Disappearances, rapes, assassinations: since the recent attacks in Russia, paranoia about "black widows" is feeding a renewal of violence against the rebel republic's female inhabitants
Wrapped in plastic sheeting, the three bodies were discovered on 17 October, buried at the edge of a road leading out of Grozny. Workmen who were digging foundations for an electrical installation, in the Zadavskoy district, uncovered them with their shovels. Their bodies were at a depth of about a metre, in a place where six months previously a Russian federal army unit had camped. The plastic bags contained the corpses of three women in an advanced state of decomposition. The local procurator's official described them as follows: "Remains of three women. Some fragments of black jumpers and skirts. Each skull has at the back the mark of a 'control shot' bullet impact fatal."
After such macabre discoveries, in Chechnya, the only way to try to identify the victims is by word of mouth. The locals know in advance that the official enquiry will be inconclusive. Other ways must be found: cross-checking meticulously, and with difficulty, the stories of disappearances of women, taken away by masked, armed men, who could equally well be Russian soldiers as members of the pro-Russian Chechen militia.
The families of the women who have disappeared are frozen into immobility at the idea of giving evidence. In Chechnya rape amounts to a terrible taboo bringing dishonour on the entire clan. Moreover, indicating that a woman has disappeared automatically produces suspicions in the FSB (the Russian secret service): "So she has gone to join the ranks of the suicide bombers?" they say.
Russian television keeps up the paranoid fear of "black widows" by showing documentaries about kamikaze Chechen women, described as "transformed into zombies, drugged and raped into submission to commit criminal acts." The recent wave of terrorist attacks in Russia, generally attributed to these "black widows," has produced in Chechnya a renewal of violence by the military against women.
In a Grozny apartment, with sweating walls and a façade perforated with shell-holes, a young occupant, Angela, describes this growing terror. In Argun, two women were abducted in the middle of the street in September, by armed men driving a Russian military vehicle. There was no way of knowing whether the abductors were Russians or Chechens.
"Armed men, whether Russian or Chechen, make the law here," says Angela. "They are primitives who have become degenerate as a result of war, and show no respect whatever for the Chechen tradition which forbids attacks against women. When they see a woman, they see her naked, that's all."
HUNT THE *******TES
In the Mikrorayon district, with its long rows of concrete buildings devastated by the shelling, another Chechen, Patimat, tells how she does her best to avoid the sweeps by not wearing out of doors the veil worn by Islamic women and which she wears in the privacy of her own dwelling. "I loosen my veil and let my hair become visible. Sometimes I even put on makeup. My mother is terrified at the idea that soldiers will take me away. They hunt the *******tes and seek out women. For them, '*******te' is synonymous with 'terrorist'."
In her twenties, Patimat is a member of the radicalised younger generation of Chechens who sympathise with the fundamentalist groups and describes herself as a believer in "pure Islam," breaking with the Sufi traditions still observed by the older generation of Chechens. "Our people is undergoing a genocide. But the new generation is wonderful; it has hardened itself, it prays, it learns the Koran and each new torture, each new persecution only turns it more and more in the direction of the Prophet's teachings," Petimat says, her eyes bright.
For her the tragedy at Beslan cannot be counted as an action of the "resistance to the Russian occupiers." She says: "Those who carried it out took children captive, and that is contrary to our ways of combat."
The attack at the Ossetian school in which more than 330 people died was the result, in her opinion, of a sinister manipulation by the Russian secret services. "Some members of the terrorist group had been imprisoned for a long time in Russian prisons before being released for this operation," she states, repeating a conspiracy theory that is widely believed by the population.
The Beslan tragedy has overwhelmed the majority of Chechens with a sense of despair. "How could they have done such a thing?" asks the mother of a young family, in tears at the mention of the hostage-taking. "It is a terrible thing for us Chechens, because all of us are held collectively responsible," she explains. Then she adds slowly: "Beslan was made possible because, in Chechnya, life is of no significance. It has no value. This action has disgusted us. But in Russia who complained about the death of so many of our children in the bombing?"
Further away to the south, in the mountains, the despoliation of war continues. Aslan, sitting on a bench, smokes cigarette after cigarette. He provides rare evidence of the tortures practised in the Vedeno region, on the Russian federal army's base "Vostock". This young Chechen is a member of a special pro-Russian unit of 300 Chechen men which operates under the command of Sulim Yamadaev, leader of an armed group recruited in Moscow.
"Over there in the forests," says Aslan, "our operational group is given the job of tracking the boyeviki the separatist fighters. Every day on our patrols there are armed confrontations, and every day one or two of our guys get killed. The Russian telly doesn't carry anything about it. Also, quite a lot of us lose a leg or a foot on the mines improvised mortars placed by the boyeviki. This is how it goes. We swoop on the villages and collect up the young men. We bring them to the base, where there are several rooms opening onto a big yard. We put one in each room, surrounded by ten men who get busy with him. They are beaten and tortured with electricity. We call it "turning the machine." Sometimes they die. We throw them out. There are underground hiding-places."
"Generally they begin to give us names, addresses," he continues unemotionally. Aslan is around twenty, and says he is paid 12,000 roubles (about 350 euros) a month by the Russian army. "We draw up lists. We get in our vehicles and go looking for these men, sometimes as far as Grozny. We catch some of them and bring them back to our base. And it goes on like that." A few days later Russian television showed a broadcast of a solemn ceremony at the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin gave out medals to soldiers taking part in the "anti-terrorist operation in the north Caucasus." "If there were more people like you our country would have done even better," the Russian president said. Among the recipients of the medals was Ruslan Yamadaev, the brother and close associate of the commander of the sinister "Vostock" base.
