After Russian Clash, Families Fear Sons’ Disgrace in Death

The men gather at the edge of the driveway, nervous and furious. The women hover inside, crying, cooking, writing letters, clutching their fingers in anguish. They are ready for the funeral, except there can be no funeral. Not until their lovely boy is brought home, washed and laid to rest in the earth.

For the moment, his body lies in a narrow trailer near the city morgue, along with those of about 100 militants and nine civilians killed last week when heavily armed insurgents launched coordinated attacks against police stations and other government buildings in this southern Russian city. The daylong shootout also left 30 law enforcement officers dead.

Was the young man a militant or a bystander?

Just a bystander, the family has insisted in several letters, appealing to the authorities to release the body and hoping desperately the government will not invoke the law that calls for terrorists to be buried in unknown, unmarked graves.

Here inside the tall, private walls of the family courtyard, though, they admit he was no bystander. These days in the turbulent North Caucasus region, there are fewer and fewer bystanders. There are those who are acted upon, and those who act.

The result has left Russia in the grip of a wave of violence that now spans years. Police are targeted daily in roadside bombings and shootings. Bombs have exploded on airplanes and trains, in subway stations and public thoroughfares, as far away as Moscow.

Russian officials insist the nation has fallen victim to international Islamic terrorism, with underground cells of fighters launching attacks financed by global jihadists. That there has been foreign support for extremist operations in Russia can’t be doubted. But the mothers of Nalchik know who has been launching most of the attacks. It is not Afghan-trained fighters who have traveled to Russia for holy war, although such men do indeed roam the mountains near here.

It is their boys.

With the entire North Caucasus caught in a web of attacks and reprisals, nearly every family with a young son here in Kabardino-Balkaria and the surrounding republics fears the almost daily raids by police that seem a desperate attempt to separate the extremists from a population that is merely boiling.

“A year ago, they detained a boy coming home from a nearby neighborhood. They beat him and left him lying in a garbage dump,” said the mother, a stout woman clothed in the black dress she planned to wear to her son’s funeral. Family members refused to allow even their first names to be published, fearing it would jeopardize their chance of recovering their boys’ bodies or elicit reprisals from the police.

“His body bore the marks of a great deal of torture and humiliation,” said the dead youth’s dark-eyed young widow. “Needles under his nails and in his spine. All his bones were broken. It was a horrible sight. He managed to tell people who his attackers were, and then he died.”

The family told of 15 young men who had been hauled out of a mosque, stomped, beaten with truncheons and had crosses shaved on their heads.

Recently, the police took an interest in their son. Officers would show up at 5 or 6 in the morning, search the house and question the young man.

He was 26. Never drank, never used drugs, the relatives said. In his wedding photo, taken a little over a year ago, he looks earnest and serious, a little too worried for such an occasion. His wife smiles shyly, her hair shrouded under a white satin head scarf.

Now she and her mother-in-law insist that the law concerning the burial of terrorists can’t apply to her late husband because he was no terrorist.

“This was an attack on law enforcement agencies only. There were no schools involved, no kindergartens, so the law on terrorism shouldn’t apply to them,” the mother said.

“Witnesses, and there were plenty of them, said the [militants] chased them out on the street, told them to clear out of the way. They didn’t want any deaths among civilians,” the wife said. “There were cases where they covered civilians with their own bodies, shielded them, making sure they weren’t hurt.”

If it wasn’t terrorism, does this mean the militants are at war with the police? Was this an act of combat?

An aunt shushed the others, thought for a moment. “It was an extreme demonstration of protest,” she said, “and it was an attempt to defend their rights and freedoms.”

For now, though, these women will say almost anything if it will move the authorities to open the doors of the morgue. For the last four days, women across Nalchik have held daily vigils outside government offices, demanding the return of their relatives’ bodies.

A few days ago, the mother was allowed to go inside to identify her son. She found his body lying in a festering stack of naked corpses piled in a deep jumble, head over limb, wounds rotting and skin beginning to fall off the bones. A photo of the scene shot secretly by a relative resembles a grainy concentration camp photo from World War II.

“The situation over there by now is horrendous,” the mother said. “There’s no temperature control, and the freezer is not at a proper level, and the bodies have begun to smell.”

“I don’t think the Gestapo did anything like this,” the aunt said. “Our poor children! How can we identify them?”

This week, the mothers drafted a letter to President Vladimir V. Putin appealing for help. Give us our sons, it says. Let us put them in the earth.

Perhaps then the nation can decide what to call them.