6 February 2000
Before I wrote the following report I wondered whether I shouldn't now spare the reader. Perhaps it would be better to leave you all thinking that the army and the new authorities were settling down and we could be optimistic about the future. However, when the intensive psychotherapy of political expediency to which the Russian authorities have subjected us wears off, it will already be too late. Hundreds of decent people will have died because we lacked compassion. And we cannot avoid the consequences or return to our pleasant and carefree existence.
The Sernovodsk Nightmare
A stout, elderly woman in filthy rags crawls with great difficulty on her hideously swollen legs along the stinking narrow corridor. It is crowded with people in old clothes. She is wailing and imploring everyone who catches her eye to help her die: "I can't stand it any longer! There's nothing to eat, nowhere to live! Nowhere to die even . . ."
"Who are you?"
"I'm no one. Valentina Yefimovna Silova from Grozny. All my life I taught the youngest classes in the school at Cheshki. What did I ever do wrong?"
The old woman falls on her side. People make room for her, but no one has the strength to lift her up and help her to a bed. The crowd just weep over her body. Indifferent to everything apart from pain, hunger and cold, she clambers upright against the wall and moves on – though where she is going no one knows. Her thickly matted vagrant's mop of hair shakes above her trembling back, covered by a coat several sizes too large. Valentina is in Ward 6 (just as in Chekhov's story of madness!) of what used to be the Sernovodsk agricultural college. She has a temperature of 40°C and it shakes and tosses her from one wall of the narrow corridor to the other.
Sernovodsk is a small Chechen town. It has long been within the "zone of security", supposedly, and as a consequence there are thousands of people here who fled from the pogroms and fighting. They have all been forbidden to travel on to Ingushetia. No one has any money. They are in the grip of cold, flu, lice, heart attacks, TB and psychiatric illness.
"Do you have any children, Valentina Yefimovna, who might take you away from here?"
"I shan't tell you. I just want to disappear."
Finally it becomes clear that she actually has two sons, one in Bryansk and the other in Rostov-on-Don. Like a partisan being interrogated, she refuses to give their names so as not to make things more difficult for them.
"But you're dying!"
"Yes. Thank God, I am."
That is the most horrifying reality of the refugee camps in Russia today, that people who have been driven to extremes of despair are now readily pronouncing their own death sentence. (I call on her nameless sons to ignore Valentina Yefimovna's wishes and to quickly get in touch!)
A diminutive old man runs up. He has a crazy look in his eyes, he is dirty and dishevelled, and the ear-flaps of his hat wave about. No, he isn't an alcoholic, there's been nothing to drink here for a long time and no money to buy anything. He's just another demented person.
"Valya," he calls her, "I've found it." Paying no attention to anyone else he prods the indifferent body of Valentina Yefimovna with a small book he's carrying. He was looking for something about Stalinism in the college library and has found it. His name is Nikolai Semyonovich Sapunov, but it is pointless asking him any questions. He doesn't answer or even look your way. His elderly mind has been so oppressed by months of hunger, cold, anarchy and shooting that it is kinder not to insist and overexcite him. The only thing that interests Nikolai Semyonovich now is a comparison between the present killing of those who live in Chechnya with Stalin's similar activities in the 1940s.
Suddenly he returns from his own imaginary world to the present and reality: "I want to eat. Nothing else. I don't want to hear or know about anything else and I don't want to see anyone. I just want to eat! If you can't feed me then get out of here!"
So I left. An impoverished country which I, in some sense, represent started this war and now it is unable to feed the elderly who have worked for it all of their lives. By irresponsibly unleashing this war, the authorities have condemned Valentina Yefimovna and Nikolai Semyonovich to almost certain death. The Kremlin issued those orders. As I hope you've noticed, the former schoolteacher and her husband are both Russian. Perhaps that detail will help some people to show a little feeling.
Ward 5
I leave the corridor and go into the wards where dozens of refugee families are squeezed together. Finally I reach Ward 5. Here the crowd is made up of people who are lying down or can barely walk. Squashed in side by side, 39 people lie there without any consideration of infection or privacy. Twenty grown-ups and nineteen children, from infants to grim-faced teenagers. A very handsome man stands out against this background.
"My name is Saikhan Bazayev. I'm 44 and I have four children. I come from the Shatoi district. I have TB. They've removed my left lung and it's actively spreading in the right lung. There's no medicine and even if there was ... In my condition I need to eat properly six times a day. Here all I get each day is half a tin of corned beef and two pieces of bread."
