11 November 1999
In Ingushetia and Chechnya they call them "criminals", plain and simple. The refugees say they are the most brutal during various "cleansing operations" – it is no good pleading with them, they don't know the meaning of mercy. The story now circulating widely among refugees is that the most vicious offenders were selected and then released from prison or the camps under an amnesty if they agreed to fight in Chechnya in these "criminal units". It's one thing to hear such talk, quite another to witness it with your own eyes. Now here they stand before me.
The men in camouflage fatigues, which bear no indications of service, rank or unit, make up the very first line, holding back the refugees at the famous "Caucasus" checkpoint. They create a contradictory and strange impression. Men and women alike are greeted with foul-mouthed obscenities and a machine-gun poked in their ribs. The insolence is reinforced by pockets visibly bulging with grenades. And it proves pointless to ask the most innocent questions. The armed men in this cordon simply spit insultingly at your feet. I had to return to Moscow to find out any more.
"Remember, you are a soldier not a bandit." This is an intriguing exhortation, you must agree. Without this reminder, would the people addressed really be so uncertain of their social status? Perhaps amnestied criminals had been let loose, after all, in Chechnya. One clue provides the answer. These parting words are nothing less than motto No I of the special memorandum signed by Yury Kalinin, Russia's deputy minister of justice. It was intended not for gangsters seeking personal redemption but for officers in the service of the State.
Our quest for the "criminals" led us to the Ministry of Justice in Moscow. A profoundly civilian establishment, its purpose is to help maintain the rule of law throughout the country. In September 1998 the Ministry was expanded to include the State Directorate for the Penitentiary System, i.e. it acquired a million prisoners and the 300,000 staff in charge of them. Before that they came under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but at the firm insistence of the Council of Europe29 the penitentiary system was finally transferred to the civilian staff of the Justice Ministry.
The effect seems not to have been as expected. The Ministry gradually succumbed to a powerful infrastructure that had been built up over decades. The Justice Ministry did not impose its rules on the modern Gulag but, instead, was being swallowed up by it. As usual, this only became apparent by chance. At the "Caucasus" checkpoint the leader of the "criminals" had introduced himself as the head of a special detachment from the Justice Ministry.
At first I could not believe my ears. Two Ministry officials in Moscow agreed to answer our questions. Mikhail Nazarkin heads the penitentiary service's Security Department while Sergei Cherkai is the immediate Moscow superior of the "soldiers not bandits" – to be exact, he is Deputy Head of the Special Services Section (a mouthful but that is his official title).
NAZARKIN: Our special detachments are indeed serving in Chechnya, on the orders of the Justice Minister, Yury Chaika. There they are at the disposal of General Kazantsev, the commanding officer of the combined forces. We have been seconded to the combined forces group and must carry out all the orders and instructions of General Kazantsev. The experience of the last Chechnya war made this a necessity: then there was no co-ordination among the different federal forces and this led to enormous losses. As regards the "Caucasus" checkpoint: if General Kazantsev decided that our lads should stand between the army and the refugees then he must have had a good reason.
Q. But you are, at least formally, a civilian organisation. How can your subordinates come under the command of an army general? What written authorisation is there?
NAZARKIN: We're not a civilian department, that's a fundamental error on your part. For more than a year we have been one of the power ministries.30 The basis for that is a presidential decree. And the decision was entirely correct and proper.
Q. What is the main purpose of your special detachments in peacetime?
CHERKAI: We are there to ensure that the penitentiary system keeps functioning in the event of various excesses and conflicts.
"Excesses" and "conflicts" are terms the prison authorities use for riots and the taking of hostages in prisons and detention centres. Cherkai's men have been specially trained to disarm and kill desperate convicts with nothing more to lose and nowhere else to go. Such detachments, according to Cherkai, have been set up in every region throughout the country. They shun any publicity: Cherkai has served in the prison camps for 13 years as a special service man, but our interview is his first for ten years.
Q. What's happening in Chechnya is also an "excess", in your view?
CHERKAI: Yes, in Daghestan and Chechnya we are facing unusual situations. When necessary the Government and the President have every right to call on our forces to carry out duties that, perhaps, are not entirely familiar to our men. We cleansed Karamakhi and several other villages in Daghestan. I myself took part in the summer events. And we more than earned the thanks of the soldiers there. Today our men are stationed at five checkpoints [refugees are being "greeted" at the "Caucasus" checkpoint by a detachment from the Kalmyk republic's prison camps, AP]. We are also cleansing Chechen villages, in particular, Goragorsk and Naurskaya. It's hard to understand you journalists! You wrote that inexperienced soldiers should not be used in Chechnya. Now they send experienced men down there, and again it's all wrong.
Q. How many of your men are stationed in Chechnya today? NAZARKIN: Nine hundred. They'll be replaced in December and we must provide the new replacements from our own "fresh" forces. Incidentally, several of our people have already been put in charge of liberated population centres, in particular, in the Naurskaya district.
Q. How do you mean? A specialist in the suppression of prison-camp disturbances is suddenly responsible for organising the work of schools, hospitals, farms – something quite alien to him! Your special services men are trained for destruction not construction. How will they organise civilian activities? They know nothing about it. They've spent years being trained for quite another job. Evidently someone needs them urgently to do his dirty work. And how could your people be put directly in contact with the refugees? With our vast military presence in the North Caucasus was there really no one but prison-camp riot police to stem the flood of civilians fleeing the bombing in Chechnya?
