16 December 1999
She was lying on her back, arms by her side, shoulders square, like a soldier on parade, unaware of anything in the world around her apart from her pain. Some people came up, threw back the sheet, and looked at the eleven bullet holes scattered across her slight, girlish body and sewn together by the doctors. But even then Mubarik Avkhadova did not react. Her enormous dry eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Her arms lay helplessly by her side. Her only link with the world was the drip running into her vein.
For the third week 22-year-old Mubarik has hovered between life and death. No one will give any guarantees. No one who visits her in Ward 8 of the Nazran republican hospital talks about the future. And everyone looks away when, worn by her struggle to keep alive, this once cheerful and carefree fourth-year student at the languages faculty in Grozny university suddenly shifts her gaze from the ceiling and stares at them as they repeat their meaningless phrases.
"A Car Full of Bandits"
What happened? By current standards it was a very ordinary case. The Russian army were advancing on the village of Alkhan-Yurt, only a kilometre from Grozny. Mubarik, the younger daughter, had stayed there on Suvorov Street with her elderly parents, her mother Tumish and father Ali, convinced until the last that the soldiers would not open fire on peaceful civilians and residential areas. On I December Ali decided that they could wait no longer and, stopping a passing Zhiguli, which already contained six people, he persuaded them to also take his wife and daughter. He stayed behind.
Round midday the vehicle with a white flag tied to its radio aerial was moving towards Goity. The village is now overflowing with refugees and it was there, a few days earlier, that Mubarik's elder sister, Aiza, had gone with her four small children. Two kilometres down the Goity road, off the main Rostov-Baku Highway, a plane began to pursue the unfortunate Zhiguli and finally opened fire.
An old woman and her grown-up daughter died immediately. To this day their names are not known. Mubarik and a 13-year-old girl, the old woman's granddaughter, were wounded. While the plane prepared for a second swoop, Tumish dragged the girl and her own daughter out of the car and shielded their bodies with her own, already bleeding from a number of wounds. She feverishly tucked their arms and legs under her and when the plane returned and again fired it only killed Tumish. On the evening of I December it was announced on TV that the air force had destroyed a Zhiguli full of Chechen fighters who were trying to flee. Only on 11 December, on a Saturday, was Aiza able to get her wounded sister to hospital in Ingushetia, after bribing each and every post now set up on the Rostov-Baku Highway. (At Goity the village elders had collected 3,000 roubles to help her.)
And what about Mubarik's village? On 9 December the federal forces arrived at Alkhan-Yurt. What did they gain there at the cost of such torment to this pretty young woman?
The same day that Mubarik was brought to Ingushetia, 11 December, the area around the village was swarming with soldiers and their officers, tanks and armoured vehicles. At first sight it looked exactly the way the books describe the front line in a war or the fictional versions of the present Chechen campaign that they show, hour after hour, on every TV channel. Machine-guns, bulletproof jackets, mud, and helicopters boastfully zooming overhead.
The closer you look, however, the stranger the sights you see. The officers, for instance, are standing with their backs to the front line. Whoever heard of such a thing? The soldiers follow their example. They sprawl over their armoured vehicles in such a way that they cannot possibly observe the territory of their opponent because it is located directly behind them.
"Where's the front then?"
"Over there."
All cheerfully pointed to a pile of tree trunks that have been chopped down and laid straight on the road to Grozny. This means that from where we're talking to the front line, beyond which there was fierce fighting, is at most 50 metres. You could hit the trees with a slingshot, let alone a machine-gun or a sniper's rifle.
"And the fighters are over there, in that belt of trees," the officers continue, with no concern for the absurdities they themselves are offering me.
"But we're no distance from them, and you're not even wearing bullet-proof jackets? Why aren't the fighters firing? Where are those snipers that everyone is so scared off? We're sitting ducks here."
The ordinary soldiers are even more open targets on this strange front. Contemptuous of the dangers concealed in the surrounding area (if, that is, one believes this talk of a front outside Grozny), they stand on the roofs of the ugly concrete bus-shelters and seem in no fear for their lives.
So where are the Chechen fighters? Are there any here at all, and were they ever here? It all feels like some show put on by the military and not really the front line in an uncompromising struggle with international terrorism. What physical evidence can we see here of the fierce war that Russia's forces already, in their tens of thousands, have been waging in the North Caucasus since mid-December?
Slaughter in Alkhan-Yurt
The refugees are unanimous. They talk today of a slaughter only of the civilian population, and the death of children, pregnant women and old men, instead of Basayev and Khattab. That is why I am here to record such testimony from those around Alkhan-Yurt. This is the area the military call the front. We know that here, one kilometre from Grozny, there were particularly fierce battles and pitiless operations to "cleanse" the territory. I want to understand the reason why the nameless passengers of that Zhiguli on the Goity road lost their lives, and Mubarik was shot.
