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	От	Гришa
	К	Гришa
	Дата	18.09.2000 08:34:23
	Рубрики	Спецслужбы; Армия;

Стaтья про Чeчню из "Los Angeles Times" ч 2

--Andrei

Andrei's pale eyes glow against his tanned skin. He's been home only 10 days. He opens and closes kitchen cabinets,
searching confusedly for sugar for his tea. "I still haven't gotten used to domestic life," he apologizes. He has just turned 21.
During basic training, he recalls, Red Cross workers came to his base to teach about human rights and the rules of war.
"They tried to teach us all kinds of nonsense, like that you should treat civilians 'politely,' " he says. "If you behave
'politely' during wartime, I promise you, nothing good will come of it. I don't know about other wars, but in Chechnya, if they
don't understand what you say, you have to beat it into them. You need the civilians to fear you. There's no other way."
Andrei says the lesson that stuck was the one his commander taught him: how to kill.
"We caught one guy--he had a fold-up [radio] antenna. He gave us a name, but when we beat him he gave us a different
name. We found maps in his pockets, and hashish. He tried to tell us he was looking for food for his mother. My commander
said, 'Stick around and I'll teach you how to deal with these guys.' He took the antenna and began to hit him with it. You could
tell by the look in [the Chechen's] eyes that he knew we were going to kill him.
"We shot him. There were five of us who shot him. We dumped his body in the river. The river was full of bodies. Ours,
too. Three of our guys washed up without heads."
Andrei says he knows that officially, Russian troops are supposed to turn all suspected rebels over to military procurators.
But in practice, his unit literally took no prisoners.
"Once they have a bruise, they're already as good as dead," Andrei says. "They know they won't make it to the procurator's
office. You can see it in their eyes. They never tell us anything, but then again, we never ask. We do it out of spite, because if
they can torture our soldiers, why shouldn't we torture them?
"The easiest way is to heat your bayonet over charcoal, and when it's red-hot, to put it on their bodies, or stab them slowly.
You need to make sure they feel as much pain as possible. The main thing is to have them die slowly. You don't want them to
die fast, because a fast death is an easy death. They should get the full treatment. They should get what they deserve. On one
hand it looks like an atrocity, but on the other hand, it's easy to get used to.
"I killed about nine people this way. I remember all of them."
* * *

Taking No Prisoners
Servicemen say the type and frequency of bespredel vary significantly from one unit to another. A few said such things
never happened in their units. But even they knew of incidents involving other units.
Other than looting, the most common crime recounted to The Times was the execution of suspected rebels.
"We called it 'taking them to the police station,' " said one police commando. "The nearest police station was 300
kilometers [about 200 miles] away. In reality, they wouldn't make it farther than the next corner."
Nearly all of the servicemen interviewed said they didn't bother taking prisoners--after all,
for them it was the safest thing to do.
"We had a clear-cut policy with prisoners: We didn't take any," said another police
commando. "To be more precise, we did take one prisoner once and tried to hand him over to
the procurator's office. But one of our men was wounded on the way, and then we decided--no
more prisoners. What's the point? We already risk our lives greatly when we fight against them.
Why risk them again to save the lives of fighters and give them the chance to go to jail when
what they deserve is death? . . . You can carry out the sentence right on the spot."
The summary executions don't just take place against suspected fighters. One 33-year-old
army officer recounted how he drowned a family of five--four women and a middle-aged
man--in their own well.
"You should not believe people who say Chechens are not being exterminated. In this
Chechen war, it's done by everyone who can do it," he said. "There are situations when it's not
possible. But when an opportunity presents itself, few people miss it.
"I don't know what it is, bespredel or not," he continued. "But it is a war. A war is a very
cruel thing, and matters of life and death should not be judged by civilian standards."
Mutilation of corpses and torture were reported less frequently but clearly were common in
a number of units. Several servicemen interviewed for this report confirmed that some members
of Russian special forces cut off the ears of their victims in a revenge ritual.
"Cutting ears may seem savage to some, but it has its explanations," said one commander. "It's an old tradition among the
special forces--you cut off the ears of the enemy in order to later lay them on the tombstone of your friend who was killed in
the war. . . . It's not a manifestation of barbarism. It's just our way of telling our deceased mate: Rest in peace. You have been
avenged."
* * *

"I would kill all the men I met during mopping-up operations. I didn't feel sorry for them one bit."
--Boris

