#6 - JRL 7275
Washington Post
August 3, 2003
Once a Sanctuary, Now a Battlefield
Hospital Blast Shows Chechen War's Reach
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
MOSCOW, Aug. 2 -- For the past four years, Russian soldiers shot or wounded on the treacherous battlefields of Chechnya found sanctuary at the military hospital in nearby Mozdok, secure in the care of nurses like Tatyana Astafyeva.
Now it turns out the battlefield has followed them.
Dozens of soldiers who had survived the Chechen combat, and the medical workers treating them, were obliterated by a truck bomb that shattered the Mozdok hospital Friday night. As rescue workers and trained dogs sifted through rubble in a futile search for survivors today, the death toll rose to 44, and will probably continue to rise, officials say. Among the workers, Astafyeva could count 17 compatriots.
"My friends died there," Astafyeva, 35, who left the hospital just hours before the attack, said by telephone after returning home from the scene today. "I saw there was nothing left of it, nothing left of our hospital, just ruins. All our colleagues working the night shift yesterday, all dead. Some of them are still under the wreckage."
Astafyeva, trained to save lives, said she now prays for the death of Chechen guerrillas. "They all have to be killed," she said bitterly.
The suicide bombing in the region of North Ossetia, adjacent to Chechnya, was the latest in a string of attacks in recent months that threaten the chance of a peaceful settlement of the long-running conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been trying to normalize the breakaway republic with a new constitution and presidential elections, vowed today to proceed with his program.
"The terrorists will be unable to impose their criminal will," Putin said in a condolence telegram released by his office. "Their bloody, evil deeds will not stop the process of political settlement and restoration of normal peaceful life."
A representative of the Chechen political leader, Aslan Maskhadov, also denounced the attack and denied any responsibility for it. But Salambek Maigov, Maskhadov's envoy in Moscow, said the Kremlin's vicious tactics in prosecuting the war and adamant refusal to come to the negotiating table have radicalized Chechens who see terrorism as their only option.
"Such actions by suicide bombers in my view are ultimately the result of the total violence committed by the Russian army," Maigov said in an interview. "Behind them are the specific tragedies of individuals who lost their relatives."
In the last three months, Chechen suicide bombers have struck a half-dozen times, including at a Moscow rock concert where two suicide bombers and 15 other people were killed last month, and in Mozdok where a suicide bomber and 17 other people on a military bus were killed two months ago. Most of the attacks have been carried out by women, generally described as widows, orphans or mothers of slain Chechen guerrillas.
The driver of the truck that slammed through the gates at the Mozdok military hospital Friday night, though, was a middle-age man, according to witnesses. After screeching up to the hospital, his truck detonated and took down most of the building in a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust that some compared to a nuclear blast.
"First there was a bang and the gates began to rumble," a nurse told Russian NTV television. "Then there was a clap, and everything began to fall and rattle. For several seconds, the dust was so thick that you couldn't see anything at all."
Televised images of the hospital showed little more than a partial shell left, as hundreds of specialists used bulldozers, cranes, shovels and their bare hands to heft large slabs of concrete away in hopes of finding victims still alive beneath the remains of the four-story building. At least 82 people were injured in the attack, many of them torn up by shrapnel, and transported to Rostov-on-Don, St. Petersburg and Moscow for treatment.
Wailing relatives haunted the halls of the civilian Mozdok hospital waiting for news. "They're in hysterics," Stanislav Medoyev, a surgeon, said by telephone. "For them, it's a horror, even more than for the victims themselves."
The hospital's chief doctor, Vladimir Selivanov, said in a separate interview that counselors were treating victims and their families but that the incident has brought home the realization that no place is safe from terrorism.
"It's not just the hospital, everything that's happening is impossible," he said. "Americans after September 11 understand what terrorism means. For our two countries, and really the whole world, it's very important to be strong against terrorism."
Authorities began holding local officials responsible today for security failures such as failing to install concrete barriers that might have stopped a speeding truck. The director of the destroyed hospital was arrested, and the military garrison commander was suspended pending an investigation.
"We are not talking about deliberate lack of discipline," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters at the scene, "but about a negligent attitude to the orders that had been issued by the Ministry of Defense to avoid terrorist acts, including special orders for Mozdok."
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