Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [17]
The war we are waging in the Caucasus dishonors our nation from top to bottom. Do you wonder how we can ever atone for this? How long it will take? Remember, Germany spent half a century trying to free itself from the tatters of its national disgrace. Throughout those decades, Russian children were playing games of fighting the Germans, and the grown-ups encouraged them. Are not we the Germans now? How long will it be before Chechen children stop playing games in which the most unpopular boy is the one who has to be the Russian?
CHECHNYA BELONGS TO RUSSIA, BUT WE DON’T WANT THE CHECHENS
January 31, 2000
The crusted wounds look painted on. The shaven head of a semiconscious child moves feverishly to and fro on an over-laundered greyish-brown institutional pillow. No groaning or whimpering, only a silence deeply unsettling in someone so seriously injured.
“She has small shrapnel fragments in her head, but don’t waste your time on that,” the emotionless voice of a middle-aged woman instructs me from a dark corner of the ward. “Much worse is that now she is an orphan. And take a look under the blanket!”
The shaven skull stubbornly continues trying to dispel its delirium. The little girl is five, her face jaundiced and sallow. Her name is Liana Shamsudinova, and from time to time her eyes flicker half open and stray disapprovingly over the ward without coming to rest on anyone. Her left hip is not covered by the blanket and is worryingly streaked with pus leaking from beneath an enormous dressing.
“You Russians count her as another resistance fighter,” the monologue from the corner goes on. “The girl needs specialist treatment if she isn’t to be crippled for the rest of her life, but she isn’t going to get that here, and we don’t get sent to clinics anywhere else in Russia, because we are Chechens.”
My invisible informant had correctly identified the most important issue that day. The setting was Sunzha District Hospital No. 1 on the Chechnya–Ingushetia border. Until recently every day saw a steady inflow of those most severely injured in the war zone in the security sweeps, raids, repeat raids and repeat security sweeps. Hundreds of people with amputated limbs: women, children, the elderly, Ingushes, Chechens and Russians. The wounds of most were neglected and festering because they had had to shelter two or three days in cellars waiting for the bombing to stop, unable to leave their villages. Then they had to wait as long again for soldiers at the checkpoints to relent and let them cross over into Ingushetia.
The result has been a wretched carnival of infection in the Sunzha hospital, destroying any remaining nerve endings. Along the corridors, spectral young girls swathed in bandages shamble with unfeeling, lifeless arms and legs. The nerves in some limbs have been severed, while others have succumbed to gangrene.
Who will pay for the intensive courses of treatment they will need for years to come? The same state budget which today is funding the war that crippled them in the first place? Where is our valiant state, conducting this war in accordance with its “overall plan,” expecting to find the money to provide artificial limbs for the hundreds of newly disabled it has created? Which of its plans contains the budgetary provision for that? Who is going to accept responsibility for the thousands of civilians whose health has been taken from them in the course of this fighting?
Millennium Celebrations Caused this Tragedy
I hate battle-pieces. In paintings, as in life, detail is what matters most. It is the detail which gives the measure of our humanity. How we react to the tragedy of one small person accurately reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality; and increasing the numbers doesn’t change much. Little Liana Shamsudinova was born in 1994 in Martan Chu, Urus Martan District, and the recent details of her life are entirely typical of today’s Chechnya.
Fleeing the bombing, her family lived from October to December 1999 in