In a frozen waste, Chechens wait for death
Phil Reeves, in Pervomaiskoye, southern Russia, finds the Chechen rebels bitter but determined
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Your support makes all the difference.Salman Raduyev looked astonishingly calm, given his dilemma. The drone of helicopter gunships overhead was a non-stop reminder that he faced the full might of an outraged Russia and her army.
And if he, or his band of Chechen rebel fighters, had any further doubts about the scale of the surrounding enemy they need only have gazed across the dead-flat frozen landscape to the south at a horizon dotted with the turrets of field guns, armoured personnel carriers and the dark silhouette of countless troops.
Yet as he stood in the heart of his village refuge, the rebel outlined his demands as calmly as a schoolmaster giving out a homework assignment. There was even a humorous twinkle in his deep-set eyes.
The Chechen leader and his fighters yesterday proved remarkably accessible, even though they remained under siege, holed up with scores of hostages during the second day of a stand-off with the Russian military following Tuesday's attack on Kizlyar in Russia's southern republic of Daghestan.
Reaching him was simply a matter of a 20-minute walk down an unguarded ice-covered road that led from the neighbouring village of Sovietskoye. Uncharacteristically - and amazingly, given their great determination to stop the Chechens fleeing - the Russians had left a chink in their ring of steel.
In Pervomayskoye, a wind-swept farming village where the Chechens have been holed up since Wednesday, the mud-bound streets were deserted but for a handful of rebels. Some wore black balaclava masks; all carried machine guns. Beneath their green Islamic bandannas the eyes looked wary - but not at all afraid.
Raduyev, a lean man with a long red beard, was standing in the back yard of a small farmhouse, a hand gun tucked into his belt. A few yards away lay a ghastly reminder of the price of this war: the bodies of three Chechens who died in the battle that ensued when rebels took between 2,000 and 3,000 people hostage in nearby Kizlyar. "They're ours," he said, gazing at the bright blue cloths draped over the corpses. Two small children, a boy and a girl, emerged from the gloom of the house. Death in this part of the Caucasus is so commonplace that no one bothers to shield the young.
There was no sign of the hostages, and nor was it any longer clear exactly how many there were. The Russian authorities said there were 66, excluding 37 Ministry of Interior police seized by Chechens from a local command post at the start of the stand-off.
But Raduyev insisted that he had 160, whom he said were split into groups and held in different houses around the settlement - a move that will make it much harder for the Russians to recover them by force.
What were clear, though, were his terms for ending the impasse. If his convoy was to continue to Chechnya, it would have to be accompanied by a human shield of international journalists, Dagestani and Russian officials and aid agency representatives.
"We don't want to hurt this village, and we don't want Dagestan to be drawn into this conflict," he said. But if Russia wanted to save the lives of the hostages, he would need "hard guarantees".
Dudayev said that the rebel leaders decided to attack the air base at Kizlyar, where they destroyed two helicopters, after learning that eight Russian transport planes were soon to deliver a consignment of rockets for use in the Chechen war. Seizing the hospital was not part of their initial plan.
They only resorted to it after some of their fighters were wounded. "But," he insisted, "we absolutely didn't touch the hostages. Absolutely not. We treated them as ourselves."
After releasing most of their captives, the rebels began their retreat to Chechnya on Wednesday morning in a convoy of nine buses with what Raduyev described as a "minimum number of hostages." They did so after striking an agreement with Dagestani and Russian officials that they would receive safe passage back to the breakaway republic.
But after they had passed through Pervomayskoye, only yards from the Chechen border, a Russian helicopter fired a rocket in front of the convoy, Raduyev asserted. The rebels immediately backtracked to the village, captured the seven Interior Ministry police and their arsenal of weapons, and the impasse began.
Yesterday the village was filled by a ghostly calm as villagers, who fled when the Chechens arrived, returned to feed their cattle and chickens.
Tense deadlock, page 8
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