Revenge for relatives

November 29, 2001
***
In the center of Urus-Martan, an attempt was made on the life of the military commandant of the Urus-Martan district, Major General Heydar Abdulmalikovich Gadzhiev, born in 1953. As usual, at this time of day he left the city administration building and headed to the former boarding school, where the commandant’s office, the FSB and the district VOVD were located. In front of the gate, a young woman dressed in a Muslim style in a long dress and headscarf came to meet him. It was Aiza Gazueva. She called out to the commandant, and then, coming close and taking him by the pea coat, she asked: “Do you remember me, do you remember my husband?” Saying that he had no time and did not know her, Heydar Gadzhiev tried to leave. The girl not only did not let him go, but, on the contrary, pulled him closer to her. The military guards rushed to help the commandant. They were already very close when the girl raised her hand and placed it on her shoulder. There was an explosion. The general fell and, apparently in a state of shock, shouted: “What happened to me?” The fragments of an explosive device set off by Aiza Gazueva knocked out his eye, tore his legs and lower abdomen in the crotch area. In addition, he received burns. Two soldiers who rushed to his aid were killed.
The explosion tore Aiza Gazueva into pieces, and fragments of her body were scattered throughout the area.
Heydar Gadzhiev was taken to the Urus-Martan regional hospital, and from there he was transported to a military base in Khankala. Eyewitnesses say that during transportation the general shouted and swore, threatening the Urus-Martan men to return and take revenge. He died from his wounds and burns in a military hospital.
Aiza Gazueva was 19 years old. Her uncle Salman Gazuev and her brothers, two siblings and a cousin, died in battles with the Russian army. His disabled brother, Vakhid Gazuev, who was blown up by a mine during the first Russian-Chechen war, was shot dead by the Russian military near the bus station in Urus-Martan when he, legless, was crossing the road on crutches.

By order of the commandant of the Urus-Martan district, in June 2001, the military, using armored vehicles, completely destroyed the house of her relatives and kidnapped her cousin Akhmed Usmanovich Gazuev, born in 1976.
During the next purge, the Russian military took Alikhan Ustarkhanov (Idrisov), the husband of Aiza Gazueva, from the house. They had only been married for a few months. He was taken to the commandant’s office, where the sovereign owner was Colonel Heydar Gadzhiev, a native of the village of Kharahi, Khunzakh region of the Republic of Dagestan.
According to one version, on November 27, Aiza Gazueva came to the commandant’s office, demanding to know why her husband was being held. Heydar Gadzhiev swore at her and then ordered the guards to drive her away. The next day, the girl was brought under guard to the commandant’s office. The general grabbed her by the hair and, swearing and shouting, tried to force her to say that her husband was a Wahhabi. When she refused, he dragged her into the next office, where Alikhan Ustarkhanov lay beaten on the floor, his face blue and disfigured. Heydar Gadzhiev ripped open his stomach with a knife and plunged his wife’s head into the terrible, bloody wound. She lost consciousness.
The Russian military took her home and, throwing her on the floor, left. Aiza Gazueva decided to take revenge.
On November 29, she came to the market, located not far from the site of the future explosion, and asked the women trading there to move away. Some did it, some stayed. Aiza Gazueva also turned to those standing near the boarding school in the hope of finding out something about her abducted relatives. These were mostly mothers, wives and sisters of people taken from their homes. Witnesses say she told them in Chechen: “Today is the end for him. He won't mock us anymore."

For many months, Heydar Hajiyev terrorized the local population. His cruelty was legendary. Hundreds of young men who were captured on his orders or with his personal participation, including completely innocent ones, were killed or maimed. Many dozens of people disappeared without a trace. He even put women in cellars and beat them himself. They complained about him, but to no avail. On the contrary, Heydar Hajiyev was promoted from colonel to major general and was often awarded. After his death, he was awarded the highest award of the Russian Federation - “Hero of Russia” - and was solemnly buried in his homeland in Dagestan, monuments were erected and memorial plaques were hung on the houses where he lived during his service in the Russian army.

