Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [20]
In this war family reunions take place outside operating theatres. The sisters met in the treatment unit of Sunzha Hospital. Khava was at the bedside of 22-year-old Madina, while Aishat was looking after her younger son, 18-year-old Alikhan. (Her elder son died during random shelling of their village during the First Chechen War.) Madina, only recently a beautiful young girl but now worn out by operations and pain, her parchment-colored face and body a shadow of what they were, has almost certainly been permanently crippled by the injuries she sustained on October 27. Some of her bone has been cut away and they need to find somewhere for her to have an operation, and then somewhere for her to convalesce because their house at 27 Kooperativnaya Street has been destroyed.
The history of Alikhan’s illness is no less grim. One leg has already been amputated above the knee as a result of the curse of gangrene. For several days the soldiers refused to allow the wounded to be taken out of their village. He has already lost the big toe on his other foot and so far attempts to stop the gangrene from spreading have been unsuccessful. Alikhan is a quiet, thoughtful young man who holds Russia responsible for destroying his life on October 23, the day he was injured. He has no plans for the future now. His only distraction is when one of the men visiting the hospital picks up his stump of a body and takes him for a “walk” along the corridors.
Alikhan tells me that none of his classmates are still alive. He left school along with eight other boys and eight girls. All the boys have since been killed. He is alive, but crippled. Everybody was sheltering in their cellars during relentless shelling of Novy Sharoy. When things quietened down at around nine in the morning Alikhan’s classmates quietly came together beside his house at 12 Tsentralnaya Street to discuss what they should do. Mortars were fired at them and all except Alikhan were killed. Who is going to provide the complex, expensive artificial limbs he now needs?
“Nobody, of course,” Alikhan says. “I am a Chechen. I can just crawl from now until the day I die.”
“Why do you get so het up about them?” the officers demanded when I tried to find out who would be responsible for supplying the artificial limbs and treatment required after these wicked acts against the civilian population. “They are not human beings, they are little furry animals. Don’t worry, they’ll soon give birth to plenty more new little furry animals.”
My present assignment to report on the war in the North Caucasus has immersed me in the suffering of our people, interspersed with this kind of insolent frontline and near-frontline cynicism. The war-zone slang is little better than what is going on there. They refer to Chechen men, even the resistance fighters, with the more or less respectable label of “Chechies.” All other Chechens, particularly boys, children, and young people generally they call “little furry animals.” Who does? The entire military and administrative infrastructure waging and servicing the present war. Even the hospital doctors have this wretched expression on the tip of their tongue. It is bad enough coming from sergeant majors, but a complete disgrace coming from the intelligentsia.
When this nightmare was inaugurated in September 1999, one did secretly hope in the depths of one’s heart that the state would catch terrorists and refrain from waging war against everyone in Chechnya. Some hope! Today it is obvious that the policy from the outset was genocide. The genocide of one people, however, soon leads to the genocide of another, a truism borne out through the centuries by successive generations of invaders and those invaded. For the totalitarian empire being constructed in front of our eyes, punitive expeditions give life meaning. Today one group is sent to the guillotine, tomorrow a different one. The day after tomorrow it will be the turn of little Liana, and later still, we need have no doubt, it will be our turn.
Perhaps the genocide would be justified