Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [21]
But what about the so-called Wahhabis, the Islamist extremists? Perhaps they have been melted down by the flamethrowers, or have slunk away to caves in the mountains? Wrong again! On January 18, Idris Satuyev, a Chechen refugee, Headmaster of the school in Alkhan-Yurt, was shot at point blank range by unidentified individuals in Maiskoye, Ingushetia, just for wearing a tie. “I told them that had been my custom throughout a long working life in the school. My lifestyle is European and secular,” the headmaster wheezes. He has survived but is now very ill in the overcrowded Nazran Hospital, in Ward 3 of the accident department. Idris lies there dreaming of the only way out of his situation: to emigrate once and for all from our sixth of the world’s land surface; no longer to be a Chechen obliged to live anywhere near us Russians.
HOW TO RECRUIT A DISPOSABLE WOMEN’S BRIGADE
June 9, 2003
On June 15, 2003, 17 people died and 16 were injured as the result of an explosion on a bus transporting military and civilian personnel to the military air base at Mozdok. The attack was carried out by a female suicide bomber. On August 1, as the result of another terrorist attack at the Mozdok military hospital, 51 people died and more than 100 were wounded.
Once again, words flood from the television screen … “suicide bomber,” “that bastard Basayev,” “Maskhadov knew,” “zombified by centers of international terrorism beyond the borders of Russia …” Instead of analysis, primitive ideological war cries: “Enemies of the political process, trying to keep it from developing;” “We will deal with Basayev and there will be no more suicide bombers.” Oversimplification of the problem to a level which only moves us further away from taking a sensible decision on how to deal with this new phase of Russia’s Chechen tragedy.
So, what is really going on? What is happening to Chechen women in this fourth year of the Second Chechen War? Do they really need to be brainwashed and “zombified” by centers of international terrorism?
No, actually they don’t. No external input is required to make a Chechen woman decide to become a disposable terrorist bomber, because the work has already been done. A typical Chechen woman today really is a zombie: she has been turned into one by the grief in which she has been immersed for year after year, by the environment surrounding her family. She has been trained to be a suicide bomber not in foreign training camps but by the brutality shown by the warring sides towards the civilian population in Chechnya. This is what has engendered an overriding desire in thousands of mothers, wives and sisters to take their own cruel revenge for their disappeared sons, husbands and brothers.
She does this not because of the dictates of a Chechen form of Islam or the traditional adats or laws which govern life in her country, but out of despair. The Constitution adopted by referendum on March 23 has only increased the numbers queuing up to join the women’s brigade for these special operations because there were high hopes that it might change something. Alas, the new Constitution has proved to be just so much paper. It has not stopped the Army’s anarchy and is protecting nobody.
The number of civilian men and women “disappeared” by the federals during the spring of 2003 has been far higher than during the same period last year. Worse, the authors of the fake political process leading up to March 23 unforgivably promised those searching for their abducted relatives that if they would just vote, some of the disappeared would return home; they would be released from prison. “The Kremlin has given the go-ahead,