Russia’s wholesale bombardment of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, was the most brutal military offensive by a big power in recent history. As the war moves into the countryside, fresh eyewitness accounts suggest that the outrage continues-behind closed doors. With chilling unanimity, former detainees describe summary executions by Russian guards wearing blue or black masks. In a railroad yard near Mozdok, the Russians’ rear base for Chechnya, hundreds of Chechens and even some local Russians are kept in railroad cars, subjected to sadistic daily beatings, they say. One group of ex-prisoners allegedly saw drunken vigilantes in cahoots with the Russians slit a prisoner’s throat ‘in a courtyard there. Ibrahim Ugurchiev, a local journalist, tells of being stripped naked and set upon by a police dog. “[The guards] were standing there laughing, satisfied as if they were watching a wedding,” he said. “They leave no peace anywhere,” said Salimkhan Timurziyev, 30, his right eye swollen and bloody after a week’s captivity.
The human-rights issue has blown up in Boris Yeltsin’s face. His own human-rights commissioner, Sergei Kovalyov, weeks ago began a campaign to bring pressure to bear over the abuses, and it’s begun to bear fruit. Last week the Council of Europe voted to postpone considering Russia’s application for membership out of concern for the country’s “disproportionate” tactics in Chechnya. And in his annual human-rights review, John Shattuck, the State Department’s top human-rights official, cited “the assault on the human rights of thousands of civilians in Chechnya” as one of the year’s black moments. President Bill Clinton has repeatedly warned Yeltsin in phone conversations: although the United States recognizes Russia’s territorial claim to Chechnya, Yeltsin should appreciate how Russia’s tactics are hurting its international standing. Are the Russians getting the message? “There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of that,” says a senior U.S. official.
Yeltsin’s hold over the embittered Russian soldiers in Chechnya may be minimal. “Each soldier is restrained only by his own personal moral standards, or fear of punishment,” said Eduard Gelman of Russia’s Human Rights Commission. In the initial armored assault on Grozny, the Russians suffered an embarrassing setback – and heavy casualties – at the hands of a loosely organized force of young Chechen men, many of them civilians who commuted to the fighting. Now that the conflict promises to be a drawn-out guerrilla war, it would be only natural if the Russian troops considered every Chechen male of fighting age a suspect. And some of the most dramatic Chechen tales may be exaggerated.
Still, permitting atrocities such as the alleged abuses in Mozdok sends dangerous signals, and not just to the outside world. It raises the ultimate cost of holding on to Chechnya. Even worse, perhaps, it eats away at the hope Russians’ nurture that their young democracy has outgrown the brutalities of the Soviet past.
