28 August 2000
Ramisa Barzukaeva regards the world through the eyes of an incorrigible and determined idealist. "I hope you understand," she repeats several times, "if you promise children something then your word is sacred! How can you deceive them?"
With a gesture that betrays the schoolteacher in any crowd, she pats her immaculately combed hair (the sight makes it hard to believe there's a war going on), and sniffs back the tears of frustration that have begun to flow. "I can tell you agree. You must never go back on your word to a child."
She is categorical and insistent. Without pausing she adds, like a first-year schoolchild: "So you will tell them that in Moscow. How much longer must we put up with this?"
The Chelyabinsk Daydream
It would be hard to imagine a greater discrepancy between this lofty talk of sacred vows and the place and time in which I heard them. Ramisa is director of School No I in Argun. The scars of war and an atmosphere of heightened tension are everywhere. Argun is an uneasy town where the military, fearing mines, drive about at the same crazy speed as in Grozny. To go to school you must thread your way past the concrete tank obstructions on which someone has written DJIHAD (in Latin transcription) and the sour warning MINES. Of the three buildings that made up the best school in the town, only the middle block now remains standing in lonely isolation.
On I September, 1,070 schoolchildren will make their way past the concrete blocks and the ruins. The rebuilding of Chechnya's wrecked schools made a modest start in June, then stopped. The teachers were informed that only 2.5 per cent of the funds to be sent from Moscow, in accordance with government decree 1075 (27 July 2000), had been received. No building materials or salaries had arrived. The workers hung around for a while and then disappeared. The devastation remained.
Yet it was not this deceit of which Ramisa was speaking. Physical surroundings, though important, are not the most essential thing. You could become a renowned scholar, she is convinced, studying in a cellar. What she has to tell is far more alarming: how the last bridges of trust linking "us" and "them" are collapsing. On the one hand, there are the young Chechens who have been brutalised by this war and collectively labelled bandits; on the other, the country that with bombs and missiles demanded their love.
In March the governor of the Chelyabinsk Region, Pyotr Sumin, came to Argun, buoyed by the favourable political moment and the imminent presidential elections. Chechnya was then getting an extra spring feed from the federal authorities and heroic tours of the republic by the country's highest officials were in fashion. Chelyabinsk would support and nurture the rebirth of Argun, Sumin loudly declared. He was given a warm reception by the teaching staff and older classes at School No 1 and the elders of the town were invited. For several hours the boys and girls told the governor things he had never heard on TV. Their chief desire was to have the right to study like all other children in Russia, they said, to pore over the same textbooks, and not to remember how the shrapnel whistles after a mine explodes. Governor Sumin was staggered by this reception, vowed to the children that he would do everything to help and, before all else, would send all the equipment needed to start a computer class. The cameras recorded the governor's heroic face, the moved reaction of the elders, the tears of the girls and the thankful eyes of the boys.
By summer the governor had not yet managed to keep his promise. Ramisa patiently waited, however, and explained to her older students that it was a time-consuming, dangerous and tiresome business sending so much equipment to Chechnya today. That was the cause of the delay. But in July tragedy struck. A truck filled with explosives drove straight into the barracks in Argun where policemen from Chelyabinsk were stationed, and dozens died. Governor Sumin went on TV and declared: "I am terminating all aid to Argun." And this time, he kept his word.
"I wrote a letter to the governor," says Ramisa. "I wasn't particularly insistent. All I did was point out: 'Even the most disreputable Chechen would keep his word if he promised something to a child.' I won't pester him further, but you can see that any trust in Russia, of which little already remains, is being lost. And that's the most important thing of all. Whether there will be another war depends on how the children of Chechnya are raised. Will they grow up ready to fight or will they be strangers to violence? Why doesn't the Chelyabinsk governor realise this? And all the others? Russia has abandoned us again. There is absolutely no concern for schools or the next generation.
"We have been placed in a quite impossible position. No one, of course, gave us any particular authority in the matter, but we took it upon ourselves to tell our pupils every day that they are also the children of Russia. We know that if they are not aware of this, there will be no future, either for you or for us."
An Undecorated Heroine
There is no more astonishing group of people today in Chechnya than the teachers. There are about a thousand of them, and they are all obsessed by their mission to save the nation from ignorance, extinction and banditry. Ramisa is not alone.
