`Russian soldiers make us live like terrified dogs'

Two years after Russia declared victory in Chechnya, its brutal struggle goes on, reports Julius Strauss in Vedeno

ARMOURED personnel carriers covered in dust race through the winding lanes, their guns sweeping left and right. Helicopter gunships clatter above the trees. They often rake the fields and houses with machinegun fire, local people say.

Even at midday the streets are almost deserted except for a Russian mine disposal team. Of the few civilians left, most hide in their houses, terrified of being dragged off by a Russian patrol or hit by stray artillery.

It is more than two years since the Kremlin announced the end of military operations and the start a rebuilding programme for Chechnya. In the capital, Grozny, a few buildings have been renovated and shooting, at least in the daytime, has mostly stopped.

But despite the boasts huge areas of the republic remain a place of fear, where beatings, kidnappings and killings by Russian forces are the daily diet.

A visit to Vedeno, a sprawling village in the southern mountains and the birthplace of Shamil Basayev, the Islamic field commander who is fighting a terrorist war against Moscow, underlines the forgotten suffering of ordinary Chechens.

Vedeno was once a rich community of 10,000 farmers. When the first Chechen-Russian war began 10 years ago, many local people supported the drive for independence.

The Russians had oppressed the Chechens for two centuries - in 1944 Stalin even deported the entire Chechen population to Central Asia in boxcars. A third of them died.

But victory and de facto independence in 1996 brought with them lawlessness, chaos and Islamic extremism. Wahhabi leaders, such as the Saudi Arabian warlord Khattab set up terrorist training camps with the aim of exporting jihad across the Caucasus.

By the time the second war came in 1999, the people of Vedeno, like most Chechens, hated Basayev and his Islamic warriors almost as much as they had the Russians.

Today, with their houses destroyed and their cattle dead, they are still caught in the middle of a war that does not officially exist. In the two days before my visit, four Russian soldiers were injured and one killed by a rebel-laid mine.

A farmer was severely wounded when his house was hit by a Russian shell. In recent weeks more than a dozen locals have gone missing.

Even reaching Vedeno is a minor adventure. The Russian authorities have banned western reporters from working in Chechnya unless they sign up to a guided tour laid on by armed Kremlin minders.

Those who defy the ban steer clear of the south, where the Russians are notoriously trigger-happy and the Islamic radicals have a reputation for kidnapping.

In one notorious case they tortured and decapitated a group of telecom engineers - three British and one from New Zealand. The winding, broken road to the village is blocked by several Russian checkpoints.

But as elsewhere in Chechnya, they have become lazy and corrupt. Armoured personnel carriers were on the move this week. Wedged on top of one were a dozen heavily armed Russians in balaclavas. A soldier told me they were a snatch squad from the FSB - successor to the KGB - which specialises in raids and interrogation.

"I've heard stories of beating and killings," he said, "although I've never seen it myself." In Vedeno itself, set in a shallow gorge surrounded by rolling hills, local people live in fear of the sound of a boot crashing through their front gate.

Ruslan, 37, is one of many who has been tortured by Russian interrogators. Like the others I spoke to, and most Chechens throughout the republic, Ruslan has never supported the Islamic rebels and their hard-line Wahhabite ideology.

But that did not protect him. The Chechen hill-farmer was pulled from his home, beaten thoroughly then subjected to electric shocks. As he was being dragged out, one soldier mustered his strength and stamped on the small of Ruslan's back, smashing his boot into the vertebrae just above the pelvis.

Now Ruslan - the names of those interviewed in this story have been changed - is crippled for life, his head and shoulders held in a permanent painful stoop. "They were all in masks," he said. "They kept saying, `Where are the rebels, where are the rebels?' Then they did this to me. Now every minute of every day I am in pain."

The Russian reign of terror has left villagers with a weary, washed-out look. But it has done nothing to staunch the attacks by rebels. Earlier this year a small group stole down from the mountains after dark and fired a rocket propelled grenade into the side of a Russian APC, pulverising the crew.

In the round-up that followed, dozens of civilians were seized. Many of them never came home. Petimat, a 52-year-old farmer's wife, told of one woman who was released after being held for 11 days.

"She had bruises all over her and burns down her legs where they had put cigarettes out on her," she said. "The next day she ran away." As she spoke in her garden, two gunships swept low.

She said: "This is spring and I have to work the garden otherwise we'll starve. But how can I, with all the rockets, the tanks and the helicopters? "The worst of it is that we used to pride ourselves here on helping each other.

Now if somebody is seized or beaten we just turn our heads." Khasan, 70, a farmer, said: "There is shooting every night. We live in constant fear. If Russians tell us to eat, we eat. If they tell us to shit, we shit. If they tell us not to, we don't.

"We have one tank at one end of the road and another tank at the other end. We live like terrified dogs."