Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [14]
“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