Eight Pieces of Empire (23 page)

THE WAR
had be gun.

The Russians formally sent in troops on December 12, 1994. They continued to bomb targets in and around the city. The Chechens engaged them in several battles in the north of the tiny republic, in hit-and-run, delay-the-inevitable actions. As the fighting got within a few kilometers of the city, most journalists pulled out, given the level of danger and having no way to file stories from Grozny in the pre–cell phone era, satellite phones being an extraordinarily expensive luxury then.

Our lifeline to the outside world was “The Elephant”—a first generation, Norwegian-made satellite telephone and the lone one belonging to Reuters. It cost $55,000 and up to $40 a minute to use. It weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and took as much as a half hour just to set up. It worked only on electricity, not batteries, but it allowed us to continue reporting when we came across a generator—or a power line not already taken out by the war.

The Elephant was designed for ship-to-shore communications—and thus it included a Telex attachment, which turned out to be something of a curious curse. I always left the thing on at night, pretending to sleep between the shelling and bombing around Grozny. The phone was zeroed in on a satellite that covered the western Pacific Ocean. All night,
the Telex printer spewed out reams of thin rolled paper. I would get up, thinking it could be an urgent message from London or Moscow. Instead, I typically found the following type of dispatch:

MAYDAY, SS Perth, South China Sea, emergency on board, crew member injured while using chainsaw, intestines hanging out of his guts. Immediate assistance required. END.

THE CITY WAS
emptying out, forlorn except for Chechen fighters milling about. “When someone breaks into your house, you shoot to kill, whatever we think of Dudayev,” one of them told me behind the presidential palace. He and other fighters were overseeing a group of captured Russian troops as they tried to repair a few tanks the Russians had either lost in combat or abandoned as they broke down.

The Chechens behind the palace were cooking up a meal—in this case slaughtering a lamb for supper. I marveled as one of them, with extraordinary gentleness, held the lamb by the head, carefully but quickly slitting open its throat, and then pouring water into the open slit, the lamb’s eyes still wide open with a mixture of amazement and fear. “What’s the water for?” I asked naively. “It’s to reduce his thirst, so there is less suffering,” he answered matter-of-factly.

I headed back into the presidential palace to gauge the mood. The only high official around was Vice President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, an aloof, bearded, ideologue poet.
^*
Above his desk was a birdcage with two parakeets inside, their contented chirping occasionally drowned out by shelling.

“You’re still here?” he asked. “You might want to think about getting out. The real bombing may start tonight,” he told me, saying that negotiations to head off a full-scale war had gone nowhere.

That night, the dwindling group of reporters among us sat in the lone open eatery, a misleadingly named restaurant called and spelled “Lasagnya” (the menu bore no relation to anything Italian or Mediterranean) on Grozny’s main street. We engaged in that journalistic specialty—speculating and pontificating with audacious assuredness.

The Chechen government television station blared from a screen plopped onto the bar, offering a wild mix of local music videos, self-help programming, and battle cries. One segment featured a commander in fatigues giving lessons, using a pointing stick and a diagram of a tank, calmly instructing fighters-to-be about the most vulnerable places on a tank’s armor for an RPG or grenade launcher and how to go about this very possibly suicidal mission.

Later in the broadcasting evening were battle scenes of a Russian-language version of the Peter O’Toole classic
Lawrence of Arabia
.

Then more Chechen music videos, mostly about love and featuring makeshift backgrounds amid rosebushes and other romantic touches.

On went the journalistic pontificating.

“There is no way the Russians are going to carpet-bomb this city,” said one reporter from London.

No sooner did the words slide from his mouth than did we hear the roar of a fighter jet overhead. Then the doors to the restaurant were blown open by a huge explosion down the street, and the blitz began.

After reporting the air strike on the center of the city to the desk that night, my reporting partner from Ukraine, cameraman Taras Protsyuk, and I fielded a frantic phone call.
^†
We were ordered out of the city at
once by our boss in Moscow. Taras, a fiery, idealistic, and witty character who regularly scoffed at obvious threats to his personal safety, protested vigorously. We reluctantly, and with a sense of guilt, agreed after being threatened with being fired for insubordination.

