Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [13]
“What do you usually talk about?”
“For days at a time we talk about who has been killed and how it was done, and where someone’s grave has been found. It is dreadful,” 17-year-old Fatima Doldayeva tells me. She graduated from Grozny No. 2 High School in late 1999 with a gold medal. What Fatima says is true. By evening the talk is more than you can take. In the refugee camps of Chechnya and Ingushetia what people mostly talk about nowadays is death.
A Woman’s Head in a Red Scarf
Sultan Shuaipov hastened to Magas Airport in Ingushetia very early in the morning, even though everyone told him he was wasting his time. He had heard on the radio that a Council of Europe delegation would be stopping off briefly in Ingushetia, and was determined to meet these solicitous foreigners the moment they got off the plane and tell them everything.
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