Martyrdom Usurped: Chechnya’s Black Widows

By ANNIE ATURA

April 6, 2010

Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter Vladimir Putin is pan­ick­ing over the female sui­cide bombers who killed 38 and injured more than 60 on March 29. The author­i­ties are trou­bled by the real­iza­tion that the bombers belong to a move­ment: the “Black Wid­ows, ” who have ter­ror­ized Chech­nya for a decade. So named for the assump­tion that they are act­ing to avenge broth­ers, hus­bands, fathers and sons killed by Russ­ian troops, the Black Wid­ows have become a sym­bol of both inde­pen­dence and sub­servience, strength and weak­ness in a coun­try that per­ceives its own des­tiny to be in the hands of unsym­pa­thetic foreigners.

Dzhanet Abdu­rakhmanova, one of the indi­vid­u­als respon­si­ble for the March 29 bomb­ing, was the 17-year-old widow of a mil­i­tant leader killed last year. Her accom­plice at press time is thought to be Markha Ustarkhanova, 20 years old, and also a widow.

Nearly every month for the past two years, a Chechen has gone through with a sui­cide bomb­ing. The recent sub­way bomb­ing in Moscow is only the lat­est in a string of sim­i­lar attacks – and, as with Chechen sui­cide bomb­ings, Russ­ian author­i­ties have tried to chalk up the acts of des­per­a­tion to Islam.

Yet the evi­dence sug­gests oth­er­wise. There were 27 attacks from June 2000 to Novem­ber 2004, and no attacks between then and Octo­ber 2007. The 18 attacks that have taken place since then have been dri­ven by the Russ­ian effort to stamp out the remain­ing mil­i­tants alto­gether via a coun­tert­er­ror­ism offen­sive. This effort has exac­er­bated the prob­lem. Russ­ian author­i­ties have abducted and impris­oned sus­pects and inspired sup­port for their activ­i­ties. Forced con­fes­sions have been rumored; sus­pects’ fam­ily houses have been burned. In Feb­ru­ary 2009, The New York Times reported exten­sive use of tor­ture and exe­cu­tion in Russia’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Women play an unusu­ally active role in the con­flict. Since 2000, 43 dif­fer­ent sui­cide bomb­ings have been under­taken in the name of Chechnya’s lib­er­a­tion, involv­ing 63 indi­vid­u­als – 40 per­cent of whom were female. Of the 43 peo­ple whose birth­places are known, 38 were native to the Cau­ca­sus. The most deadly attack by a Black Widow to date was the coor­di­nated bomb­ing of two pas­sen­ger flights in August 2004, which took 90 lives. Until the Rus­sians’ coun­tert­er­ror­ism offen­sive, the extrem­ism of such attacks had dimin­ished pub­lic sup­port for the sui­cide bombers. The 2004 Beslan school mas­sacre under­taken by Chechan extrem­ists left hun­dreds of Russ­ian chil­dren dead, to the detri­ment of the Chechan sep­a­ratist cause. As a sep­a­ratist spokesman said, “A big­ger blow could not have been dealt on us. Peo­ple around the world will think that Chechens are beasts and mon­sters if they could attack children.”

The des­per­a­tion that led to the sui­cide bomb­ings began in 1999, when the Rus­sians invaded Chech­nya and killed 30,000 to 40,000 civil­ians of a pop­u­la­tion of about a mil­lion. The first sui­cide attack took place in 2000 – and its per­pe­tra­tors were female. On June 7, Khava Barayeva and Luiza Mago­madova drove into a Russ­ian Spe­cial Forces unit with a truck laden with explo­sives.

Women tend to be more effec­tive than men in Chech­nyan sui­cide bomb­ings, killing an aver­age of 21 peo­ple per attack, com­pared to 13 for males, accord­ing to The New York Times. They also tend to assume more risky mis­sions; they travel incon­spic­u­ously to their tar­gets, accord­ing to a July 2003 inves­tiga­tive report by the Russ­ian mag­a­zine Kommersant-Vlast. Chechen women have car­ried out 8 of the 10 sui­cide attacks in Moscow.

Yet women’s assump­tion of the role of sui­cide bomber has not nec­es­sar­ily cor­re­sponded with a shift in opin­ion sur­round­ing gen­der roles. Barayeva couched the rea­son­ing behind her attack in gen­dered lan­guage – but she did not by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion speak from a fem­i­nist per­spec­tive. In her mar­tyr video, she exhorted Chechen men to “not take the woman’s role by stay­ing at home.”

Another Chech­nyan fighter, named Rosa, described her embar­rass­ment about tak­ing on the trap­pings of a male fighter: “At first, when the com­man­der told me to put on fatigues I couldn’t do it. Then I obeyed him but put a skirt over the trousers,” she said, accord­ing to a report by The Toronto Star.

Any mis­di­rected fem­i­nism at work beneath the sur­face of the bomb­ings has been fur­ther sub­verted by pop­u­lar assump­tions regard­ing the attacks’ moti­va­tion. Despite clear evi­dence of unrest within Chech­nya, the Krem­lin has been quick to claim that the women were being actively exploited by (male) ter­ror­ists from abroad: “This is absolutely not char­ac­ter­is­tic of Chechens,” said Aslan­bek Aslakhanov, a mem­ber of the Russ­ian par­lia­ment. “Men never send their women to fight in wars. There is no reli­gious aspect to this – it’s psy­cho­log­i­cal … ter­ror­ists exploit­ing the mis­for­tune of these women.” Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Dmitry Medvedev has called the male coor­di­na­tors who planned the most recent bomb­ings “beasts,” and announced, “We will find and destroy them all.”  Respon­si­bil­ity, how­ever, may be dif­fi­cult to allocate.

The Rus­sians are deeply threat­ened by the idea that women are being drawn into the fight. The pres­ence of females in the sep­a­ratist move­ment seems to prove that the Rus­sians’ con­trol of Chech­nya isn’t so benef­i­cent, after all: if even women are fight­ing, the assump­tion goes, then Russ­ian vio­lence has per­me­ated the home. This is not a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion that the Rus­sians are eager to assume, and it’s only nat­ural that offi­cials would attempt to shift atten­tion back to the pub­lic sphere by claim­ing that the Black Wid­ows are merely uncon­scious pawns in a polit­i­cal game.

By their very epi­thet, the Black Wid­ows are defined by their male loved ones’ deaths and polit­i­cal inten­tions. Some fem­i­nists might insist that these women were inde­pen­dent actors,  and reject any reas­sign­ment of respon­si­bil­ity. It’s unclear how the women them­selves saw it– whether their des­per­a­tion was a pecu­liarly “fem­i­nine” one, whether they were proud of their unusual role as female mil­i­tants (as sug­gested by a photo of Dzhen­net Abdul­layeva in which she poses defi­antly with her hus­band and her gun), or whether their ter­ror­ism was, to them, ulti­mately gen­der­less. Imag­in­ing these ter­ror­ists’ per­spec­tives is an uncom­fort­able exer­cise– no more uncom­fort­able, though, than Russia’s pat dis­missal of their crimes.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale Col­lege. She is a staff writer for Broad Recog­ni­tion.