[Marxism] More Russian paranoia I suppose???

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Los Angeles Times

Chechnya's Grimmest Industry
Thousands of people have been abducted by the war-torn
republic's kidnapping
machine. Tales of the survivors read like relics from
a barbaric past.

By ROBYN DIXON, Times Staff Writer


Kidnap victim Mikhail Brenner, shown with wife
Tatyana, lost all but one of
his teeth in beatings. "You try not to succumb to the
pain," he says.
YURI KOZYREV / For The Times


     NALCHIK, Russia--As awkwardly as a newborn foal
struggling on spindly
legs, Lena Meshcheryakova is learning how to curl her
lips up at the corners
to make a smile.
     Drifting just beneath the surface of her
5-year-old world are the
memories of a darker place: the cellar in Chechnya
where she was held
prisoner by kidnappers for nine months.
     When she was freed at age 3, she had forgotten
how to smile. She could
barely even speak. But she knew how to pray like the
devout Muslim Chechen
men who had imprisoned her. The words she kept
shouting out were "Allahu
akbar!" (God is great!)
     Lena, kidnapped from her Russian mother's home in
Grozny, the Chechen
capital, was a victim of Chechnya's most voracious
industry, the trade in
hostages and slaves. Thousands of people have been
gobbled up by the Chechen
kidnapping machine, which has ravaged Russia since
1994.
     The stories of survivors are like the relics of
some wild,
half-forgotten era of warlords and lawless barbarism.
Victims have been kept
in earthen pits or small cells that are often scrawled
with the initials of
hundreds of earlier captives. They have been used as
slaves to dig trenches
or build large houses for relatives of the kidnappers.

     The kidnappers have been known to mutilate their
captives, even
children, severing their ears or fingers. Gangs have
sent videotaped
recordings of mutilations and beheadings to relatives
to terrify them into
finding the ransom. Russian authorities have used the
gruesome videos to
feed anti-Chechen sentiment and boost public support
for Moscow's latest war
in the separatist republic.
     When the kidnapping industry reached its peak a
few years ago, there
was even a relatively open "slave market" in Grozny,
near Minutka Square,
where the names and details of human livestock
circulated on lists for
interested buyers. Gangs often traded hostages or
stole them from one
another.
     In the years between Russia's first war in
Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996,
and Moscow's launch of a new war against Chechen
rebels last fall,
kidnapping was one of the biggest sources of
enrichment for criminal gangs
in an economy that had little else to offer but oil
theft, arms trade,
counterfeiting and drug smuggling.
     The highly organized gangs hunted for victims
among the wealthy clans
from Chechnya and neighboring republics in southern
Russia. Foreigners and
Russian television journalists were in high demand.
     There were even professional go-betweens who took
a commission on
ransom deals, visited victims in their cells and
dictated the despairing
letters that captives sent to relatives pleading for
the ransom to be paid.
     Nearly a thousand hostages are still being held
or are dead, according
to Russian Interior Ministry figures.
     Most of the victims were kidnapped in Chechnya or
nearby. But dozens of
people were seized in Moscow and other cities and
traveled under guard to
Chechnya in trucks with hidden cells, buried under
potatoes or furniture.
     In at least one case, a hostage was doped and
transported in a
suitcase.


     Piecing Together a Child's Lost Months
     In her new hometown of Prokhladny, near Nalchik
in southern Russia,
Lena Meshcheryakova is rediscovering a childhood world
of smiling suns
painted on kindergarten doors, posters with cotton
ball sheep and lunchtime
milk ladled from an enamel pail. Her mother, Tatyana,
44, is gradually
putting together the jagged puzzle of what happened to
Lena in the lost nine
months of her captivity.
     Back in her Grozny neighborhood, Tatyana
Meshcheryakova, a kindergarten
director, was resented as a Russian woman teaching the
children of Chechens.
She thinks that her family was a target for Chechen
extremists because of
it.
     At 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 1998, she awoke to the
sounds of the
neighborhood dogs barking. Then four armed men were in
her room. They took
away her child and a pair of inexpensive gold
earrings.
     The initial ransom, $15,000, might as well have
been a million dollars
for a woman who hadn't been paid in four years. Nine
months later, it had
fallen to $1,000, and neighbors, colleagues and
friends helped scrape
together the money to buy her child's life.
     Before Meshcheryakova was reunited with Lena,
doctors warned her to
show no emotion and to get no closer than a handshake,
in case of infection.
     "But I decided to hug her, and when I did she was
just skin and bone,"
Meshcheryakova says. The child had lost all her hair.
"She was a pitiful
sight, all covered in scabies, her skin hanging loose.
She had deep bedsores
and could barely move. She weighed 9 kilograms [20
pounds] at 3 years of
age."
     Lena couldn't tell her mother the story. It
finally emerged in painful
scraps. She spoke of people named Ruslan and Shamil,
who carried machine
guns, and a bad-tempered woman called Larisa.
     Lena's ear was ripped, and she had a deep scar on
her finger. "Larisa
hit me with a knife for losing a slipper," Lena
explained to her mother.
     She was terrified of people in camouflage and
burst into tears whenever
she saw a cellar. When her mother asked why she was
always sitting with
hands behind her back, Lena told her she was wearing
handcuffs. She would
greedily pounce on any crumbs that fell to the floor
and lick the last tiny
scrap from her plate.


