Salvation Army on the Front Lines in Aid to Chechnya

GROZNY, Russia, May 31 (RNS)--To reach this obliterated city, humanitarian-aid truck convoys run a gauntlet of a half-dozen Russian military checkpoints, where surly soldiers check documents, affect menacing looks, and sometimes extort minor bribes.

It is a well-choreographed, monotonous routine performed dozens of times a day. It all falls to pieces, however, when the Salvation Army trucks come along.

At checkpoint after checkpoint on a recent journey into Grozny, soldiers skipped all the formalities and greeted the lead Salvation Army vehicle with a polite request for a Salvation Army button. Just like American kids fixated on Pokemon, Russian recruits stationed in Chechnya are obsessed with getting the dime-size Salvation Army lapel pins.

At one muddy roadblock surrounded by barbed wire and manned by tanned soldiers with automatic rifles beneath their olive ponchos, an ominous voice boomed over the public address system: "Where are the buttons? They promised us buttons."

The fad on the front line of Russia's battle against Muslim rebel fighters is, perhaps, an indication of soldiers' boredom--or maybe they view themselves as agents of salvation? If nothing else, it is a powerful testimony to the Salvation Army's gutsy presence in a godforsaken place few other religious-aid agencies have dared venture.

"We are the first to get to places in the hills where they are still shooting," said Idris Musayev, 40, coordinator of the Salvation Army's project here, as he led the convoy east to Grozny in a small Russian-made Lada car.

Musayev, an ethnic Chechen and a Muslim, is intensely proud of his work with the evangelical Protestant organization that is far more active in the region than the country's Russian Orthodox Church or various Muslim humanitarian groups.

When the Salvation Army first started distributing baby food to villages and towns in the breakaway republic of Chechnya on March 2, the Russian military was still battling for them. Now, heavy fighting has given way to isolated hit-and-run guerrilla attacks, and the daytime security situation has somewhat stabilized.

Despite the improvements, large humanitarian organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have chosen to stay out of Chechnya, instead focusing on the estimated 215,000 refugees living in temporary shelters just across the border in Ingushetia. That means the Salvation Army's $100,000-a-month baby food program is vital to those Chechen mothers and infants who remain behind in the ravaged republic.

On a recent weekday morning, the Salvation Army's mud-spattered white trucks pulled into the village of Cheri-Yurt, located about 10 miles from Grozny and home to 22,000 people, 10,000 of them new arrivals fleeing fighting elsewhere in Chechnya.

According to the women standing in line for the Salvation Army food package for children 5 years old and younger, this was the first time any such aid had been distributed in the town since normal food deliveries were disrupted with the onset of fighting last October.

Mali Takhterova, a 40-year-old housewife, explained how she recently gave birth to an underweight son.

"We didn't have enough to eat. The baby was born at just 1.6 kilograms [under 4 pounds]," Takhterova said as she stood in line with other local women. "There won't be many more new children here anytime soon. There's just not enough to feed them with."

Each food package contains enough juice, dry milk, porridge, and puree to sustain a child for three weeks, said Salvation Army Capt. Geoff Ryan, a wiry Canadian with a close-cropped beard who launched the Army's program in the region and sometimes rides shotgun with Musayev.

Ryan envisioned the children's food packages as a way of filling a niche not covered by other aid groups.

Continued on page 2: »