La Cecenia dopo l'uccisione di Kadyrov

["F A B I O C C H I::" <eco_fabiocchi@tin.it>]

May 23, 2004
Chechen Leader's Death Dashes Hope for Return to Normalcy
By SETH MYDANS http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/europe/23chec.html
     
GROZNY, Russia - As patients waited in a crowded corridor outside, Dr. Zoya Mumayeva sat slumped in her tiny office, a living ruin like the bombed and vacant buildings that form the backdrop of her life.

"It's like a fog in my head," she said, trying to describe her feelings. "All I know is that I'm tired. It's been 10 years and I'm tired. It's just emptiness inside."

She spoke in a monotone, as if by rote.

"Now they've killed the president," she said. "Oy, oy, oy, oy. What will we do now? What will happen now?''

After a decade of war, the exhausted people of Chechnya had allowed themselves to hope for normalcy under Moscow's handpicked president, Akhmad Kadyrov. His killing in a bomb attack at a stadium here on May 9 struck all the harder at people who had begun to let down their guard and imagine the possibility of another kind of life.

On the radio now, readings of the Koran continue for hours in memory of Mr. Kadyrov, sounding the same flat note of depression as Dr. Mumayeva's lament.

Mr. Kadyrov, who took office after a manipulated election in October, had begun to win grudging respect with his heartfelt manner, his hints of defiance toward Moscow and the small improvements he was bringing.

"I hated him," said Bekhan Musostov, 37, an oil engineer. "But I saw that this was a person who was trying from his soul to get something done. He gave us some kind of hope that he was really working for us."

Now, Mr. Musostov said, fear has taken the place of hope in the power vacuum that will precede a new presidential election scheduled for September.

Petimat Alkhazov, 50, who sells military clothing from a stall, said her teenage daughters were again insisting on sleeping in her room, as they had when there was open warfare in the streets. "Mama, what is going to happen?'' they ask.

Grozny, the regional capital, is still a grotesque landscape of destruction - miles of shattered and empty buildings riddled with bullet holes, the stigmata of violence and hatred. But along the fringes of the wreckage, tiny shops and cafes have appeared. Bricks and sand and cement and planks and door frames are for sale from trucks parked beside the road.

Chechnya is still a deadly place - tormented by kidnappings, torture, ambushes and killings - but people say there seems to be less gunfire at night. Ugly concrete military checkpoints have been removed from many streets, and a dozen, mostly decorative, stop lights have been hung.

Men with rifles slung this way and that are everywhere. But so are the proud and elegant Chechen women, dressed in their finest, stepping delicately in their spike heels through the mud of the central marketplace.

In what seems a bad joke, city officials have pasted fresh blue street names and house numbers on whole neighborhoods of vacant and collapsed buildings that once were homes.

On one lane that is already being swallowed by overgrowth, a resident has put up a sign that announces "House for sale."

It would not take much, people here say, for Chechnya to slide back into chaos.

Mr. Kadyrov's death has staggered the Kremlin's efforts to install a subservient local government, to draw down the Russian troop presence and to let the Chechens fight and die among themselves. A strong-arm leader who commanded political obedience and fielded a private army, Mr. Kadyrov had eliminated rivals and personalized his government.

At the moment, the best the Kremlin seems to be able to come up with as an obedient replacement is his son Ramzan. He is just 27 years old, politically untried and widely hated for his brutality as leader of his father's army.

On the Chechen grapevine, he is disparaged - fairly or not - for having finished only three years of school.

Since the killing of Mr. Kadyrov, both President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and one of his top economic ministers have traveled to Chechnya to take a look at the damage and to promise improvements. All around Grozny, people were incensed at Mr. Putin's statement afterward that the city "looks horrible from a helicopter."

"So it's a surprise to him," one businessman said sarcastically. "Is he the only one who doesn't know what has happened here?''

The last four years of war in Chechnya are known as Putin's war, a demonstration of machismo that helped him win the presidency in 2000. It has dogged him ever since, spawning dozens of terrorist attacks in Chechnya, in Moscow and elsewhere.

Terror is a way of life in Chechnya. Kidnappings by masked men often end in sadistic murder. It seems that just about every armed group is involved - soldiers, policemen, rebels, extortionists, and particularly Mr. Kadyrov's private army.

The kidnappings are so common that the masks are sold from stalls by the roadside in a choice of camouflage or basic black. Some come with a hole for the mouth, as well as for the eyes, which one saleswoman, Raishat Yevendiyeva, 49, said was popular with people who smoked.

The stalls, which also sell uniforms, boots, holsters, cartridge belts, ammunition pouches and other military kit, are crowded with tough looking men - a sort of neutral zone for people who may be killing one another once evening falls.

Asked if he felt safe in Grozny today, Khamzad Soltakhanov, 67, who has hunkered in his basement through much of the fighting of the past decade, said: "How shall I put it? When we wake up alive in the morning we're happy."

Any real resolution of the war seems impossibly far away. The fighting has created far-reaching blood debts in this clan-based society that residents say may take generations to heal.

On one recent Sunday, more than 100 mourners gathered for the funeral of a young village official who had been killed in a drive-by assassination. "I had to come," one man said. "He is a relative of my third cousin - the nephew of my cousin's wife."

The man said that when another relative had been kidnapped by extortionists a few years ago, he and his friends had tracked down all four kidnappers and killed them.

Mr. Kadyrov's killing is now another signal for revenge. Some people say his private army is already at work, although it is not certain who is responsible.

In the sports stadium where he died, the rubble and blood remain. Bricks and bits of wood and a spray of concrete pebbles are scattered across the infield.

Wind blows through the abandoned and empty arena, one more testament to hopelessness in this city where nothing is repaired.