Six Red Cross Workers Killed In Chechnya Massacre Of Innocents Threatens To Undermine Peace Process

Masked gunmen using silencers killed six Western aid workers as they slept at a Red Cross hospital compound in Chechnya Tuesday. The dawn raid threatened to shatter the fragile peace process in the breakaway region.

In the bloodiest assault against foreigners since the Chechen war began two years ago, an unspecified number of assailants broke into the compound at 4 a.m., killed five women, all of them Red Cross nurses, and one man. Another man was seriously wounded.

The attack was the worst violence against the International Committee of the Red Cross in its 133-year history. The killings brought disbelief and outrage from the ICRC, which suspended its relief operations in Chechnya.

The United Nations refugee agency also froze services for 80,000 displaced Chechens in neighboring regions in protest.

“The people who did it knew exactly what they were doing,” said Kim Gordon-Bates of the ICRC in Geneva. She said the hospital compound was clearly marked with large Red Cross emblems.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack in Novye Atagi, 11 miles southwest of Grozny, but Chechen separatist leaders and Russian officials accused each other of trying to provoke a new outbreak of hostilities in the war-shattered Caucasus.

Separatist leaders, who won virtual control of Chechnya after forcing Moscow to accept a humiliating cease-fire and withdrawal from the region in August, came under immediate pressure to find the killers. Kazbek Makhasheva, the Chechen police chief, told Russian NTV television that investigators had reconstructed the crime from witnesses’ accounts, and that the killers would be found shortly.

Numerous foreign aid organizations are working in Chechnya, which was devastated after 21 months of fighting that cost an estimated 80,000 lives and left tens of thousands more homeless and without basic necessities. Throughout the conflict, foreign aid workers have been targets of violence; several, including renowned American aid specialist Fred Cuny, have been killed.

Even after the August truce between Moscow and the rebels that virtually ended the fighting, foreign aid groups have been the victims of kidnapping and theft. But Tuesday’s attack was the worst by far. The victims were experienced Red Cross workers in their 40s and 50s. All were unarmed and without armed escorts.

The Red Cross opened the compound, its only hospital in Chechnya, in September. With space for 50 patients, the hospital provided work for about 100 local residents, who were paid up to $350 a month, good wages in a region with few jobs.

“We saw the medical system in the republic was so badly damaged and there was a need for an alternative medical structure,” Bertrand Kern, deputy director of the Red Cross delegation in Moscow, said at a news conference. “Until we can be assured that the ICRC will be respected, we are suspending our activities in Chechnya.”

The United States joined other nations in condemning the killings and urged the Chechen separatist authorities “to do everything they can to track down the murderers,” Reuters reported.

Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin denounced the shootings as a “barbaric attack” aimed at “destabilizing the situation in the republic,” and Nikolai Kovalyov, the chief of Russia’s security agency, hinted that the rebel leaders were unable to control rogue factions.

“They have to show that they can control the situation in their country,” Kovlayov said at a briefing in Moscow. “If there is an explosion of terrorist activity in Chechnya it will be a big blow to their authority.”

Russian military commanders in Chechnya said that they might halt the pullout of the last federal troops in the region, an estimated 8,000 soliders and paramilitary police troops, in response to the violence.

But Movladi Udugov, first deputy prime minister of the separatists’ government in Grozny, said he suspected the slayings had been ordered by enemies of the peace process in Moscow. If so, Udugov told Russian television, the attack “would be a terrible link in a chain of provocations against the fragile peace process in Chechnya.”

The killings further heightened tensions that followed the capture of 22 Russian servicemen on Saturday by a maverick Chechen commander, Salman Raduyev, notorious in Russia for leading a deadly hostage-taking raid in the neighboring region of Dagestan in January. Some 60 of Raduyev’s men seized the Russians when they tried to prevent the rebels from entering Dagestan.

Raduyev has refused the request of Chechnya’s separatist leaders, President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev and Prime Minister Aslan Maskhadov, to hand over the hostages, embarrassing the Grozny government and seemingly playing into the hands of Moscow hard-liners who see the rebels as uncontrollable bandits.

Tuesday’s attack in Novye Atagi, Maskhadov’s hometown, was a particularily galling slap at the authority of the former Soviet army colonel who masterminded the Chechens’ military victory and is seen as a favorite in scheduled Jan. 27 presidential elections in Chechnya.

Renewed tensions could jeopardize the Kremlin’s agreements with the rebels, which oblige Russia to withdraw all its troops before the Jan. 27 vote. Moscow, which insists that the oil-rich region is part of Russia, has also promised to help rebuild Chechnya’s shattered towns. In return, the rebels have agreed to put off any formal decisions on their claim to independence for five years.