Chechnya: Living with a Vengeance

In 2001, Aslan left the ranks of the Chechen rebel fighters and went home to his family in the village of Urus-Martan. But the pro-Moscow security agencies had long had him on their rebel blacklist, so the 26-year-old had to live under cover. By day, he hid in a barn belonging to his sister, and as soon as night fell, he clambered through courtyards to his own house where he spent the night.



That lasted until the day men in uniform burst into the house at dawn and found him at home. They led him outside half-dressed, pushed him into an armoured personnel carrier and drove off.



Aslan's relatives have had no news of him since. They say they have tried everything - using contacts, searching places where suspects are commonly detained either officially or unofficially, and bribery.



The soldiers who conducted the raid belonged to the Russian military, but they were assisted by two Chechen policemen. One of them was said to have been a fellow villager, whose first name was Rustam.



That suspicion marked out Rustam as a target for blood revenge. Because he was from the same village, he was deemed to be more guilty than the other policeman, an outsider. In December 2003, a car in which Rustam was travelling to work came under fire, and he died on the spot from head injuries.



In turn, Rustam’s relatives have now declared a blood feud against Aslan’s relatives, saying he played no part in the seizure of the young man.



There are no reliable figures on the extent of blood-feud killings in Chechnya as they are usually carried out in secrecy, and are masked by the general crime statistics.



But there is agreement that the pattern of tit-for-tat killings, forming a kind of perpetual motion, has emerged as a main driver of the Chechen conflict. All the signs are that acts of vengeance, stemming from an old and bloody tradition, are on the rise.



During more than a decade of lawlessness, many Chechens have seen revenge killings as the only way of administering justice.



A century ago, Chechens might feud over a plot of land. Nowadays, the custom has become deeply politicised and vendettas commonly involve opposing sides in the broader conflict. So the relatives of militants captured by Chechen policemen will try to hunt down the person responsible, while security officers pursue rebels to exact retribution for colleagues killed by them.



Because the avengers often do not have precise information about who the culprit is, they act blindly.



One example of this was a bloody raid which Chechen security forces launched on the village of Borozdinovskaya last year. In fact, the attack was retaliation for the murder of a forester whose son was among the security forces involved. To this day, no trace has been found of the 11 villagers who disappeared after the raid.



Recently, a Grozny resident named Tamara went to the office of the Commissioner for Human Rights in Chechnya asking for help in finding and freeing her 23-year-old son Timur.



It emerged that the young man, who had no links to the rebels, was abducted from his home at night by men in camouflage and masks in March. His mother said that she had no idea who had seized him, but that she and her family did know who had informed on him. Tamara emphasised that if Timur was killed or his health suffered, a blood feud would be declared against the person suspected of falsely denouncing him.



Chechnya’s human rights commissioner, Nurdi Nukhadjiev, says retribution against informers adds a new dimension to the vendetta tradition. To complicate matters further, there are cases where informers tell the authorities someone is a rebel just to settle a personal score.



To curb the spate of attacks, plans for a law on national reconciliation have been mooted.



Political analyst Edilbek Khasmagomadov is sceptical, saying, “I don’t know how a legal document can establish a political consensus.”



However, the tradition of reconciling the sides in a blood feud is as ancient as vengeance itself. In Soviet times, the government of Chechen-Ingushetia had a special reconciliation commission working on such cases, and a similar body has operated in Ingushetia for several years.



In 2002, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, who at the time was the Russian president’s human rights representative in Chechnya, tried to set up a state reconciliation body, declaring that “in Chechnya the majority of crimes are committed out of blood vengeance”.



Today a number of organisations are engaged in efforts to break the chain reaction of violence caused by disputes. According to Khamzat Khirakhmatov, who is deputy to Chechnya’s mufti or chief Islamic figure, the clerical establishment receives at least two to three messages from representatives of feuding parties every day. Chechnya’s 305 imams or prayer leaders are all involved in reconciliation.



However, it is village elders who are most closely engaged in this form of conflict resolution.



“Sometimes years are spent trying to reconcile families,” said Hamzat Salamov, a prominent Chechen elder. “This happens when victims’ families flatly refuse to forgive the offender.”



Sometimes, a wronged family will appeal for intervention and reconciliation rather than seek vengeance, because they are afraid that the feud will only escalate and they will lose more relatives.



Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the tradition is that relatives of the offender are considered fair game for revenge attacks.



According to Salamov, this practice is definitely un-Islamic, “Settling scores against people who have nothing to do with someone’s death is in direct contravention of the precepts of Islam,” said Salamov. “Acts of revenge directed at relatives of a guilty person go against not only the writings of the Koran, but also our own customs. Nevertheless, the record of score-settling against completely innocent people and the potential for this to happen in the future do not give much cause for optimism



Experts on the feuding tradition warn that the current level of revenge-based bloodletting could be nothing compared with what might happen if the Chechen conflict comes to an end.



A judge at Chechnya’s Supreme Court, Musa Sattayev, told IWPR that the present militarised environment – with a police force of 30,000 compared with just 4,000 in Soviet times – is actually a deterrent to revenge killings.



Sattayev warns that if a political consensus were to be achieved, the peace might bring an outbreak of personal revenge attacks by people who have stored up grudges for years and who believe “revenge is a dish best served cold”.



As long as the conflict continues, though, the abductions and extrajudicial killings by both sides, coupled with the common criminality that flourishes in a lawless environment, also provide plenty of motives for acts of retribution.



As deputy interior minister Akhmed Dakayev puts it, “the elders have enough work for several decades to come.”



Amina Visayeva is editor of the Vecherny Grozny newspaper.