GROZNY, Russia — They usually come at night, wearing masks, driving cars without license plates, always carrying weapons. They search houses without explaining what they’re seeking. When they leave, they take people away who are sometimes never seen again.
More than four years after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops to bring order to the breakaway region of Chechnya, the full-scale fighting has tapered off. But Russia’s quiet war continues with stealthy raids that unsettle life here and violate basic human rights, critics charge.
“When there’s a war going on, it’s all around you and easy to see,” said Khava Vakhayeva, 49, a Chechen woman. “Now it’s quieter, but people are still disappearing.”
The Grozny skyline is an unremitting landscape of crumbling red brick and concrete buildings, ripped apart by Russian bombs. Telltale signs, such as clothes hanging to dry on a balcony or the glow from kitchen windows, indicate that Chechen families are still living in buildings that would have been condemned long ago almost anywhere else.
In late winter, which lasts long in the northern Caucasus, the city streets — or what is left of them — turn into rivers of mud, and run-down Russian cars negotiate their way through potholes the size of large dogs, avoiding grimy pools of water.
Grozny residents set up wooden stools where they sell plastic cola bottles filled with gasoline — one of the few signs of economic activity in a city where most people are unemployed. While many Grozny residents have electricity, it often flickers off for hours at a time, leaving them to sit in the dark, listening to the intermittent gunfire that punctuates almost every night.
Four years after Russian troops went in, control of Chechnya is elusive. Sent to hunt down the Chechen rebels, the Russian forces have failed to find top separatist leaders such as Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev and are ambushed almost daily.
Roughly the size of Connecticut, Chechnya declared independence in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian forces and Chechen rebels fought a brutal 1994-1996 war that ended with a humiliating withdrawal of Russian troops.
The Russian pullout gave the Chechens de-facto independence but, even in Chechnya, few portray this as a time of freedom and prosperity. Instead the region has been roiled by gangland chaos, including robberies, kidnappings for ransom and killings.
It was, according to Russian officials and some analysts, also a time when radical forms of Islam began to take root in this mostly Muslim region.
In 1999, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia killed more than 300 people and terrified the country. Authorities blamed the blasts on Chechen separatists. At the same time, Chechen rebels raided the neighboring republic of Dagestan, provoking fears of a radical Islamic uprising along Russia’s southern border.
Russia sent troops into Chechnya to bring the republic back under Moscow’s control, and Mr. Putin — who was then prime minister under the ailing and soon-to-retire Boris Yeltsin — promised to wipe out what he described as Chechen terrorists, once and for all.
“He stopped the catastrophic developments in the north Caucasus,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst. “There were a lot of Chechens there, but also a lot of Arabs taking over control of Dagestan and moving toward the Black Sea coast.”
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and suburban Washington by the al Qaeda terrorist network, Mr. Putin and other Russian officials asserted that the long war in Chechnya was, in fact, the first front in a global war on terrorism. The United States, seeking Russian support for its efforts in Afghanistan, toned down its criticism of Russian human rights violations in Chechnya.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Chechens have been killed, wounded or displaced. Officially, Russia says Chechnya’s population is 1 million, but analysts believe the actual figure after the wars is closer to 700,000.
Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer estimates that as many as 10,000 Russian soldiers have died in the second Chechen campaign — twice the Russian losses in the 1994-96 war. But he cautions that no figure is entirely reliable.
The Russian government keeps a tight lid on bad news coming out of Chechnya. The Russian military rarely releases information about casualties, and the conflict seldom makes it into the nightly TV news or major Russian newspapers — most controlled by the Kremlin — despite the fact that analysts believe roughly 80,000 troops are in the region at any one time.
One issue that never makes it into the Russian media is human rights violations. Russian forces have been implicated in widespread incidents of rape, pillage, unlawful detention and killings.
In January, Musa, a man from the Chechen capital, was with his brother on the street when a group of men wearing black masks pulled up in a car and attacked them.
“The last thing I remember is being hit in the head and falling,” said Musa, who did not give his full name for fear of retaliation.
Musa and his brother spent the next week held against their will, being pistol-whipped and beaten. Eventually, they were blindfolded, put back in their car and driven to the place where they had been picked up.
Their captors, whom Musa believes were either Russian soldiers or their Chechen agents, said it was a case of mistaken identity and they were free to go.
The Russian human rights group Memorial documented 478 disappearances in 2003, but warns that the true figure is probably much higher because many people are reluctant to come forward, and the organization is unable to monitor all of Chechnya.
In 50 cases, the disappeared were later found dead, 155 were released or their families paid a ransom to buy them out, and the remaining 273 are still unaccounted for.
Human rights organizations say all the signs — type of equipment used, uniforms worn, reports from people who have been released — point to Russian troops and allied Chechen forces as the perpetrators.
“The government’s record remains poor in the continuing struggle with separatists in Chechnya, where federal security forces demonstrated little respect for human rights,” the U.S. State Department said in its annual report on human rights in Russia.
So far Mr. Putin has refused to negotiate an end to the conflict with Chechen rebel leaders. Instead, the Kremlin has sought to impose a political solution to the conflict — essentially, by creating a government composed of Chechens loyal to Moscow and backed by Russian forces.
The result has been less than promising.
Direct elections in Chechnya — presidential elections last October and an earlier referendum on whether to remain part of Russia — were tainted by accusations of vote-rigging by the Russian authorities. The referendum, for instance, passed last March with 90 percent in favor of remaining part of Russia, Russian officials said.
During the presidential race, former Chechen rebel turned Kremlin ally, Akhmed Kadyrov, won an overwhelming victory after his main competitors pulled out, reportedly because of pressure from the Kremlin, which was pushing Mr. Kadyrov.
Meanwhile, Chechen rebels seem to be experimenting with a new tactic designed to bring the war out of Chechnya and into the rest of Russia — suicide bombings.
Last July, at least 16 persons were killed when two women blew themselves up at an outdoor rock concert in Moscow. An explosion on the Moscow subway Feb. 6 killed at least 39 persons, although it is not known whether that attack was the work of a suicide bomber.
Russian officials say such attacks are a sign that the war in Chechnya is not a fight for independence, but a “holy war” being supported by international terrorist organizations. During a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last year, Mr. Putin described bombings in Saudi Arabia and Chechnya as “links in the same chain of acts by international terrorists.”
Meanwhile, life in Chechnya remains difficult.
According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, last year Chechens were one of the ethnic groups with the most people seeking political asylum.
“It’s a permanent discussion among friends — how to get out,” said Natalia Estimirova from the Grozny office of Memorial.
Many of those who remain in Chechnya do so because they have little choice. They hold little faith in the new pro-Moscow government or believe that life will become safer soon.
When asked whether life is getting better, Musa, who ekes out a living repairing cars in his garage in Grozny, shakes his head.
“Putin said he’d bring order here. It’s been four years. Do you see any order?”
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