     Russian Soldiers See a Cause to Fight For
     The kidnapping industry reached its crescendo in
the lawless chaos
after Russia was defeated in the first Chechen war.
The kidnappings gave
Russian soldiers a cause to fight for--which they
lacked in the first
war--and made it easy for them to hate all Chechens.
     Despite the fact that Russia has captured most
Chechen territory, there
were still 73 kidnappings in southern Russia near
Chechnya in the first half
of this year.


Friends helped Tatyana Meshcheryakova scrape together
the $1,000 ransom for
daughter Lena.
YURI KOZYREV / For The Times


     According to the Interior Ministry's
organized-crime department, 1,807
people have been kidnapped since 1994. The figure
excludes the thousands of
Chechens abducted within the separatist republic and
the many other people
who didn't go to the authorities for help.
     "It's not just a disorganized bunch of
cutthroats. It's a highly
organized, well-oiled machine, and they've got
contacts all over the North
Caucasus," says Mikhail Brenner, 45, a road
construction engineer who was
kidnapped in Ingushetia, a Russian republic
neighboring Chechnya, in October
1998 along with four of his colleagues.
     In the year of his captivity, dozens of people
passed through his cell,
with its filthy mattresses and bloodstained walls.
     One of the five, Victor Zinchenko, 53, whose
mother was a
poverty-stricken widow, was beheaded in a green forest
glade. The video of
his death has been played countless times on Russian
television, but the
part never telecast shows his executioners kicking his
severed head about
like a football, says Brenner's wife, Tatyana, who got
the full version of
the video in a parcel from the kidnappers.


