Special report: crisis in Chechnya
Jonathan Steele in Sernovodsk, Chechnya
The Guardian

The helicopters circled the village all night and, behind the brick walls of their family compounds, people listened in terror in their beds. By morning scores of armoured personnel carriers had surrounded Sernovodsk and groups of Russian soldiers were going from house to house, arresting and beating virtually every male teenager and adult.

Several hundred were herded into a field not far from the mosque, ordered to pull their shirts over their heads to act as makeshift blindfolds, and told to lie face down on the ground. Others were crammed into the filthy basement of an unfinished farm building nearby.

One by one men were picked out and taken into an army lorry. Wires were fixed to their wrists or genitals and, cranking the handle of a primitive generator like a field telephone, a Russian soldier gave them electric shocks.

The massive security sweep, known as a zachistka, in a placid lowland village in western Chechnya which has had almost no guerrilla activity, has prompted the biggest political crisis in the region since the Russians launched their second war against the rebel republic in September 1999.

It has also shown that Moscow still has no coherent strategy to win Chechen hearts and minds, no policy of transferring power to the republic's political elite, no readiness for dialogue with its opponents, and no exit strategy short of a misplaced faith in military victory.

The Sernovodsk atrocity prompted Akhmad Kadyrov, the top Moscow-appointed Chechen official, to demand an inquiry and publicly protest to President Vladimir Putin for the first time.

Russia's senior prosecutor, Viktor Dakhnov, conceded on Monday that the "initial results show individual violations of the rules of special operations have been committed during the security sweeps".

"The violations were not of a mass character and the operation was not an orgy," he claimed.

But interviews by the Guardian in Sernovodsk, one of three villages affected by the zachistka in early July, suggest that close to 700 people were detained. In nearby Assinovskaya around 800 were taken. More than 350 Chechens have made official complaints.

"It was the worst day of our lives. We will remember it forever," Raisa Amagova said as she recounted how troops burst in and ordered her 28-year-old son, Salambek, to dress.

"He went outside with them, then realised he had forgotten his identity document. He asked to go back and fetch it, but they just knocked him down with a rifle butt. They beat him again on the ground. He managed to get up and they took him away."

Special police

Raisa Amagova and Salambek's wife, Alisa, joined hundreds of other village women in running towards the field where the men were taken, but they were held back by a cordon of Omon (special police).

A Russian woman doctor expressed dismay when troops of the Omon later brought the unconscious Salambek, but the special police denied responsibility.

"Salambek was on the ground, yellow liquid was coming out of his mouth," Raisa said. He was taken to hospital in Achkoy-Martan, the nearest town but died last Thursday. His kidney had swollen to 14cm more than its normal size. His liver had been crushed by the beating.

Mr Dakhnov, admitted that at least 10 Chechen civilians were injured. Even the senior commander in Chechnya, General Vladimir Moltenskoi, conceded that soldiers had committed "large-scale crimes and lawless acts", though he later toned it down to say there had merely been "violations of the rules".

Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Mr Putin's main spokesman on Chechnya, hinted at a change in tactics. He said counter- terrorist searches had to be "focused", and promised there would not be "mass operations of this kind".

In the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia, where around 180,000 Chechen refugees are living, still too afraid to go home, President Ruslan Aushev told the Guardian: "Genuine counter-terrorist operations haven't been conducted in Chechnya for over a year. Only civilians are suffering, and we just see abuses of human rights."

The zachistka in Sernovodsk also confirmed how groups within the Russian security forces operated as marauding bands, subject to no central discipline or control.

Many of the worst troops are kontraktniki, who volunteer to come to Chechnya to loot and kidnap. "It's an uncontrolled criminal mass," says Lipkhan Bazayeva, the head of the Ingushetian office of Memorial, a Russian human rights watchdog. "They sell people for up to $4,000, and even demand money from relatives to return the bodies of the dead."

At Sernovodsk, around four dozen of the roughly 700 men who were taken on July 2 were driven away in buses and armoured personnel carriers when the rest were allowed to go.

Most were released over the next few days but by this weekend Selimkhan Umkhanov, 28, and Apdi Isigov, 22, had still not returned. Selimkhan's wife, Tasa Musayeva, described his arrest in dignified understatement. "Ten soldiers came into the compound. They spoke in an uncivilised way. They used unmentionable phrases. They swore. They put him on an armoured personnel carrier and drove him away."

'Barbarians'

She and Apdi Isigov's mother tried to find their missing loved ones. "We went to almost all the military bases, and asked for them but got no information. We even went to Grozny to ask. At the roadblocks Russian soldiers told us: 'The kontraktniki are barbarians. They could do the same to us. There is no cooperation. They work in small groups'," she said.

Other survivors revealed a widespread pattern of abuse. "I was taken with my brother and three other guys," said Ruslan Alimov. "They took away our belts and forced us to pull our shirts over our heads. From the basement by the field we heard shouts and screams from an army lorry. I saw three men who said they had been given electric shocks on their hands. The soldiers were asking them who the fighters were, who the Wahhabis - Islamic fundamentalists - were."

Some men paid troops with cash to be allowed out of the line of hundreds being taken to the field, they reported.

In Assinovskaya troops took around 800 men to a field. Soldiers broke the doors of the school, threw grenades into empty classrooms and blew open three safes. They stole 60,000 roubles for teachers' wages, as well video equipment and a prayer room carpet. At the village hospital, soldiers looted drugs from the storeroom.

The massive sweep was apparently prompted by a mine explosion which the Russians say left five Russian policemen dead. "It's a form of collective punishment of ordinary people," says Lipkhan Bazayeva of Memorial.

"These zachistkas are going on all over Chechnya. The latest ones have been publicised only because they're on our border," Ingushetia's President Aushev said. "There are some elements in Russia who are against the war, but others want it to go on. The war is useful to people on the political as well as the economic level".

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