In Moscow they were just beginning to think how to counter religious extremism in the Caucasus, and pretending not to see Basayev's "business" activities and Khattab's excesses, when this modest school director, Ramisa Barzukaeva, bravely and single-handedly took a stance against the insolence of the " bearded ones" flooding into Argun. Confronted by the fighters' automatic weapons, this small woman did not flinch but insisted on her pupils' right to a secular education. It was Ramisa, not the Russian minister of education who stood up to a dozen undisciplined fighters at the school entrance and said: "No, you are not going to get your way. We shall continue teaching in Russian and not in Arabic. The girls will continue to come to school!"
At a time when many men fled Argun and Chechnya rather than face this challenge, Ramisa stayed behind.
"But why? You have a daughter in Moscow, haven't you?"
"The children and their parents came to me and begged me to stay. They said: 'If you stay, so will we.' I couldn't abandon them."
For three years she has lived in danger of her life, for the sake of her students. She has shaped their thoughts and feelings and has brought all of her skills to bear on their distorted perception of the world. It was her duty as a teacher to give everything she had for the sake of the future.
Her heroism can be compared to that of submariners who contain the nuclear reactor at the heart of their vessel at the cost of their own lives. She personally saved hundreds of young lads from drifting into Khattab's camp, from becoming infected with rabid extremism and turning into cold-blooded killers. Who in the end was the most concerned to end the senseless slaughter? Ramisa, or the governor of the Chelyabinsk Region?
"I don't need any medals. I want computers for the children, and a decent school. So they have everything that others have in Russia today," says Ramisa. "I want my children to believe that they are not outcasts and are needed by the country. I want my pupils to try and get into Russian higher education when they leave school, and not go and study in Turkey. I think they just cannot appreciate in Moscow how very important that is today for Chechnya, and for the future of Russia! But, you know, I shan't now accept a single computer from Governor Sumin. He did not trust us then, though he put on a show of doing so. I want respect not humiliation. There's a world of difference between help and handouts."
Last winter Chechnya was shaken by a scandalous story.
The Ministry of Defence issued a challenge: select your 15 best teenagers and we'll give them places at the Omsk military academy. Chechnya really did send its finest youths to the distant Siberian city. The elders sent off their grandsons with words that anyone now capable of thinking in Chechnya ponders and repeats: "Study, and some day you will certainly be an honour to your homeland and prove that we are the equal of the other nations in Russia."
The Minister of Defence himself received this delegation of future cadets. There were many fine words, promises and wishes; parting advice, hopes and TV cameras. During his first days in Omsk, Amirkhan Shamurzayev wrote home:
Mama, we are being very well taught here and the boys are well disciplined. Just what is needed. They've also given me my uniform. I'll come home in it and you won't recognise me!
Amirkhan is a typical teacher's son. He is more educated and well brought up than his contemporaries. His mother, Zulai Shamurzayeva, has taught Chechen Language and Literature all her adult life at School No 1 in Gudermes – she is as much a slave to her profession as Ramisa in Argun: "I don't talk about the war during our lessons. The children can see all that with their own eyes. I talk about friendship between individuals and nations, about justice and camaraderie."
Q. And do your pupils understand what you're saying?
A. I speak in such a way that they do. But it's going to be more difficult now, after this business in Omsk. I thought Amirkhan had been unbelievably lucky. He'd got out of this hell, I thought, and now everything depended on him. But soon the tone of his letters from Omsk changed. No one used our boys' names at the barracks but – if you'll forgive the expression – they called them "black-arsed. . ." – you know what I mean. No one even tried to wash away the offensive slogans in the toilet NIGGERS OUT OF OMSK!
Soon most of the Chechen youths had returned home. Only four remained, among them my son. He said he would bear any insult for the sake of his education. And he was patient. But the evening before the end-of-year exams in May, the corporal called in these four and announced: "Whatever happens, Chechens won't study here!" And he wouldn't let them sit the exam.
Those young men had gone there with the best of intentions! They had a single dream: to be like all other children in Russia. On 25 May they were put on a train to Rostov, each given 165 roubles and sent back across the entire country without any papers. The boys only reached home on 9 June, because they were unable to leave Rostov without money or documents. They starved there, sleeping nights at the railway station, and asked the military commandant's office for help – but it was quite hopeless.
