Chechen Fighting Ebbs, but Information War Rages On

The crime was heinous, even by Chechen war standards: a herdsman and three children--his 10-year-old son and two nephews, 13 and 14--shot at point-blank range as they tended cows.

The bodies were discovered Wednesday. By the next morning, Russian news agencies were quoting the Kremlin’s chief spokesman for Chechnya, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, denouncing the killings as a “cynical and cruel action by rebels.”

That evening, the killings were reported on all three national TV networks as a rebel atrocity.

In the village of Alleroi, Kheda Muskhadzhiyeva watched the news and seethed. She’d spent the previous day videotaping the corpses.

“How could it have been rebels?” she asked, saying that the village is surrounded by Russian forces. “We saw the APC [armored personnel carrier] arrive. We heard shots in the field. We just thought they were trying to scare us. We never thought they would shoot children.”

The next day, she took her videotape and headed for the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, where the human rights group Memorial has an office.

Nearly a year after heavy fighting subsided, two wars are still underway in Chechnya.

The first is a guerrilla conflict between Russian forces and Chechen rebels, who plant mines and stage hit-and-run attacks. The Russians respond by rounding up men for zachistki--document checks designed to intimidate the population. Hundreds of men detained during such operations have gone missing.

The second war is an information war. On one side is the well-funded information apparatus run by the Kremlin and Yastrzhembsky, who was recently promoted to coordinate information policy across the entire Russian government.

On the other side is an ad hoc coalition of human rights groups, staffed largely by amateurs and volunteers, assisted by locals such as Muskhadzhiyeva.

“The fact that Yastrzhembsky immediately announced it was the rebels, it only raises suspicions,” said Tatyana I. Kasatkina, executive director of Memorial, who was in Nazran when Muskhadzhiyeva arrived. “They can’t know that until there is an investigation. And there was no investigation.”

Muskhadzhiyeva doesn’t look much like a foot soldier in any war, let alone an information war. The plump 50-year-old looks as if she’d be more comfortable kneading bread than wielding a video camera. But she does.

“I just want to live until the day when justice is done, when all these lies are wiped away,” Muskhadzhiyeva said in an interview.

Muskhadzhiyeva said she was sitting in her sister’s house drinking tea about noon last Tuesday when the herdsman’s wife burst through the door, distraught.

She said the family dog had returned home, limping and bleeding. The cattle had begun to wander back to the village.

“She said the dog would never return home without his master,” Muskhadzhiyeva said.

The herdsman’s family lived across the street. They were so poor, Muskhadzhiyeva said, “they don’t even have a stool in the house to sit on.”

The father, Khozh-Akmed Alsultanov, 44, earned a meager living by tending the village herd, earning about 50 cents a month per head of cattle. The boys often kept him company.

The pasture was located near an oil pipeline frequently visited by Russian troops who collect leaking oil for refining and selling. On the morning the four were killed, a federal armored personnel carrier arrived about 11 a.m. and drove into the field.

Most villagers hide when Russian soldiers show up, Muskhadzhiyeva said. But Alsultanov probably wouldn’t have bothered--he had all his documents in order, including permission from military authorities to pasture cows in the field.

The children had identity papers listing their ages: Islam Alsultanov, 10; Shakhid Umarkhadzhiyev, 13; Shamkhan Umarkhadzhiyev, 14.

The neighbors set out for the pasture a mile and a half away. When they got there, all they found was the bag with the four’s lunch of bread and onions, and a scattering of cigarette butts on the ground.

The villagers searched fruitlessly for the family until a stiff afternoon rain forced them to halt. They still weren’t that worried, assuming the four had been taken into custody and would be released as soon as their documents were checked.

A Bus Driver Makes a Grisly Discovery

But the next morning, a bus driver noticed disturbed soil in a depression about 300 yards from where the lunch bag had been found. He scraped with his hands through a layer of leaves and found the bodies. They still had their identity papers on them.

In Muskhadzhiyeva’s video, the bodies are laid out on rough blankets, the documents open on their bellies. All have their hands held up, palms out, as if trying to shield their faces.

The boys, who look younger than their ages, are dressed in rubber boots, inexpensive sweatshirts and sweaters. One is emblazoned across the chest with the word “KIDS” in English. Ragged cuffs dangle from the elder Alsultanov’s raised wrists.

A surgeon from the regional hospital dons rubber gloves and examines the bodies. All have dents on the front or sides of their heads about the size of rifle butts. Each has two gunshot wounds to the head, one to the temple from point-blank range. One boy has an eye half-open, peering out quizzically from his misshapen skull as if trying to make sense of the situation. The blood on their faces is still red.

Muskhadzhiyeva began to cry as she watched the film.

“After such hell, such impunity, such horror--who now could want to remain a part of Russia?” she asked.

Yastrzhembsky claimed the killings were deliberately intended to discredit Russian forces. “Such actions are aimed first of all at causing the local population to behave inadequately toward representatives of the federal forces,” he said in a statement.

Like Yastrzhembsky, Muskhadzhiyeva believes the killings were a deliberate act of intimidation--but by the Russians, not the rebels.

Many rebel fighters have left their mountain hide-outs in recent months and integrated with the civilian population. More frequent zachistki operations and random acts of violence, she says, are designed to frighten the population into giving them up.

Meanwhile, the information war is intensifying. Russian officials including Yastrzhembsky frequently report on the number of Russians and Russian-allied Chechens killed in apparent rebel attacks. Since the beginning of the year, several dozen such killings have been reported.

Just days ago, two months after Chechen residents discovered a mass dumping site for more than 60 bodies near Russian military headquarters, Yastrzhembsky announced the discovery of a mass grave on the Chechen side.

There were at least 18 bodies in the grave in the village of Gezikhoi, and perhaps as many as 30, he said. Some had been beheaded, others dismembered.

“The character of the injuries and the large amount of fragments of human bodies suggest that these people were tortured and executed in another place, and fragments of their bodies were brought there for final burial,” Yastrzhembsky’s office said in a statement.

The victims were believed to be Georgian construction workers who had been kidnapped five years ago while building a road between Chechnya and Georgia, the statement said.

When they denounced the killing of the herdsman and the three children last week, Russian officials said they were investigating. But Muskhadzhiyeva is skeptical. She said a representative from a militia post and the prosecutor’s office were present at the exhumation, but they simply announced that rebels were to blame and left without examining the bodies or calling for autopsies.

‘Our Menfolk Are Being Destroyed’

Local residents carried the corpses back to the village and arranged for a brief exam by the surgeon, who had no equipment and could only probe their head wounds with his fingers. They were buried before nightfall in accordance with Muslim tradition.

If the Russians’ goal is to make Chechen civilians more docile, Muskhadzhiyeva said, their methods are backfiring.

She listed others from the town who have disappeared. A 72-year-old known as “Old Man” Tolkhadov was seized in January while he was saying his prayers, she said. In September, two brothers ages 13 and 14--relatives of the slain herdsman--were seized by Russian forces while they were out collecting nuts, trying to earn enough money to buy new shoes for school. Their mother has been unable to find them at any detention facility.

“Now we women are thinking--we have to get together,” she said. “Our sons, our fathers, husbands, our brothers, our menfolk are being destroyed. We have no peace. As much as we can, we will have to defend ourselves. Whether with pitchforks, shovels, truncheons, guns or semiautomatics, we’ll make of ourselves a women’s battalion. What else is left for us?”