Drivers Carry Heavy Burden of Suffering

GROZNY -- The cars driving out of Grozny look like normal, everyday civilian traffic. But their cargo and their errands tell of lives brutally turned upside down.


Ziudin Majidov, 52, was leaving the city Thursday to take his dead son to bury him in his village of Zakan-Yurt. "What can you do?" he whispered, his hand trembling as he touched the blanket covering his son's body lying next to him on the back seat. Khezar, 23, was killed on the night of Jan. 3.


"He was fighting, he was defending the city," said Khezar's uncle, the driver of the car.


People gathered to swap news from the city at the main road junction to the south. Chechen fighters, taking a break from the action, said they were going to their village of Urus-Martan to rest but would return soon.


There were no checkpoints or roadblocks on the roads south, west and east from Grozny, allowing Chechen fighters to travel freely through much of the countryside.


One Russian checkpoint, manned by Interior Ministry troops with three armored personnel carriers, was all that guarded the western road to Grozny from Ingushetia.


Allaudin Zaramaktov, 45, said he had brought wounded from Grozny and was returning with meat for civilians and soldiers in the city.


Meat is one of the few things not in short supply in Chechnya. Small street markets continue to work in the south part of the city as close as two kilometers from the central square. But they have little to sell. Women in brightly colored wool headscarves set up their stores, but despite the cheerfulness of their displays, misery was close to the surface.


"They bombed my house on the 31st," said Zinaida Kurunchuk, 45, an ethnic Russian and a single mother of two teenaged boys. She began to cry. An economist at the Ministry Building in Grozny, Kurunchuk turned to selling cigarettes on the street two weeks ago. "I do not have any clothes to change into, everything is destroyed," she said.


Occasional buses moved through the city's outskirts, but residents shopping at Chernorechnye market on the southern edge of Grozny said that after nights and days of bombing they were too frightened to go anywhere.


Zina Karsayeva, 70, said she had not heard from her son and grandchildren for weeks. They live a bare 10 kilometers away on the other side of the city, in Mikrorayon, scene of heavy bombing Dec. 22.


"How can I get there? There is no transport and I am too frightened," she said.


"We are scared, we are existing but we do not understand what is happening," said Sveta Dudayeva, 24, a young Russian woman married to a Chechen. "He is fighting, he comes back every few days to wash and rest, and then he goes away again."


The residents of southern Grozny, who now have to go out daily in search of water, gather around the few sources, carrying buckets several kilometers back home.


"Yeltsin is a scoundrel," shouted one Chechen woman who did not give her name. Panting from the half-hour walk uphill from her village to a spring, she joined the small crowd filling plastic containers and metal milk churns.


"Say thanks to Boris," said one man struggling to lift a container full of water up the icy steps.


"The elders always warned us of this, and told us what to expect from the Russian Empire. But somehow I never believed them," said Magoned Algereyev, 35, who was filling eight containers for his family and his herd of 10 cows. "Today I know."