Friday, January 30, 2004
Beyond
Politics
A young woman with bare arms and a pale, pretty face
lies on her side on a bed, the sheets wrapped around her. But there is
something wrong with the picture, and it takes a caption to explain it: Half of
her body has been torn away by shrapnel. In an image from five years earlier, a
man in a fur hat lies sprawled on a snowy pavement, his gnarled face
half-turned toward us as he tries to prop himself up. He could be taken for a
Moscow drunk who has slipped on the ice, were it not for the dead body lying
behind him. In fact, he has lost a leg to a bomb explosion and is dying before
our eyes.
A lot of analysis continues to be written on Chechnya,
and justly so. But I think it is also right to pause and feel some rage. Rage
at the senseless destruction and brutality visited by a government on a
province that it claims as its own. Rage at how the Russian leadership has
murdered thousands of its own citizens and yet still takes no responsibility
for it. There are many secondary complications in Chechnya that stall the way
to a solution, but there are also dead-simple crimes that demand attention and
justice.
American photographer Stanley Greene's new book,
"Open Wound," is full of that rage. "My anger is total,"
Green writes. Like pretty much anyone who has visited Chechnya in the last
decade -- and, as someone who went through that experience, I include myself --
the experience deeply shocked Greene and altered his view of the world. Ten
years on, after repeated returns to keep faith with the victims of the war, he
has channeled his anger into a compassionate and memorable book.
"Open Wound" takes 10 minutes to leaf
through, but leaves behind unforgettable images. Charred bodies alternate with
empty apartments where people have died. A color photograph of a pile of
rotting books is enough to tell us what happened to Grozny University. Above
all, there are faces. War confers people a visual honesty, and Greene records
that with unflinching concern. A bare-chested man, driven mad by the bombing
that killed his family, clutches a chair over his head while the fires of
Grozny burn behind him. A few days later, he is also dead. A woman stands
weeping at her door, which is stamped with the traditional handprints of
greeting. Looking at the picture, it is hard not to weep along with her.
Very often, debates on Chechnya turn into conflicting
statements of belief about what the Chechen people actually want. Everyone,
from Vladimir Putin to Shamil Basayev, maintains that he or she has the
Chechens' best interest at heart. Long-distance pundits chime in with their own
views. Reporting from ground-level, Greene's collection and three other books
by reporters Thomas Goltz and Anna Politkovskaya and Chechen surgeon Khassan
Baiev come as a welcome corrective to that.
Indeed, as the years go by, Chechens' belief in any
politics at all seems to diminish. I have never met a single Chechen -- even at
the senior levels of the so-called pro-Moscow leadership -- who has supported Russia's
military campaign in Chechnya, and there are certainly none in these four
books. But support for the pro-independence rebels has also dropped
precipitately.
Or maybe it was never quite as high as was generally
thought. My impression, even during the 1994-1996 war, was that support for
armed resistance was fairly provisional. In January 1997, Chechens did vote en
masse for their victorious battle commander Aslan Maskhadov, and I can vouch
for the enthusiasm of the voters and the fairness of the elections. But even
here, I believe, they were voting more for Maskhadov the peacemaker than
Maskhadov the warrior.
In February 1995, I spent half a day in the western
Chechen village of Achkhoi-Martan. I remember the head of the village saying
that he was being squeezed by the Russians on one side and the Chechen fighters
on the other, and had tried to persuade the latter to leave in order to spare
Achkhoi-Martan from destruction. He failed.
A few days after I left the area, the American
journalist Thomas Goltz arrived and spent six weeks just down the road in the
village of Samashki. He accounts for that time and for subsequent trips to
Chechnya in "Chechnya Diary." By chance, he had picked the village
that two months later became the scene of the worst massacre of the first
Chechen war, when 100 villagers were killed by drugged-up Russian soldiers.