Saikhan is not at all nervous. He is very calm and thoughtful, with no sign of excitement. He doesn't long for death like Valentina Yefimovna, he simply knows that it is not far off and that he will achieve nothing more in his life. His children will be left destitute, since his house and orchards were destroyed by the war. Even if they could escape this nightmarish refuge, they have nowhere to go.
"It's hardly decent for me to complain, you know," Saikhan continues, his shoulders shuddering with the fever that does not leave him for one moment. "I just feel so sorry for those around me. I'm passing on my infection to the children all of the time. Our living conditions here make it impossible to isolate me from the rest. Even if they survive the camps and go back to some kind of home in Chechnya they have little hope, I've signed their death sentence. For instance, I pleaded with the people from the Migration Service to give me a separate basin. They said that was against the rules."
His wife Malika is weeping next to him: "Just look at us, we're real terrorists."
"What are you hoping for in life?" I ask. "Everyone in order to live, must have something to hope for."
"We have no hope."
It may seem to you, my readers, that your continuing support for the war gives you the right to pass sentence on another human being. Yet when you imagine that you can obtain if not happiness then at least peace of mind at the cost of another's life you are making a tragic mistake. I can only say that no one's peace of mind is worth the death of another human being. Retribution is sure to come. Moreover, it does not come to us together, which would be easier to bear, but to each individually. Then we have to face a single choice: either we end this war or it will be the end of us.
Into the Carriages!
On the far outskirts of Sernovodsk there is one more appalling place. To the right of the railway track is a military compound and to the left is another. This means that every night there are gunfights, drunken soldiers, disturbances and uncertainty. On the night Yeltsin abdicated, for instance, rounds of ammunition were joyously fired straight at the carriages and everyone lay on the floor, not daring to make the slightest movement. For between the two compounds sits a train of 47 carriages in which 2,250 refugees are living. It was shunted here from Ingushetia under strong pressure from Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Koshman. It is crucial, he thinks, for the future of Russia that those who fled to Ingushetia from Chechnya must be forced to return as quickly as possible, and he has persuaded acting President Putin and Minister for Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu to support his policy. The rationale is that finance for the refugees will then flow directly from Moscow to Gudermes and pass only through his hands. There must be no more diversion of funds to Ingushetia. The results of his policy can be seen only on the ground. From ministerial offices in Moscow you see very little of what is really going on.
Rosa Djabrailova from Carriage 16 and Yakhita Dudayeva from Carriage 15, both from Grozny, insist they are only 40 years old. The two women look nearer 60. Circumstances have forced them to forget about themselves, but they beg us, for the sake of the children and old people, to pass a message to someone at the top, and to take them back to Ingushetia. There is no water and nothing but hunger, lice, filth, and a desperate cold in the carriages. Since early January there has been no fuel for heating their miserable refuge. Rosa clings to my sleeve and begs me not to leave. It's easy to understand. As soon as the carriages were moved to Sernovodsk journalists were forbidden to go there, so that the complete elimination of the refugees could proceed in profound concealment from the world. The decision was taken at the headquarters of the forces in Mozdok, by those same generals who are implementing a policy of mass liquidation of the civilian population.
However, we must keep working, even when access to information has been totally denied. Journalists secretly reach the carriages by employing all the guiles of the partisan: wearing different clothes, lying their heads off, and, in some cases, giving various forms of bribe to those at the federal checkpoints. It's very unpleasant to behave in this way, but people are begging for help. How does this square with the numerous assertions in Moscow that Chechnya is a part of Russia and that Russia supposedly wants it to live in peace? I think you know the answer.
As I am talking to Rosa Djabrailova, a young woman, Dina Saldalieva, crawls out to us. A week ago in the freezing carriage, on the filthy bunk, she gave birth to her daughter, Iman. Dina is sure her little girl will not live. In front of everyone else, and with no shame or embarrassment, Dina and Rosa tell of their gynaecological afflictions – the constant haemorrhaging, pain and inflammations they suffer. I ask them, why don't you at least lower your voices, as is usual when talking of such matters: it makes an extraordinary impression. They look at me with incomprehension and say, "When you're facing death you cease to fear such things."
