By David Hoffman
SAMASHKI, Russia -- In Moscow's brutal war against Chechen separatists, this is ground zero.
The green metal fences are lacerated with bullet and shrapnel holes. Many rooftops are nothing more than skeletons. In the main market, women peddling vegetables keep a Russian artillery shell casing perched on the street in front of their stalls. Children climb recklessly on the glass-splattered, bombed-out building once known in the Soviet era as the House of Culture but now just a testament to the ruins of war.
While other villages and towns have also been devastated in the 20-month-old Chechen conflict, few have surpassed the suffering of Samashki, a town of 12,000 people about 30 miles west of Grozny, the capital. It was here in April 1995 that drunken Russian soldiers went on a rampage, throwing grenades into cellars filled with women and children, killing more than 100 civilians.
The killings prompted many protests by Russians opposed to the war, with some comparing it to the massacre by U.S. troops of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. But it was not the end of Samashki's troubles.
This year, in March, the town was hit again. According to residents, they had been given an ultimatum by Russian troops to cough up money and guns. But after they turned over three carloads of weapons, the Russians gave residents an abrupt warning to flee, then attacked the town again, in some cases leveling homes only recently rebuilt from the first assault. It was part of a larger, fierce offensive against Chechen separatist rebels that was launched just before President Boris Yeltsin announced a peace initiative on March 31.
"We don't plan to rebuild until the Russian army leaves," said Arbiyya Shansayev, 35, an agronomist, whose brother was slain in the first massacre. "Right now, we're just living a life of subsistence."
Even taking into account the relatively primitive state of rural communities in Russia's outlying regions, Samashki is barely surviving. Once there was electricity, water and natural gas here. Now there is little of anything. Mounds of rubble, broken glass and bricks line the streets. A donkey-drawn cart brings water by the pail. A hammer echoes in the distance as one family struggles to make a house habitable again. "You have to build some huts, at least," Shansayev said. As many as 15 people live in each of the houses still standing.
But many of those who escaped last year's massacre have not escaped the destitution and despair that befall civilians caught in the throes of war.
Asat Salgireva, 52, survived both attacks but lives amid the ashes of two homes -- both on the same site, both destroyed by Russian artillery shells. Now she occupies a tent along with six grandchildren, a son, two daughters and three elderly family members. Pots and pans lie on the dirt floor, and a jury-rigged pipe occasionally emits enough natural gas to cook a hot meal. Family members sell tomatoes and canned goods at the bazaar, hoping to earn the equivalent of 50 cents a day to survive.
"I don't know how we'll manage in the winter," she said. "We'll have to ask people to take us in." Behind the tent is a small truck garden, but she said they are afraid to eat the vegetables, fearing they have been somehow contaminated by the Russian bombardments.
The front of the tent is a wasteland of ash and the remnants of her second house. A naked stovepipe protrudes into the air; a bathtub sits by a radiator. But the house, a prefabricated one brought to the town after the first attack, was demolished in the second.
Mayerbeck Musayev, 52, who was born in Kazakhstan when Chechens were living there in exile by order of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was sitting on a nearly crushed building across the street from his wrecked home. He had put a corrugated metal roof on it "in order to survive the winter," he said. "But until the [Russian troops] leave, nothing else will be done."
"We are now eating our last grains of salt," he said, as young children raced toward the water cart with empty pails.
The trials of Samashki offer an illustration of how civilians have been drawn into the vortex of this war between the light-footed Chechen rebels and the clumsy but heavily armed Russians. Chechen towns and villages are home for many of the guerrillas, and their lives are woven into those of civilians. The Russian forces, mostly Internal Affairs Ministry troops, are on unfamiliar, hostile territory. In fighting the rebels, the Russians have killed civilians by the thousands; more than 30,000 people have died here, most of them civilians caught in Russian onslaughts.
The Samashki massacre occurred while Russian troops were purportedly searching for a few elusive guerrillas. After the killings, Russian authorities classified all the dead as "fighters," but they were not.
The massacre was later exhaustively documented in a report prepared by the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow. In interviews with witnesses, rights center investigators confirmed that the killings took place on April 7-8, 1995, after Russian troops had clashed with a small group of Chechen rebels near the village.
Following the skirmish, the report said, Internal Affairs troops and riot police "began an operation to mop up the village," described as "an intense search of the streets, house-by-house, to find, neutralize or detain rebel fighters in hiding and also to seize arms caches." But the victims of this "mop-up" operation were almost entirely civilians, according to the Moscow center, which documented the deaths of 103 people in what it said was an incomplete tally. According to the report, the villagers were killed by "shelling, strafing of streets from armored vehicles, sniper fire on streets and in courtyards, execution-style shootings in houses and yards; grenades thrown into and exploded in cellars, yards and rooms with people present; the burning of houses, murders committed while detained people were being marched off."
Moreover, the report found, many of wounded villagers died because the troops refused to allow "timely, decent medical help" to reach them.
Shakhid Adulyev, 64, a Samashki pensioner who survived the massacre, recalled that the Russian devastation of Grozny "was bad, but this is worse. What they did to us here is something you shouldn't do to livestock."
=A9 Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company