6 December 1999
Abandon all logic, ye who travel here. Shake off your Moscow stereotypes and conceptions. Forget all you have been told about this war. Then you will rapidly see that the army you were shown, confident in its sacred purpose and storming one enemy position after another with ease and no tangible losses, does not exist.
Instead you see exhausted men with unbalanced minds. Then there's the cold, the filth, scabies, rotting feet, drunkenness and hashish. And they all desperately want to come through this alive.
Fatal Confrontation with a Cow
"If those ***** in Moscow are not going to pay me then I'll . . ." – the General yelled with such gusto that the sound echoed around the hills and drowned the howls of the artillery salvos – ". . . go back to Moscow and demand my money! Why come here causing mischief?"
We were standing outside the village of Muzhichi, in the distant foothills of Ingushetia. For no reason whatsoever this army general had just shot dead a skinny, young brown cow that provided the milk for one Ingush family. It's not far from the border with independent Georgia and no distance at all, across the pass, to rebellious Chechnya. So the troops and howitzers have long been billeted in the village and the children sleep badly at night, disturbed by the crash of the artillery.
The cow met its end as follows. She was ambling back from the pasture through the twilight with the other cattle towards her familiar shed. She could already see the fence, where she enjoyed scratching herself, and her owner, Khadizhat, whose warm hands would gently pull at her stubborn teats each evening. Suddenly the path to her familiar and understandable world was blocked by the General. (We know his name and surname, but are not publishing them because he has children of his own, and they are not to blame.)
He was young and handsome, a striking figure. A real fighter. Bare-chested, camouflage hat at an angle, he had fury in his eyes and was as full of testosterone as any teenager after three months at the front. Leaving his men behind him he placed his (by local standards) Very Important Person in the middle of the path and faced the herd. The General was obviously selecting a target. Then, he rapidly fired his machine-gun one-handed and from the hip. Khadizhat screamed and the village shuddered. Tomorrow they would be burying someone else they thought.
First the General shot the cow with his own gun. Then he lifted the body onto the armoured vehicle and, to the wails and laments of the cow's owner, ordered his men to drag it back to the field-kitchen.
"You had nothing to eat?" I asked.
"No, I'm not hungry. It's just that those ***** aren't paying me any money!"
"Who? The Ingush from Muzhichi?"
"No, the Muscovites in Internal Affairs."
The soldiers listen very attentively to this conversation.
"What's your name?"
"It's a military secret." The cow-conqueror smelled of stale alcohol. "We are forbidden to associate with journalists. One more question and I'll arrest you for spying."
*
In the given circumstances our General has evidently lost "the ability to analyse events and understand his own thoughts and actions". It is that capacity, supposedly, which defines the professional war-worthiness of our senior officers – just as those with warm and gentle hands are chosen to milk the cows. Perhaps, though, you are consoling yourself with the thought that this was a regrettable misunderstanding. It only reflects, you say to yourself, the tolerable percentage of monsters that somehow have found their way into the disciplined ranks of those who defended the Motherland from international terrorism. Before I answer, let me show you the second picture in our North Caucasian military exhibition.
A High the Size of an Ammunition Box
Yura's tongue had obviously got the better of him and Volodya also felt an excessive and strange urge to chatter. It was clear they were both mildly stoned. Their thoughts became confused and tangled, and constantly turned back on their tracks but they each have one endlessly repeated, muddled and obsessive theme. Anyone who has smoked grass can tell what the problem with Yura and Volodya is.
They are both serving with the OMON [riot police], a lieutenant and corporal respectively, and we met them at their post near the Chechen village of Assinovskaya, Both were proudly showing off their new sleeve badges: the OMON are no longer snow leopards or lions they're TEAM SPECIAL (the words are written in English). Our specialist, Lieutenant Yura, could not stop talking about the blood and dismembered flesh of "persons of Caucasian nationality"34 and several times repeated his fantasies of how "yesterday they slashed a dukh35 to pieces in the drainage channel, just over there". Volodya was just as obsessed with his wages, which were too low in his view.
Volodya felt deeply offended; Yura saw himself as a hero in some American action film. He described more revolting scenes, watching to see how his listeners reacted. The FSB distributed videos among the soldiers in the North Caucasus, he said, and they watched them every evening to "get in the mood".
