Chechens Falling Prey to Russian Soldiers of Fortune

Salman Batashev was in a pasture tending his herd when the Russian soldiers came, tied a black scarf over his eyes and took him away.

They didn’t say much, the 31-year-old recalls. They didn’t even ask if he supported the Chechen rebels. Instead, they asked how many cattle his family owned, what kind of house they had, how well they lived. They drove him around for half an hour, then took off the blindfold and threw him into a deep earthen pit.

Four men were there already.

“The servicemen were counting us as if we were sheep, estimating how much they could earn for us,” Batashev says, speaking softly, the fear returning as he recounts his ordeal. “We knew we were being kept there for ransom.”

In the second half of the 1990s, between Russia’s first and second wars in the separatist republic, Chechnya’s warlords became notorious for running cruel and lucrative kidnapping rings, using the proceeds to arm and enrich themselves.

But in recent months, the tables have turned. According to victims and officials, many of the Russian units that have reoccupied the rebel republic are running their own kind of abduction business, illegally detaining Chechen men and freeing them for ransom.

For many Russian servicemen, a tour in the war zone is a moneymaking proposition, both by official and unofficial means. Officially, they get combat pay of about $30 a day--a significant improvement over an average military salary of $50 a month. But for many, that’s not enough, and unofficially they increase their earnings by taking bribes to let travelers through checkpoints, or to release detained suspects.

Aslambek Aslakhanov, a retired police general recently elected to serve as the rebel republic’s deputy in the lower house of Russia’s parliament, says the practice is widespread, although some Russian units are more deeply involved than others in the reverse kidnapping industry.

“With or without a reason, they conduct sweeps, take people away, maim them, and then as a rule their relatives have to buy them back,” Aslakhanov says. “Do you understand? They have to ransom their cripples.”

Batashev was lucky. He wasn’t beaten or injured. On Sept. 25, 10 days after he was abducted, the soldiers pulled him out of the pit, took him back to his pasture and let him go. When he got back to this mountain village, his family told him they had paid a middleman $700 for his release--more than the amount many Russians earn in a year.

When Russian troops reentered Chechnya a year ago, they vowed to wipe out the rebels and restore law and order. But many Chechens and observers say the Russian troops have just replaced one form of lawlessness with another.

“Despite the end of large-scale hostilities, repression of the civilian population has not come to an end,” says Pavel Krasheninnikov, a former justice minister who heads an ad hoc parliamentary commission on Chechnya. “Laws and human rights are being violated by servicemen all the time.”

Thousands Just Disappear

In many respects, those who are ransomed are the lucky ones. Thousands of Chechen men have simply disappeared since the beginning of the war.

“One ought to understand that most of them are no longer alive,” Aslakhanov says. “They were deliberately rubbed out a long time ago.”

For Russian servicemen, illegal detentions not only boost their earnings but help keep the civilian population cowed.

Victims say the size of the ransom that the soldiers demand depends in part on the location of the Russian unit. In Chechnya’s northern flatlands, where there are more servicemen and more civilian oversight, ransoms can be as low as $20. But in the highlands, where the battle against the rebels still rages and civilian authorities dare not venture, ransoms can easily top $1,000.

That’s how much it took to free 28-year-old Rustam Khalimov, who says he was detained Sept. 24 with a friend at a roadblock outside the mountain village of Tangi-Chu. Servicemen at the checkpoint accused him of violating curfew, even though it was only 7 p.m. Curfew begins at 9 p.m.

After being held overnight at the checkpoint, the two handcuffed men were blindfolded and driven away on an armored personnel carrier. Khalimov was thrown into a narrow, barren pit--about 10 feet deep and only 4 feet across.

Once a day, a soldier would be lowered in to remove Khalimov’s handcuffs, give him food and wait as he ate. When Khalimov asked why he was being held, the servicemen replied only that they were trying to determine if he was a rebel fighter.

Sixteen days later, he was blindfolded again and dropped off in the middle of Tangi-Chu. When he arrived home, his joyful family said they had paid $1,000 for his release. His friend was held in the same conditions and ransomed for the same price.

“No one beat us. No one asked us any unnecessary questions,” he says. “As we understood it, their main goal was to make money on us. And that’s exactly what they did.”

Some units demand the ransom in weapons, not cash. Relatives are told to bring the soldiers anywhere from one to 15 assault rifles to pay for their family member’s freedom. The family members are forced to buy weapons illegally from black-market traders--who are in cahoots with the military. The soldiers even tell the relatives which traders they should go to.

“It is the weapons traders who pay them cash,” Khalimov explains. “This is the weird circulation scheme they use now. But there is a good reason behind it: When they accept guns as payment, it makes them look clean, as if all they are doing is confiscating illegal weapons.”

And it also allows the servicemen to boost their performance records, reporting a greater number of illegal weapons confiscated from the local population. Such reports are distributed in Moscow on a daily basis.

In some cases, Russian servicemen genuinely suspect their detainees of working for the rebels. But in many other cases, they are open about the fact that the detentions are for money.

Artur Gakayev, 17, was hanging out with seven friends in the village of Gikalo when a group of soldiers drove up in a large truck and rounded up the young men. As they drove past the village school, Gakayev asked the soldiers if he could get off and let his mother, a teacher, know he had been detained.

“As soon as they heard that my mother was a teacher and my father had died, they gave me a kick in the butt and threw me out of the truck,” he says. “They were saying that a teacher will not be able to pay anything for me since teachers aren’t paid even their meager salaries.”

The youths with wealthier parents spent three or four days locked in a basement, he says. Their families paid around $175 for their release.

Ramzan Batyyev, deputy director of the Russian government’s human rights reporting center in the Chechen town of Znamenskoye, says women who come to the center bring stories of unofficial and illegal detentions.

“There is some unverified information that some people are unofficially detained by Russian servicemen without any sanctions from their superiors and are unofficially held in custody,” he says. “But since this information has never been officially confirmed or verified, we are not in a position to comment on it. . . .

“But in this general mess in the Chechen republic today, it is also impossible to rule out that such cases have never happened,” he adds.

‘All They Wanted Was Money’

Sultan Akhmadov, a 21-year-old from the town of Argun who was detained along with two friends, spent three days in a quarry outside the capital, Grozny.

“Our hands were tied behind our backs with steel wire,” he recalls. “Our captors gave us food. On the third day, one of us managed to work his hands free and helped us do the same, and then the three of us simply walked into Grozny.

“All they wanted was money,” he concludes. “Nothing else. If there had been a different reason, we would have been kept where normal prisoners are kept--at a pretrial detention center, at the commandant’s office, or a prison. They kept us in a quarry deliberately so no one would learn about us.”

Chechens accuse Russian officials of deliberately ignoring the practice. Islam Dakuyev, an 18-year-old from Grozny’s suburbs, says he was even held on the grounds of a military base. He was released only after his mother paid about $220 in ransom.

Dakuyev says the worst thing is that there is no defense, and nowhere to appeal for help. And anyone who resists paying ransom risks sending a family member to a quick and anonymous death.

“There were absolutely no guarantees that the man would keep his promise,” Dakuyev says. “But my parents had no other choice. They were afraid something really bad could happen to me.”

Special correspondent Nunayev reported from Khuti-Khutor, Tangi-Chu and other Chechen towns, and Times staff writer Reynolds reported from Moscow. Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.