Russia uses arson against famlies of Chechen rebels

NY Times:

The men who set fire to Valentina Basargina’s house arrived in the stillness of 3 a.m. There were three of them. Each wore a camouflage uniform and carried a rifle. One held a can of gasoline. They wore masks.

They led Ms. Basargina and her son outside and splashed gasoline in their two rooms, she and her relatives said. One man produced a T-shirt, knotted onto a stick. It was damp with gas.

“This is for the one who is gone,” he said in thickly accented Russian. Ms. Basargina’s nephew had recently disappeared; the police had said he joined the small but smoldering insurgency fighting for Chechnya’s independence from Russia.

The man lit the torch and tossed it inside. The air whooshed. Flames shot through the house.

The attack, late last month, was part of what Chechens described as an intensified government effort to stamp out the remnants of a war that has continued, at varying levels of ferocity, for nearly 15 years.

In a campaign to punish families with sons suspected of supporting the insurgency, at least a dozen homes have been set ablaze since midsummer, residents and a local human rights organization said.

The burnings have been accompanied by a program, embraced by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Chechnya’s president, that has forced visibly frightened parents of insurgents to appear on television and beg their sons to return home.

“If you do not come back I will never forgive you,” one father, Ruslan Bachalov, said to his son on a recent broadcast. “I will forgive the man who will kill you.”

“I have no other way out,” he added. “The authorities and the president demand that I bring my son back.”

In the arson cases, each attack has followed the same pattern. The families have been awakened by men in uniforms and black ski masks who have herded residents outside and then torched their homes. Many of the attacks have been accompanied by stern declarations that the homes were being destroyed as punishment.

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Residents and the human rights organization said that the impunity was unsurprising, because the arsonists appeared to be members of the police.

The pro-Kremlin Chechen government said it knew nothing about the burnings. “We have no information about what you are talking about, so we cannot help,” a spokesman for Mr. Kadyrov said to a query from a journalist.

In a series of state-run news programs this summer in Chechnya, senior officials spoke openly of the collective responsibility of people whose relatives have joined the insurgency, and of collective punishment.

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If nothing else the story demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Russian position on South Ossetia and it support for the Palestinian terrorist. The suggestion that the authorities are not aware of the campaign reveals either fundamental corruption or incompetence. Either way it is clear that the families will not get justice from the state.