Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [19]
On January 4, the Shamsudinov family funeral was held in Martan Chu. In full view of the tank crews basking in the Caucasian sunshine, all the women and children they had murdered were borne to the cemetery. Not one of them even came to apologize for their New Year high spirits.
Similarly vile, but even more cynical behaviour was displayed in Shali. On January 9, the administration of this district center assembled people in the central square to issue the first pensions and benefit payments from the Russian-installed government of Nikolai Koshman. There is a school facing the square and Zarema Sadulayeva, its Deputy Headmistress and maths teacher, had also gathered the children to finish giving out New Year and Kurban-Bairam (Eid ul-Adha) presents.
They had no idea that at that same moment resistance fighters were entering the far end of this very large village. A tactical missile came crashing down, not on the enemy detachment but straight into the crowded central square. The fighters melted away, but in the square many people died or were severely injured. How many? Dozens? Hundreds? There is a large discrepancy in the figures given for the simple reason that the surviving villagers could not dig graves fast enough and many buried their relatives together, so that there were fewer graves than casualties. It was another Guernica, comparable in horror to the infamous missile attack on the central market in Grozny last October.
The nightmare was repeated in Shali the following day. Ali-bek Keriev, Zarema’s husband, took his severely injured wife away from the hospital, fearing that it too might be targeted. He asked his sister, a doctor, to come and care for her. Alas, 40-year-old Kisa was killed during an ensuing mortar bombardment, and since January 9 Ali-bek has been unable to sleep. He maintains a full-time vigil at his wife’s bedside. On January 13, he managed to move her, pregnant and close to death, to the central hospital in Nazran but the outlook is not good. He can’t bear to look at her dreadful wounds and watch her convulsions. She desperately needs powerful, intensive-care drugs but as usual they are in short supply. In his sleepless nights Ali-bek writes poetry, a personal appeal to the Being who may or may not be sitting on high observing everything that happens here below. All Zarema had done was to go out to distribute presents to children.
Whatever appeals may be addressed to the Almighty, relations between civilians and federal troops are just as soulless in Shali as in Martan Chu. There will be no inquiry into the killings in Martan Chu, the massacre of a family not meriting a criminal investigation. No prosecutor will question the shameless lies which tricked the Shamsudinovs into returning to their village. The implication is that the aftermath of the New Year crime is the personal problem of this luckless little girl and her Aunt Raisa, who now faces the task of trying to bring her up. Raisa views the future with unconcealed foreboding; in order to treat the child’s injuries adequately she would need a lot of money for the proper drugs, a top-class clinic and consultants, things she is not going to find in Martan Chu or anywhere else in Chechnya or Ingushetia today. Be that as it may, the Empire refuses to make an exception: Chechens are not allowed beyond the borders of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Not a single general is to be found with the decency to admit that he bears any guilt for Liana’s suffering, or that it is his duty to help her.
The situation is identical in respect of Shali: no half-witted gun-layer has been blamed for devastating the central square, no criminal charges are being brought for the murder of civilians. Nobody has so much as apologized.
Madina and Alikhan: A New Generation Consigned to a Hospital Bed
Madina and Alikhan Avtorkhanov are cousins. Their mothers Khava and Aishat are sisters. Khava lived in Samashki and Aishat in Novy Sharoy in Achkhoy-Martan District. They were not far from each other, but the shelling left them separated by a whirlwind of deadly