"What do they show?"
"How they kill and rape. Don't you know how they raped Shamil Basayev's brother, Shirvani, in Nazran? A whole gang of them. Well, I saw it." Yura is very pleased with the nauseating effect this has.
"Did you enjoy that?"
"Not bad." Yura is satisfied. It doesn't take long to realise he is mentally unbalanced. All that's lacking is a formal confirmation.
People are now so used to seeing mentally ill men clutching Kalashnikovs at the front line in the North Caucasus that they might not notice it any more. It would be foolhardy of them, however, to ignore it. One curious detail. Standing next to Yura is his unit's staff psychologist. He's also a little strange, if only because Yura's behaviour seems to have no effect on him.
By December these men are worn out by the war. Around Yura and Volodya we see the faces of their fellow-OMON men tormented by gunfire in the night. Further off are the army soldiers who are hungry and dirty, and all with athlete's foot because they never take off their rubber boots, even at night. Before their eyes flows a constant stream of misery and grief, as the refugees shuffle across Assinovskaya through all the shortening hours of daylight: weeping women and children, scowling old men. The wounded fighters are carried through from Chechnya, men with amputated limbs and oozing wounds.
"I wouldn't wound them," comments Yura. "I'd just finish them off." Think for a moment, and you're likely to go mad at the thought: they are taking men for treatment in Russian hospitals who were crippled by Russia's own soldiers, and the same budget is today financing the murderous bombing attacks and the treatment of their victims.
The landscape before the man with a gun is too doleful for him not to brighten it up somehow. By the end of the autumn, thoroughly commercial relations had been established on the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia, not far from the "Caucasus" checkpoint. The soldiers drive up in armoured vehicles from the nearby "liberated" villages. They are met by the black marketeers from the Ingush side.
Policemen from the Ingush OMON man the first post on the road to the "Caucasus" check point. They tell us the going rate for "intensive care". For two zinc cases (i.e. boxes of ammunition) you get either 20 bottles of locally produced vodka (at 10 roubles each) or one glassful of hashish. Usually the deal works as follows. The soldiers bring the cases in the evening or at night, whenever it's dark (and always accompanied by an officer), and by that time their partners with the vodka or hashish are already waiting at the Ingush post. The police are convinced that all the participants in these exchanges have earlier reached agreement on the time and place and that the whole system runs very smoothly.
Why then do these well-informed Ingush policemen simply sit and watch? Where are the seizures of contraband, the arrests and widely publicised investigations into these cases of corruption?
"We've received no order to act," say the valiant OMON, averting their gaze.
If you believe them, I don't. But it's impossible not to think about the other side of this coin. The military have become so mercantile that they are selling the very bullets that, sometime later, will almost certainly fly in their direction.
100-Rouble Gateway
Picture No 3 from our exhibition. There is one more very curious checkpoint in this war. The "October" checkpoint allows you to travel from Chechnya to Mozdok (where the headquarters of the combined forces in the North Caucasus are to be found). Refugees at the Sputnik camp near the Ingush village of Sleptsovskaya (Ordjonikidzevskaya) have extraordinary tales to tell. The soldiers at the checkpoint supposedly tell women from north Chechen villages who are taking food to sell at the market in Mozdok: "You're not allowed there! Mozdok is a prohibited city for you."
But as with all else in Russia, never be in a hurry to go away. After a little while the town becomes quite open and the soldiers tell the most persistent women how much they must pay. One person on foot must pay 100 roubles; a light vehicle costs about 500–600 roubles, depending on the mood of the bribe-taker. To cross with a body (forgive this cynicism!) costs 1,000 roubles. "If you pay the soldiers they don't even look at your passport," the refugees assure me.
Can you believe such assurances? Of course not. Or not until you've tried it yourself. I travelled there, driving about two hours by car from the Sputnik camp. The refugee women were quite right. I paid 100 roubles and got past without showing my passport, with its "permanent resident" stamp from the Moscow authorities, or any other details of my life and work.
At which point a treacherous suspicion entered my head. What if you offer them 200, 300 or 500 roubles? Could you then carry back arms and ammunition into Chechnya without any hindrance? And then leave the republic again without showing up on their computer? All this talk as though it is the frontier with Georgia that matters!
