Brutality of Chechen War Spills Across the Border

Signs of Russian Role in Killing Tests Brothers' Political Faith

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 13, 2003; Page A17


GALASHKI, Russia -- It wasn't until the next day that they found his pale, blue body, buried in a shallow but carefully disguised grave. His teeth had been shattered, his jaw broken, his nose smashed, his right arm fractured, his leg bludgeoned and his body riddled by 14 bullet holes.

Strewn around the site, according to the official investigation report, were telltale clues, the detritus of a military encampment -- empty Russian armed forces porridge and pork ration cans, hundreds of spent cartridges and an explosive device marked "Defense Products Complex" with a military serial number.

As recounted by relatives, villagers, human rights investigators and Russian prosecutors, the disappearance, torture and murder of 31-year-old Umar Zabiyev following the ambush of a farm truck outside this tiny village in the mountains of Ingushetia shows that the war in Chechnya next door respects no borders. More and more, it is spilling over in the form of attacks on Russian troops stationed here and, according to victims, attacks by Russian troops.

Two months after his brother died, Musa Zabiyev is convinced that Russian troops were responsible -- no easy conclusion for him, because Musa Zabiyev wears the Russian military uniform himself. He is a major and deputy commander of all Russian Interior Ministry troops in Ingushetia.

"I'm ashamed to look in my mother's eyes," he said, shaking his head. "My own colleagues killed her son." So far, the family can only speculate as to why.

In a series of attacks on Russian targets in Ingushetia and North Ossetia, another neighboring province, in the last three months, Chechen guerrillas have expanded their operations outside their home turf. Two assaults on military convoys in the past two weeks near Galashki killed 11 Russian soldiers. Twelve days ago, a suicide bomber smashed his truck through the gates of a military hospital in Mozdok, 45 miles to the north, destroying the building and killing 50 people.

For their part, Russian forces in Ingushetia have adopted some of the brutal tactics that their side uses in Chechnya, including zachistki, or "cleansing operations," according to residents and human rights groups. Troops have descended on camps housing Chechen refugees and rounded up men seemingly at random, while other Chechens and Ingush citizens have disappeared or come under fire.

"Some of the same things that have been happening in Chechnya are beginning to happen here in the same way," said Arsen Sakalov, the Ingushetia-based coordinator of the Chechen Justice Initiative, a human rights group. "This isn't just a coincidence."

That a member of the Zabiyev family should become a victim gives a taste of how random the war in this region has become. The family's ethnic group, the Ingush, has largely been spared the abuses inflicted by the Russian army on Chechens, though both groups are predominantly Muslim. And Zabiyevs have been embedded in the local pro-Russian establishment for years, which might be expected to insulate them from violence by Russian soldiers.

Besides Musa, another brother, Murat, serves as a sergeant in the Interior Ministry forces, while a third, Ali, dresses in the camouflage uniform of an emergency ministry dispatcher. Their dead brother Umar
worked as a security guard at a nearby brick factory.

For Musa and his surviving brothers, Umar's death has been a test of faith. All these years working and fighting for the Russian state, and for what? "I can't explain what's happening," Musa said. "Only someone in this kind of trouble could understand. For nothing, to lose a brother."

Two months after the killing, the investigation appears stalled. No one has been arrested and no official explanation offered.

The family received 100,000 rubles, or $3,225, in compensation from the Ingush government, but otherwise feels cast off. Musa, 46 and softening a bit around the middle, still wears the light blue uniform of the Interior Ministry, still does not take off his oversized military-style cap, even indoors.

Yet his eyes register sadness and disbelief. "The scariest thing is when you're face to face with your troubles and everyone stands unmoved," he said. "It was as if a chicken were run over by a car. It isn't as if he were a person. It's been two months and not a single person has said a single word of apology or sorrow or condolence. Not one word."

The violence that visits Ingushetia increasingly these days often seems indiscriminate. On June 3, masked Russian soldiers blockaded a camp in Nazran housing Chechen refugees, stealing watches, radios, cameras and relief aid and taking away four men, one of whom later told human rights investigators that they were interrogated with electric shocks. The same day, 20 armed men burst into a refugee camp in Nesterovskaya firing guns into the air.

