Family members of Chechnya insurgents being punished: report

New York, Sept 29 (PTI) In a move to punish families
of absconding young men suspected of supporting the insurgency
in Chechnya, at least a dozen homes have been set ablaze since
midsummer, a media report claimed on Monday, citing residents
and a local human rights organisation.

The burnings have been accompanied by a programme,
embraced by Chechnya's president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, that has
forced visibly frightened parents of suspected insurgents to
appear on television and beg their sons to return home, the
New York Times said.

"If you do not come back I will never forgive you," it
quoted one father, Ruslan Bachalov, saying to his son on a
recent broadcast. "I will forgive the man who will kill you."

"I have no other way out," he added. "The authorities
and the president demand that I bring my son back." In the
arson cases, the paper said attack has followed the same
pattern. The families have been awakened by men in uniforms
and black ski masks who have herded residents outside and then
torched their homes.

Many of the attacks have been accompanied by stern
declarations that the homes were being destroyed as
punishment, it added. Residents and the human rights
organization were quoted as saying that the impunity was
unsurprising, because the arsonists appeared to be members of
the police.

The pro-Kremlin Chechen government said it knew
nothing about the burnings, the paper said. "We have no
information about what you are talking about, so we cannot
help," a spokesman for Kadyrov said to a query from a
journalist.

The burnings, the Times said, have occurred in several
districts or towns — including Alleroi, Geldagan,
Khidi-Khutor, suggesting that the arsonists have been
operating with precise information and with a degree of
impunity in a republic that is crowded with police and
military units.

In a series of state-run news programmes this summer
in Chechnya, senior officials spoke openly of the collective
responsibility of people whose relatives have joined the
insurgency, and of collective punishment, the Times said.

The broadcasts are in Chechen, a language spoken in a
tiny portion of Russia and understood by scarcely any of the
Russian officials in the region who work with Kadyrov's
government.

On one, Kadyrov spoke bluntly about households whose
young men "go to the forest," the local idiom for joining the
rebels, the paper said. "The families whose relatives are in
the forests, they are accomplices in the crime," he said.

Muslim Khuchiyev, a confidant of Kadyrov's and the
mayor of Grozny, Chechnya's capital, went further, the paper
said. "We are not now holding dialogue with you on the basis
of the laws of this state," he said. "We will act according to
Chechen traditions."

"The evil which is done by your relatives in the
forest will return to you and your homes," he added. "Each of
you soon will feel it on your skin."

Toward the end of his televised remarks, the paper
said, Khuchiyev said the government would not allow relatives
to bury insurgents who had been killed.

"If we find out that someone buries them, we will take
tough and cruel measures on this person," he said. Violence by
all sides in and near Chechnya, the Times said, has been one
of the darkest chapters of post-Soviet Russian life.

Since war erupted in 1994, Russia and its local
proxies have been implicated in bombings and aerial attacks on
civilian areas, armed and indiscriminate sweeps of
neighborhoods, and patterns of illegal detention, torture and
killings. Tens of thousands of Chechens have been killed.
Thousands of others have disappeared, the paper said. PTI DS