Ethnic Chechens face revenge attacks in Moscow
Venturing into the street is perilous for the Chechen minority here after a recent terror wave.
(Page 3 of 3)
"He is condemned as a terrorist from the day he was born - because he is Chechen," Kameta says of her son. During the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s, she spent a month in the basement of her apartment building, as the capital, Grozny, was reduced to rubble from constant Russian shelling.
"We can't live in Chechnya, and it's very difficult to live here - we're in a blind alley," says Arsen. He says family that remain beg him not to return to Grozny, and tells of the harrowing fate of three cousins taken from their home and tortured one night, two years ago.
A man witnessed a Russian armored vehicle drop one cousin in a garbage dump. "He was in very bad condition. His ears were burned because they used electricity. They broke his fingers with a hammer," says Arsen. "He's alive, but mentally broken." The two others were found elsewhere, dead.
"It's just liquidation of a nation - we're being exterminated," says Arsen. "Russia, where we live, is making terrorists of us. Our children, our brothers, live in basements, illiterate and sick with tuberculosis. We are becoming a nation of invalids."
"This [case] is just a drop in the sea," says Kameta. "It happens everyday. What happened in Beslan in three days has been happening in Chechnya for 3650 days [10 years]."
"I'm sure that Beslan's children are worth all the sympathy and love," says Kameta. "But if one-tenth of that love had been shown toward us, all Chechens would burst into tears of rejoicing. We have been killed, our houses have been destroyed, and at the same time we are called terrorists."
"Most young people are doomed to become rebels," says Kameta, who holds two higher education degrees. "They have no other way out. They are never left alone. They might get killed in their own home."
Arsen cried during TV coverage of Beslan, and even considered giving blood for the victims. But he reconsidered when he realized it would raise questions.
Two months ago, the couple went back to Grozny for the first time in years, for the funeral of Kameta's father. Arsen still has pictures of pulverized Grozny on his mobile phone.
"When I saw it with my own eyes, it looked like a graveyard," Arsen says. "People have changed. They are not moved by anything anymore, not even their own grief. They look lifeless, cold, their eyes glazed over..."
"At the same time, there is an optimism as they try to rebuild," adds Arsen, before Kameta stops him short.
"That is not optimism!" she admonishes. "They barely survive. After the first war, there was some optimism. But after 10 years, nothing is left of this optimism. I've got a chance to live [in Moscow], you've got a chance to live. But people there?"
Arsen hands Kameta a diaper for Magomed, and they tell about a moment of pity they felt in Chechnya, where Russians are now part of a widely despised minority - as they themselves are in Moscow. An elderly Russian man sat alone in a market, outcast by local Chechens, trying to sell an unappetizing pile of apples.
"Everyone ignored him. He didn't feel comfortable - if he stayed [in Grozny], it meant he couldn't leave," says Arsen. "We didn't want them, but we bought all his apples. We understood him."
