Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [18]
There was no military engagement at that time in Martan Chu, but the soldier who fired the shell knew perfectly well what he was doing. He fired just for the hell of it. By current standards in Chechnya 8:20 p.m. is late at night. The federal command has ordained that absolutely everybody must remain in their houses. They are not even allowed out into their own courtyards to relieve themselves, on pain of being shot without warning. This actually happened in Novy Sharoy to Mahomadov, a refugee from Naur, who ventured out just as dusk was falling and was shot in his doorway by a sniper.
Liana’s house was wilfully targeted by someone well aware that it was inhabited. A lit oil stove, that surest sign of life, was visible through the windows. There is every reason to suppose that the shelling was an expression of drunken exuberance on the part of the tank troops deployed on the outskirts of Martan Chu. There was no other firing on the village that night. The soldiers simply loosed off a shell and their unruly emotions were placated.
“They were celebrating the New Year,” Liana’s aunt, Raisa Davletmurzayeva, surmises. This is what the villagers also concluded.
The result was that Liana’s mother, Malika, was killed. She was 28 and was breast-feeding her youngest son, Zelimkhan. The shrapnel split her head in two, and the neighbours who ran to the Shamsudinovs’ house found her body cooling, her breast exposed, and Zelimkhan pressed to it.
The little boy’s position was unchanged in death, firmly clasped in his dead mother’s arms. From beneath the remains of the roof the neighbours retrieved the bodies of Liana’s elder sister, seven-year-old Diana, and, next to her, of her 18-year-old aunt, Roza Azizayeva, who had come to help about the house. The neighbours carried Liana out, alive and crying. There were no other survivors and today she is an orphan, her father having disappeared somewhere in Ukraine after going to Belaya Kalitva in search of work a year ago.
Since then Liana has not spoken to anyone, and she was certainly not going to speak in Russian to me. She has been in shock since January 3, and only calls out from time to time in Chechen for her mother. In her lucid moments fellow patients have tried to communicate that her mother is dead. It is a Chechen tradition not to conceal misfortune, to teach children to be brave, even when a very young child is facing a lifetime of having to be brave.
“I will look after her of course,” Raisa tells me, “but there is a limit to what I can do. In the Sunzha hospital we had to buy everything ourselves, hypodermic syringes, drugs, drip-feeds. She needs a lot of medical care. Where am I to find the money for that?” By now we are talking in a different hospital, in Galashkino, a tiny primitive facility with only 40 beds. Nearly all the wounded have just been transferred here from Sunzha, which is closed for a thorough disinfection. Contagion spreading from neglected “Chechen” wounds had reached crisis levels.
Liana, although blameless, is also a carrier of infection, and now finds herself in the markedly worse conditions and reduced nursing care of Galashkino Hospital. The wards are cramped and overcrowded, there is little equipment, and it is freezing cold because the heating system is useless. With her major gangrenous fractures, Liana is unlikely to recover in such conditions. How can people survive when the Empire, sweeping aside all in its path, declines to rest its baleful gaze on those who happen to