Monday, Mar. 25, 2002

The Forbidden Valley

By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE

Just beyond the last checkpoint, where Georgian Interior Forces yet again register visitors, a black BMW waited on the beat-up road. It belonged to Aslanbek, a self-described Chechen refugee and representative of the inhabitants of Duisi, the largest village in the Pankisi Gorge, a remote Georgian valley that hit the headlines in February after the U.S. announced it was an al-Qaeda base area.

"Welcome to Duisi," he said, asking two journalists the purpose of their visit. To discover why Washington was so worried about the Gorge, we answered delicately. "No one here will answer that question," he replied, and relations went downhill from there. Previous visitors had met emotional Chechen refugees or reassuring local Georgian officials who denied that there were any terrorists in the 17-km-long valley. This time, perhaps because the visit was unannounced, the mood was brusque and unwelcoming.

Well-built young Chechen men with full beards and a young woman in a flowing face cloth slipped past but avoided conversation. They would be unusual in Chechnya, with its more relaxed approach to Islamic dress codes. Other residents were particularly incensed at a request to see the new mosque — built, according to officials in Tbilisi, by Wahhabi money from Saudi Arabia. "Go take pictures of churches," said one, who said he was a refugee from southern Chechnya. "Why are you poking your nose into our mosque?"

The village, population about 3,000, was well-kept, and several new houses, luxurious-looking by any standards, sported double satellite dishes — surprising for a place that officially lives off subsistence farming and handouts. The mosque was closed and the mullah unavailable. After a photographer had snapped a passerby without permission, locals told us angrily to get out — or else. On the main track out of the village, young men bent over the hood of a car, their sidearms showing. One played with a two-way radio that was, a Georgian police escort remarked glumly, more modern than anything his men had.

A brief visit to the Gorge, about three hours drive from Tbilisi, made it clear that the area was completely out of Georgian control. The escort, from the local police headquarters, admitted that he had been in the village — the edge of the village anyway — a few weeks ago, when he was called in to examine the severed head of a local "bandit," he explained. The visit did not explain who was really hiding there. It is obviously a haven for Chechen fighters and bandits, and senior European diplomats say it is an increasingly significant staging post for the manufacture and export of heroin from Afghanistan. But the U.S. government believes that on any one day between 10 and 80 international terrorists with links to al-Qaeda are in the Gorge. Most are from Saudi Arabia or Jordan, with possibly some Algerians. Washington will not say what al-Qaeda is doing there, but stresses they are neither stragglers from Afghanistan, nor there by accident. They are in the valley with ill intent. Some have arrived since the collapse of the Taliban. Others came earlier and may have simply flown into the capital on regular flights, thanks to corrupt government ministers.

As a result of the U.S. announcement about al-Qaeda in the Pankisi — which came as something of a surprise, said Defense Minister David Tevzadze in an interview — the first of up to 200 U.S. trainers will be arriving in a week or two. Their task is to create, from a demoralized and bedraggled army, a combat-ready force of about 1,500 men. Georgian officials hope that the $64 million program will just be the beginning of a close alliance with the U.S. It will certainly be the start of Washington's headaches. These include a corrupt system that has allegedly protected terrorists, smugglers and drug lords, and a regime that would love to use the new force against Abkhazia, the Russian-protected Black Sea region that broke away in 1993. Not to mention the tough, unfriendly inhabitants of Pankisi.