Goltz, as anyone who has met him would testify, is a
warm, impulsive and, occasionally, terrifying personality. This book is the
successor to his "Azerbaijan Diary," a totally gripping and
hair-raising account of the first two years of independence in that Caucasian
republic. In the tumultuous years of 1991 to 1993, Goltz coined the term
"contact journalism" and made it his credo. Basically, the idea is
that "if you didn't see it, don't report on it." The result is Hunter
S. Thompson-meets-the Caucasus -- a roller-coaster ride through war and
revolution thankfully unmediated by any theoretical notions that this was
actually "a transition to democracy and a market economy."
Goltz spent much less time in Chechnya, so
"contact journalism" pays fewer dividends here. Some readers will get
cross at the way in which Goltz's big personality crowds the pages of
"Chechnya Diary." Russian names and words are routinely mangled and
misspelled, as are those of a few Western journalists. Despite these caveats,
however, the new book is a deeply compelling picture of ground-level Chechnya
and the appalled, confusing feeling of living inside a war-zone.
In the notebooks he publishes alongside his pictures,
photographer Stanley Greene records his anguished thoughts on being a war
reporter. There are "70 or 80 corpses" lying in the streets of
Grozny, and Greene knows that he should photograph them but cannot bear to do
so when he sees the dogs eating their faces. Later, he will note his growing
sense of detachment.
The problem of being a reporter-at-war is also one of
Goltz's themes, and his reflections on the subject should make sober reading
for journalism students. Goltz probes hard at the question of whether he is
making a difference, or indeed only making things more dangerous for the people
around him. His villains are the news editors who are not interested in his six
weeks' worth of material shot inside a Chechen village because "the story
has moved on," and who then, hilariously, become desperate for just the
same footage when Samashki becomes "the story" again because of the
massacre. Never have the rituals of foreign news -- as elaborate and arbitrary
as Japanese theater -- been exposed so keenly.
In "Chechnya Diary," Goltz gives us a
fascinating up-close portrait of Hussein, the local commander in Samashki.
Hussein had come to Samashki from Kazakhstan, where he was born, a relict of
the Stalinist deportations. Less religious and less observant of traditional
Chechen practices than his fellow villagers, he was also more nationalistic.
Like many Chechens, Hussein formed his identity in
ever-shifting response to the various persecutions and concessions that Russia
meted out. This was also the lot of another quite extraordinary Chechen, the
surgeon Khassan Baiev, who used his Russian medical education to deal with the
effects of Russian military brutality. In his memoirs, titled "The
Oath," Baiev describes how he frequently risked death simply in order to
stick by the doctor's Hippocratic oath and treat both Chechen fighters and
Russian soldiers.
"The Oath" is precious for being the first
published account by an articulate Chechen of both pre-war life and the
experience of the war. Born in 1963, Baiev describes what it was like to grow
up as a Soviet Chechen. Glad of the opportunities for advancement that the
Soviet system provided, the young Baiev was nevertheless angered by the
discrimination he faced and stayed committed to Chechen and family traditions.
Upon graduation from medical school in Krasnoyarsk, Baiev more or less
abandoned his Russian girlfriend Marina, having decided that he must marry a
Chechen. His absolute determination made him not only a top surgeon, but an
international judo champion.
In 1994, Baiev returned to his native village of
Alkhan-Kala, where he worked as a surgeon throughout the first Chechen
conflict. Narrating the nightmarish kidnappings of 1997-1999, he introduces us
to his psychopathic fellow villager, the master kidnapper Arbi Barayev, who,
Baiev is convinced, worked in collaboration with the Russian security services.
