28 November 1999
We already had enough problems with the weather – it was cold, damp and windy – when the helicopter appeared, flying low over the ground, intimidating us and stirring up a veritable hurricane. It's chilly in Russia and frightening.
With a crazy determination, worthy of better application, the helicopter circles towards us a fifth time. It rumbled, descending still lower towards the field, letting the gunner examine us at point-blank range and again flew away.
Finally Bagaudin Batygov, administrator of the "Southern" refugee settlement in Ingushetia (nine kilometres from the Nesterovskaya village) could stand it no longer. He grabbed a piece of paper from his briefcase and quickly began to write something on it. And at the same time he muttered:
"I always do that when the helicopters start buzzing us. Then 'they' think that I'm here on official business and don't start shooting. I'd much prefer to stay alive! Don't look up, they might misinterpret that. The gunner..."
He's right. It really did help.
Now I can get on my way. My mission could not be less warlike. The Southern refugee settlement is an open field on the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia where they erected 95 of the "Luzhkov" caravans a month ago – humanitarian aid sent by the city administration in Moscow. But no one has moved in there and today they present a pitiful spectacle. The military were roving all around the area. To begin with they used the caravans as winter quarters, but then they went to live in dugouts and now they come here on raids every evening. The doors have been broken, the roofs stolen, windows smashed, and all the valuable fixtures and fittings – heaters, sinks, cupboards and tables – have been carted off to some unknown destination. Of the hundred or so panels brought here to construct outdoor toilets only four remain.
As the helicopter flew away, we called out: "Hey, soldier! We know you're there. What's the problem?" We could even see these filthy hunted soldiers. But they kept silent. Then there was a burst of machine-gun fire. Their ill will expressed in lead. Thankfully it was not directly aimed at us.
This was the road to Nesterovskaya village and by the roadside, two kilometres from the Southern settlement, the officers of these pillaging soldiers stood in a group. It was 10.16 a.m. and they were knocking back vodka as fast as they could. This is what people in Chechnya and Ingushetia fear most of all today: the lawless behaviour of the army. If you're unlucky enough to fall into the hasty hands of a drunken or hashish-crazed "man with a gun" then you've had it.
It is quite clear even now how the war is changing as the cold weather sets in and the operation drags on. The lives of thousands of civilians become dependent not on the will of those who write the orders in Moscow and Mozdok32 but of the man who actually carries out the order. Everything depends on his intellectual level and moral qualities. Anyone can shoot where they like in this war. Survival now depends on a whim.
Monsters and Human Beings
We know of instances when air-force pilots jettisoned their bombs into the river on the outskirts of villages so as not to commit the sin of bombing their peaceful inhabitants.
We know cases of quite the opposite kind. The pilots deliberately fired on the Rostov-Baku Highway when refugees were fleeing along it from the war zone, and then flew past a second, third and even a fourth time when they saw that someone below was still moving. The war is rapidly acquiring two faces and each potential victim hopes and prays that they will be lucky and meet the "kind" face of this war.
Asya Astamirova, a young 28-year-old inhabitant of the Katyr-Yurt village in the Achkhoi-Martan district, has looked at both the one and the other. She survived physically because some soldiers saved her. But she is now dead to the world because other soldiers carried out a dreadful and cynical atrocity before her very eyes.
On 16 November Asya was bringing the body of her husband Asian back to be buried in Katyr-Yurt. He had died in the Sunzhensk district hospital from the wounds he received when he came under fire. With her in the car were her children, six-year-old Aslanbek and two-year-old Salambek. In another car were Asian's older sister Oeva, a mother of two, and their two uncles who were no longer young men. At the checkpoint between Achkhoi-Martan and Katyr-Yurt they were stopped and, without a word, the soldiers opened fire on both vehicles. When the first burst into flames Asya and the little boys leapt out. "For Allah's sake, save us!" they cried. The contract soldiers in their bandannas, who were not raw youths, continued shooting and told her: "There's no Allah, you Chechen bitch! You're dead."
They fired directly at her and the children. Aslanbek fell unconscious, Salambek screamed and Asya saw the car and her husband's body burn. Young conscripts observed the whole scene from a distance. When the contract soldiers had finished and went off to rest, the conscripts loaded the wounded Asya into an armoured vehicle and took her away. After several hours driving across the fields, avoiding the military posts, the soldiers unloaded the wounded family outside Sunzhensk hospital and without a word to anyone they left.
Asya is still in a state of shock. She gazes blankly round ward No I where she and the children were placed. Her mother Esita Islamova asks each new visitor: "How can I tell anyone after this that we belong together, that we're citizens of Russia? I can't!"
I try to stroke tiny Salambek's hair – his right leg is encased in plaster where fragments hit him – but the boy begins to scream and cry. He turns away and hides in the pillow.
"He's afraid," Esita explains. "You're a Slav, like the contract soldiers."
"But what about the conscripts, they're also Slavs?"
"He's only a child . . . It's what he remembers and that's what he's reacting to."
Our losses are immeasurable as we let the army get out of hand and degenerate into anarchy. By allowing such a war to be fought in our own country, without any rules, not against terrorists but against those who hate their own bandits perhaps even more strongly than we do, we are the losers and the loss is irreversible.
INGUSHETIA