THE CAUCASUS BATTLEFIELD

A Normal Day of Death in Grozny
October 27, 2005

By Walter Mayr

Grozny used to be the pearl of the northern Caucasus. Now, it is little more than crumbling apartment buildings amid fields of rubble. Death is a daily occurance in the city and Islamism is rife. But the main problem may be the province's Putin-appointed governor.

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A Russian soldier patrols Grozny in 2003.
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A Russian soldier patrols Grozny in 2003.
Nalchik and Grozny are 205 kilometers (127 miles) apart on the highway that leads to the Caspian Sea and passes through Northern Ossetia. The ruins of School Number 1 in Beslan, the most recent testament to the human cost of the conflict in southern Russia, stand before a panoramic view of Mt. Kazbek, whose cliffs gave rise to the myth of Prometheus. Alexander Pushkin once wrote that, in the Caucasus, "homicide is nothing but a gesture."

Hardly a village and not a single city along this stretch of highway M 29 is without the faces and stories that tell of destroyed houses, of a lost homeland and of killed, abducted and tortured sons, of murdered police officers and of widows, orphans and mothers who mourn their adolescent sons who died for Russia.

The M 29 is a road of death. The sense of danger becomes increasingly palpable as the road passes eastward through Ingushetia. At the "Kavkas" border crossing into Chechnya, the Russian state is little more than an idea barricaded behind a wall of concrete blocks, barbed wire and automatic weapons.

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was once considered the pearl of the northern Caucasus -- until 1994, when Moscow declared its first war against the Chechen separatists. The local residents breathed a sigh of relief after the 1996 peace treaty, but then experienced the rise of radical, self-declared saviors and fanatical terrorists acting under the protection of the cease-fire, followed by a hail of bombs and rocket attacks brought on by the outbreak of the second Chechen war in 1999 -- instigated by then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The Caucasus Battlefield

Caucasus Chaos Part I: A Breeding Ground of Radicalism in Southern Russia
Caucasus Chaos Part II: Islamist Theocracy in the Shadow of Mt. Elbrus
Caucasus Chaos Part IV: Spinning out of Control in Dagestan


Today Grozny is little more than a settlement that looks as though an angry giant had beaten it with his fist. Entire rows of houses and squares have been erased from the face of the devastated city. Grozny's inhabitants live, without water or hope, in the ruins of collapsed buildings, their rafters protruding into space.

Official death count: 160,000

There are splashes of color here and there -- the bronze-and-gold monument that stands on the abandoned grounds of the former presidential palace, and the freshly painted, pink university building a few steps down the street. In a recently constructed building on Oil Worker Square, three-room apartments are available for the equivalent of 25 annual salaries of the average white-collar worker in Grozny.

The men who sit at the head table on this Sunday in the garden of Baudi Bachmadov, the dean of the law department at the university in Grozny, are, by local standards, neither winners nor losers. They are considered the elite of the republic, or at least what's left of it after 11 years, two wars and an official death count of 160,000.

The mood around the table, which is decked out with roast chickens, kiwis, bananas, vodka and cognac, is festive. The dean's eldest son is getting married. Professors, prosecutors and high-ranking government officials are there, while a bodyguard shouldering a Kalashnikov stands watch.

At the head of the table sits Professor Sharani Jambekov, a member of the Russian Authors' Society. He is one of those who has publicly warned against the social devastation caused by a war that has claimed victims in every family in Chechnya. "Our young people want to avenge their dead relatives, which is probably why many are now joining the Wahhabites," he says.
The celebration ends a short time later. The family next door is mourning their daughter, who was shot the day before by the militia.

It's a normal Sunday in Grozny, and reports are coming in at the OMON special unit's headquarters building. Twenty-two members from various arms of the elite unit lost their lives in the previous week. On this Sunday, a member of OMON is murdered, and seven militia fighters are killed by a land mine.

But even here the men find reason to celebrate. Sergeant Najud Gudigov, who killed three terrorists with other members of his team on the outskirts of Grozny the day before, has arrived. He keeps replaying a video recorded on a cell phone he took from one of the men killed, the "Emir of Sernovodsk." It shows the men he shot, laughing at a camp in the mountains.

$10,000 ransoms

"This was my fourth mission of this type in four weeks," says Sergeant Gudigov of OMON's "Special Marksmen Unit." Gudigov is 38, gaunt, gray-haired and hasn't been promoted in five years. His commanding office, OMON Deputy Commander Buwadi Dachiyev, looks up briefly from his data base, where the movements of rebels in the neighboring republics are stored, and says, "There are now more armed Wahhabites in Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkariya than there are here."

Moscow still maintains an armed force of 80,000 in Chechnya. But the Chechen rebels, who have expanded the war to the neighboring republics and in the spring declared the opening of a "Caucasus Front," want that to change. This would play into the hands of the de facto ruler of Chechnya, Ramsan Kadyrov, the son of pro-Russian President Ackmad Kadyrov, who was murdered in 2004. Ramsan, the deputy prime minister of the republic, commands a small army of at least a thousand bodyguards, as well as a several thousand member-strong death squad that terrorizes Chechnya.

Humans rights organizations hold Kadyrov responsible for three out of four crimes committed in the republic. His fighters, clad in black uniforms, control a lucrative business in kidnappings and abductions, demanding ransoms ranging from $40 to more than $10,000. Chechnya's president says that 2,500 people are currently listed as "missing" in his country.

An enormous poster of President Putin naming Ramsan Kadyrov a "Hero of Russia" graces one of the bullet-pocked walls of what remains of the House of the Book in Grozny. Under his knit cap, the honoree beams with the face of a suburban criminal. It's an image that epitomizes the fatal errors of the Putin system.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,382033,00.html