Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [153]
Sigrid catches constantly at her grey braids of hair, blown about by a strong wind which has sprung up here in the cemetery, high above the fjord. She is barely able to hold back the tears. Her eyes redden and her eyelids droop, and then she squats down and lays a hand on the dark brown fjord soil by Ingeborg’s gravestone. She steadies herself for a few moments before catching her grey hair again. She pushes it up, away from her eyes in defiance of the wind, and the gesture seems to help her gather what remains of her strength. They say here that the older women of Norway do not cry. It is not their way. They are strong, indomitable, familiar with suffering, and do not usually give way to tears. They lived through the Second World War, when Norway endured a brutal occupation, with partisans, a resistance, fighting, and many dead. Most later lived through great poverty and hunger, and it was only when they were very old that Norway became rich and was able to provide them with decent old people’s homes and good pensions.
Sigrid is one such Norwegian woman. You can tell that she is by nature very tough, like anyone who lives with the wind and the sea and who is used to seeing their family sail out, never to return. She is fully aware of what someone standing beside her in the cemetery may be thinking.
“Yes, losing my daughter has put ten years on my age,” she nods, swallowing a lump in her throat in order to continue the simple story of her family. All her life Sigrid taught Norwegian and English, and of course brought up her own children, but her husband was a doctor. Sigrid lost first him, and then the daughter who had decided to follow in his footsteps.
Sigrid proudly shows me a certificate, Order No. 589, dated December 11, 1997, issued by President Aslan Maskhadov, awarding Ingeborg the highest decoration of the Chechen Republic. That award and a grave are all that Sigrid has left after the death of her daughter.
“Do you feel Russia has wronged you?”
“No. My grudge is against the Red Cross.”
Sigrid Foss says that she believes the organization in whose cause her daughter died was over-ambitious.
“At that time, between the two Chechen wars, the Red Cross wanted to establish a hospital against all the odds, as if to say, ‘Look at us! We can do something nobody else can do! The Russians are too frightened, and the Chechens don’t have the means.’ Their ambitions led them to assure Ingeborg there was no great danger, when in fact it was deadly.” Sigrid was told this by the Norwegian doctor who by a miracle survived, and who accompanied the stretcher bearing Ingeborg’s body back to Molde.
“A stretcher? Not a coffin?”
“That’s right.”
For Sigrid, 1997 and 1998 passed under the initial shock of bereavement, but then she wanted to establish the truth. Gradually, however, things took a bizarre, heartless turn. As if it was not enough that Ingeborg’s life had been cut short, Sigrid found she had no way, because of everything going on in Chechnya and Russia, to find out who exactly was responsible for her daughter’s untimely death.
What is left for someone whose child has predeceased them? Given that it is impossible to right the terrible wrong that has happened, they do at least want to know what that was. Alas, to this day Sigrid Foss does not even know whether there is an inquiry into the murder of her daughter in Starye Atagi, let alone whether it is making progress.
Everybody has forgotten her: Russia, because her daughter was helping the Chechen population to survive, and at present that is unfashionable in Russia; Chechnya, because Chechnya has no time for anything other than trying to survive.
“Two years ago we had a phone call from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. I