But as we pulled out of Grozny in our Niva, we met hundreds of cars, headlights hazy through a driving snow and filled with silhouettes of men with guns. Unbelievably, they were heading
into
Grozny, not out like us, most visible in their cars armed with nothing but Kalashnikovs or other light weapons to confront the inevitable Russian tank and MiG fighter plane onslaught. It was almost as if they were enthusiastic about getting another chance to take on the Russians, and seen through the prism of the deathly deportations of 1944 and their associated privations, it was understandable.

We bedded down for the night in Nazran, the muddy capital of the tiny neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia. Taras was livid about having been sent out of Grozny, where there was a war to cover. I told him to settle down. “You just don’t understand. You can’t, because you’re an American,” he told me. “I know that I am going to die sooner or later doing what I do” (which was covering every conceivable war there was). “It’s just my fate!” Taras shouted at me in bitter irritation.

The next morning, Taras called the Moscow desk in the morning with some half-baked story that we would just approach the outskirts of Grozny to take footage of the oil-storage facilities that had been hit by aerial bombing and were now spewing black smoke into the air. We promised to stop and turn back if we saw any “front lines.” We crossed at least three, but I told Moscow that we had simply encountered groups of Russian troops by the side of the road. After all, how does one define a “front line” in a guerrilla conflict?

By the first days of January 1995, following the disastrous New Year’s Eve assault on the city, there were dozens of foreign journalists covering the Chechen war, but none remained permanently based in Grozny, the bombing and shelling having become incomprehensibly intense. There was no place to stay except in dark basements, and venturing outside even briefly was extremely risky. Despite the exercise of caution by most of
them, about twenty foreign, Chechen, and Russian journalists were killed or disappeared in the first year of the war alone, in an area about the size of Rhode Island.

Though the press corps was formally no longer “based” in Grozny, “commuting” to the city was equally or even more hazardous, because it meant making two-hour car treks along snow-covered roads, almost randomly controlled by columns of nervous Russian troops or jumpy Chechen fighters.

This was a typical “day at the office”:

I SET OFF
for Chechnya with cameraman David Chikhvishvili from a muddy town in Dagestan, the mainly Muslim “autonomous” republic to the east of Chechnya. Along the way we meet a column of Russian APCs and tanks that train their guns on our car, an old BMW driven by a local driver who is taking five hundred dollars for the hair-raising round-trip to Grozny and back. The way into the city is blocked in three directions by Russian troops. But there is a dirt road that leads to the city limits and avoids Russian checkpoints. I can never figure out why the Russians are so sloppy in their “blockade” of Grozny other than sheer incompetence. There is always some way in, even if often laden with hazards. On the way to this “access road,” we hear the telltale drone of fighter planes bearing down. The driver slams his foot into the brake pedal, and we throw open the doors in the middle of the road and jump into a drainage ditch. The fighter plane roars so loudly that our eardrums pop. Then there is a tremendous flash and a split second later a huge explosion as the bomb goes off less than a hundred yards away. Were we the target? It is hard to say anything other than this is another close call survived. Then we are back in the car and on our way again, southbound toward Grozny. The mud track ends and we are now back on the main asphalted road, taking a right at an enormous sign that reads
G-R-O-Z-N-Y
in concrete letters standing about ten feet tall. The name means “threatening” or “menacing” in Russian, as if one needs to be reminded that the town was
originally established as a forward encampment for the czarist conquest of the Caucasus.

There is a flat open space in front of the sign that has been cleared out to make way for an impromptu morgue. Someone has taken an enormous roll of material, evidently from a textile plant, and placed it upright. Thus those who recognize the corpse of a loved one can wrap them up and take them home for burial in the backyard in town, or in the ancestral village in the mountains if the bereaved family can make it there. The corpses are in varying degrees of decomposition. As badly rotten ones are taken away to be tossed into mass graves, fresher ones are deposited and lined up.