At Tanzila, a compound of ramshackle wooden boxes where 1,000 Chechen refugees live, Russian troops showed up one day in June and corralled the first nine men found in the main courtyard. "They didn't say anything, they just started beating us right away, all nine of us," Kuri Gisumov, 47, said in an interview last week, days after being released from six weeks of detention. "They made us lie down on the ground and beat us as if we were animals. . . . I was covered with blood."

Some refugees attribute the actions to a campaign to pressure the 60,000 to 80,000 Chechen refugees living here to return home. The government offers 350,000 rubles, or $11,300, to each family to rebuild a house in the war-battered republic in hopes of closing the tent camps by next
month. But many Chechens remain afraid.

Askab Mikiyev, an aide to Ingushetia's president, denied that the refugees were being forced to leave. "Nobody has been lifted up and put on a truck," he said. "We're just trying to convince people. Sometimes you have a very tense situation. It's understandable. People have suffered so much. As soon as you touch them, they start screaming." He added that in Ingushetia, "no zachistkis have ever happened. Never."

Like many people living here in this ribbon of brick houses in the Assinovskoye Gorge, Umar Zabiyev juggled a job and farm work to make ends meet. He looked serious and purposeful in the black-and-white identification picture left behind. With two young sons, the youngest 9 months old, he felt pressure to provide for his family.

"He worked all the time, never got tired," said his widow, Yasyet Kateyeva, 30, still wearing a black head scarf in grief. "Sometimes he would come back from his [factory] shift and he would change immediately for [field] work. I'd say, 'Lie down for a bit, take a rest,' and he'd say, 'I can't. I don't have time.' "

And so it was on that summer evening June 10 that he and his brother Ali, 28, were in a potato field with their 65-year-old mother, Tamara Zabiyeva, harvesting before the sun sank below the horizon. About 7 p.m., they piled into their creaky 12-year-old truck to head home.

When it had gone about 200 yards, according to Ali, the truck came under fire from both sides. Umar lost control as the truck hurtled off the road and crashed, pierced by at least 50 bullets.

Their mother was hit by two bullets and a piece of shrapnel. The two sons pulled her out of the truck.

"I told Umar, 'She's wounded,' " Ali recalled, "and he said, 'They hit her in the head, it's useless to take her further.' He said, 'I'll stay with her, you run and get help.' "

Ali ran 21/2 miles and found villagers and local police, who went to the site only to discover the unconscious mother and no Umar. Search parties were organized. At about 10 p.m., two villagers helping in the search entered a nearby forest, where they were set upon by men in Russian
military uniforms.

"They jumped up and yelled at us, 'Lie down! Lie down!' " said Alaudin Dzeitov, 40. "We said, 'We're ordinary people, don't shoot!' "

In separate interviews, Dzeitov and Vakha Artskhanov, 27, gave consistent accounts of being held, face down in the dirt, for three hours by about 30 armed men who were trying to figure out what to do
with them. "The one on the walkie-talkie said, 'We caught two of them. What are we supposed to do with them? We've shown ourselves here,' " said Artskhanov. "I thought they were going to shoot us."

Eventually, the armed men departed, instructing the two villagers not to move for at least a half-hour.

In daylight, the two brought searchers back to the spot. About 20 yards away, they found Umar's grave, covered by soil, dry branches and grass. "It was done very skillfully," Musa Zabiyev recalled. "I'm a serviceman myself, so when I looked at it, I couldn't believe there was a man hidden there."

Magamet Barakhoyev, an Ingush government investigator who went to the scene the day the body was found, said he is convinced that Russian troops carried out the shooting but that it may be impossible to prove. "What difference can we make if none of them cooperates with us?"

Gelani Merzhuev, the civilian prosecutor on the case, said a "special unit" was operating near Galashki at the time and might have been responsible. "Until lately, this kind of unit was not located in Ingushetia and we didn't have problems before," said Merzhuev, a gruff-talking figure who walks around with a pistol tucked in his Hugo Boss belt. "Lately it's becoming more frequent."

But he too held out little hope of prosecution. "There's a war going on. These are the results of war. How can you investigate?"

© 2003 The Washington Post Company