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Slideshow: Chechnya’s Forgotten Armenians

I was in Grozny to see my old friend Timur, and along the way I decided to use the opportunity to search for my Armenian relatives buried there. My great aunt and her daughter had died in Grozny in the 80s, and the rest of their family had moved away as a result of war. I had also been given the task of finding the graves of the Armenian relatives of my friend in Krasnodar. When I asked him why he didn’t want to visit himself, he told me that after his aunt and cousin were killed by a mine blast during the war, he had lost all interest in revisiting the place where he used to spend his summers as a child.

Having previously been the most cosmopolitan city in the North-Eastern Caucasus, Chechnya’s capital Grozny was prosperous and multi-ethnic, but with the onset of war in 1992 the city was destroyed and many fled the republic. The majority of Chechnya’s Christian population left including the approximately 15,000 Armenians that lived there, including my relatives.

“I have lived in Grozny all my life and have never been to this part of town,” Timur laughed as we drove. This is not surprising, considering Timur is Chechen and Muslim. There are four Christian cemeteries in Grozny, and only two Muslim cemeteries; Chechens have a strong tradition of burying their dead in clan cemeteries in their home villages in the mountains and foothills of Chechnya’s south and not in the city proper.

The cemetery, near Grozny’s old cannery, was in bad shape. Only around 20 percent of its large territory is accessible — thick brush has grown over the footpaths making it virtually impossible to get through without a cutting tool. Only a small number of graves look like they are receiving any care. Others still lay on the ground, bearing the scars of rockets and bullets from war.

A clean up of the city’s cemeteries seems inevitable however, given the current Chechen leadership’s penchant for aesthetically improving the city. Virtually no signs of the wars remain in the capital — astonishing, given the massive scale of damage it sustained.

The city’s mayorship has recently announced plans for the conservation of some of Grozny’s older Christian cemeteries, including the one I visited. These plans however pose a problem – conserving a cemetery means no new burials can take place. Those still alive whose family plots are in conserved cemeteries cannot be laid to rest there. Some say that Christian residents should have been consulted before the decision was made to effectively close those cemeteries.

With so few Christians left in the republic to speak out against the policy however, the plan is not likely to face any strong opposition.

I did not find my relatives in the cemetery unfortunately, but I did take photos of as many Armenian graves as I could, hoping to eventually find a connection, both for myself and for my friend.

Karena Avedissian is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham studying social movements in the North Caucasus. She has just completed a stint in Russia interviewing activists in Krasnodar and the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria.

