#10 - RW 264
Toronto Star
July 13, 2003
'Black widows' terrorize Russia
Female attackers add new horror to suicide bombings
Chechen women paid deadly visit to Moscow rock fest
MICHAEL MAINVILLE
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

MOSCOW-- It has been almost five years since she was caught on the fringes of a rocket attack that killed 140 people in the central marketplace of Grozny, the Chechen capital.

But Makka -- a 45-year-old Chechen woman with sunken eyes and deeply wrinkled cheeks that make her look 15 years older -- still can't keep her hands from shaking.

Sometimes, the uncontrollable trembling gets so bad that she can barely lift a teacup.

Still, in some ways, she considers herself lucky.

Unlike thousands of other Chechen women, she hasn't lost any members of her immediate family in the decade-long war that has ravaged her homeland.

"So many Chechen women have lost so much -- their husbands, their brothers, their fathers," says Makka, who is staying with an aunt in Moscow while seeking treatment for her nervous disorder.

"If you haven't lived through what we have, you cannot understand it."

So while she can't condone what they've done, she says she understands why desperate Chechen women have begun to take their own lives in suicide attacks.

"It is a great sin to commit suicide, but I know what makes these women do it," says Makka, who declined to give her last name.

"Sometimes, I feel like I'd rather die than continue living through this nightmare."

Russians, and many Chechens, have been shocked by a wave of deadly suicide bombings by Chechen women in which dozens of people have been killed over the last few weeks.

A week ago Saturday -- in the first successful such suicide attack to hit the Russian capital -- two women wrapped in explosives blew themselves up outside a Moscow outdoor rock festival crowded with tens of thousands of fans.

The attack left 15 people dead, including the two bombers, one of whom was carrying Chechen identity documents, and wounded dozens more.

On Wednesday, Russian police arrested two people alleged to have been involved in organizing the attack and seized more than 30 kilograms of explosives in a town 150 kilometres northwest of Moscow.

Later that day, a 22-year-old woman from a small Chechen village tried to enter an upscale restaurant on one of Moscow's main streets carrying a black sports bag packed with 400 grams of TNT and loaded with ball bearings.

She was stopped by security guards and tried to detonate the bomb, but police officers called to the scene managed to handcuff her first.

A 29-year-old sapper with Russia's Federal Security Service was killed a few hours later when the bomb exploded while he was trying to disarm it.

Until recently, the emergence of female Chechen suicide bombers would have seemed absurd.

Women have traditionally been excluded from the fighting that has devastated Chechnya, and suicide bombings were almost unheard of in the first years of the war.

But Chechens say that nearly 10 years of brutal and almost constant war has driven desperate women into the conflict.

"Something has changed in our society, in our psychology. So many terrible things have happened to these women that actions that once seemed unthinkable have somehow become acceptable," says Eliza Musayeva, a Chechen woman who runs aid programs for the human-rights group Memorial in the Russian republic of Ingushetia.

Thousands of Chechen refugees fled to neighbouring Ingushetia after the outbreak of the war.

The Kremlin sent troops to Chechnya in 1999 in its second post-Soviet attempt to crush an armed separatist movement in the mostly Muslim republic.

Russia had previously withdrawn its forces from Chechnya in 1996 -- leaving the North Caucasian republic with de facto independence -- following a disastrous 20-month campaign.

The two wars have killed at least 100,000 people and have been marked by accusations of horrifying behaviour on both sides. Human-rights groups have repeatedly accused Russian forces of kidnapping, torturing and killing civilians.

Throughout both wars, occasional accounts have emerged of women taking up arms and joining rebel groups in their mountain bases. But for the most part, Chechnya's strong patriarchal tradition kept women out of the fighting.

That all changed last October, when 41 Chechen guerrillas, about half of them women, took nearly 800 people hostage in a Moscow theatre.

