Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [15]
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