I want to know why 23 people died here in Alkhan-Yurt between 1–8 December: farmers, their wives and children. Only three died as the result of bombing, the rest perished during a check on "ID documents and residence permits" (information from Human Rights Watch):
1 Alkhanpasha Dudayev
2 Humid Khazuyev
3 Isa Muradov
4 Musa Geikhayev
5 Arbi Karnukayev
6 Nebist Karnukayeva
7 Enist Sulimova
8 Turka Sulipova
9 Musa Yakubov
10 Sharani Arsanov
11 Marvan Karnukayev
12 Aset Karnukayeva
13 Kantash Saidullayev
14 Sovdat Saidullayeva
15 their child
16 Isa Omarkhadjiev
17 Doka Omarkhadjieva
18 Zara Omarkhadjieva
19 Matag Abdulgazhiev
20 Belkiz Madagova
21 Birlant Yakhayeva
22 Alimpasha Asuyev
23 Amat Asieva37
How are we to go on living after this? Who is our friend or enemy now?
On the eve of Constitution Day38 the "liberated" Chechen settlement of Alkhan-Yurt was as empty as a film-set in the middle of the night. There was not a single human being anywhere, not a cow, a chicken or a goose. Not a single living thing, nor any sound that might distantly suggest a mooing or clucking. If someone had been weeping, shouting or lamenting it would have been less frightening.
Silence. On the hill a churned-up graveyard. The officers tell me that Chechen fighters had dug themselves in there, so they had to fire straight at the graves. But where then are the dead fighters' bodies or the prisoners?
"Where they should be," the officers reply.
Perhaps it would be better to show them to everyone. To put the survivors on trial. Then that would really be the triumph of the legitimate authorities over international terrorism.
The silence that greets these elementary proposals is the most tell-tale sign of this war. We continue gazing in silence at Alkhan-Yurt. The cupola of the mosque has been turned into a sieve. A few jagged rafters are all that remain, at best, of the roofs of hundreds of houses. The walls are like some worn and discarded garment, with gaping holes of all sizes (depending on the calibre of weapon the officer chose to shoot with). Alkhan-Yurt lies quiet and deathly still, in the tight grip of the encircling armoured vehicles. If people can be wounded, so can the villages they leave behind them.
"We're Not Shooting at People's Homes"
So this is the "fierce struggle with the Chechen fighters". The army tells us "We are not shooting at people's homes", and the result is a devastated village and not one piece of evidence that the fighters have been there. And the front? There are no fighters there either.
But where are all the people? There must be someone on the front-line in Alkhan Yurt. Where is Mubarik's father, Ali, who couldn't get into the Zhiguli on I December and stayed behind at their house on Suvorov Street?
The commanding officer issued a very straightforward order. The civilian population has the right to leave their cellars and basements only between II a.m. and I p.m., carrying a white flag. If there is no white flag, they will be shot and also if they come out after I p.m. But why, I ask? The village has already been "liberated". And why only at those times, why not from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.? The military here prefer to answer every question with a brief and clear "Because". That's how General Shamanov, our newly decorated Hero of Russia, has taught his subordinates to reply when asked about his imposition of this 22-hour curfew, an unfathomable addition to the theory of military strategy at the close of the twentieth century.
That is why they do not allow journalists here who have not first been thoroughly tested and processed by the press service of the combined forces in Mozdok. Without such ideological preparation the picture is all too clear. They call it the front, but it's nothing of the kind. And there can be no justification for the sufferings of Alkhan-Yurt. Who then are they fighting against? When the remaining inhabitants are allowed back, to walk again through their village and fields as they wish, they will know the soul-wrenching answer. Well, what would you say if you found yourself in the position of these hunted and tormented villagers who have been deprived of every human right?
The answer is obvious. But let me offer one more picture, this time from the "liberated" northern areas of Chechnya, a region opposed to Maskhadov, Dudayev, Basayev and all of their kind. The snapshot comes from Goragorsk39 on 10 December. This large and once unbelievably beautiful village, spread out like Moscow over "seven hills", lies roughly 80 kilometres northwest of Grozny. There were also fierce battles here and people died on both sides. A great deal of destruction is evident, as are the fresh graves. A rough-hewn cross commemorates Private Alexei Mitrofanov, who died fighting for Goragorsk, and stands next to the vast and gaping holes left in the oil tanks by heavy artillery shells. This speaks more eloquently than any briefing: Mitrofanov died for someone else's oil.
You can't help noticing that they took particular and malicious delight in targeting the mosque in Goragorsk. It has been reduced to its foundations. The villagers give a welcoming smile to all visiting "persons of Slav nationality", but their silent response came during the night. The statue of the Unknown Soviet Soldier, which stands as always in the central square, was neatly decapitated. No one can find the head. There are those here who fought the Germans in the Great Patriotic War,40 but even that did not halt the villagers who have driven inwards their feelings of hate and desire for revenge.
The memorial itself suffered from the fighting nearby. The words NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, have fallen off; the words NOT ONE DEED IS FORGOTTEN remain.
INGUSHETIA-CHECHNYA
ALKHAN-YURT, GORAGORSK, NAZRAN
*
On 19 December elections to the Duma, the lower house of parliament, were held throughout Russia. A new bloc supporting Prime Minister Putin and calling itself Unity (or The Bear) won wide support. Headed by Minister for Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, Alexander Gurov, the senior police expert on organised crime, and one-time wrestling champion Victor Karelin, it offered few policies, but promised to stop talking and get things done.
A few days before, the surviving inhabitants of the Grozny old people's home were finally evacuated as the federal artillery continued to shell the Chechen capital (see Chapter 24).