One is a Chechen fighter, recognizable as such only because he’s still dressed in fatigues—otherwise it’s difficult to tell who he is. His head is missing down to the lower jaw, and the lower part of his skull is soup bowl shaped—the inside of the skull bone shimmers as if a car wash man buffed it to a high shine. Next to him is a woman, who looks to have been anywhere from forty to sixty when killed, her hair long caked into a lumpy form, like an old rag doll. People search for their missing by circling around the line of corpses, trying to find any discernible feature, and we begin filming the grisly ritual. But the war is getting to people’s nerves, and the deference reserved for foreign journalists during the first days of the war is already fading. For some, we are at best a nuisance; at worst, perceived fabricators or spies. A middle-aged man aggressively approaches us.

“What are you reporters here for?” he growls. “You film all of this and then you don’t show any of it. Nothing changes. You just need it for your own purposes.”

My cameraman, David, at six foot four and with an expression that projects a readiness to pounce on anyone who insults him, is a man with a notoriously short fuse.

“We need this?” he shouts at the man, barely able to restrain himself.
“We need this?!”

The man berating us shuts up. David finishes filming, and I snap a
few photos and take some notes. Then we move on into the heart of the city, getting to the heavily bombed Chernorechiye (“Black River”) suburb before the driver balks and refuses to go any farther. We randomly meet a rebel fighter who, after a full-speed sprint along a wall, leads us through a courtyard and into the cellar of an apartment building. We expect nothing more than a shelter but instead discover ourselves inside an elaborate, underground hideout—and a beehive of activity. Below the lifeless steam pipes are rebel commanders, a field hospital, a “deputy Chechen foreign minister,” and many women volunteers, some in their sixties, working as nurses.

“Tell the West to send humanitarian aid,” chortles one aging nurse. “Send us bullets and bombs,” she jokes.

It is now time to reverse our running steps along the wall and get back to that place in the Chernorechiye District where we left the car and driver and then get out of town and back to Dagestan in time to file for the nightly news cycle—and then wake up in the morning after a restless sleep without dreams (or at least none that I can recall) to do it all over again, albeit with a daily variation of danger.

It was inevitable that the Russians’ superior firepower would eventually allow them to take Grozny. It was simply a matter of destroying the central parts of the city block by block, gradually driving out the cellar-dwelling Chechen fighters, and this is precisely what happened. In early February 1995, in the last district they still had a toehold over, I met the chief Chechen commander—Aslan Maskhadov, driving with a lone bodyguard in an unarmored jeep. Renowned for his almost meek, mild manner, he placidly told me that the loss of Grozny was nothing to be overly concerned about. I was surprised to hear this.

“The main thing is that people now know how to dig a trench, how to handle a gun,” he said. The fighters withdrew into the mountains; the Russians kept up their attacks, taking village after village and pushing what was left of the resistance deeper into the southern part of Chechnya. Some began predicting the demise of the rebels. International interest in the story waned.

This of course did not mean the war was anywhere near an end. A
massacre by Russian troops in the town of Samashki, population ten thousand or so, in April 1995, again attracted the world’s attention, but unfortunately only after it was too late. The war correspondent Thomas Goltz and I spent a week trying to somehow get into the town, which Russian forces had blockaded and were shelling and bombing. After failing to subdue a small band of fighters inside, a large group of Russian troops went on a rampage in the village. When we were finally let in, we found house after house where people were gathering burned bodies to bury; the Russian troops had used flamethrowers, or grenades tossed into basements, to “pacify” the inhabitants. More than 100 and as many as 250 civilians were killed.

The Russians had also taken Grozny by destroying it, but the rebels fought on the mountains, where they were subject to relentless, but often ineffective, artillery and air barrages.

THEN, ON A
lazy, hot June day in 1995, there was a seminal event in the world of guerrilla tactics and terrorism.