No less than genocide.

WHILE Bill Clinton was disporting himself with Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, General Balkhovitin, Deputy Commander of the Frontier Troops in the Caucasus Military District, was preventing the distribution of medical supplies to the 100,000 or so Chechens who have taken refuge in the town of Khasavyurt in neighboring Daghestan. He gave instructions that a large consignment of medicines from Jordan should be impounded at the Azerbaijani border with Daghestan, at the same time ordering the arrest of those who tried to collect the medicines. The need of the refugees for medical supplies is obvious enough. The Daghestani authorities, under pressure from the Russians, have provided little help for them. The local hospitals will not treat them. They have been housed ad hoc in school buildings, abandoned factories, and homes belonging to Chechens who live in Khasavyurt. Most of the refugees arrived in Daghestan with only the clothes they stood up in. The overcrowding is startling. There are 160 refugees living in half of Khasavyurt School No. 11. On the school walls hang murals of Soviet soldiers doing the goosestep. Twenty people from the village of Binoi are crowded into a room barely 12 feet by 10. When I told them that I represented a human-rights organization, they laughed bitterly. The violation of a few abstract principles did not adequately describe what they had suffered. An old lady turned her face to the wall. She was refusing to eat, hoping to die. She had lived through the deportation of the entire Chechen population by Stalin in 1943, and the Russians had destroyed her home again: and now they were even holding a parade in Grozny to celebrate their victory over fascism. Who would wish to continue to live in such a world? Everyone compared the Russians to the Nazis. They were perpetually drunk; they looted everything they could, and destroyed with gunfire things they could have easily carried lest their officers order them to do so. Wherever we went in Khasavyurt, people spoke passionately about the terror unleashed by the Russian army, about its brutality and bestiality. Even allowing for the traditional enmity of the Chechens toward the Russians, whose domination they have been resisting for three centuries, the eyewitness stories were so consistent in tone that it was impossible to disbelieve in their fundamental truthfulness. Cattle were slaughtered; no one had so much as a chicken left. Doors were booby-trapped. A woman protested when three soldiers dragged her daughter off, and her legs were strafed by machine-gun fire. Refugees fleeing from the Russian army were likewise strafed and bombed, and one man had seen two refugee vehicles destroyed by fire from a jet fighter. At Samashki, one woman had seen the men of the place led away; stragglers were run down and squashed by tanks. The houses were looted and burned. The soldiers mocked those whom they did not shoot. Helicopters hovering over the villages had broadcast demands for the surrender of all guerillas. The bombardment of the villages had begun soon afterward, and many children had been buried in the rubble. One nursing mother had lost a child, crushed by a falling roof; her breast milk had dried up afterward, and her baby had died for lack of any substitute. She cried as she narrated this, in a room in which there was a picture of the infant Lenin on the wall. No one has yet thought to remove the icons of Lenin in the Russian periphery. In that same room, all the children were malnourished and severely infected with scabies. They were not permitted to mix with the local children -- there was no medicine to cure it. On and on went the stories, of extortion and cruelty, of killing and looting. The Russians would not allow the Chechens to bury their dead without payment of a large fee; often they came to houses and threatened to kill the inhabitants unless a payment (preferably in dollars) was forthcoming. It was a threat they carried out often. The Russians had hoped that the refugees would return to Chechnya for Victory Day, so that they might persuade a gullible world that everything had returned to normal, and that the ``police action'' in the North Caucasus was over. Some refugees had attempted to go home, but they had turned around again immediately because of the complete destruction of their property and the continuation of the war. For once, the word genocide seemed scarcely an expression of generalized paranoia. Of course, the refugees had many theories to explain the catastrophe which had overwhelmed them. The war was about oil, or oil pipelines; or it was the means by which the Russians found accommodation for their troops returning from Germany, with the conscripts who had previously occupied the barracks being sent to the war and the vacated barracks then accommodating the troops from Germany. And of course the Russians could not allow themselves to be defeated militarily by a tiny nation (a compromise being counted as a defeat), for military might has long been the guarantee of Russian greatness. Without the sheer brute power to overwhelm its neighbors, Russia would be of little account in the world: its foreign trade is less than Belgium's, its political traditions are uniformly disastrous, and its material civilization is repellent. Yet it also has a belief in its mission civilisatrice. For many years, the historical fiction was taught that the Caucasus was incorporated into Russia peacefully, at the wish of the local people. But the old hatreds subsist, and I was told by one nationalist that a Caucasian kills a Russian as a ratcatcher kills a rat -- itself an attitude to make one tremble. Meanwhile, the Chechen refugees uniformly expressed their contempt for President Clinton. In their eyes, his appearance in Moscow was craven and cowardly. It was the moral equivalent of paying the Dane-geld. And ``if once you have paid him the Dane-geld/You never get rid of the Dane.''