CHERKAI: The reason is simple. There is a catastrophic shortage of manpower here! [He admits his men "are hired out by the Ministry of Justice" and are doing jobs they have no training for, AP.] But there's nothing you can do about it – there's a war on. It's hard to foresee everything and keep things neat and tidy.
Q. Aren't you uneasy that the "Caucasus" checkpoint and the events we've been describing are all on Ingushetia's territory? Your people were in charge there, though there is no fighting in the area. Does that mean you consider Ingushetia to be the arena for a new war?
NAZARKIN: From a legal point of view everything is quite in order here. I'd advise you to carefully read through the presidential decree authorising the present anti-terrorist operation. There it clearly specifies "the territory of the North Caucasus". Not Chechen territory, note. That's of fundamental importance. Acting on that decree, the military can today carry out their activities where they're needed. Ingushetia is also a part of the North Caucasus. Therefore, there has been no bending of the rules, all these actions are well within the framework of the official documents. Now as concerns instances of tactless behaviour towards the refugees, I can well believe it – under extreme conditions anything may happen. Some of the soldiers simply lost control of their emotions.
Q. And the refugees are at some holiday camp, are they? Isn't that an extreme condition for them as well? Just imagine if the roles were reversed. If it wasn't your men who were cursing the refugees, but they who were insulting you, and if they then came nearer and poked their machine-guns at "your boys", what would your men have done? Of course, they'd have killed them and said they were terrorists. Your people represent a civilian ministry and they are behaving disrespectfully towards the civilian population only because they have machine-guns in their hands. Isn't that right?
NAZARKIN: The answer to all your questions is as follows. Our men have to carry out their assignment using any means. That was the order they were given.
Q. Even those methods they use on rioting prisoners?
NAZARKIN: Any means.
The entire conversation, I should add, was frequently interrupted by long digressions about recent history and the first Chechen war. In each case these leading officials of the prison-camp special services argued that no matter how badly their men behaved they would be forgiven and their actions justified. There was only one argument: what was happening now paid back the Chechens for the losses of the first war and the chief purpose of the present fighting was revenge for those who had died then.
CHERKAI: Among those supposed refugees, you didn't see any teenage suicide-bombers there, at the "Caucasus" checkpoint, did you? They've been trained in Basayev's camps to carry out terrorist acts in Russia. None were detained when you were there? Not one? Well, we've been told it's going on.
Q. I saw nothing of the kind. Are you sure it's true?
NAZARKIN: Not entirely, of course. Basayev also likes to push a good story. Nevertheless the way I see things, one Chechen is a Chechen, two Chechens are two Chechens, but three Chechens – and it's already a gang. And there are no exceptions to the rule.
Cherkai then, without any inhibitions, began to expound his ideology. Our fighters, he is convinced, must learn from the Chechens. Brother must answer for brother and if someone in the family has been fighting for Basayev, then all of his relatives are accomplices and deserve extermination. Incidentally, Cherkai also wants the blood feud to regain its place in the Russian mentality.
Q. So we should reply to their mediaeval ways with something similar?
CHERKAI: I don't see why not.
Q. But, tell me, why are your men really there?
CHERKAI: For kicks, and the rest can't wait to get there either.
There is a Plan
It's hard to find any major difference between the attitudes and behaviour of Minister Chaika's fighters and those supported by their "colleagues" who fight for Basayev and Khattab. A code of military honour? As a rule, neither displays anything of the kind. An idea of how to deal with the civilian population – with children, pregnant women and old men? Very vague. Blood lust? Now that's ineradicable.
At the end of our conversation Sergei Cherkai recognised that the only proper use for the cruel and merciless Justice Ministry fighters in this war would be if they captured and liquidated Basayev and his gang of cutthroats. That is a job they could do. The rest is not really their scene.
At which point the most important questions arise. Was it, then, mere accident that they were sent to the war? Why was it Chaika's prison guards who were chosen to deal with the refugees? What will we consider victory – the head of Basayev? Who exactly are they pacifying in the present operation?
The latest information from Chechnya confirms that the incidents at the "Caucasus" checkpoint were not the result of the chaos of war but part of a deliberate plan. It has now been announced that the special detachments of the Ministry of Justice will guard the new refugee camps – those that are now being set up in Chechnya itself under the control of the military (as Sergei Shoigu, Minister for Emergency Situations, recently declared). Neither Russia's journalists nor Western observers will be able to move freely there. Moreover, these Gulag guards are now forming the backbone of the "territorial self-defence groups" for towns and villages in the liberated areas. A special guard for these special settlements. Again a "wicked" nation is being held in a ghetto?
All that remains for me is to recount one conversation I had in Ingushetia. Those I spoke to are major actors in the present "anti-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus". I said to them that there was no sense, from a military point of view, in treating the refugees so harshly. The officers replied: No, it makes a great deal of sense and is done to "soften up the Chechen fighters". Once they learn that their families are in the hands of prison camp guards they'll most certainly become more amenable.
The name for it is a concentration camp. All they need now is to start designing gas chambers. And for as long as one set of gangsters faces another we can feel nothing but doomed.
INGUSHETIA-MOSCOW