Recently the military commandant for Chechnya again spoke on TV: "Chechen lads are studying in Omsk. Now they're on holiday and soon they will return there . . ." Who was he trying to fool?
All three of my sons wanted to join the army so much. Now they don't. There is no way I can convince them that what happened to Amirkhan is not part of the system, but an unfortunate combination of circumstances. I tell them he just happened to meet bad people, the majority of Russians are kind – but my sons don't listen to me. They trust Russia less than they did during the war.
Q. Has the business with Amirkhan changed the nature of your conversations with your pupils? Perhaps you won't begin the school year on 1 September with the "lesson about peace" and talk to them about friendship and justice?68
A. I find it hard to bear, but I haven't changed. Chechnya's future lies only in friendship with Russia. I am hoping that on 1 September during the "lesson about peace" in Omsk the teachers will tell their children exactly the same: that the future of Russia lies only in friendship with Chechnya.
Q. Despite everything that has happened?
A. Yes.
So says Zulai. This woman who is living a semi-starved existence surrounded by the sound of gunfire every night, who has been mortally offended on behalf of her rejected and humiliated son, and who must borrow a pair of shoes from someone else on 1 September so as not to attend the festival of learning in her household slippers, possesses a certainty about the matter that I, for one, do not feel.
An Iron Response
We're walking down a long corridor, its walls covered with deep cracks left by shooting and bombardment. At the end is a small locked room where the equipment that has just arrived for the new school year is being kept. A pensive Vakhit Ganshuev, director of School No 1 in Ilaskhan-Yurt (formerly Beloreche), and Khasa Baisultanov, the school's bustling manager, say I must not to be too surprised by what I see.
In accordance with government edict No 1075, as they are well aware, the salaries of Chechnya's teachers, a total of 1,445 million roubles, have been transferred via banks in Mozdok. So has their holiday pay of 1,209 million roubles; 23,325 million roubles for rebuilding schools; 7 million roubles for classroom furniture, and so on . . . So where is it all?
"There it is, our seven million," announces Vakhit Ganshuev with a cosmic sadness.
A child's hand has written THE LAST CRY OF THE TITANIC on the door that Khasa Baisultanov unlocks. Ganshuev gives an understanding smile and shoves the creaking wooden panel aside. There are 19 tables and 38 chairs in there. That is exactly how much the Russian government sent to Ilaskhan-Yurt and its 617 schoolchildren. That is not the full extent of their sorrow, however: poverty is not a vice, after all. It is the quite conscious mockery that is the true misfortune here. Without additional explanation a person would hardly realise that the unloaded pieces of metal, still in their paper wrapping, are indeed tables and chairs. Because these are only the frames: there is not a single wooden back, seat or cover.
"Nor did they send bolts, nuts or screws," adds Baisultanov.
"Our school was one of the worst affected. Our village was one of the worst affected. We've been through everything," says the director. "Half our children have developed heart problems since the war. They often faint. Why humiliate us with such handouts? They'd do better to send nothing."
The same picture can be seen in all of Chechnya's schools. Everywhere the directors, teachers and children have sad faces. Deep moats or trenches have been dug around the school playgrounds to keep out armed men and provide somewhere to hide. How can we cross that gulf?
*
On the eve of a new school year it seems almost inevitable that the coming generation will take Russia and Chechnya to war again in 2015. This dark lesson is imposed from above, from Moscow. The policy of central government seems obvious: to create as many uneducated, empty and amoral people in Chechnya as possible. The only people who are trying to hold back this tide are the Chechen teachers. But they may not prove strong enough.
And yet the appearance of well-being has been preserved. In Chechnya there is one decent school, No 2 in Gudermes. It was under the personal patronage of Nikolai Koshman. He liked to come there with TV journalists and, in front of the cameras, donated a fully equipped computer studies room. He brought textbooks and pencils and stroked the children's heads. It's now a habit to bring all the important guests from the capital here as well. They are greatly pleased and then give interviews in Moscow, saying that the public education system in Chechnya has been fully restored.
CHECHNYA