"You should firmly stand behind my system of destroying housing, eliminating food stocks and troubling them [Chechens] with raids," said Nikolai I in 1852 to one of his generals. - Leo Tolstoy, Khadzhi-Murat

Federal troops stationed in Chechnya "are doing a good job in accordance with the assignments they receive from the command. I am satisfied." - President Vladimir Putin, Khankala, April 14

ARGUN, Chechnya - This town on the way from Grozny to the mountains in the south is like a fortress but without the walls. From rings of checkpoints and from the top of the town's only nine-story building, federal troops stand guard, giving anyone who enters Argun the unpleasant feeling that they are being watched. While the security precautions may be necessary in light of the military operation going on in the republic, Argun residents complain that they live at gunpoint on the streets and are not safe in their own homes. They say federal troops come at any time of day or night and take away their relatives. Many are tortured or killed. Others disappear.

Argun is one of the most dangerous places in Chechnya. The town of 23,000 people sits in a valley between the mountainous region where most Chechen rebels are based and relatively rebel-free regions in the rest of the republic.

People who live here say they feel trapped between two evils - separatist rebels on one side and federal troops on the other. They are the ones who suffer most when rebels launch hit-and-run attacks or land mines blow up, as happens all too often. The remote-controlled explosives are usually planted at night along roads, and military vehicles regularly fall victim to them. Many soldiers have been killed in the blasts. Each time a land mine goes off, troops respond with a zachistka - or cleansing, when they go house to house checking documents and rounding up Chechen men.

Cut open and sewn back
Ismail Khutiyev, 19, had just returned to Argun after completing an English-language course in Mesker-Yurt when he was arrested at home by federal troops in the early morning of March 12, said his grandmother Zheizan Khutiyeva, 69. A zachistka was on that day. "The only thing I could say is that today about 10 rebels already have been detained and they are being worked on," said Yury Boronyuk, Interior Ministry spokesman in the North Caucasus, on RTR television March 12. "There are no losses, the operation is being conducted successfully." Khutiyev's body and the bodies of three other young Argun men who also were detained March 12 were discovered by a shepherd not far from Argun 12 days later. All of them had a crude stitch going from their neck down to the very bottom of their abdomen.

"He was stitched with something like a thin iron bar," Khutiyeva said, crying. "We took it out and we were shocked to see that his internal organs were missing in his belly."

Ismail Khutiyev's mother, Zura, who was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet, is well-known in Chechnya. But it made no difference when soldiers came for her son. "Soldiers shouted at her when she wanted to stop them from taking away her son: 'You, bitch, just go home,'" Khutiyeva recalled.

The mother of one of the other young men whose body was found in a shallow grave near Argun on March 24 confirmed that her son's body also had been cut open and sewn back together. Like Khutiyev, her son had his documents in order and was arrested without cause, she said.

An Argun doctor, whose name is being withheld to protect him, said he suspects some scheme involving the sale of internal organs is going on in the region. "I don't have any proof to say that organs are being taken out for transplantation purposes here," he said. "But there is indirect evidence: In many corpses that are found in the area, the internal organs are missing, and all of these corpses are of young and healthy guys."

Four other young Argun men were shot and killed by federal troops March 11, shortly after a land mine went off in sewer pipes at a cemetery on Ulitsa Lenina in the center of town, near where the men were working.

"I saw them lying on the square," said Zara, a local woman. "They were lying in a row, head to head, near the fence of TETs [the local heating plant] and all had a hole in their foreheads. People said they were caught just as they were building a fence and were killed immediately."

Zara said local residents were saying that sappers checked the pipeline in the morning but stopped exactly at the place where later the land mine went off. "People were saying that perhaps they fixed the mine themselves so that it would explode later and they could pretend to fight the rebels," Zara said. The mother of one of the men killed at the square wore black and her eyes were frozen with deep pain. She did not mind having her name published, but it is being withheld to protect her.

"He had his passport and a statement that he is employed to build for TETs," his mother said. "He told me that morning that he was lucky to get a job and that when he is paid, we would buy a sack of flour. My heart aches since then." The day before this woman was interviewed April 15, President Vladimir Putin visited the main military base outside Grozny at Khankala and told federal troops they were doing a good job.

"I cursed Putin. I wished that he would never get home alive. Here every mother is going mad worrying for her children. How could he live with all of this?" the woman said. Zara said the federal troops have grown increasingly cruel. "I asked them in the beginning of April, when they did their last zachistka, why are they arresting and torturing our men, don't they have pity for them. And they answered that they left their pity at home. "I am not afraid of them," she added. "I have already lost my son." She said her son was a student of Grozny University and was passing by the central market in Grozny on Oct. 21, 1999, when Russian missiles exploded there. Zara is now raising his small daughter.

"I recently sent my other sons to Moscow to keep them alive. They live with my sister," Zara said. One Argun man, whose name also is being withheld, said he was arrested Feb. 11 and taken to the second floor of the military commandant office in Argun, where he was beaten and tortured with electric shocks.

Torture
"They connected two electroshock apparatus to my neck and turned the power on, then again," he said. "When I fainted, they poured water on me and used it again and again." He said seven of his ribs were broken from being beaten with a baton, and they also hit him on the soles of his feet and beat him over the head with a pistol. The man said he pretended to try to escape, hoping he would be killed. "I couldn't stand it any more. A normal person can't stand this," he said, adding that during his 10 days in detention he was with 25 other men who also were beaten and tortured. "Many could only lie down after the torture, and one of them died," he said.

According to the man's father, the troops also sicked a dog on him and he had gangrene in his arms when he was released. The father showed photographs of his son heavily bruised with cuts all over his body. Another photo showed clothes that were red with blood. Two months later, the man still had scars. The local doctor said many people who were detained are turning up with signs of having been tortured with electrical shocks.

"After such torture, we see small white circles on the skin with a dark spot in the middle," he said. "Many, especially those arrested in March, had such spots between their eyes, at their forehead." The doctor said he found it difficult to believe the talk about the torture until a person he knew, Ruslan Magomedov, who never had anything to do with the rebels, was arrested in the winter and his body was found two months later with clear spots from electrical shocks. The corpse, found in the sewer just under the manhole cover, was mined, the doctor said. "Federal troops detain from one to 10 people after each zachistka and those who are lucky to be released need treatment," he said.

The morning of April 15, when this reporter was in Argun, another land mine had gone off at about 11 a.m. People immediately disappeared from the streets. "They have detained three locals today," Zara said sadly in the afternoon. "Tomorrow the zachistka will definitely take place." Soldiers at a checkpoint on the road leading out of Argun appeared in good spirits. They were celebrating Easter by shooting their assault rifles into the air and waving cars by without a check.

Yevgenia Borisova, The Moscow Times
Courtesy of Ichkeria Org