Theories in Red Cross Killings Reveal Chechen-Russian Divide

Who killed six Westerners working for the Red Cross in Chechnya in December?

The immediate answer is clear: 15 masked men, with the silenced guns of professional killers, broke into a white-walled hospital compound in the dead of night and shot their victims, point-blank, as they slept. What remains a mystery is who the gunmen were, who commissioned the crime and why.

The brutal killings forced the International Committee of the Red Cross to beat a hasty retreat from the war-ravaged separatist region in southern Russia.

And the slayings deprived Chechens of desperately needed humanitarian aid, added weight to Russia’s contention that the region is a den of murderous thieves and nearly scared off foreign observers due to monitor January elections confirming a transition to peace.

But, even now that peacetime elections have taken place, the Chechen police are no closer to finding the killers of Nancy Malloy, Fernanda Calado, Sheryl Thayer, Johan Joost Elkerbout, Ingebjorg Foss and Gunnhild Myklebust. Local officials believe that law enforcers in the capital, Grozny, are not even trying.

“If the police had really got to work on this seriously, it could have been sorted out long ago,” Nashmudin Takhigov, mayor of Noviye Atagi, said sadly. “They should be telling the people of this village, on whom the whole burden of guilt falls, that they’ve traced a named person to a particular address in a particular town. But we’ve seen nothing like that so far, and I don’t think we’re likely to.”

The hospital limps on. The foreigners have gone, the power is running low and there is not much medicine left, but a local surgeon still comes in three times a week to tend to the three remaining patients, and a handful of nurses go on working without wages.

Outside the stricken hospital, Noviye Atagi is still in mourning. People in this beautiful town, almost untouched by the war, feel dishonored by the international scandal.

Under silver roofs and filigree balconies, gleaming in the freezing sunshine, thoughtful locals swap memories and theories.

The sheer number of theories reflects a deeply divided society, ruined after nearly two years of a war with Russia that has left survivors with angry prejudices.

The two most widely held theories are stark expressions of political and ethnic hatreds.

People in the rest of Russia have no difficulty believing that fly-by-night Chechen gun nuts crept in off the street to murder the wealthy foreigners. Many Chechen men still carry their wartime weapons, there is virtually no employment, and violent crime has skyrocketed since the war ended.

In support of this theory, survivors of the massacre say the killers spoke Chechen to each other and spared a Chechen translator and Chechen guards as they hunted down expatriates during the Dec. 17 murder spree.

People all over Chechnya find it equally easy to believe that Russian secret service agents killed the medical staff in hopes of discrediting the Chechens, disrupting the elections and allowing Moscow to begin a new, more successful war to crush Chechnya’s dream of independence.

They say the fact that the killers carried professionals’ guns, with silencers, and left behind the expatriates’ money and jewelry proves they were not crazy ex-fighters hunting instant wealth. Instead, they say, the gunmen were carrying out a contract, and the obvious fact that chasing away the Red Cross was not in Chechnya’s interests proves the contract was not taken out by a Chechen.

This is the theory that Chechnya’s security service is working on, according to press officer Rizlan Zukhairayev. He says Chechnya has demanded the extradition from Russia of a Chechen who works for Russia’s security services and organized the killing.

The stories that Noviye Atagi residents tell are less black and white. They reveal a complex of local dramas featuring warlords, profiteers, post-war poverty, malice and suspicion, and a big cast of suspects on whom neither Moscow nor Grozny has any immediate political reason to shine a spotlight.

Were the killings part of a quarrel between the foreigners and Khattab, an Arab warlord fighting alongside the Chechens, who threatened to rocket their compound unless they replaced red crosses with Muslim crescents?

Heidrun Zimmermann, a German nurse who survived the attack, believes that fundamentalists such as Khattab were to blame.

“Their act of terrorism can be interpreted as just pure hatred for the Red Cross, which is treated by Chechen Muslims as a Christian symbol,” she told Geneva’s Le Matin newspaper.

