22 January 2001
For the civilian population the tragedy in Novye Aldy was the most terrible incident of the second Chechen war. Yet there has never been a court case or even an investigation. The prosecutor-general's office is doing everything it can to make sure that no one is charged with the war crimes committed there.
Malika Labazanova comes from Novye Aldy on the outskirts of Grozny. She has worked at a bakery all her life and early each and every morning, with no break for holidays or weekends, she journeys into the city centre to work. That is the only joy she now has in life.
Only once has she ever had to stop work for a time and that interval split her life in two – before and after 5 February 2000. For during the taking of Grozny by federal forces that winter, Malika stayed at home and witnessed the brutal massacre the soldiers carried out in Novye Aldy on 5 February.
From 6 February onwards Malika herself was laying out the corpses in the basement. It was she who protected them from the hungry dogs and crows, and she who then buried the bodies. After which, she washed down the basement tiles.
That was not the end of the nightmare, however. A tragedy that claimed more than 100 victims was followed by another that drags on to this day. As a result Malika, who has never been involved in any kind of public activity, is today chairwoman of the Aldy committee, set up last autumn by the relatives of the victims. The committee's main goal is to make the authorities reply to one question, and one alone: who was responsible for the terrible death of their loved ones?
October 1999 to February 2000
In September and October 1999, after military operations began and Grozny came under fire, many inhabitants of Novye Aldy left for Ingushetia. Others remained behind and families were separated. The old people and those who looked after them decided to guard their homes from looters of every description, whether the newly arrived federal forces or their fellow citizens.
Those who stayed protected their houses and their village from the Chechen fighters. When the federal forces first moved into Grozny in early December the nearest positions held by Chechen armed groups were only two kilometres away (in the 20th precinct, another district of Grozny). There were no fighters in the village itself. Nevertheless throughout December 1999 and January 2000 Novye Aldy was mercilessly bombed and shelled every day.
People hid in their basements and only once in a while did they come out to draw water from the spring. As a result of these trips, 75 of the basement-dwellers died in two months. They were shot dead, or, lacking medical aid, they died from their wounds. Some were old people who simply could not take the stress, or withstand the hunger and the cold.
On 30 January, as we all know, a special military operation began to lure Chechen fighters out of Grozny – Shamanov's little trick. The Chechen field commanders were deliberately misinformed that, if they were prepared to pay, then the Feds were ready to create a corridor for their organised retreat from the city. The money was handed over, but the fighters soon found they had been led into a minefield. Meanwhile, federal artillery and aviation mercilessly struck at the surrounding villages through which lay the corridor that the General Staff had designated. Novye Aldy took its full share of the punishment.
On 3 February, when it became clear that federal troops were gradually taking over the positions of the Chechen fighters in the 20th precinct, a delegation from Novye Aldy, for the most part old men, set out under a white flag to talk to the commanding officers of the 15th motorised infantry regiment. The soldiers opened fire on the delegation and one of the Russians living in Novye Aldy was killed outright. Nevertheless the old men managed to persuade the soldiers to stop shelling the village and on the afternoon of 4 February it became quiet again in Novye Aldy.
Soon the first checks on people's ID documents and residence permits were carried out. The soldiers thumbed through the passports of those who had now emerged from the basements and said something strange to them: "Get out now. Those coming after us are animals. Their order is to kill." The old men did not believe this, however, and even decided that it was a trick to get them out of their houses so they could be looted.
On 5 February, from early morning, a second "cleansing" operation began in the village. It proved to be an irrational and bloody settling of scores with anyone who got in the way.
The Cleansing
Aza Bisultanova is a young schoolteacher. It's hard to understand what she's teaching the children today. How can she give any lessons now? She is still in a state of shock following what happened, though eleven months have passed. On 5 February her 68-year-old father, Akhmet Abulkhanov, died. "If only they'd just shot him . . ." she mutters.
It was Abulkhanov, a respected figure in Novye Aldy, who walked through the village on the morning of that Day of Judgement and persuaded people to leave their basements. It was he who chivvied the doubters: "Why do we need to hide any longer? Things will only get better from now on. If we stay in the basement the soldiers will think we're guilty of something. But we've done nothing wrong." It was Abulkhanov who took the hand of the smiling soldier who entered their courtyard and said, "Thank you, my boy. We were waiting for you. I'm glad to see you come at last."
"Take out your teeth, old man," said the soldier, "and bring some money as well, or I'll kill you."
Abulkhanov did not understand and continued to stroke the soldier's hand. But Malika Labazanova, who was standing nearby and would witness the reprisal that followed, quickly took off her earrings, handed over her wedding ring, and explained that the fillings in her teeth were not pure gold but simply plated. They allowed her to go to the neighbours and get some money. Malika came back and held out all that could be found: 300 roubles. The soldier took the notes and roared with laughter: "You call that money. . . ?"
