Chechnya's Invisible War

The sight of a vehicle parked on the dark street corner with all doors open is a warning. Even with no curfew in place, not many people drive around Grozny’s side roads at night.

And this is not just any vehicle but an UAZ minivan, nicknamed the “tabletka” because of its pill-like shape. And as everyone in the Chechen capital knows, this is the vehicle favoured by Russian special forces troops when on raids.

Another tabletka can be seen on the next corner, as can the silhouette of a man with a rifle. We turn away, down another street. A third tabletka passes.

Who is inside these vans – and who have they come for? These are questions that residents of Chechnya often have to ask themselves, but are rarely able to answer.

Ten years after the start of the first war in Chechnya and five years into the second, a traditional conflict – firefights, shelling and air strikes – continues in the mountains. Down in the plains, where most of the population lives, that battle is almost invisible.

Underground rebel cells lay mines, assassinate officials and occasionally ambush the soldiers or the police. Russian security forces and loyal pro-Moscow Chechen units fight back with informers, spot checks on roads, and what they call “targeted mop-ups” – the raids where armoured personnel carriers and tabletkas are sent to snatch suspects from their home.

This is a shadowy struggle in which both rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov’s fighters and the Russian side infiltrate each other, soldiers show no identity, and prisoners are taken and often never seen again.

It is a conflict in which ordinary people do not know where they stand.

“You have to be very careful what you say now,” said Beslan, who, like almost everyone interviewed in Grozny, asked for his surname to be withheld.

“There are a lot of informers and you don’t know who’s who. When there were frontlines in this war, it was easy. Now anyone could be working for Maskhadov or for the Russians. It’s very dangerous.”

Just as almost every Chechen family has seen relatives killed in bombing or fighting, many have stories of others who were arrested and then simply disappeared.

Mother of two Raisa described the night that masked soldiers came for her 23-year-old son Shamil, who had recently been badly wounded by a booby trap explosion while scouring ruins for scrap metal – one of the only ways to make money in Grozny. By luck, he happened to be at an uncle’s house when the raid took place.

“They came at 3am and did not say who they were,” Raisa said. “They broke down the gate, and stole our clothes and our food from the cellar. It was cold outside and they smashed a window.”

The following morning, Raisa and her family loaded a few possessions into a car, abandoned their home and settled in another part of Grozny, effectively refugees in their own city.

Human Rights Watch, Memorial and other non-governmental organisations regularly report the discoveries of bodies by roads or on the outskirts of villages – usually men who were last seen at the time of their detention.

There are no accurate figures on how many Chechens have disappeared or have been summarily executed in the second conflict that began in 1999.

Memorial has compiled a list of 1,304 people killed between July 2000 and July 2001 alone, mostly by illegal executions.

Things have improves since then, although the situation is still bad. Memorial reported that by the end of November this year, 318 people had been abducted in Chechnya, 161 of whom were freed, 136 disappeared and 19 were found dead.

These figures, however, are incomplete since Memorial monitors only five of Chechnya’s 17 regions, less than one third of the country.

Many compare the atmosphere in the capital to that during Stalin’s reign.

“One day you say something wrong, the next you disappear,” said Leila as she filled water bottles from a broken pipe in Grozny’s obliterated city centre. “Two of my nephews were snatched this March and have never come back.”

Valentina, an ethnic Russian pensioner who survived the heavy bombardments of Grozny in both wars, is so nervous that she locks herself in her apartment at six o’clock every evening. “If I hear dogs barking at night, I’m scared. What can be disturbing them, I wonder?”

Even the visible side of the conflict can be bewildering. Checkpoints may be manned by any one of more than a dozen different branches of the security forces, ranging from Russian intelligence units to the so-called “Kadyrovtsy” - a group run by Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of former pro-Moscow president Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May.

With their mishmash of uniforms and habit of driving at high speed in blacked-out cars, the Kadyrovtsy look unnervingly like the rebel fighters most of them once were.

At one intersection in Grozny, a group of Chechen policemen fired shots into in the air to stop a car with no number plates and darkened windows. When the vehicle came to a halt, several more armed men jumped out. Only after much arguing was it established that they were all on the same side.

There is mistrust and enmity between some Russian units and their supposedly loyal Chechen counterparts, many of whom are widely considered to be rebel agents.

However, there is also evidence of commercial deals made between Russian forces and the rebels.

One senior source in the pro-Moscow Chechen security forces said that rebels were able to agree on unofficial truces in certain areas of the mountains. Likewise, there has long been evidence of weapons sales by federal troops to the rebels.

According to a different senior security official, the current situation is strangely similar to the years after the first Chechen war ended, when various armed bands roamed through the republic, crime and kidnapping flourished, and ordinary people were left unprotected.

“This is not a war of so-called resistance, but a dividing up of business influence between different parts of the power structures,” he said. “It’s a so-called ‘manageable small conflict’ in which uncontrollable parts of the security forces can sell arms.

“Essentially, it’s the same now as it was in the inter-war period - gangsterism. Only the names have changed.”

The dogs may be barking at night in Grozny for a long time to come.

Sebastian Smith, IWPR’s Caucasus trainer-editor based in Tbilisi, is the author of “Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya”.