     Local Authorities Were Often Involved
     After the withdrawal of the Russians from
Chechnya in 1996, Moscow was
impotent to stop the kidnappings or free the victims.
The local Chechen
government's security service was no help, afraid of
sparking clan
vendettas.
     In fact, the Chechen authorities were often
involved in kidnappings.
Aslanbek Kharikhanov, 31, of Mairtup village, left the
Chechen police force
in disgust because so many police cooperated with
gangs or became kidnappers
themselves. Chechnya's customs service often kidnapped
people while
inspecting trains or buses.
     Even ordinary Chechens played a role in the
crimes.
     Victims such as Brenner, who was guarded by old
men with machine guns
as he worked as a slave building houses, concluded
that every Chechen
supports the kidnapping industry. But ordinary
Chechens are also terrified
of the warlords and their armies.
     Siryazhdin Idrisov, 37, a farmer from Mairtup,
kept a man in his
basement in the summer of 1997. The man, who looked
about 45 and Russian,
was brought to him by a warlord.
     "What could I do? I couldn't say no to a
warlord," Idrisov explains.
"He said I would answer for the prisoner with my head
or with the heads of
my family members, and I knew he was serious. I
suspect many other people in
the village had the same problem, but we never shared
it. We were just
terrified, that is all.
     "I was afraid the man would run away, so I kept
the basement closed at
all times. I fed him well; I gave him the same food my
family had. I never
spoke to him. But I felt sorry for him. He looked very
sad and frightened at
all times. I was quite relieved when the warlord came
after 12 days and took
him away." The man's fate is unknown.
     Idrisov wouldn't give the warlord's name, saying,
"I don't want him to
come and kill me."
     The heart of the industry was the town of
Urus-Martan, about 15 miles
southwest of Grozny, controlled by the notorious eight
Akhmadov brothers,
including Uvais Akhmadov, the town's police chief.
     Kirill Perchenko, 22, the son of a Moscow art
dealer, was kidnapped in
August 1999 from one of Moscow's fashionable streets
and trucked to Grozny.
He was sold to Ramzan Akhmadov, one of the brothers,
and saw hundreds of
names, going back to 1992, scratched on the walls of
the warlord's cells.
     The Akhmadovs had many rules for their prisoners.
They had to keep
their eyes down and weren't allowed to meet a
Chechen's gaze. They worked at
cobbling shoes, carrying water and other chores.
     Several times, Perchenko was given 100 strokes
with wooden sticks for
using bad language. After the first month of frequent
hard beatings, he
says, he began to get used to the pain.
     The beating that really sticks in his mind wasn't
the most painful one.
A few Chechen boys, aged 5 or 6, were encouraged to
hit him while a woman
stood nearby, laughing.
     He says that during his captivity he watched
seven men being executed
by his captors. One of his friends was bashed to
death.
     Once, a hostage, a Russian officer, attacked and
wounded one of the
guards with a knife. Punishment was immediate.
     "They put him on the ground, and four hostages
had to hold his arms and
legs," Perchenko remembers. "They took a two-handed
saw and killed him. He
was lying on his stomach screaming. They cut from the
back. From the back
you hit the spine first, and it's very painful."
     "The next day they took us all out of our cell
and cut off the head of
an 82-year-old man they had taken in Grozny. They just
took it off with a
knife and said, 'For Allah,' before killing him. They
put both [men's] heads
on poles. And they took out the heart of the old man
and nailed it to a
tree."
     Perchenko managed to escape after six months in
captivity.
     Only about 10% of hostages were freed by Russia's
organized-crime
force, according to former Maj. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a
crusading journalist
from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper who has devoted
himself to tracing and
freeing hostages. Most were bought, a few escaped, and
some were abandoned
by gangs when Russia started bombing towns and
villages after the second war
began last fall.
     With 950 unaccounted for in the Interior Ministry
figures, it's not
clear how many died in Russia's ferocious bombing
campaign.
     "Hostages say the most terrible thing they
experienced was the Russian
bombing," says Izmailov, who believes the number of
hostages is much higher
than official figures suggest.
     The least "lucrative" hostages are soldiers, says
Mikhail Suntsov of
the ministry's organized-crime department.
     Roman Tereshchenko, a 22-year-old soldier, was
sold into slavery in
Chechnya by another soldier, Vasily Pinigin, for a few
hundred dollars in
June 1998. Pinigin was convicted earlier this year and
sentenced to eight
years in prison. It was the only trial of its type,
although there were
several cases in which soldiers betrayed colleagues to
kidnappers, either
for money or to avoid being kidnapped themselves,
Suntsov says.
     The ransom for a soldier was usually $2,000 to
$10,000, he says, and 10
times more for an officer.
     Although kidnappings have been going on in
Chechnya for centuries, the
trade really took off in September 1996, when Russia
ran out of captured
Chechen rebels to exchange for Russian POWs.
     The Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament,
passed an amnesty
enabling convicted Chechens serving time for various
crimes in Russian
prisons to be swapped for captive Russian civilians
and soldiers. A similar
amnesty was passed late last year. Izmailov, who
arranged many of the swaps,
set a minimum of three Russians for every Chechen
released.
     The problem was that the rule implied that one
Chechen life was worth
three Russians. It was like pouring gasoline on the
flames.
     "Of course it helped create a market. But the
people who split the atom
did not know it would result in a nuclear bomb,"
Izmailov says. "What other
option did I have?"


