Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (5 page)

Sultan looks very old although he turns out to be only 45. His head of grey hair twitches, a nervous tic which keeps his eyes on the move, and his body jerks periodically. He is profoundly disturbed. On February
20, having spent the entire First War in Grozny guarding his house, he had to gather up 51 bodies from Shefskaya and the neighbouring streets, Lines 3–8. Twenty-one of the bodies he managed to bury, after first giving each an individual tag. When he was physically incapable of burying any more he laid the remaining 30 in the inspection pit of a car maintenance business on Line 3.

All 51 had been brutally murdered in a so-called security sweep in the suburb of Novaya Katayama during the night of February 19. Most of them were Sultan’s friends and neighbours. This is believed to have been the doing of the notorious 205 Brigade, retaliating for losses in the previous war.

On February 19 soldiers had come to Sultan’s street, Line 5, and warned local people who emerged from their cellars, “Get away as quickly as you can. The bunch coming after us intend to kill the lot of you.”

“The soldiers moved on,” Sultan relates, “but we, my neighbours and I, just laughed at them. Very clever! They want us all to run away so they can take their time looting our houses. Behind these soldiers came a rapid reaction squad. They were very decent lads, and again nothing happened. We relaxed. The nightmare began as night was falling. Federal soldiers of some description entered our streets in the twilight. My neighbour, Seit-Selim from Dunaiskaya Lane, was one of the first to be shot. He was about 50. He just asked a soldier what kind of troops they were. In the morning, when we were burying Selim in his courtyard, the same troops came by. They said, “What did he die from?” The soldier who shot him was the one who asked us that. We replied, “Shrapnel.” We knew by then that if we told the truth they would shoot us too. The one who had killed Seit-Selim burst out laughing at our lying. He was a young fellow, and he really enjoyed the idea that we old men were scared of him.

“But to return to the previous evening. When 74-year-old Said Zubayev came out of No. 36 on Line 5 he ran into the federals and the soldiers made him dance, firing their rifles at his feet to make him jump. When the old man got tired, they shot him. Thanks be to Allah! Said never knew what they did to his family.”

Sultan falls silent, raising his head very high, not wanting the
treacherous tears to run down his cheeks. Nobody must see his weakness. With a toss of his head he drives them back into their ducts and continues.

“At about nine at night, an infantry fighting vehicle broke into the Zubayevs’ courtyard, taking the gates off their hinges. Very efficiently and without wasting words the soldiers brought out of the house and lined up by the steps 64-year-old Zainab, the old man’s wife, their 45-year-old daughter, Malika (the wife of a colonel in the Russian militia); Malika’s little daughter, Amina, aged eight; Mariet, another daughter of Said and Zainab, 40 years old; their 44-year-old nephew, Said Saidakhmed Zubayev; 35-year-old Ruslan, the son of Said and Zainab; his pregnant wife Luiza; and their eight-year-old daughter Eliza. There were several bursts of machine-gun fire and they were all left dead in front of the family home. None of the Zubayevs survived except for Inessa, Ruslan’s 14-year-old daughter. She was very pretty, and before the massacre the soldiers carefully set her to one side, then dragged her off with them.

“We looked desperately for Inessa but it was as if she had vanished into thin air,” Sultan says. “We think they must have raped her and then buried her somewhere. Otherwise she would have come back to bury her dead. That same night Idris, the Headmaster of School No. 55, was killed. First they battered him against a wall for a long time and broke all his bones, then they shot him in the head. In another house we found, side by side, an 84-year-old Russian woman and her 35-year-old daughter, Larisa, a well-known lawyer in Grozny. They had both been raped and shot. The body of 42-year-old Adlan Akayev, a Professor of Physics at the Chechen State University, was sprawled in the courtyard of his house. He had been tortured. The beheaded body of 47-year-old Demilkhan Akhmadov had had its arms cut off too. It was one of the features of the operation in Novaya Katayama that they cut people’s heads off. I saw several bloodstained chopping blocks. On Shevskaya Street there was a block with an axe stuck in it, and a woman’s head in a red scarf on the block. Alongside, on the ground, also headless, was a man’s body. I found the body of a woman who had been beheaded and had her stomach
ripped open. They had stuffed a head into it. Was it hers? Someone else’s?”