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HOW AMIR KHATTAB BECAME SHAHEED IN CHECHNYA Monday, April 29, 2002 Department of Strategic Information, Kavkaz -Center http://www.kavkaz.org/eng/article.php?id=565 Command Headquarters of the Chechen Mujahideen forwarded the official information to Kavkaz -Center about the death of Amir Khattab . The death of the Chechen Commander has been officially confirmed in accordance with this information. Some details of the death of Commander Khattab and how the tape ended up in the hands of the invaders are pointed out in the report. According to the information from the Headquarters of the Chechen Mujahideen , Amir Khattab was poisoned on March 19 by a letter that was brought to him by a messenger. As the Headquarters claim, it was established exactly that Khattab was poisoned by that letter. Khattab knew the messenger who brought the letter. Nothing was reported about the fate of the messenger. But according to some information he is now with the Russians. The report that came from the Mujahideen's Headquarters did not specify who the letter came from. Kavkaz -Center was unable to get that information either. The report further says that Amir Khattab was buried in the mountain regions of Chechnya and only a narrow circle of the individuals who were close to him know where it is. Amir Elsi (radio call sign " Gardez ") from the town of Gekhi , his bodyguard and his right hand, was one of them. His face was occasionally slipping through when Khattab was being filmed. Elsi had the tape with the video recording. Several days ago, on April 23 to be more exact, Esli was killed in the shooting with the invaders. Thus, the tape with the recording ended up in the hands of the invaders only on April 23. The Command Headquarters of the Chechen Mujahideen reported that the information about the death of the Chechen Commander was secret for some time in order not to encounter any obstacles while burying Amir Khattab and to avoid possible defiling of his grave by the invaders. The report also pointed that the sub-units that Khattab was in charge of, are now headed by his assistant Amir Abu- Walid . Let us remind that this is the official version of the death of Amir Khattab , that was spread by the Command Headquarters of the Chechen Mujahideen on Saturday, April 27. There is also information that the temporary secrecy about the death of the Chechen Commander was connected to the fact that his body was secretly transported back to his homeland, Saudi Arabia . That's why , allegedly, there were no reports of Khattab's death for the time being, so that his body could be delivered to his relatives without hindrance. However this version is least likely, because it contradicts all the Laws of the Shari'ah . According to the Shari'ah , Shaheed's grave is where he died. Kavkaz -Center Agency has also received more detailed information about a meeting between Amir Khattab and President Maskhadov , about which our agency reported earlier referring to the sources in Chechen Leadership. Let us remind that according to that information, the meeting between Maskhadov and Khattab took place on April 12-13. However according to the detailed information, that meeting took place much earlier. On April 12 an audiotape with Khattab's speech was forwarded to Shamil Basayev , where he reported to Basayev about the meeting that was held. That information allows us to say that the meeting between President Maskhadov and Khattab took place in April. These clarifications were made by Shamil Basayev himself, who reported it to Kavkaz -Center Agency through a mediator. Biography Information : Kavkaz -Center Agency has some, not numerous, facts of Amir Khattab : Amir Khattab -- was originally from Saudi Arabia . His father -- is a Saudi Arab who belongs to one of the oldest clans of Arabia . His mother is a native of Turkey , of Turkish background. Khattab has many relatives. In his homeland his family is known to be respectable and quite affluent. According to some information, Khattab has 8 brothers. When he was 15 years old, his family decided to send him to study in the US . However, the juvenile left the house by motivating his decision to independently choose to take part in the Jihad, according to the Shari'ah . Even though his older brother tried to talk him out of it , Khattab went to Afghanistan as a volunteer. For several years he was fighting against the troops of Soviet invaders. He was wounded. After Soviet troops withdrew, Khattab returned home. However, he left for Afghanistan again, where he started to help Tajik and Uzbek refugees. According to Khattab himself, in December 1994 he found out about the war in Caucasus from CNN reports. Before that, he knew nothing about Chechnya except stories about Imam Shamil who is buried in Medina . Khattab said that he made a decision to go to Chechnya when he saw on TV how Chechen Mujahideen were proclaiming "Allah-u Akbar !" (God is Great !). Khattab arrived in Chechnya with his companions in 1995 and had not left Chechnya ever since. Starting from March 1995 until March 2002 Amir Khattab was an active participant in combat operations against the troops of Russian invaders. In 1996 he was appointed the Chief of Military Training Center of the Central Front of Chechen Armed Forces by President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria . Military Amir of Majlisul Shura of the Mujahideen of Ichkeria and Dagestan . Deputy of Shamil Basayev , Amir of Majlisul Shura . Commander of the Islamic International Brigade. Honored by the highest awards of the Chechen State . Amir Khattab's wife is a Darginian , native of the village of Karamakhi , Dagestan . Khattab has two children. ================================================================================     ININ List Archives Found Here: http://www.egroups.com/messages/inin ================================================================================

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Grozny Journal

Chechnya’s Capital Rises From the Ashes, Atop Hidden Horrors

By Andrew E. Kramer

• April 30, 2008

GROZNY, Russia — The surprise lay under tiles in the basement of the kindergarten on Kadyrov Street, found by laborers toiling here in the war zone turned construction site of Chechnya’s capital city.

The bodies were exhumed and reburied with respect, though with nary a pause in the banging of hammers and plastering of walls to accommodate a forensic study of the basement.

And that, human rights workers say, is nothing unusual in a city more or less at peace now, but with many grim basements and much rebuilding under way.

“People died there, and now they just build a school,” Natalia Estemirova, a researcher with Memorial, a human rights group, said in an interview. Her group documented the discovery of the bodies last summer at the Zvyozdochka, or Starlet, kindergarten.

She added: “We know people disappeared. We know that most of them were killed. And we know we need to look for them with a shovel.”