     Standing Blindfolded in a Self-Dug Grave
     Telling their stories means reliving their
captivity for men such as
Maj. Vitaly Khapov, whose kidnappers clamped open his
jaw and ground his
teeth down with a metal file, or Brenner, who had to
dig a grave and stand
in it blindfolded while gunmen fired bullets past his
ears.
     Oscar Wilde wrote in his story "The Happy Prince"
that there is no
mystery so great as misery--but equally mysterious is
the will to survive
it.
     All but one of Brenner's teeth were knocked out
in vicious beatings.
The kidnappers' aim was to break him.
     "People like that can't break your spirit,"
Brenner says. "They could
hardly even read or write properly. When a beast like
that is beating you
up, you try to watch in a detached way, thinking that
this person being
beaten up is much higher than the person beating him.
He's just a killing
machine, beating you up.
     "You feel hatred for them, of course, but all the
time you have a
feeling of derision. You try not to succumb to the
pain."
     Brenner escaped last fall and walked for five
days to neighboring
Ingushetia, just in time to be asked to identify
Zinchenko's decomposing
head, which had been found two weeks earlier under a
bridge.
     In November 1997, Vitaly Kozmenko, 73, was seized
in Grozny by three
men in camouflage and was held in several different
cells and pits.
     He spent two months in a grave-size pit under a
house high in the
southern Chechen mountains. His hands were painfully
cuffed and his feet
were chained, but he could walk a few paces.
     The owner of the house was always masked. He was
curt and cruel but
brought a bucket for Kozmenko to relieve himself into
and a few boards for
him to sleep on. After three days in the pitch
blackness, Kozmenko began
having hallucinations and he explained the problem to
his guard, who
softened.
     "I said, 'What do I call you?' He said, 'Call me
Sonny,' and he called
me Grandpa. I said, 'Sonny, can you bring me a light?'
"
     With light he was able to write. Kozmenko still
has a small scrap of
worn cardboard, folded many times, that is covered in
tiny illegible writing
and hieroglyphics, his diary of two months in the pit.

     Later, he was moved to a cellar in Mairtup
village, where he was
chained to a couch. Kozmenko's limbs were so confined
that he was almost
sleepless, tormented by thoughts of being able to just
rest one hand on his
thigh. Somehow he persuaded his newest captor, Lechi,
to unchain him for a
night, despite the Chechen's fear of reprisals if
Kozmenko escaped.
     After that, "I said: 'Lechi, unchain me, open the
door and leave the
house. I'll not run away.' . . . He said, 'To hell
with them,' and unchained
me for good. And I started to learn to walk again."
     Lechi borrowed several books for his prisoner,
facing embarrassment
when a suspicious friend asked him why he had suddenly
become so interested
in reading.
     "A man should not lose his spirit and should
struggle to the end,"
Kozmenko says. "I suffered a lot of excruciating pain,
but I survived
because I said to myself life is given to man just
once. You should do all
you can to stay alive."
     He was released after his wife, a lawyer, agreed
to defend the case of
a rich and powerful politician who was charged with
inciting a coup in
Dagestan, a republic neighboring Chechnya.
     After 14 months in captivity, the first thing
Kozmenko did when he got
back to Moscow in January 1999 was to go to an ice
hole in the frozen Moscow
River and plunge in for an exhilarating dip.


     'Let There Always Be Blue Sky'
     In Lena Meshcheryakova's kindergarten, the words
of a Russian nursery
song decorate one wall: "Let there always be sunshine.
Let there always be
blue sky. Let there always be Mama. Let there always
be me." For all the
other children, it's just a pretty song, but for Lena
the implied
alternative is quite real.
     Lena still has rings under her eyes, and her
solemn little face rarely
lights up. She still wakes up screaming about people
coming to get her. She
is often anxious and irritable, and whenever she sees
Grozny mentioned on
television, she begs for the promise that she will
never have to go back
there.
     Lena and her mother, a widow, have been staying
with a relative for
months. Lately, there have been hints that it's time
to move on from the
house in Prokhladny, but the mother can't afford to
buy her own place.
     As Tatyana Meshcheryakova tells the story of her
daughter's survival,
Lena plays nearby. She lets a ladybug run along her
finger, then is
chagrined by its apparent death due to her attention.
She gently places the
tiny insect on a matchbox.
     Gradually, Lena is recovering. "Now she has even
started to be
naughty," her mother says gratefully. "Thank God she
was born. Thank God
she's here."
     "It's moving! Look, Mama! It's moving!" Lena
shrieks excitedly as the
ladybug picks itself up and begins to scurry away. And
suddenly, Lena is
smiling.


---
     Sergei L. Loiko of The Times' Moscow Bureau and
special correspondent
Mayerbek Nunayev contributed to this report. Dixon
reported from Nalchik,
Rostov-on-Don and Moscow. Nunayev reported from
Mairtup.
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times



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