He assumed the post of military commandant of the region in mid-summer 2000. Residents of Urus-Martan and the surrounding villages greeted this decision of the Russian command with enthusiasm: after all, he was a Caucasian, a fellow countryman, a Muslim. Exhausted by the arbitrariness of Russian security forces, they wanted to believe that life would now change for the better. However, the locals were cruelly mistaken. During his “commandantship,” Heydar Hajiyev made it clear publicly more than once that for him there was no difference between the fighting Chechens and those who had never taken part in hostilities against the Russian army. He acted accordingly: anyone who, for some reason, ended up in the district commandant’s office, if he came out of there, was crippled. The commandant liked to personally take part in the beatings.

His attitude towards women deserves a separate discussion. On his orders, market women in the center of Urus-Martan were beaten, and in the fall of this year, he himself publicly kicked the pregnant Raisa Murtazalieva in the stomach.

With his active assistance, various law enforcement agencies turned the Urus-Martan district into a training ground for testing new methods of conducting the so-called counter-terrorism operation. Rarely a “purge” in Chechnya was carried out without the torture of people driven at gunpoint to the outskirts of populated areas. However, few people know that Heydar Hajiyev was one of the first to introduce such a practice. In August 2000, on his orders, several hundred residents of the village of Gekhi were taken to a field and kept there for more than a day, subjected to beatings and torture in a specially erected tent. As a result, several people died and dozens ended up in hospital beds. Once, when the commandant arrived at the place of execution, his subordinates laid the people on the ground and he, as if on a sidewalk, walked along them from his car to the torture tent. Major Russian military leaders who observed the “cleansing”, among whom were Generals Vyacheslav Tikhomirov and Mikhail Labunets, apparently recommended this method for widespread use.

During Heydar Hajiyev’s tenure as military commandant in the Urus-Martan region, hundreds of people were killed. Most are in their own homes, in front of their parents and children. Dozens were captured and taken to the territory of the commandant’s office, after which some of them were found dead, with signs of terrible torture, while others are still listed as missing.

Another innovation, which he first used in the Urus-Martan region, was the murder of all male family members. Over the course of a year, employees of the commandant’s office, together with the FSB and the police, destroyed: father and son Agayev, Barzukaev brothers, four Elbiev brothers, father and son Aidamirov and many others.

It was General Heydar Hajiyev who made it a rule to blow up the houses of people disloyal to the Russian authorities. The military then began to apply this experience in other regions of the republic.

After the assassination attempt on Gadzhiev, the population of the Urus-Martan district froze in anticipation of retaliatory action from law enforcement officers, but they locked themselves in the building of a former boarding school and at first did not take any action. Only about an hour later, the military poured out of the gates of the commandant’s office onto the central square of the city and headed towards the bus station. Owners of buses and private cars became the first victims of revenge: the military smashed car windows with machine gun butts. Soon the bus station was empty. Drivers in wrecked cars left it in a hurry. No one even dared to be outraged out loud, fearing that they might be detained or that weapons would be used against them.

Then employees of the commandant's office at the Urals moved to the market and began to detain currency traders (five or six people were put in trucks). People began to run away in fear - some with their goods, and some without them. The military grabbed everything from the shelves. Soon the market was empty too.

In Urus-Martan, military personnel looted a private store (Sovetskaya St., 24). Having smashed the display cases, they took two cameras, four dozen packs of film, more than 20 sets of various types of batteries, etc. In total, the store owners suffered damage amounting to more than 11 thousand rubles.

But the main thing was ahead. On the night of November 29, searches and detentions of people began in the Urus-Martan district. The military blew up the houses of the Tsagaraev, Musaev, Dukuzov, and Tsakaev families. Men from the Gazuev family, relatives of the deceased Aiza Gazueva, were beaten. Within a week from the day of the bombing of Heydar Hajiyev, in Urus-Martan alone, the Russian military and employees of other security agencies captured 72 people. Some of them were released on the day of their arrest, others a few days later. The fate of several detainees was unknown for at least some time.

On December 13, near the village of Chernorechye, 450 m from the Rostov-Baku highway, opposite the intersection with the road to the village. The Goyts discovered the bodies of six (some reports seven) men. They were identified. Those killed were Lom-Ali and Musa Yunusov, Shamil Dzhemaldaev, Aslan Taramov, Vakha Tukaev and Muslim Khamiev. As a retaliatory measure for Aiza Gazueva’s bombing of the Urus-Martan commandant, the Russian military took them away from their houses in the villages of Alkhan-Yurt, Gekhi and Gekhi-Chu from November 30 to December 5 inclusive.

From the book “People Live Here”, Usam Baysaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006.