Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (6 page)

A boy of about seven jumps down from the bench. He points a wooden rifle at me and shouts, “Are you a Russian?” The grown-ups shush him, but he yells, “You are a fascist!”

The war we are waging in the Caucasus dishonors our nation from
top to bottom. Do you wonder how we can ever atone for this? How long it will take? Remember, Germany spent half a century trying to free itself from the tatters of its national disgrace. Throughout those decades, Russian children were playing games of fighting the Germans, and the grown-ups encouraged them. Are not we the Germans now? How long will it be before Chechen children stop playing games in which the most unpopular boy is the one who has to be the Russian?

CHECHNYA BELONGS TO RUSSIA, BUT WE DON’T WANT THE CHECHENS

January 31, 2000

The crusted wounds look painted on. The shaven head of a semiconscious child moves feverishly to and fro on an over-laundered greyish-brown institutional pillow. No groaning or whimpering, only a silence deeply unsettling in someone so seriously injured.

“She has small shrapnel fragments in her head, but don’t waste your time on that,” the emotionless voice of a middle-aged woman instructs me from a dark corner of the ward. “Much worse is that now she is an orphan. And take a look under the blanket!”

The shaven skull stubbornly continues trying to dispel its delirium. The little girl is five, her face jaundiced and sallow. Her name is Liana Shamsudinova, and from time to time her eyes flicker half open and stray disapprovingly over the ward without coming to rest on anyone. Her left hip is not covered by the blanket and is worryingly streaked with pus leaking from beneath an enormous dressing.

“You Russians count her as another resistance fighter,” the monologue from the corner goes on. “The girl needs specialist treatment if she isn’t to be crippled for the rest of her life, but she isn’t going to get that here, and we don’t get sent to clinics anywhere else in Russia, because we are Chechens.”

My invisible informant had correctly identified the most important issue that day. The setting was Sunzha District Hospital No. 1 on the Chechnya–Ingushetia border. Until recently every day saw a steady inflow of those most severely injured in the war zone in the security
sweeps, raids, repeat raids and repeat security sweeps. Hundreds of people with amputated limbs: women, children, the elderly, Ingushes, Chechens and Russians. The wounds of most were neglected and festering because they had had to shelter two or three days in cellars waiting for the bombing to stop, unable to leave their villages. Then they had to wait as long again for soldiers at the checkpoints to relent and let them cross over into Ingushetia.

The result has been a wretched carnival of infection in the Sunzha hospital, destroying any remaining nerve endings. Along the corridors, spectral young girls swathed in bandages shamble with unfeeling, lifeless arms and legs. The nerves in some limbs have been severed, while others have succumbed to gangrene.

Who will pay for the intensive courses of treatment they will need for years to come? The same state budget which today is funding the war that crippled them in the first place? Where is our valiant state, conducting this war in accordance with its “overall plan,” expecting to find the money to provide artificial limbs for the hundreds of newly disabled it has created? Which of its plans contains the budgetary provision for that? Who is going to accept responsibility for the thousands of civilians whose health has been taken from them in the course of this fighting?

Millennium Celebrations Caused this Tragedy

I hate battle-pieces. In paintings, as in life, detail is what matters most. It is the detail which gives the measure of our humanity. How we react to the tragedy of one small person accurately reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality; and increasing the numbers doesn’t change much. Little Liana Shamsudinova was born in 1994 in Martan Chu, Urus Martan District, and the recent details of her life are entirely typical of today’s Chechnya.

Fleeing the bombing, her family lived from October to December 1999 in a refugee camp in the hill village of Assinovskaya. From mid-December the refugees came under increasing pressure from Migration Service officials, who did not want them concentrating in one
locality and urged them to return to their home villages, assuring them that peace had returned and their area was secure. On December 29 Liana’s mother, Malika Shamsudinova, finally fell for these lies, the family went back to Martan Chu, and just four days later Liana was orphaned. On January 3, 2000 at 8:20 p.m. their home on Pervomaiskaya Street suffered a direct hit from a tank shell.

