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发帖数: 2507 | 1 Thousands of people have been abducted by the war-torn republic's kidnapping
machine. Tales of the survivors read like relics from a barbaric past.
September 18, 2000|ROBYN DIXON | TIMES STAFF WRITER
NALCHIK, Russia — As awkwardly as a newborn foal struggling on spindly legs
, Lena Meshcheryakova is learning how to curl her lips up at the corners to
make a smile.
Drifting just beneath the surface of her 5-year-old world are the memories
of a darker place: the cellar in Chechnya where she was held prisoner by
kidnappers for nine months.
When she was freed at age 3, she had forgotten how to smile. She could
barely even speak. But she knew how to pray like the devout Muslim Chechen
men who had imprisoned her. The words she kept shouting out were "Allahu
akbar!" (God is great!)
Lena, kidnapped from her Russian mother's home in Grozny, the Chechen
capital, was a victim of Chechnya's most voracious industry, the trade in
hostages and slaves. Thousands of people have been gobbled up by the Chechen
kidnapping machine, which has ravaged Russia since 1994.
The stories of survivors are like the relics of some wild, half-forgotten
era of warlords and lawless barbarism. Victims have been kept in earthen
pits or small cells that are often scrawled with the initials of hundreds of
earlier captives. They have been used as slaves to dig trenches or build
large houses for relatives of the kidnappers.
The kidnappers have been known to mutilate their captives, even children,
severing their ears or fingers. Gangs have sent videotaped recordings of
mutilations and beheadings to relatives to terrify them into finding the
ransom. Russian authorities have used the gruesome videos to feed anti-
Chechen sentiment and boost public support for Moscow's latest war in the
separatist republic.
When the kidnapping industry reached its peak a few years ago, there was
even a relatively open "slave market" in Grozny, near Minutka Square, where
the names and details of human livestock circulated on lists for interested
buyers. Gangs often traded hostages or stole them from one another.
In the years between Russia's first war in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, and
Moscow's launch of a new war against Chechen rebels last fall, kidnapping
was one of the biggest sources of enrichment for criminal gangs in an
economy that had little else to offer but oil theft, arms trade,
counterfeiting and drug smuggling.
The highly organized gangs hunted for victims among the wealthy clans from
Chechnya and neighboring republics in southern Russia. Foreigners and
Russian television journalists were in high demand.
There were even professional go-betweens who took a commission on ransom
deals, visited victims in their cells and dictated the despairing letters
that captives sent to relatives pleading for the ransom to be paid.
Nearly a thousand hostages are still being held or are dead, according to
Russian Interior Ministry figures.
Most of the victims were kidnapped in Chechnya or nearby. But dozens of
people were seized in Moscow and other cities and traveled under guard to
Chechnya in trucks with hidden cells, buried under potatoes or furniture.
In at least one case, a hostage was doped and transported in a suitcase.
Piecing Together a Child's Lost Months
In her new hometown of Prokhladny, near Nalchik in southern Russia, Lena
Meshcheryakova is rediscovering a childhood world of smiling suns painted on
kindergarten doors, posters with cotton ball sheep and lunchtime milk
ladled from an enamel pail. Her mother, Tatyana, 44, is gradually putting
together the jagged puzzle of what happened to Lena in the lost nine months
of her captivity.
Back in her Grozny neighborhood, Tatyana Meshcheryakova, a kindergarten
director, was resented as a Russian woman teaching the children of Chechens.
She thinks that her family was a target for Chechen extremists because of
it.
At 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 1998, she awoke to the sounds of the neighborhood
dogs barking. Then four armed men were in her room. They took away her child
and a pair of inexpensive gold earrings.
The initial ransom, $15,000, might as well have been a million dollars for a
woman who hadn't been paid in four years. Nine months later, it had fallen
to $1,000, and neighbors, colleagues and friends helped scrape together the
money to buy her child's life.
Before Meshcheryakova was reunited with Lena, doctors warned her to show no
emotion and to get no closer than a handshake, in case of infection.
"But I decided to hug her, and when I did she was just skin and bone,"
Meshcheryakova says. The child had lost all her hair. "She was a pitiful
sight, all covered in scabies, her skin hanging loose. She had deep bedsores
and could barely move. She weighed 9 kilograms [20 pounds] at 3 years of
age."
Lena couldn't tell her mother the story. It finally emerged in painful
scraps. She spoke of people named Ruslan and Shamil, who carried machine
guns, and a bad-tempered woman called Larisa.
Lena's ear was ripped, and she had a deep scar on her finger. "Larisa hit me
with a knife for losing a slipper," Lena explained to her mother. | Y*******n
发帖数: 2296 | 2 同样的，非穆斯林在新疆就是被缠头劫抢烧杀。
缠头杀人有武警保护，
杀完有法院保护。
非穆斯林被杀了扑街还是乱哄哄扰乱治安秩序。 |
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