What did people do the morning after the pogrom? On February 20, the men who had survived tore strips of clothing from the victims and tied them to branches of the trees under which they had buried them, so that later, after the war, people would be able to find the graves of their kinsfolk. Novaya Katayama, where so many trees are festooned now with scraps of cloth, wholly lives up to its strange Japanese name. In Japan they tie colored ribbons to branches as a sign of remembrance of someone they loved and still love.

“But why didn’t you flee Grozny when you had the opportunity? Why didn’t you get out to Ingushetia, you, and the Zubayevs, and Professor Akayev, and Idris, and Larisa the lawyer, and all the others who died?”

Sultan’s answer is devastating: “We often talked about it in the cellars while we were being shelled. We really believed the generals were telling the truth when they said that after the federal troops came, life would get back to normal. That gave us hope that things would get better, that is why we guarded our houses. We wanted to be first in line to get back to work after the liberation.”

They believed us! They trusted us! So we killed them!

Sultan went to the airport to do his bit but no delegation from the Council of Europe arrived. Instead some senior officials from Moscow emerged from their plane and right there, on the runway, got into cars sent to meet them, and that was that. Nobody listened to what Sultan had to say. “I suppose I should have doused myself with petrol to get their attention,” he says seriously, and slouches off, a lonely old Chechen who buried 21 bodies and hadn’t the strength to bury the other 30. His head bobs about more than ever, and every few moments he has to raise his hands to stop his hat falling off.

Bullet Holes in a Passport

“How am I going to get through the checkpoints and back to Chechnya now? With a passport like this the federals will see immediately that
somebody has tried to shoot me and are bound to arrest me. If I tell them the truth, they are even more certain to shoot me.” Kheyedi Makhauri, a refugee from Grozny, can barely speak and talks haltingly, but she desperately wants everyone she meets to see her red booklet. It really is an extraordinary sight: you can view the world through two bullet holes shot in her passport. The young Georgian woman who looks out at you from page 2 of the perforated ID has such delicate features, such an interesting face and exotic slant to her eyes, that you can hardly bear to look from the photo to the original standing in front of you today.

Kheyedi is crying. She knows exactly what you are thinking, and is certain she is doomed, that she will never be able to return to Grozny. She is afraid of people in uniform.

Her story is straightforward and appalling. Throughout the war she and her five children have lived far from home, in the hill village of Nesterovskaya in Ingushetia, under someone else’s roof. When she heard on television that Grozny had been liberated, she decided to return and see how her house at No. 201 Pugachev Street had fared. She wanted to see whether it would be possible to move back. She set off with Larisa Dzhabrailova, a Russian and mother of four who had been her friend and neighbour both in Grozny and Nesterovskaya. On the way they were joined by Nura, a Chechen acquaintance on a similar mission. They reached Kheyedi’s house the next day and found it was now a mere shell. They were on their way to look at where Larisa had lived when the thing which people most dread in Chechnya today happened: the three of them stumbled upon soldiers who were in the course of looting. The soldiers were loading mattresses, chairs and blankets into an infantry fighting vehicle, and when the women unexpectedly came out of a side street they came face to face with the marauders.

Kheyedi, Larisa and Nura were promptly arrested, blindfolded and bundled into the vehicle. A little later they were set down and ordered to walk forwards, holding hands. Then they were ordered to remove the blindfolds and found themselves against the wall of a ruined house. They knew immediately what was going to happen. First the
federals shot Larisa. She pleaded for mercy, shouting, “I am Russian, I was born in Moscow Province! We saw nothing! We won’t say anything!” She was 47 and died instantly, without suffering. Next they shot Nura. She too pleaded, “I’m only 43! I have three sons like you!”

“I was third,” Kheyedi concludes her story. “They pointed a rifle at me and everything stopped. I came to when I felt a sharp pain, and only later realized what had happened. They had shot but failed to kill me. I’d been unconscious and the soldiers must not have checked if I was still alive. They dragged our bodies together, threw a nearby mattress over us and set it on fire. They wanted the bodies burned so nobody would know what had happened, and that was the pain which woke me. It was the fire licking at my leg. The soldiers had gone. I crawled out from under the mattress and just lay there for a long time before deciding to crawl away. I was found unconscious in the road by two Chechen women going to milk their cow, and came to in a cellar. There were other wounded people there and somebody found a bus for us and sent us all to Ingushetia.”

