Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya

I am a journalist—a special correspondent for the Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta—and this is the only reason I’ve seen the war; I was sent there to cover it. Not, however, because I am a war correspondent and know this subject well. On the contrary, because I am just a civilian. The editor in chief’s idea was simple: the very fact that I’m just a civilian gives me that much deeper an understanding of the experiences of other such civilians, living in Chechen towns and villages, who are caught in the war.

For that reason, I’ve been going to Chechnya every month since July 1999, when the so-called Basayev²⁰ raid on Dagestan took place, which resulted in torrents of refugees from mountain villages and the whole second Chechen war. Naturally, I have traveled far and wide through all of Chechnya. I’ve seen a lot of suffering. The worst of it is that many of the people I’ve been writing about for the past two and a half years are now dead. It has been such a terrible war. Simply medieval, even though it’s taking place as the twentieth century passes into the twenty-first, and in Europe too.

People call the newspaper and send letters with one and the same question: “Why are you writing about this? Why are you scaring us? Why do we need to know this?”

I’m sure this has to be done, for one simple reason: as contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won’t work.

So I want you to know the truth. Then you’ll be free of cynicism.

And of the sticky swamp of racism that our society has been sliding into.

And of having to make difficult decisions about who’s right and who’s wrong in the Caucasus, and if there are any real heroes there now.

London, May 2002: The Beginning

It is the eve of the summer of 2002. We are in the thirty-third month of the second Chechen war. The end of this hopeless war is nowhere to be seen. The “purges”²¹ never stop; they resemble mass autos-da-fé. Torture is the norm. Executions without a trial are routine. Marauding is commonplace. The kidnapping of people by Federal soldiers in order to conduct slave trading (with the living) or corpse trading (with the dead) is the stuff of everyday Chechen life.

“Human substance” disappears overnight, without a trace, à la 1937.

And in the mornings, on the outskirts of town, there are cut-up, disfigured bodies that have been thrown out after curfew.

And for the hundredth or thousandth cursed time, I hear children in the village streets routinely discussing which fellow villager was found, and in what condition. . . . Today . . . yesterday . . . scalped, with sliced-off ears or chopped-off digits. . . .

“So he had no fingers?” one adolescent asks, matter-of-factly.

“No, Alaudin had no toes,” the other answers apathetically.

This is state versus group terrorism. Wahhabi²² bands attack villages, demanding money for a jihad.²³ The army and police, nearly one hundred thousand strong, wander around Chechnya in a state of complete moral decay. And what other response could one expect but more terrorism, and the recruitment of new resistance fighters?

Who is to blame? President Maskhadov,²⁴ who was chosen by the people and is therefore responsible for their fate? Maskhadov is in the mountains. To his people, he’s a leader in name only, and as a rule, he keeps his silence on every issue.

Maskhadov’s comrades in arms? They’re scattered all over the world. Basayev? Gelayev?²⁵ Khattab?²⁶

What about Putin? He’s in the Kremlin, enjoying the respect of the world community as an active member of the international “antiterrorism” VIP club, the so-called coalition against terror. It’s May 2002, and Bush is in Moscow . . .fraternization . . .a “historic visit” . . .but barely a word about Chechnya, as if the war didn’t exist.

The world capitals flash before my eyes as I campaign for support. This spring I’ve been in Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Manila, Bonn, Hamburg . . .Everywhere they invite me to make a speech about “the situation in Chechnya,” but there are zero results. Only polite Western applause in response to the words: “Remember, people are continuing to die in Chechnya every day. Including today.”

It’s a clear, obvious, unbelievable worldwide betrayal of humanitarian values. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a little more than half a century old, has fallen in the second Chechen war.

From Geneva, after some sluggish sessions of “official human rights advocates” (the UN Commission on Human Rights), I go on a trip to Urus-Martan, a district center in Chechnya. The situation there is bloody and stagnant, the same as a year ago. “Death squads”—Federal units belonging to an unknown department—are rushing all over the district destroying the “enemies of Russia.” These enemies consist of anybody who fought for or sympathized with Dudayev²⁷ and Maskhadov, or anyone who happens to be on hand.

May 2002 reeks of despair.

. . . Finally, England. A decent hotel on a nice street. There is a magnificent, elderly aristocratic-looking doorman in a dignified maroon uniform. A gray-haired man with a fixed expression slowly gets up to meet me. He’s wearing a baggy, light gray suit that only underscores his tragic weariness. His weak shoulders are slumped.

This man is a Chechen, a native of Urus-Martan, who hasn’t been there for two years. He can’t be there—that’s the kind of war this is. He glances around too much, as if he were homeless. His life is not comfortable, despite the doorman, the fancy hotel, and the cosmopolitan English surroundings. I search his face for the man I remember. The world knows this gray-haired man completely differently from the way he appears now. They know him from photographs in the newspapers, in news agency reports, and on TV: a dashing, zealous, alert man with a khaki bandanna tied in back of his head, always next to Maskhadov.

This legendary figure is Akhmed Zakayev. He is a brigadier general of the Chechen resistance forces, a comrade in arms of Dudayev (under whom he served as minister of culture) and Maskhadov, an active participant in the Khasavyurt agreements²⁸ at the end of the first Chechen war, and the commander of a special force brigade in the second Chechen war. He was wounded in March 2000, carried off the battlefield through the mountains across the border, and has not returned to Chechnya since. Today, Zakayev is Aslan Maskhadov’s special representative to Europe.

Our meeting has been rescheduled several times, from country to country. Zakayev’s name was handed over to the Interpol by Russia and uses an assumed name.

“I brought you some presents,” he says after we greet each other, and shows me a book and a videotape.

But Zakayev doesn’t put them into my extended hand. He slowly turns the book with its pages down and deliberately shakes it.

“See, there’s nothing else here,” he says, in a completely normal tone of voice. “No white powder. Don’t be afraid.”

I’m not afraid, but I realize that I’m watching his hands carefully anyway. The recent war has damaged both of us. Although we’re in England, we behave as if we were in Russia, where Chechen terrorism is strongly feared, and Chechens try to dot their “i”s right away, before they’re asked to. That’s why Zakayev shakes the book. But this doesn’t satisfy him. He takes a key chain from his pants pocket and unseals the videotape.

“Nothing here either.”

“Akhmed, is all this really necessary?”

He says this without a smile and without malice.

There is an uncomfortable silence.

“When were you in Urus-Martan?” Zakayev asks. Moisture glimmers inside the half-closed eyelids of this man who’s been driven into a corner and is used to constantly checking to see if someone is following him. This isn’t the interview yet—we’re just chatting. Urus-Martan is Zakayev’s native village, so it is especially important for him; it’s the Chechen tradition.

“About ten days ago, at the end of April.”

Zakayev’s eyes are expressionless, as before, but a tear flows from one of them.

I have to say something . . .

“They showed me the street where your house was.”

“It’s been destroyed, you know . . .”

“Not completely?” Zakayev allows himself hope.

But we both know that it’s been razed to the ground.

“Of course not,” I say. “Not completely.”

It’s time to start the interview. About the war we’ve left behind. An interview as long as the war. Or perhaps, as long as life itself. Definitely as long as our lives.

It will be hard to understand what we talked about, considering the massive prowar and anti-Chechen brainwashing on the part of our government. You’ll be able to understand only if you know what happened during the war.