Fascinating as it is, all this is more or less a
prelude to Baiev's account of the first two years of the second Chechen
conflict, which makes for some of the most extraordinary passages about war
ever written. When the Russians began to bomb Grozny and outlying villages such
as Alkhan-Kala, Baiev's house was partially destroyed and then comprehensively
looted by soldiers. Still, the surgeon managed to set up a field hospital in
the village, where he worked in almost unimaginable conditions -- using a car
battery when the electricity failed, a hacksaw to do amputations and a
carpenter's drill for brain surgery. Alkhan-Kala was caught right in the middle
of the fighting. One day it would be bombed or visited by Russian General
Vladimir Shamanov's hideous kontraktniki, who were rampaging and raping their
way across western Chechnya, while the next day the terrifying kidnapper
Barayev and his fighters would come charging through.
Loyal to his oath, Baiev operated on everyone, but the
danger kept growing. In early January 2000, Baiev was almost executed by
Barayev -- whom he had saved from death five years before -- for having treated
the Russians. He was saved only by an influx of wounded Chechens needing his
help. Then, two days later, the doctor was beaten up by a gang of Russian
kontraktniki for having treated Barayev's men. They were dragging him off,
probably to kill him, when he was saved by a crowd of angry women who berated
the soldiers for taking away a doctor who had treated their own.
Then, at the end of January, the Chechen fighters
retreated from Grozny across a minefield. Scores were killed and around 300
were wounded and ended up in Baiev's hospital. Baiev began a marathon session
of operations. He saved the life of Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, who
had stepped on a mine. In three days, without sleeping, he performed 67
amputations and seven brain surgeries.
Baiev tried to arrange for the fighters to be ferried
out of the village, but was detained by Russian soldiers who fortunately did
not realize who he was. When he eventually got back to Alkhan-Kala, the village
had been "cleaned up" and the hospital mined. Seven of his patients
had been shot at point-blank range, including an elderly Russian woman whom he
had treated for weeks.
Baiev managed to escaped to Ingushetia, Moscow and
eventually the United States. The last part of his moving book relates his
strange arrival in a foreign land where he is not even qualified to practice
medicine. After he left, one of his nephews was arrested and tortured in a
filtration camp and another was murdered, probably by Arbi Barayev's gang.
The violence in Chechnya continues today, if not at the
same level, then in a different style. Luckily, Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna
Politkovskaya continues in her lonely crusade to record it. Her second book of
reports in English, "A Small Corner of Hell" is as harrowing as the
first, "A Dirty War."
Politkovskaya is unsurpassed in "contact
journalism." She has made about 50 trips to Chechnya since the beginning
of the second war in 1999. No doubt, this is why she attracts such hostility in
Russia. Two years ago, while participating in a panel about Russia, I heard the
novelist Tatyana Tolstaya angrily rail against Politkovskaya and attack
"Chechen bandits." That extraordinary outburst said a lot more about
Tolstaya than it did about Politkovskaya. I can only surmise that
Politkovskaya's relentless accounts of the barbaric behavior of Russians in
Chechnya prick uncomfortably at the consciences of those who want to say that
all is well in Putin's Russia.
Politkovskaya has made it her mission to be the
defender of Chechen civilians. Through the dozens of tiny vignettes and reports
in "A Small Corner of Hell," she exposes in detail the humiliations
inflicted by the Russian army on the weak and the defenseless, who can be more
easily subjected to rape and violence and extorted of their money and possessions.
But Politkovskaya gives no quarter to the rebels, either: The Chechens with
whom she spends time curse rebel leaders Basayev and Ruslan Gelayev just as
freely as they curse the Russian forces.
If anyone held out any hope for Moscow's latest policy
of "Chechenization" and of sub-contracting the war effort to its
chosen leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, they should read Politkovskaya and think again.
"I've never met a Chechen who would say, 'I respect Kadyrov,'"
Politkovskaya writes, arguing that he is equally hated in Chechnya by Moscow's
supporters and opponents.
If a single word in these books sums up Chechnya's
condition, it is "exhaustion." Chechens are worn out from a decade of
violence. Their voices are dignified, aggrieved -- and, above all, very tired.
They deserve something different. But who is listening?
Thomas de Waal is author, most recently, of
"Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War."