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The Times (UK) October 22, 2003
Deadly secret of the black widows
By Luba Vinogradova
On the first anniversary of the Moscow theatre siege in which 50 terrorists and 120 hostages died, this writer, who has investigated the lives of the Chechen women suicide bombers involved, describes how many were sold to terrorist warlords and some were widows forced into it by their families
IN MANY ANCIENT SOCIETIES a woman was a slave in her husband's house. She couldn't even handle her own belongings without her husband's permission. She could share her husband's bed, but not his meals. According to an Indian tradition, still practised in some remote areas, if the husband Dies the wife is burnt alive with his body. In the rebellious Russian Republic of Chechnya, where separatists are fighting to establish an Independent Islamic state, that tradition is being taken to murderous extremes.
There are no ritual funeral pyres: instead, young women have high explosive strapped to their bodies and are sent to their deaths as "suicide bombers".
During the past couple of years Russians have grown used to Chechens blowing themselves up, along with anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. If it happens in Chechnya, the response is indifference - it is part of everyday routine. If it happens in Russia, however, everyone bursts with fury. Especially now that the explosions have reached Moscow itself.
"How dare they?" we say. "There are 74 nationalities in Russia who have exactly the same status as Chechens and live in conditions that are not a bit better. Why do the remaining 73 nationalities sit there quietly, doing their best to survive, while Chechen women are blowing themselves up?"
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Her story is different from those of other female suicide bombers we knew about. She grew up in Kurchaloi, a regional centre in Chechnya. The family home wasn't destroyed, and no close relatives were killed by the Russian troops. After school she entered a medical college; she had wanted to be a midwife. Her teachers and class-mates recall her as a good, enthusiastic student. Zulikhan's parents and friends are convinced that her half-brother, Danilkhan, was to blame for her death. The whole town knew he was a fighter. The family say Danilkhan kidnapped his sister five months before the explosion in Tushino and they never saw her again.
Their father says: "It was he who sent Zulikhan to die. I won't find peace until I see him dead. I am very sorry for my daughter and for the Muscovites who have died because of my son. Show me his corpse, I have cursed my son."
On July 6, the day after the explosion in Tushino, we woke up to news of yet another terrorist act by a shakhidka. Although she was detected and disarmed, the terrorist act was not a failed one: 30-year-old Major Gennady Trofimov was killed while attempting to defuse it. A price paid for a handsome prize: the first live shakhidka. What she told her interrogators casts fresh light on what drives these women to kill and be killed.
An officer close to the case agreed to meet me and talk about it. "It was Uncle Shamil's initiative to start training them, you know," he said, referring familiarly to Shamil Basayev. Chechen fighters mostly recruit women from among the poorest groups of the population, usually women aged from 20 to 35 who are bringing up children on their own, with no help from close relatives because they are either dead or missing.
It is extremely hard for these women to survive in their homeland. There are no jobs and no realistic prospect of ever finding one. They have nowhere of their own to live. The only help they receive is from distant relations in whose houses they are forced to stay in virtual slavery.
"When the husband is killed, the widow is left with two options," said my informant. "She can either stay with his relatives and cease being a woman, or go wherever she wants to, but the child will stay with the husband's family. The mother has no say in this." Zarema Muzhikhoeva chose the latter option.
Born in 1983, she was brought up by her grandparents. She attended school for only eight years from the age of seven, and had no further education or work. Her father died when she was a child. Her husband was killed in the first war in Chechnya when she was still pregnant with their daughter; her family home in the village of Bamut in Achkhoi-Martan region was destroyed during the fighting. She had no choice but to take her daughter and live with distant relatives in a steppe settlement known as Asinovskaya.
There, she survived in a position of servility, the norm for Chechen women who find themselves in such a situation. "Mostly I cooked and washed clothes," Zarema recalled when interrogated.
Completely on her own for the first time in her life, Zarema began looking for ways to build up a new existence and to support herself. But everything that could go wrong for her did. She couldn't find a job and drifted from one acquaintance to another, living sometimes in relative squalor.
She missed her daughter so much, but she knew her husband's family wouldn't let her see the child, even for a short time. She met an American of Arab origin who proposed to her. According to Zarema, she didn't like him and wasn't desperate enough at that stage to become somebody's servant once again.
Some time later her situation became severe enough to do what many others wouldn't hesitate to do in lesser circumstances. She committed a theft. She was caught and the case was in the process of being dealt with by the police. In any event this was the least of her worries. Zarema's life was beginning to spiral further out of control. She was conned by some men into owing what was, by Chechen standards, an enormous amount of money.
She knew she could never pay it back.
A female acquaintance (who, Zarema reflected afterwards, probably was involved in the con all along) came to see her and offered her help in solving all her problems. It wouldn't be a problem to pay Zarema's debts, give her grandparents some money to build a new house, and provide a handsome sum for her little daughter.
And all that was required from Zarema was for her to choose the true road of Allah. Zarema, by now at rock bottom, agreed, hoping vaguely that * as she had before - she would find a way out of this latest situation. * Basayev's fighters took her to a village in the mountains and there she lived with them for a month. Her daily routine remained more or less unchanged: she cooked and washed clothes, this time for the fighters.
The only difference was that she had to pray every day. Whenever they had a spare moment, the fighters would go out of their way to tell her about the atrocities of Russian troops in Chechnya.
When her training was complete, she was sent to Moscow, two weeks before two girls from the same group blew themselves up in Tushino. They all stayed together in a house rented in Tolstopaltsevo, a village a few kilometres south of Moscow. Zarema knew nothing of the others' deaths. It was in the yard of this house that the police found, with Zarema's help, a buried metal container filled with explosives belts.
Zarema slept with the man in charge of the group, who was, most likely, the Chechen fighter Temirkan Shogenov. He took her to see one of the Terminator films at the cinema.
Finally the day came. Zarema was told she could at last fulfil the will of Allah. She was given a black shoulder bag containing 1.5kg of plastic explosive, fitted with a push-button detonator. After hours of wandering the streets Zarema, nervous and exhausted, was finally picked up at a café. According to journalists, she tried to push the button. According to the police, she didn't. She was upset when told later that the major had been killed defusing her bomb.
As a biologist I am only too well aware of how strong our instincts are. In women, the instinct of self-preservation is much stronger than in men and I am unable to imagine how these healthy young women could press the button.
"It's impossible to understand how they could do it if you don't know their mentality and their history," said the official who had told me Zarema's story. "And if you haven't seen what their life has been like the past ten years. These women, who are all in their teens or twenties now, have grown up during the war and have seen nothing but death and destruction."
A Chechen professor who is settled in Moscow agreed, after some hesitation, to talk to me - "But please don't mention my name."
I asked him: "So is a human life of no value in Chechnya nowadays?"
"No," he said. "You have misunderstood. A human life is. It's a woman's life that isn't."