There was no military engagement at that time in Martan Chu, but the soldier who fired the shell knew perfectly well what he was doing. He fired just for the hell of it. By current standards in Chechnya 8:20 p.m. is late at night. The federal command has ordained that absolutely everybody must remain in their houses. They are not even allowed out into their own courtyards to relieve themselves, on pain of being shot without warning. This actually happened in Novy Sharoy to Mahomadov, a refugee from Naur, who ventured out just as dusk was falling and was shot in his doorway by a sniper.

Liana’s house was wilfully targeted by someone well aware that it was inhabited. A lit oil stove, that surest sign of life, was visible through the windows. There is every reason to suppose that the shelling was an expression of drunken exuberance on the part of the tank troops deployed on the outskirts of Martan Chu. There was no other firing on the village that night. The soldiers simply loosed off a shell and their unruly emotions were placated.

“They were celebrating the New Year,” Liana’s aunt, Raisa Davletmurzayeva, surmises. This is what the villagers also concluded.

The result was that Liana’s mother, Malika, was killed. She was 28 and was breast-feeding her youngest son, Zelimkhan. The shrapnel split her head in two, and the neighbours who ran to the Shamsudinovs’ house found her body cooling, her breast exposed, and Zelimkhan pressed to it.

The little boy’s position was unchanged in death, firmly clasped in his dead mother’s arms. From beneath the remains of the roof the neighbours retrieved the bodies of Liana’s elder sister, seven-year-old Diana, and, next to her, of her 18-year-old aunt, Roza Azizayeva, who had come to help about the house. The neighbours carried Liana out, alive and crying. There were no other survivors and today she is an
orphan, her father having disappeared somewhere in Ukraine after going to Belaya Kalitva in search of work a year ago.

Since then Liana has not spoken to anyone, and she was certainly not going to speak in Russian to me. She has been in shock since January 3, and only calls out from time to time in Chechen for her mother. In her lucid moments fellow patients have tried to communicate that her mother is dead. It is a Chechen tradition not to conceal misfortune, to teach children to be brave, even when a very young child is facing a lifetime of having to be brave.

“I will look after her of course,” Raisa tells me, “but there is a limit to what I can do. In the Sunzha hospital we had to buy everything ourselves, hypodermic syringes, drugs, drip-feeds. She needs a lot of medical care. Where am I to find the money for that?” By now we are talking in a different hospital, in Galashkino, a tiny primitive facility with only 40 beds. Nearly all the wounded have just been transferred here from Sunzha, which is closed for a thorough disinfection. Contagion spreading from neglected “Chechen” wounds had reached crisis levels.

Liana, although blameless, is also a carrier of infection, and now finds herself in the markedly worse conditions and reduced nursing care of Galashkino Hospital. The wards are cramped and overcrowded, there is little equipment, and it is freezing cold because the heating system is useless. With her major gangrenous fractures, Liana is unlikely to recover in such conditions. How can people survive when the Empire, sweeping aside all in its path, declines to rest its baleful gaze on those who happen to be in its way?

On January 4, the Shamsudinov family funeral was held in Martan Chu. In full view of the tank crews basking in the Caucasian sunshine, all the women and children they had murdered were borne to the cemetery. Not one of them even came to apologize for their New Year high spirits.

Similarly vile, but even more cynical behaviour was displayed in Shali. On January 9, the administration of this district center assembled people in the central square to issue the first pensions and benefit payments from the Russian-installed government of Nikolai Koshman.
There is a school facing the square and Zarema Sadulayeva, its Deputy Headmistress and maths teacher, had also gathered the children to finish giving out New Year and Kurban-Bairam (Eid ul-Adha) presents.

They had no idea that at that same moment resistance fighters were entering the far end of this very large village. A tactical missile came crashing down, not on the enemy detachment but straight into the crowded central square. The fighters melted away, but in the square many people died or were severely injured. How many? Dozens? Hundreds? There is a large discrepancy in the figures given for the simple reason that the surviving villagers could not dig graves fast enough and many buried their relatives together, so that there were fewer graves than casualties. It was another Guernica, comparable in horror to the infamous missile attack on the central market in Grozny last October.