Images of the women, clad in black hijabs that revealed only their eyes, caused a sensation when they were broadcast on television screens around the world.

The Russian government and media dubbed the women "black widows."

Hostages who survived the three-day standoff with Russian forces at the theatre say the Chechen women spoke often of the horrors of their lives -- of losing husbands, brothers and fathers; of rape and torture at the hands of Russian soldiers; and of despair that nothing would ever change.

"You're having a bad day, but we've had a bad 10 years," one of the Chechen women told a hostage interviewed by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The siege ended with 170 dead, most from a gas used by Russian special forces when they stormed the building.

All the hostage-takers were killed and some Chechens have accused Russian forces of leaving none alive so that their stories could never be heard in a courtroom.

In the months since the theatre siege, the black widows have emerged as a terrifying weapon that experts say Russia will find extremely difficult to counter.

Over the past two months, Chechen women have participated in four suicide attacks that killed nearly 100 people, including fellow Chechens, and left hundreds wounded.

In June, a woman blew herself up outside a bus carrying military personnel to a base near Chechnya.

In May, a woman detonated a bomb at a religious festival in an attempt on the lives of pro-Moscow Chechen leaders.

Also in May, a Chechen woman was part of a suicide attack in which bombers rode an explosives-filled truck into a government compound in Chechnya.

Chechen militants "seem to have hit on a new Palestinian-style tactic, the difference being that in Chechnya it is mostly women," says Thomas de Waal, an analyst specializing in Chechnya for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

"If Israel, a small country with some of the best security forces in the world, cannot contain this kind of threat, what hope does Russia have with its thousands of miles of territory and corrupt security forces?"

Mainstream separatist leaders, such as one-time Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, have denounced suicide bombings, which are being blamed on radical rebel groups.

Russian officials contend that suicide bombings are a foreign import to Chechnya and prove that Chechen rebels now have close links with international terrorist networks.

The Interior Ministry has alleged that "Arab instructors" trained a group of 36 Chechen women to be sent beyond Chechnya's borders to carry out suicide attacks.

President Vladimir Putin also has been keen to connect Chechen fighters with Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups.

On Monday, he was quoted by the presidential press service as telling ministers that Chechen rebels "are not only linked with international terrorist organizations but have become an integral part of them, perhaps the most dangerous part."

Putin, who has refused to negotiate with rebel leaders, promised the attacks would not derail his government's peace plan for Chechnya. A Kremlin-sponsored referendum installed a new constitution in Chechnya this year and presidential elections have been scheduled for Oct. 5.

The peace plan has come under fire from human-rights groups, which say a referendum and elections cannot be held fairly under conditions of war.

The Kremlin contends that it has the situation in Chechnya under control, but the republic remains mired in violence, with Russian soldiers, rebel fighters and civilians dying almost daily.

Despite the Russian government's claims, most observers doubt that Chechen fighters have signed on to the vision of global jihad espoused by Al Qaeda.

Few deny that some outside influences are at work in Chechnya -- mostly in the form of financial aid -- but most analysts say Chechens are still fighting a localized struggle for independence.

"Of course there is an influence from the Middle East, but the roots of Chechen actions are very different from those of bin Laden or Al Qaeda," says Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Islam and the Chechen conflict at the Moscow Carnegie Centre.

"Their actions are motivated by the fight for independence and, more and more, by the desire for revenge, which runs very deep in Caucasian tradition."

Zainap Gashayeva, a Chechen and co-chair of Echo of War, an anti-war coalition of Chechen and Russian women, says it is this desire for vengeance that has pushed Chechen women to the forefront after 10 years of fighting.

"Our society has fallen apart and these women are in a state of despair," says Gashayeva. "A normal person can only face so much humiliation and violence.

"I sympathize with the innocent people who died in these attacks, but the same number of people die or disappear every day in Chechnya and nobody sees them.

"Nobody cares about them."

Michael Mainville is a Canadian journalist based in Moscow.

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