Any systematic forensic work, though, could revive prickly questions for the departing Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, about the prosecution of the war that, along with Russia’s economic revival, will serve as his legacy of the past eight years.

As a result, Russia’s general policy toward mass graves in Chechnya is to leave them undisturbed. There are 57 known but unopened mass graves in the republic of Chechnya, which is about the size of Connecticut. Countless smaller grave sites lie beneath the capital’s parks, courtyards and basements.

In Grozny, bulldozers, cranes and men with jackhammers work around and sometimes over graves from two wars, the first from 1994 to 1996 and the second that began in 1999. (The fighting now is sporadic and small in scale.) The city, besieged, bombarded and depopulated by war, has now become the scene of a frantic, oil-financed rebuilding effort. And the authorities point proudly to gleaming new buildings as symbols of the peace.

In the past year, after Russia installed the leader of one of its proxy militias, Ramzan Kadyrov, as president, 969 refugees have received new housing. A mosque that will accommodate 10,000 worshipers is rising on the central square, and scores of schools have been rebuilt.

Yet, the graves in Grozny remain a vexing problem. At least a half dozen have been moved to make room for the rebuilding.

In perhaps the most striking case, in April 2006, workers exhumed 57 bodies in Kirov Park to clear ground for a youth entertainment complex. During bombardments in 1999 and 2000, human rights workers say, residents buried relatives and unidentified victims in the park. Six bodies from that site were never identified, and were reburied in numbered graves in a cemetery.

“Many, many bodies are found,” Ms. Estemirova said.

The graves of Grozny grimly symbolize the peace that Russia has settled for here, one emphasizing physical reconstruction while leaving unaddressed the human scars of the war. There has been no systematic prosecution of war crimes or identification of the dead.

Just how many disappeared remains an open and contentious question. A human rights ombudsman for the Chechen government, Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, has identified 3,018 unsolved disappearances from the two wars. The remains of some of the missing surely are buried under construction sites.

The regional prosecutor has offered a lower figure, saying that 2,747 Chechen civilians have filed missing persons reports, and that 574 of those have been resolved. Memorial, Ms. Estemirova’s group, put the number of people who disappeared at 3,000 to 5,000.

The mass graves have raised tensions between Russia and Europe. The Council of Europe, the human rights monitor, has made a major issue of the exhuming of mass graves and the identification of victims and their killers.

“There are a great number of families who have lost members to abductions,” Thomas Hammarberg, the council’s human rights commissioner, said during a visit to Chechnya this month. “So many people were affected by this it cannot simply be swept under the carpet.”

But, of course, that is what is happening, as construction destroys evidence at the sites of war crimes. The building of the School for the Deaf on Minutka Square, for example, served as a temporary headquarters for Interior Ministry troops who became the focus of a rare, Russian war crimes investigation.

The basement, witnesses said, was used for torture. One Russian officer was convicted of murder. Yet in 2006, the basement was filled with debris, ostensibly to stabilize the site for rebuilding the school, Ms. Estemirova said.

And as building continues, even the question of how to link the names of the missing with the unidentified bodies in Grozny is contentious.

The Council of Europe is encouraging Russia to embrace systematic forensic work in the graves, before too many are disturbed by the building.

Mr. Kadyrov’s government has endorsed a proposal to provide information about the disappeared anonymously on the Internet, separating the question of identification from the politically charged issue of culpability.

Yet disappearances in Chechnya continue. As the Russian policy of “Chechenization” of the conflict has gained traction and, even critics grudgingly say, success in tamping down the violence, abuse by Russian soldiers has waned. Increasingly, the disappearances bear the hallmarks of Chechen-on-Chechen violence.

Many Grozny residents still live in ruins, with yawning gaps in the walls. The city, though, is largely peaceful. Merchants sell cigarettes, stuffed animals and Red Bull energy drinks on the streets. Young men in police uniforms loiter on the sidewalks, spitting out sesame seed husks, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. And the construction boom continues unabated.

But the building provides little solace to Adeni Idalova, a Grozny resident missing two sons. “Our children will never walk on these sidewalks of gold,” she said. “What do we need them for?”

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