They shot the old man, turning his execution into target practice that took off the top of his head. Next they killed three others. One had been disabled since childhood and tried desperately to make them listen: he was disabled, he had papers to prove it.
For some reason Malika was spared. She was ordered to drag the bodies into the basement and she obeyed. The soldiers decided to burn the cow alive in the barn. And also all of the sheep. The cow was already locked in when one of the young privates suddenly took pity on the beast and tried to help it escape the fire. His senior officer warned him to stop or he would kill him too. The blazing, terrified sheep ran from the fold, their mouths gaping, gasping for air, and dropped dead.
People too were burnt alive. Zina Abdulmejidova, Husein Abdulmejidov, Gula Khaidayev, Kaipa Yusupova, Yelena Kuznetsova and Victor Cheptura were so disfigured that one could no longer tell their age.
The only term for what happened is hell on earth.
To begin with, those villagers who by some miracle survived were convinced the soldiers were simply out of their minds. Perhaps insanity had led them to carry out this massacre or perhaps they'd been taking drugs. Someone in his right mind would never permit himself to do such a thing. All subsequent events, however, demonstrated that the motives behind the 5 February events were quite different.
For several weeks, contrary to all their traditions, the families did not bury their dead. They were waiting for staff from the prosecutor's office to take statements, begin an official inquiry, and carry out the necessary investigative procedures. When they could wait no longer, they buried their loved ones. Then they waited for death certificates to be issued. Only a few received them. However, soon the man from the Grozny prosecutor's office who had issued these documents specifying that knife wounds, bullet wounds and so on had been the cause of death was hurriedly transferred somewhere else. All to whom he had given such certificates were called in to the Zavodskoi district administration and ordered to hand them back in exchange for "death certificates on the new forms" (that was the explanation offered). These, it turned out, did not even contain an entry for the cause of death.
January 2001: One Year On
Soon a year will have passed since the atrocity in Novye Aldy, the Khatyn massacre of modern-day Russia.73 There has been no investigation. During the entire eleven months since it happened, the witnesses have not once been questioned. No one has presumed to create photofit pictures of the criminals, though many of the killers did not hide their faces.
Photofit descriptions, indeed! The majority of the affected families have not even received death certificates. They have almost nothing to present in court, in order to assert their constitutional right to justice.
Today it is quite obvious that the investigation by the Prosecutor-General's office has been successfully halted. Officially the office fobs off any interested parties from Novye Aldy with the assertion that they are monitoring the situation. To everyone else involved they offer the shameless lie that the Chechens, faithful to their customs, refuse to allow the bodies to be exhumed and therefore the investigation is prevented from going ahead.
This lie is logical and understandable if, of course, you look at things from the point of view of those shielding the killers. Hardly any civilians have the chance to check anything since Grozny is almost constantly closed for outside visitors. Novaya gazeta has managed to discover a little, however.
The inhabitants of Novye Aldy, it turns out, no matter how terrible they may find it, are begging, pleading and demanding that all the necessary exhumation procedures be completed. They insist that the chief material evidence in this investigation, the bullets that were fired, finally be removed from the bodies and then it will be possible to establish who were the monsters in military uniform that carried out the massacre. The response to all these persistent demands was an outrageous insult. A brigade of forensic experts from the military roared into the village and demanded that people add their signatures to already completed forms stating that the relatives refused to permit exhumation.
The Prosecutor-General's office – which has proved so responsive when the oligarchs are under discussion74 – begins to wriggle and make excuses in this case. Lower-ranking staff at the office who have had something to do with the Novye Aldy case will agree to "speak out" only if they are given complete anonymity. It is as though they were being asked to reveal the State's most highly guarded nuclear secrets. They say there is pressure from the very highest authority and orders have been given to halt the investigation, codenamed "5 February". Under no circumstances does Putin want to quarrel with the country's leading military figures.
Our sources in the Prosecutor-General's office tell us that if the Novye Aldy nightmare were exhaustively investigated and led to charges against individual officers, then other similar cases would follow. The staff we talked to also referred to their own fears, since the officers who risk being prosecuted for these atrocities have supposedly been threatening them as well.
That's a little hard to believe, of course. Only time will tell. Meanwhile we must accept the fact that among the majors, colonels and generals that the country is praising, defending and decorating with awards there are also war criminals. Among the heroes are a percentage of unspeakable scum. And we all live together, side by side.
Not long ago, on 23 November, Hasan Musaev was buried in Novye Aldy. On 5 February 2000 this old man had watched as four of his relatives were shot dead. He fell to the ground and a soldier held a gun to his head when he heard a voice say: "You can live. And suffer because we didn't shoot you."
Old Hasan certainly suffered and he died from his third heart attack. Surely no one in Russia feels any relief at that?
CHECHNYA–MOSCOW