Cleaning Up
And what are we to make of the military trucks that drive back and forth across Ingushetia? Suddenly their interiors are hung with carpets to make them warmer. It's unheard of. I hope no one imagines that our generals, like modern-day Suvorovs,36 have indeed taken the comfort of their men so much to heart that they added carpets to warm the interior of the trucks.
There is as much plundering in this war as there was last time. Stories about "cleansing of property", at the same time as "liberated population centres" are "cleansed" of real and suspected fighters, are some of the commonest tales among the refugees in the tent camps. Of all that I have heard I have chosen the monologue of Yazirat Dovletmurzaeva, an 85-year-old grandmother from the village of Samashki. Today she lives in Tent 3, Block 13 of the Sputnik camp. She is illiterate, and all of her life she has worked on the land, tending her cows, never getting involved in any political events. She finds it hard to understand the motives behind the wars that have raged around her for the last five years. She's quite clear about one thing, though. She has never acquired any wealth during her life and has no possessions in her home.
"Yesterday [21 November, AP] I walked over to Samashki to see if I could return home at last. I want to go back very much. When I got there some soldiers were climbing out of the windows. The house had been plundered. They had taken away everything they could find, all my pickles and conserves. They took the cow. They even took the door. I'll never save enough to buy a mattress as good as the one I had."
If the military can listen calmly to this tale, then I think they'll agree with me: when such things happen the war could go on forever and each new trainload of troops for Chechnya will be very happy to be transferred to the North Caucasus.
And how can we leave out the vile story about the Interior Ministry soldiers in Sernovodsk? Berlant Magomedova describes what she saw:
"The soldiers walk around the market demanding vodka. Sometimes they bring sacks full of tinned meat and exchange it for vodka. Once they're drunk they begin shooting. On 15 November they shot our neighbour Mohammed Esnukayev. He was a very good man, an orphan who had been looked after and brought up by the entire street, but when he told the soldiers 'I don't have any vodka' they shot him dead."
It was from Sernovodsk, remember, that a platoon of soldiers came in their armoured vehicle to the village of Sleptsovskaya (Ordjonikidzevskaya) on 25 November. Led by their commander, they demanded that same accursed vodka and, in similar circumstances, shot dead a young female shop assistant. All Ingushetia was stunned by this event. But it is a natural consequence of everything that has happened to the army in the North Caucasus. Something of this kind was bound to happen sooner or later.
The Costs of War
Inevitably someone will say: "That is the cost of war. It always carries with it a certain element of evil and unpredictability." And he or she will take comfort in the thought. Those who have actually been there know that things are much worse than anyone could imagine.
As winter progresses the mood in the army is changing rapidly. Too many feel themselves caught in a dead end. They're confused and uncertain. After the soldiers have sat for weeks in a dugout that is more like a swamp, wearing rubber boots day in, day out, and their commanding officer is forced to wander around collecting enough money to go to the baths in the next village, then the war ceases to appear a sacred feat of liberation – even supposing they arrived in the Caucasus with such feelings.
The men in uniform are today physically exhausted and psychologically worn out. They can no longer tolerate these inhuman conditions and begin, as a consequence, to behave inhumanly themselves. They're not supermen, but ordinary people like you and me. So we must stop lying to ourselves: what is going on in Chechnya is not at all what many in Moscow dreamt of!
I'm not reporting these particular offences to encourage the staff officers in Moscow and Mozdok to immediately track down those who committed them. That would be stupid and inefficient. They must act quite differently, either focusing the war within clear limits or a local arena, or else halting it altogether. The present "struggle with the terrorists" is spreading across the entire country and is becoming a deadly danger to many who have not the slightest connection with the terrorists.
Dusk began to fall rapidly at the checkpoint near the Chechen village of Assinovskaya. We could stay no longer. Night-time was when the trade in bullets and vodka began. Lieutenant-Colonel Gubich, head of the Kursk OMON stationed here, despairingly drove away all non-military personnel, in accordance with his orders. As we were leaving, however, he told us: "Pass this message on to Moscow: "This war is quite senseless.' And that," he added, "is the most important truth of all."
INGUSHETIA