No matter how the weekend standoff ended, the botched assault was yet another glaring example of Russian brutality and incompetence in its dealings with Chechen separatists. The rebels succeeded in staging a replay of the savage battle for their Parliament building in Grozny last January. That was a case study in Russian military disarray, as artillery was brought up to pound the rebel stronghold into a smoking ruin. But this time, Russian blood was flowing not in Chechnya but in a Russian town 90 miles away, with most of the wounds apparently inflicted by Russian troops. Freed hostages confirmed they had been forced to stand at windows as the Chechens returned fire. “Every shot from the federal police forces claims the lives of innocent people,” said a statement from the hostages demanding an end to the storming of the building.
The fighting could not have come at a more embarrassing time for Boris Yeltsin. The Russian president was playing the world leader at the Group of Seven summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “The world community has finally understood whom the federal troops have been fighting against,” Yeltsin said before he flew to Canada–only to find that his peers didn’t think that the hostage crisis retroactively justified the war in Chechnya. On Saturday the G-7 leaders formally declared that the conflict, now a festering guerrilla war in the hinterlands of the Connecticut-size province, “should not be resolved by military means.” In private sessions the heads of state strongly urged Yeltsin to seek a political settlement, said a White House aide. All this just when security officials in Moscow had begun bragging that the Chechen war was won. On the very day that Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin had said a Chechen attack in Russia “can be completely ruled out,” the Chechens did just that.
No fools, the Chechens. The raid on Budyonnovsk was like a remake of “The Dirty Dozen.” As many as 200 rebels - some disguised as police–drove across a frontier and passed through several Russian checkpoints on the highway north of Grozny. By one account, they used the code name for military convoys transporting bodies: “Cargo 200.” But many Russians wondered whether ready rubles may not have been all the password they needed; the rebels later claimed the only thing that stopped them from going all the way to Moscow was an especially greedy cop.
It was just before noon when the convoy of two Kamaz flatbed trucks and a police car rolled into Budyonnovsk, a community of 54,000 in the rich farming region of Stavropol. With the “bodies” covered in tarps, the Chechens drove immediately to the police headquarters and killed everyone in sight. Dividing into small teams, they systematically attacked symbols of Russian authority: the police station, city hall, bank and telecommunications center. Almost 100 people died in the gunfire, including 20 policemen and 20 attackers–before the rebels herded men, women and children into the hospital, where they mounted a heavy machine gun on the roof.
Much of the team apparently melted away before Russian officials could bring up reinforcements. They left a group of 60 to 70 fighters led by Shamil Basayev, who had been third in command of the breakaway Chechen government before Russia cracked down last winter. In a replay of the siege of Grozny, Basayev allowed reporters into the hospital Thursday to film corridors filled with women and children pleading for help. Wearing the green ribbon that identifies Chechens as suicide fighters, he told a press conference his men would fight to the death and kill the hostages unless Russia called off the war in Chechnya; from off camera came the sounds of screams and shots. “We are not bandits,” Basayev said. “We are a country at war with another state. They have taken our families, our land and our freedom.”
“They will not surrender,” Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said before the security forces moved against the rebels. “Forceful actions are needed.” Forceful, yes; but effective? Russians recalled Grachev’s prediction seven months ago that the defenders of Grozny would be routed in a single afternoon by one paratrooper division. After the firefight, terrified residents of Budyonnovsk showed little confidence in their rescuers. “They should give them whatever they want, stop the war, just make an agreement so they will let the hostages go,” a woman whose husband was missing sobbed to a reporter on the scene. Some townspeople took to the streets to beg Russian soldiers to hold their fire.
Yeltsin’s domestic opponents were scathing. “It is intolerable that peaceful, innocent people pay with their lives for the schemes and mistakes of politicians,” said former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev, a native of the Stavropol region. The Russian Parliament prepared to debate a no-confidence vote. But Yeltsin seemed intent on resolving the showdown by force. In Halifax, he described Chechnya as the “center of world terrorism, bribery, corruption and mafia-style criminality.” Russia, he said, had no choice but to attack the hospital because “we had to destroy those bandits.” Chernomyrdin followed up on Russian television with a disjointed, almost incoherent statement in which he repeated claims that authorities can prevent the Chechen war from spilling over into Russia. “The government did and has been doing everything to maintain order in the country,” he said. But for all the prime minister’s bluster, he talked with Basayev early Sunday morning to discuss a possible deal–a ceasefire in exchange for release of most of the hostages. With TV showing footage of corpses on the streets of one ordinary town, Russians could only hope their state would stop its endless lurch from one bloody crisis to another.