Wrapped in plastic sheeting, the three bodies were discovered on 17 October, buried at the edge of a road leading out of Grozny. Workmen who were digging foundations for an electrical installation, in the Zadavskoy district, uncovered them with their shovels. Their bodies were at a depth of about a metre, in a place where six months previously a Russian federal army unit had camped. The plastic bags contained the corpses of three women in an advanced state of decomposition. The local procurator's official described them as follows: "Remains of three women. Some fragments of black jumpers and skirts. Each skull has at the back the mark of a 'control shot' bullet impact fatal."
After such macabre discoveries, in Chechnya, the only way to try to identify the victims is by word of mouth. The locals know in advance that the official enquiry will be inconclusive. Other ways must be found: cross-checking meticulously, and with difficulty, the stories of disappearances of women, taken away by masked, armed men, who could equally well be Russian soldiers as members of the pro-Russian Chechen militia.
The families of the women who have disappeared are frozen into immobility at the idea of giving evidence. In Chechnya rape amounts to a terrible taboo bringing dishonour on the entire clan. Moreover, indicating that a woman has disappeared automatically produces suspicions in the FSB (the Russian secret service): "So she has gone to join the ranks of the suicide bombers?" they say.
Russian television keeps up the paranoid fear of "black widows" by showing documentaries about kamikaze Chechen women, described as "transformed into zombies, drugged and raped into submission to commit criminal acts." The recent wave of terrorist attacks in Russia, generally attributed to these "black widows," has produced in Chechnya a renewal of violence by the military against women.
In a Grozny apartment, with sweating walls and a façade perforated with shell-holes, a young occupant, Angela, describes this growing terror. In Argun, two women were abducted in the middle of the street in September, by armed men driving a Russian military vehicle. There was no way of knowing whether the abductors were Russians or Chechens.
"Armed men, whether Russian or Chechen, make the law here," says Angela. "They are primitives who have become degenerate as a result of war, and show no respect whatever for the Chechen tradition which forbids attacks against women. When they see a woman, they see her naked, that's all."
HUNT THE *******TES
In the Mikrorayon district, with its long rows of concrete buildings devastated by the shelling, another Chechen, Patimat, tells how she does her best to avoid the sweeps by not wearing out of doors the veil worn by Islamic women and which she wears in the privacy of her own dwelling. "I loosen my veil and let my hair become visible. Sometimes I even put on makeup. My mother is terrified at the idea that soldiers will take me away. They hunt the *******tes and seek out women. For them, '*******te' is synonymous with 'terrorist'."
In her twenties, Patimat is a member of the radicalised younger generation of Chechens who sympathise with the fundamentalist groups and describes herself as a believer in "pure Islam," breaking with the Sufi traditions still observed by the older generation of Chechens. "Our people is undergoing a genocide. But the new generation is wonderful; it has hardened itself, it prays, it learns the Koran and each new torture, each new persecution only turns it more and more in the direction of the Prophet's teachings," Petimat says, her eyes bright.
For her the tragedy at Beslan cannot be counted as an action of the "resistance to the Russian occupiers." She says: "Those who carried it out took children captive, and that is contrary to our ways of combat."
The attack at the Ossetian school in which more than 330 people died was the result, in her opinion, of a sinister manipulation by the Russian secret services. "Some members of the terrorist group had been imprisoned for a long time in Russian prisons before being released for this operation," she states, repeating a conspiracy theory that is widely believed by the population.
The Beslan tragedy has overwhelmed the majority of Chechens with a sense of despair. "How could they have done such a thing?" asks the mother of a young family, in tears at the mention of the hostage-taking. "It is a terrible thing for us Chechens, because all of us are held collectively responsible," she explains. Then she adds slowly: "Beslan was made possible because, in Chechnya, life is of no significance. It has no value. This action has disgusted us. But in Russia who complained about the death of so many of our children in the bombing?"
Further away to the south, in the mountains, the despoliation of war continues. Aslan, sitting on a bench, smokes cigarette after cigarette. He provides rare evidence of the tortures practised in the Vedeno region, on the Russian federal army's base "Vostock". This young Chechen is a member of a special pro-Russian unit of 300 Chechen men which operates under the command of Sulim Yamadaev, leader of an armed group recruited in Moscow.
"Over there in the forests," says Aslan, "our operational group is given the job of tracking the boyeviki the separatist fighters. Every day on our patrols there are armed confrontations, and every day one or two of our guys get killed. The Russian telly doesn't carry anything about it. Also, quite a lot of us lose a leg or a foot on the mines improvised mortars placed by the boyeviki. This is how it goes. We swoop on the villages and collect up the young men. We bring them to the base, where there are several rooms opening onto a big yard. We put one in each room, surrounded by ten men who get busy with him. They are beaten and tortured with electricity. We call it "turning the machine." Sometimes they die. We throw them out. There are underground hiding-places."
"Generally they begin to give us names, addresses," he continues unemotionally. Aslan is around twenty, and says he is paid 12,000 roubles (about 350 euros) a month by the Russian army. "We draw up lists. We get in our vehicles and go looking for these men, sometimes as far as Grozny. We catch some of them and bring them back to our base. And it goes on like that." A few days later Russian television showed a broadcast of a solemn ceremony at the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin gave out medals to soldiers taking part in the "anti-terrorist operation in the north Caucasus." "If there were more people like you our country would have done even better," the Russian president said. Among the recipients of the medals was Ruslan Yamadaev, the brother and close associate of the commander of the sinister "Vostock" base.