Boris' body was both built and broken by years of boxing. His face, hands and torso have the strength and subtlety of
cinder blocks. Since he returned from the war zone, he has had trouble sleeping at night.
"Sometimes I fear I will not be able to control myself, especially after a couple of drinks," the thirtysomething police
commando says. "I wake up in a cold sweat, all enraged, and all I can see is dead bodies, blood and screams. At that moment,
I'm ready to go as far as it takes. I think if I were given weapons and grenades, I would head out and start 'mopping up' my
own hometown."
He says he can no longer remember all the people he killed.
"I killed a lot. I wouldn't touch women or children, as long as they didn't fire at me. But I would kill all the men I met
during mopping-up operations. I didn't feel sorry for them one bit. They deserved it," he says. "I wouldn't even listen to the
pleas or see the tears of their women when they asked me to spare their men. I simply took them aside and killed them."
When he came home from Chechnya, he resigned from his unit. He says he's happy to be in a regular job. And he's trying to
forget the war.
But there are some things he can't forget.
"I remember a Chechen female sniper. She didn't have any chance of making it to the authorities. We just tore her apart
with two armored personnel carriers, having tied her ankles with steel cables. There was a lot of blood, but the boys needed
it. After this, a lot of the boys calmed down. Justice was done, and that was the most important thing for them.
"We would also throw fighters off the helicopters before landing. The trick was to pick the right altitude. We didn't want
them to die right away. We wanted them to suffer before they died. Maybe it's cruel, but in a war, that's almost the only way to
dull the fear and sorrow of losing your friends."
* * *

Killing for Revenge
Notions of provocation and revenge are central to the servicemen's mind-set. In Russian culture, a man not only has the
right but is also honor-bound to respond to a "provocation." When a Russian serviceman is killed or mistreated by the enemy,
his comrades must take revenge.
Nearly all of the servicemen who recounted incidents of bespredel--a slang term that originated in Russia's
prisons--described them as revenge attacks for the deaths of their comrades.
"When you see your mates drop down on the ground, when you take your dead and wounded to the hospital, this is when
hatred rises within you," said a 23-year-old army officer. "And the hatred is against all Chechens, not just the individual
enemies who killed your friends. This is when bespredel starts."
These tendencies in Russian military culture have been intensified by a virulent Russian hatred of the Chechens--a hatred
running higher in this conflict than in the 1994-96 war in the republic.
A major reason is the blood-curdling acts of the Chechen fighters themselves--while enjoying de facto independence for
three years, many ran brutal kidnapping gangs that abducted Russian hostages, some of whom were tortured and killed.
Russian TV reports have repeatedly broadcast gory footage of atrocities allegedly committed by the Chechens, including
mutilations and beheadings.
"Why should human rights be respected only from one direction?" a police commando complained. "It's always from our
side and never from theirs."
Russia's human rights critics don't dispute the monstrosity of the crimes committed by Chechens. But Malcolm Hawkes, a
researcher with Human Rights Watch, points out that according to international law, "Russia is obliged to respect human
rights regardless of abuses committed by the other side."
Military analyst Alexander I. Zhilin, a retired air force colonel, says that's a hard standard to live by in the heat of war.
"Russian soldiers ask themselves and their commanders simple questions: 'Why can the Chechens do anything they want,
kill right and left, and get away with it? Why are our hands tied?' " Zhilin said. "Sometimes commanders have to turn a blind
eye to these terrible things because this is the only way to prevent a mutiny among soldiers, or often because they simply feel
the same way."
Moreover, after a series of bomb attacks in Moscow and elsewhere last year that killed more than 300 people, the Russian
public and Russian servicemen have accepted the official line that this is not a war against unsavory separatists but a fight
against inhuman "bandits and terrorists."
The view has been enhanced by a barrage of news reports depicting the fighters as mercenaries and religious fanatics,
many of them from other countries. While it's unclear what proportion of the fighters come from outside Russia, many of the
servicemen were convinced that it was a majority--making it easier to consider them alien.
Sergei Kovalyov, a Soviet-era dissident who served as human rights commissioner in Chechnya during the first war until
he was fired for his outspokenness, says the Kremlin fosters a culture of impunity that makes it all but certain that some
excesses might take place.
"As usual, it is the authorities who are to blame because they deliberately refuse to do what they should do--monitor the
situation, suppress unlawful actions and severely punish the guilty. But they deliberately do not do it," he said.
"If one were to make a list of those guilty of the cruel treatment of peaceful civilians, one should start with President
[Vladimir V.] Putin," Kovalyov said. "He knows perfectly well what is happening."
And that, Kovalyov said, is "not too far from genocide."