Chechen suicide bombers: The black widows’ revenge

Date: 12/07/03

Russians will have to get used to living with terrorism on their doorstep

“GO AWAY,” the young woman told a policeman trying to question her as she lay dying amid the remains of her partly exploded bomb. “I couldn't...I will not get to Allah.” Soon, she did.

The first Chechen suicide bomber - also a woman - blew herself and a Russian army truck up three years ago. But it has become one of the methods of choice since last autumn, when a band of rebels took a Moscow theatre and its audience hostage and threatened to blow up everyone, themselves included. (They and 129 hostages were killed by the subsequent rescue.) The most devastating suicide bomb attack, last December, destroyed the government headquarters in Grozny, the Chechen capital, and killed around 80 people. In the last two months there have been at least four more, all aimed at military targets in or near Chechnya, claiming over 100 lives. Some, like the double bombing at a rock concert in Moscow last weekend that killed at least 16, were carried out by women. On July 9th a Chechen woman was caught taking a bomb into a Moscow restaurant.

“It's completely alien to our culture,” rails an indignant Jabrail Gakayev, a Chechen historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Even during Russia's protracted war against the Chechens and their Caucasian neighbours two centuries ago, he says, “women only took up arms when the men were killed and they had to protect their children.”

That, in a way, is what is happening. Young Chechen men are the Russian army's favourite target for arrest, torture and disappearance. Muslim fundamentalists who have joined the Chechen rebels are targeting women who have lost husbands and brothers, and are willing to kill themselves in revenge. Russian officials speak of training camps for “black widows”. However, says Shamil Beno, a Chechen foreign minister during the republic's brief, self-proclaimed independence in the 1990s, “I don't think they do it for religious-fanatical reasons, but for practical ones: there's nothing else they can do against the army. If there's no change in direction in the next few years, we think there are 30,000 families that could produce shahids [martyrs], families that have suffered terribly and see no alternative.”

The Russian government has been trying to “normalise” Chechnya. A suspiciously well-attended referendum on a new constitution was held last March, and presidential elections are due on October 5th, with a promise that the republic will be granted some sort of autonomy. Last month an amnesty for participants in the conflict was declared. But its terms would exclude many rebels and seem more designed to pardon Russian troops, while the election will most likely be a way to legitimise a pro-Moscow puppet. And the Chechen rebels now know that Moscow is wide open to suicide attacks.

Russians will have to get used to living with terrorism on their doorstep.