The nightmare was repeated in Shali the following day. Ali-bek Keriev, Zarema’s husband, took his severely injured wife away from the hospital, fearing that it too might be targeted. He asked his sister, a doctor, to come and care for her. Alas, 40-year-old Kisa was killed during an ensuing mortar bombardment, and since January 9 Ali-bek has been unable to sleep. He maintains a full-time vigil at his wife’s bedside. On January 13, he managed to move her, pregnant and close to death, to the central hospital in Nazran but the outlook is not good. He can’t bear to look at her dreadful wounds and watch her convulsions. She desperately needs powerful, intensive-care drugs but as usual they are in short supply. In his sleepless nights Ali-bek writes poetry, a personal appeal to the Being who may or may not be sitting on high observing everything that happens here below. All Zarema had done was to go out to distribute presents to children.

Whatever appeals may be addressed to the Almighty, relations between civilians and federal troops are just as soulless in Shali as in Martan Chu. There will be no inquiry into the killings in Martan Chu, the massacre of a family not meriting a criminal investigation. No prosecutor will question the shameless lies which tricked the Shamsudinovs into returning to their village. The implication is that the aftermath of the New Year crime is the personal problem of this luckless little girl and
her Aunt Raisa, who now faces the task of trying to bring her up. Raisa views the future with unconcealed foreboding; in order to treat the child’s injuries adequately she would need a lot of money for the proper drugs, a top-class clinic and consultants, things she is not going to find in Martan Chu or anywhere else in Chechnya or Ingushetia today. Be that as it may, the Empire refuses to make an exception: Chechens are not allowed beyond the borders of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Not a single general is to be found with the decency to admit that he bears any guilt for Liana’s suffering, or that it is his duty to help her.

The situation is identical in respect of Shali: no half-witted gun-layer has been blamed for devastating the central square, no criminal charges are being brought for the murder of civilians. Nobody has so much as apologized.

Madina and Alikhan: A New Generation Consigned to a Hospital Bed

Madina and Alikhan Avtorkhanov are cousins. Their mothers Khava and Aishat are sisters. Khava lived in Samashki and Aishat in Novy Sharoy in Achkhoy-Martan District. They were not far from each other, but the shelling left them separated by a whirlwind of deadly lead flying in all directions.

In this war family reunions take place outside operating theatres. The sisters met in the treatment unit of Sunzha Hospital. Khava was at the bedside of 22-year-old Madina, while Aishat was looking after her younger son, 18-year-old Alikhan. (Her elder son died during random shelling of their village during the First Chechen War.) Madina, only recently a beautiful young girl but now worn out by operations and pain, her parchment-colored face and body a shadow of what they were, has almost certainly been permanently crippled by the injuries she sustained on October 27. Some of her bone has been cut away and they need to find somewhere for her to have an operation, and then somewhere for her to convalesce because their house at 27 Kooperativnaya Street has been destroyed.

The history of Alikhan’s illness is no less grim. One leg has already been amputated above the knee as a result of the curse of gangrene. For several days the soldiers refused to allow the wounded to be taken out of their village. He has already lost the big toe on his other foot and so far attempts to stop the gangrene from spreading have been unsuccessful. Alikhan is a quiet, thoughtful young man who holds Russia responsible for destroying his life on October 23, the day he was injured. He has no plans for the future now. His only distraction is when one of the men visiting the hospital picks up his stump of a body and takes him for a “walk” along the corridors.

Alikhan tells me that none of his classmates are still alive. He left school along with eight other boys and eight girls. All the boys have since been killed. He is alive, but crippled. Everybody was sheltering in their cellars during relentless shelling of Novy Sharoy. When things quietened down at around nine in the morning Alikhan’s classmates quietly came together beside his house at 12 Tsentralnaya Street to discuss what they should do. Mortars were fired at them and all except Alikhan were killed. Who is going to provide the complex, expensive artificial limbs he now needs?

“Nobody, of course,” Alikhan says. “I am a Chechen. I can just crawl from now until the day I die.”

“Why do you get so het up about them?” the officers demanded when I tried to find out who would be responsible for supplying the artificial limbs and treatment required after these wicked acts against the civilian population. “They are not human beings, they are little furry animals. Don’t worry, they’ll soon give birth to plenty more new little furry animals.”