The Times (UK)

November 12 1999

[for personal use only]

Men imprisoned and beaten, refugees say

FROM ALICE LAGNADO IN NAZRAN, INGUSHETIA

REFUGEES fleeing the war in Chechnya have alleged that Russian troops were kidnapping Chechen men and holding them prisoner in "filtration camps". Several refugees waiting at Ingushetia's border with Chechnya told The Times yesterday that Russian soldiers were keeping Chechen men as prisoners on their bases, starving and beating them. "You know what happens in prison? Well, that's what it's like," one man said.

Ali Alimkhanov, 42, who arrived in Ingushetia a week ago from Grozny and was waiting at the checkpoint for relatives, said: "They say they need to check documents, then the person disappears. They beat them and they don't feed them."

Vyacheslav Izmailov, a former Russian army major who is in Ingushetia to help refugee orphans, said: "I can't be absolutely certain that there are filtration camps now, but there may well be and there were in the last war."

Dusty buses packed tight with people escaping Russian bombs arrived every few minutes at the border yesterday morning. Women and children carrying a few possessions in plastic bags streamed out on to the snow. The lucky ones were met by relatives, many of whom have had to wait several days at the border in freezing temperatures. Others tramped into Ingushetia on foot, exhausted and cold, to face grim refugee camps.

One woman said of the Russians' strategy: "They are just bombing, from the air and from the ground. We were in the cellar every night."

People spoke of bombs raining down on villages, sometimes concentrated on the outside and the centre, but always where civilians were living.

They said that the fighters the Russians are targeting are Chechens who have taken up arms and they had not seen Wahhabi fundamentalists in their villages. They also said that they had seen no arms caches in their villages.

Mr Alimkhanov said that the Russians bombed Chechnya's Hospital No 2 in the Minutka region of Grozny three or four days ago. "I met the head doctor here on the border and he told me," he said. He said that the hospital had some state-of-the-art medical equipment donated by foreign aid organisations.

Yakha Saidulayeva, a 26-year-old nurse, standing at the checkpoint in hope of greeting relatives, said that a psychiatric hospital was bombed in Urus-Martan a week ago, killing the head doctor and injuring nurses and patients. She said another attack on the local market had killed two girls aged 13 and 14. Russian forces were not bombing the entire village, but large parts of it where they suspected "fighters" lived, she said.

The refugees accuse Russia of running a smear campaign against Chechens. It is a commonly held view that the Russian security services organised the torrent of kidnappings in Chechnya, paying poor Chechens to carry out the attacks. They also believe that Russia was behind the apartment bombings in September that killed almost 300 Russians in Moscow.

"Ask any Chechen whether they know someone who would go to Moscow and blow up apartments. I don't know that kind of person," Sa d Magomed said. He rubbished Russian claims to be staging a Nato-style campaign. "What they say on television is nonsense. There are no precise strikes, they are just hitting people. There are very many people left in Chechnya."

Reflecting the view of other refugees, Mr Magomed was in no doubt that Russia would flatten Grozny, perhaps soon: "They will get drunk on New Year's Eve and try to storm Grozny, like in the last war. There will be a mass of young soldiers and Kazantsev [the general who commands the North Caucasus region] will sit in his base while they die."

The refugees felt let down by some of their leaders - not Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen President, who appears to have overwhelming support, but there is disapproval of Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord, for his assault on Dagestan in August.