I remember the dormitory at Sernovodsk. It was the same there. The women told me of the uterine growths and tumours, inflammation of the Fallopian tubes and the absence of obstetric stools without lowering their voices, standing in the middle of a crowded ward next to their own apathetic husbands and, most shocking of all, the husbands of other women.
Clutching her stomach Liza Elbieva, 42, from Grozny, staggers over to speak to us. She stayed till the very last moment, when even the basement had been destroyed. In early January the soldiers came and told her: "You have 40 minutes, run in that direction. After that the bombing will begin."
"What if someone can't get out?"
"That's their bad luck," the soldiers replied.
On Pitomnik Street, for instance, the Vagapovs, father and son, remained behind at No 16. The son was handicapped and confined to a wheelchair. In 40 minutes you could get nowhere safe with him.
As a result of all the shock and stress, Liza is now suffering a massive haemorrhage and it's noticeable, but I'm the only one to pay any attention to the spots of blood on the back of her coat. In the Kirov suburb of Grozny, an Uzbek soldier called Ural, who was at the checkpoint, also saw these blood spots. No one wanted to let the people fleeing from Pitomnik Street go any further, although they had been told to abandon their homes (so much for those imaginary "safe corridors" out of the city). The Uzbek came up to Liza and quietly said: "I'm also a Muslim. Let me help."
And he did. He was able to get her through the checkpoint and when Liza reached Sernovodsk she went to the local hospital, a small and poorly equipped place. The gynaecologist there refused to examine her and said indifferently: "Go to the market and buy me some gloves. Then I'll examine you. But in any case I have no medicine." Liza had no money at all.
I give her some money and beg her to spend it on herself, to buy the gloves and the medicine. She grabs the banknotes as if she were delirious. She has forgotten about her pain, she says, now she can provide for her children for many weeks if she uses all of the money to buy millet and prepares no more than 100 grams a day.
Walking past the carriages towards the crowd are four people of Russian appearance. They are the carriage conductors, it turns out, who were also shunted back into Chechnya in the carriages with the refugees without their knowledge or consent. Now they are virtually hostages. The Railways Ministry has forgotten all about them. The Migration Service and other government departments, of course, have no time to worry about their plight. They have even been forbidden to walk back into Ingushetia and phone home: the checkpoints are no more ready to let them through than the refugees. Lilya Bayazitova, Larisa Gavrilova, and Zhenya Kukushkin are all from Chelyabinsk. "Remind them in Moscow that we're down here," they request, and comment: "Why are we here? We're totally bemused. Are we still at work? Or are we participating in some experiment in survival, together with the Chechens? Whatever for? We also have nothing to eat. All the medicines we had we gave to the children in the carriages."
Ruslan Koloyev, First Deputy Minister in the Ingushetia MES, is not used to showing his emotions. He is of a profoundly practical turn of mind and takes a rather sceptical view of the reality he faces today. He is not inclined to overreact to the horrors of the refugees' existence. At the same time, he cannot calmly observe what is going on:
"Sernovodsk is in the Chechen republic, it is not part of Ingushetia. Who should be in charge there? Who should be caring for those people? The answer is quite clear: the government of Chechnya, headed by Russian Deputy Premier Koshman and his people. I can't understand why they're doing nothing! Why are we the ones who have to take the most basic food to Sernovodsk every day? – which, strictly speaking, is an infringement of the rules. I'm ashamed to admit it, but we're sending dried milk and baby food to Sernovodsk and thereby depriving the refugees who are actually in Ingushetia. Because we can see what's going on there. Supposedly, the Migration Service is functioning again in Chechnya and they have put a certain Mr Kaplanov in charge and given him the responsibility for feeding 'his' refugees. But nothing has happened. We don't know where Kaplanov is or what he's doing. We merely see the results of his 'activities'. The tins of meat that very occasionally are sent to Sernovodsk for 'Kaplanov's' refugees are bought for 20 roubles, when they should cost only 8. It's barefaced squandering of funds. Remember, the budget is paying out 15 roubles a day to feed each refugee. If a can of meat is sold for 20, then all that person will get is two thirds of the contents. Naturally, no one bothers about the regular transfers of funds and the result is nothing less than a tragedy."
A hungry person, who has no way of earning a living for months, endlessly waits for some aid from the authorities. Finally he gets one tin of tinned meat to last him a week. Can you imagine what that means?
CHECHNYA-INGUSHETIA