 people who have vanished.

Meanwhile, his catalog of death has grown so fast it fills his room. The faces of hundreds of dead young men stare up from sheets of cheap photographs stacked on the windowsill. Others look down from the walls. More are videotaped, the cassettes heaped next to a player in the corner. Even the poor quality of the grainy prints does not disguise the violence with which the life was beaten, shot or tortured from the broken bodies.

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The detective work is paying off. So far, 462 families have identified missing relatives through his pictures. He has buried the rest of the unnamed bodies in modest numbered plots at Grozny’s central cemetery.

But the future of his work is under threat. Since Zavgayev, who was also Grozny’s last Communist Party boss, was put back in power by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin last summer, replacing a more neutral interim leader, Khamidov’s group has been blacklisted. Khamidov wants to investigate 41 more sites around Grozny, where informants have seen Russians digging and where they say there may be more mass graves.

His Committee for Missing Persons’ official status and funding--granted by the previous Chechen regime--has vanished, along with access to experts on exhumation; the digging is canceled.

“We are finding money where we can,” he said. “We’re putting our own money into the work so we can afford film and videotapes . . . but there are all kinds of frustrations, even now that there’s supposed to be a truce.

“Zavgayev’s government . . . [is] only concerned with hushing up these crimes. They are working hand in hand with Russia to make the outside world believe everything is all right and the war is over.”

Khamidov contends 3,000 Chechens have been rounded up in the weeks since the cease-fire was signed in late May; he plans to protest this at the next internationally monitored peace talks.

While senseless killings in Bosnia-Herzegovina shocked the outside world into toughened peacemaking there, the West, critics here say, has done little to stop Russian abuses in Moscow’s more remote Muslim backyard. Moscow’s counterclaims that Chechen rebel fighters mistreat Russian prisoners of war are seldom borne out by captives who are released; the assertions, however, do confuse public opinion.

Human rights groups and the OSCE have condemned Russian abuses.

But a widespread belief that Yeltsin is the best guarantor of Russia’s democracy has, analysts say, hushed Western complaints, as Yeltsin heads off an electoral challenge from Communist rival Gennady A. Zyuganov on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the pro-Moscow Zavgayev is so furious with the OSCE’s refusal to toe the line that he has tried to declare its representative in Grozny persona non grata and has threatened to expel him for what he calls his favoritism to the Chechens.

The last of the notorious official Russian camps, at a bus station in Grozny, was closed last week under the truce. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross had been allowed in periodically over the last year. Red Cross staff say they regularly receive allegations that civilians are also detained and tortured at two Russian bases, Assinovskaya in west Chechnya and Khankala north of Grozny. But they have not been let in to inspect them.

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In a corner of Khamidov’s office, lanky 17-year-old Ruslan Uzhakhov, shivering despite the fierce heat, nursed the bruises on his smooth face. A bandage covered his right eye, his arm was in a sling, and his voice quivered on the edge of adolescent tears.

“They took me into the filtration point at Kapinsky crossroads because I couldn’t prove who I was,” he said. He has no documents because his passport was destroyed when Russian troops burned his house and killed his parents last year. He and his brother have been living in abandoned houses ever since.

“When it got dark, the soldiers started to hit me,” he recalled. “They didn’t talk, didn’t ask questions, they just beat me up. There were two other prisoners in the cell with me, and one had broken ribs sticking right out.”

Still, Ruslan is lucky, many here would say. His brother remained free to tell Khamidov’s team of his arrest. After he had been beaten for two days without interrogation, the committee successfully argued him free from detention.

But with the Chechen administration in chaos, records destroyed by the blitz and hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes, the identity documents demanded by checkpoint soldiers remain in short supply. So almost everyone in Chechnya, critics remind, remains a candidate for arrest.