I met this woman who had faced execution in Ward 1 of Sunzha District Hospital, in Ordzhonikidze on the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia. Kheyedi is very ill now. Her body was riddled with bullets and she has a lot of pain from where a bullet passed right through her back, damaging the nerves. The upper part of her body is completely paralysed and she has no sensation in her arms. It is too early to make any prognosis.

“Why did they do it?” asks Kheyedi’s 13-year-old daughter, who is looking after her. “She is so kind and gentle. She just really wanted to go back home.”

A nurse comes in and begins bandaging Kheyedi. Her belly is covered with scabs over the holes left by her “passport” bullets. She does not remember what happened, unconscious as she was after the shooting, but guesses that before they left the soldiers riddled her stomach with bullets. That is where the bag containing her passport was hanging.

Nightmare in Aldy

It is time to return to the quarry, to Aslanbek and Rezeda. I am sitting with them on those concrete blocks again and the boy is telling me about atrocities the soldiers committed in Aldy. They didn’t just murder, they desecrated the bodies. His father had every one of his gold teeth pulled out, along with all the others. During the “security sweep” their neighbour, old Grandmother Rakiat, had her mouth ripped open to her ears as they tried unsuccessfully to tear her jaw out.

Rezeda sketches a map of their street to show how the troop detachment advanced. “This is our house,” she says, “and this one belonged to our neighbour, an old-age pensioner called Sultan Temirov. Contract soldiers decapitated him and took his head away. Somebody told us they usually take the head if they suspect someone is related to resistance fighters. Before the war Sultan’s brother was the Speaker in the Chechen Parliament. That is why they threw the rest of his body to the dogs. After the federals had moved on to other houses, the neighbours managed to save his left leg and groin from the frenzied dogs. That is all they were able to bury.”

Witnesses believe more than 100 people were killed during the security sweep in Aldy. These are the only available figures so far. The greatest suffering was visited on those still living in Voronezhskaya and Matasha Mazayev Streets. (Matasha Mazayev was a Hero of the Soviet Union during the Second World War who was born and grew up in this village.) It befell them entirely by chance, simply because those are the first streets you come to when entering Aldy.

Rezeda continues, picturing the soldiers’ progress through the houses. “They did us, then Granny Rakiat and Sultan Temirov. Then they moved on to the Khaidarovs and shot the father and son there, Gulu and Vakhu. The old man was over 80. Beyond them was Avalu Sugaipov, an elderly man who had refugees living with him. We hadn’t even had time to learn their names, but they were two men, a woman, and a five-year-old girl. All the grown-ups they burned alive with a flame-thrower, including the mother in front of her
daughter. Before executing them the soldiers gave the little girl a tin of condensed milk and said, “Run off and play.” I imagine she has lost her wits. The Musayevs lived at No. 120 Voronezhskaya Street; they shot old Yakub, his son Umar, and his nephews, Yusup, Abdrakhman and Suleiman. The only one they didn’t kill was Khasan, an old man who owned the house. He was considered the Elder of the whole of Chernorechiye, but they didn’t just leave him alone. The federals kicked the bodies of the Musayevs together and forced the old man to lie across all five of them and not to move. Then they fired a burst of semi-automatic fire and wounded him. They told him if he got up they would kill him, and then they stood around smoking. Khasan didn’t move and they went off, pleased with themselves. I can’t go on!”

Rezeda runs outside. Aslanbek crawls over the bunks into a far corner and turns away. Their elder sister, Larisa, takes up the story. She tells of deeds beyond the imagining of anyone but a psychopath. She tells how the trees in their street are now decorated with monstrous bloody blotches where neighbours were put up against them and shot. “You can’t clean it off! That’s why I will never be able to go back there. I just couldn’t live beside those trees where they murdered people I knew and loved. When we left Aldy we saw the men who had survived crying like women; young men’s beards had turned grey. When we were in Ingushetia I saw a television report on the security sweep operation in Aldy. They showed a female sniper they said was Chechen who had supposedly been shooting at the federals from houses in Aldy. They claimed that was why the reprisals were so severe. I couldn’t believe it. It was Tanya Ryzhaya. Everyone in Chernorechiye knows she is an alkie, and, incidentally, Russian. For more than two years her arms have been shaking so violently she couldn’t hold a spoon. We had to feed her, and here they are saying Tanya Ryzhaya was the justification for this whole nightmare in Aldy!”