“No, no, all that calmed down after the original threat in late August,” Mayor Takhigov said reassuringly. “The Red Cross staff didn’t paint in crescents, but they whitewashed the whole perimeter fence around their compound and removed all the red crosses.”

Takhigov blames the killings on a businessman from a neighboring southern Russian statelet, Ingushetia, who had won the lucrative Red Cross building contract for the whole of southern Russia and who, he alleges, was about to be caught cheating the foreigners.

The mayor’s main concern was that Chechens were being cheated of work by the relatively wealthy Ingushetians in an area that the war has left with 90% unemployment. He had insisted that Chechen building teams be taken on, instead of a 50-man Ingush brigade, to build the hospital itself.

On the day before the murders, Takhigov said, he delivered a formal complaint to the Red Cross about the chaos arising from the business dealings of the Ingush businessman, whom he would not name. He warned them that if the problem was not sorted out, an “international scandal” could follow.

But Zimmermann, an anesthesiologist, was not convinced of the purity of Noviye Atagi officials’ motives.

She recalled the letter as being “full of reproaches . . . [insisting] the hospital is controlled by local authorities and demanding we keep promises we allegedly gave earlier--to grant an ambulance to a local clinic and a service car to the mayor--which was all a lie.

“The local authorities were trying to use the mission in their own interests,” she said. “Big money was at stake. . . . We felt malice everywhere because our employer was in Grozny, not Noviye Atagi. It added to tension.”

The Red Cross hospital, a series of prefabricated buildings tacked on to an existing boarding-school building, was created in August to treat war wounded after a final burst of fighting knocked out the remaining hospitals in Grozny, 15 miles away. As the one viable employer for miles around, and the only distributor of free medical care in Chechnya, it quickly became a focus for the hopes and economic fears of all central Chechnya.

Lines of would-be employees formed outside every day. Former boarding-school Principal Svetlana Fuzheva, who still lives in a little house at the back of the compound, said the Red Cross expatriate staff treated hopefuls with tact and diplomacy.

“But,” she added, “of course some people took offense. There were grudges because the Red Cross couldn’t give jobs to everyone.”

Local bigwigs joined the have-nots in lobbying for jobs for their proteges.

Against this anxious, frenetic background, violence began to enter the lives of the Red Cross staff.

The most dramatic incident came in November, when a group of masked men broke into the compound and stole most of the communications equipment kept there.

At about the same time, a note was left at the hospital. “Hey, Crosses, this is to pay you back for your betrayal,” it read.

Mayor Takhigov said guards were warned that they would be killed if they carried on working at the hospital.

Takhigov said he begged Red Cross staff to let him post armed guards at the gate.

“All we got was a firm request not to interfere,” he said.

Nevertheless, without telling the Red Cross foreigners, he gave the unarmed guards at the hospital a single sub-machine gun, just in case.

Locals believe that it was a warning shot from this gun, fired by a guard on the night of the slayings, that sent the killers fleeing and saved the remaining foreigners.

Locals agree it was pig-headed of the Westerners to continue refusing armed protection after the November attack. Eight guards manned the two gates to the compound, but Fuzheva’s house, and the foreign staff’s sleeping quarters, backed on to nothing more secure than a rickety fence.

“If there had been armed guards, the killers might have come all the same, but they wouldn’t have killed so many people so easily. Perhaps the Red Cross needs to look again at the principles on which it operates. It bases its work on a notion of the world which is too idealistic,” Fuzheva said.

“I wanted them to put barbed wire and an electric current through the fence, but no one listened,” said Ibragim Magomadov, a boiler-stoker at the hospital.

Ibragim and the hospital guards said they are ready to hunt down the killers themselves, if Chechnya’s police fail to move forward with the investigation. The hospital has been renamed after Fernanda Calado, and the people of Noviye Atagi want to make all the victims honorary Chechen citizens.

“I couldn’t have been more devastated if my own family had been murdered. They did only good to us. They were the first good thing that happened to us in the two years of horror that the war brought. If I could give my own life to spare theirs, I would,” hospital kitchen worker Fatima Muzayeva said.