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Evil Things Happened Here by Janine di Giovanni Samashki, Chechnya Taissa had just laid her two-year-old nephew, Turpo, down to sleep on a cot, covered him with a pile of rugs and put a green fleece hat on his head in an attempt to keep out the cold. She was washing the dishes with water that she had drawn from the well that morning, and she wanted to go outside before the 4.30 Russian-command curfew began. But as soon as she heard the first crack of the rocket, then the aftershock that rattled the windows of her house, she ran outside and began screaming for her aunt Mata and her older sister Raisa. She didn't even bother to put on her shoes, despite the rain and mud outside. She just ran to the bomb shelter in her slippers and thick socks, her long blonde hair swinging behind her, tears running down her cheeks. Taissa spent her 21st birthday in a bomb shelter, and she is sick of being frightened, being cold, being poor, and being stuck underground sitting with the old village ladies praying that the next bomb doesn't fall any closer. What she really wants is to be back in Siberia studying cosmetology, learning how to give a French manicure and going out to discos at night. Now, her social life consists of a battery-operated radio that plays bad Russian pop songs or occasionally something western such as Cher's stupid song "Believe". When that happens, she leaps to her feet and dances wildly, watching her moves in the cracked mirror that hangs on the wall. The rest of her daily life passes with the monotony of Chinese water torture. When she is not dreaming of her other life, she is working: cooking for her family, trying to be creative with limited ingredients, or sitting in the dark in the evenings listening to Radio Liberty, the US-sponsored station, getting depressing information about the Chechens losing the war. Sometimes the Russians, who occupy the village, enter on foot, and then she and the family go down to the cold underground bunker and hide, or run to warn other neighbours. "Last night they came and stole our dishes," she says. So her task for the day was to find new ones to use. "Every day it's something," she says. At times, Taissa feels more angry than scared - "Why me? Why don't I have a normal life like any other 21-year-old? They stole our youth, our best friends, our happiness." But at other moments, when the Russian helicopters fly closer and closer, leaving a trail of bullets outside the shelter where we hide, she squeezes herself tight into a ball and screams like an animal. It is a primal sound, but she can't help herself: it is not natural to be trapped underground for hours on end, in an old root cellar surrounded by neighbours guessing how many people have just been killed. "The worst thing is to feel that you lost your power," she says miserably. Samashki, this village 18 miles west of Grozny, is a cursed place. At first glance, it seems almost normal for a Chechen village that has been under Russian occupation since November. The people go about their business with a scared, frightened look, walking the wide, almost medieval unpaved streets where old men in long felt coats and astrakhan hats ride on pony-driven carts. The market is meagre, selling a few stale Bounty bars and acid-flavoured orange soda from Russia; the grim Soviet-style buildings that house the local schools and the clinic open and close randomly depending on how much pressure the Russians put on the civilians. It appears to function, in a dysfunctional kind of way. Then you look closer. Almost every building is burnt, gutted, driven through with rockets, shells, bullets. And the people walking through the streets have a glazed, almost crazed look in their eyes, the result of severe post-traumatic stress. "Most villages in Chechnya have suffered," says Valya, an ethnic Russian who married a Chechen man and has lived here since 1969. "But this place... evil things have happened here. Why are the Russians attacking the Chechens? They are good people, and what is the sense of this war? My grandchildren sleep with their eyes open now." There is nothing strategic, historic or symbolic about Samashki, yet since the first Chechen-Russo war, which lasted from 1994-1996, it has been constantly targeted, with brutalities aimed more against civilians than against soldiers. Part of it has been an intimidation campaign launched by the Russians during the first war, to try to teach civilians a "lesson" of what happens to a village if they are partial to fighters. It is a vicious way to treat innocent people who are merely trying to survive: it has become more a war against civilians than a war against fighters. "As My Lai did in Vietnam, Samashki came to symbolise the senseless horror of war that was aimed as much at the civilian population as the rebels," write Thomas de Waal and Carlotta Gall in their book, Chechnya: a Small, Victorious War. According to Mark Lattimer from Amnesty International, "The village of Samashki has become a terrible exemplar of the Russian forces' inhumanity in Chechnya - in both Chechen wars it has repeatedly been subjected to deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians." "Our village was a normal place," shrugs Taissa's uncle, Mousa, who is called back from putting out a fire down the road (the result of a rocket attack) to give the chronology of the town. "Now it is the most destroyed town in Chechnya." Its name is so symbolic with destruction that a Russian human-rights group, Monument, wrote an entire book about it called By All Available Means: The Russian Federation Ministry of Internal Affairs Operation in the Village of Samashki. The detailed report not only gives startling evidence of what happened inside this village, but also provides lists of the dead and lists of the houses, buildings, schools and dwellings that were destroyed. We could re-print an entire account of what led up to the wasting of Samashki, but the simplest starting point is April 1995, when the Russian command ordered Special Forces troops to flush out fighters. After a brutal artillery bombardment, during which most of the population cowered underground, a specially trained unit entered the village on foot with tanks and armoured personnel carriers following behind. Basically, it was a time of terror: the soldiers laid waste to anything they could find. "For two days, they conducted zachistka, or cleansing operations, here, which means they pretty much killed everything that moved," explains Mousa. "Not just killing men of fighting age, but old women, children, animals. They locked civilians in cellars and threw in grenades." The Russians performed house-to-house searches, shooting civilians point-blank in the streets or in front of their homes. By the time the "operation" was finished, more than 100 - all but four of them civilians - were murdered and 100 men were taken away to "filtration" camps. The testimonies from the survivors of the assault are chilling. "They opened bunkers, poured in petrol and burned people alive," says one old man, Zia, who lost 60 members of his family. "They lynched one child under a tree and put a sign underneath him which said 'The Russian Bear has awoken'." "We thought they were on drugs," explains Mousa. "We found syringes later. That would be the only way to explain it. War is war, but how can you burn living people?" And, indeed - although Russian officials deny it - drugs are common among the Russian armed forces. On April 13, days after the massacre, journalists (who, along with the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Fronti res were denied access to Samashki during the operation) were finally allowed inside the destroyed village. Those who gained access to Samashki reported finding syringes and ampoules containing Promodol, an anti-shock tranquilliser, and Dimedrol, a powerful narcotic. Both are issued to Russian soldiers in their first-aid kits. Russian pharmacists later said that the drug cocktail combined with alcohol (vodka is generally consumed in large quantities by soldiers) could result in extremely aggressive behaviour. This, combined with the survivors' testimonies, gives a twisted, even more sinister account of the terrible story. The Russians still insist Samashki was not innocently targeted, that it was a place that harboured Chechen soldiers. But the villagers deny this and say that they ordered all fighters out in an attempt to keep the war from coming to their doorstep. According to one of the village elders, dozens of fighters who were hiding in the nearby woods were all told to leave in March 1995 so that the village would not be at risk. That summer, the villagers tried to repair their houses for the winter and to store fruit in their cellars. They had barely recovered from the trauma of April when a second assault on the village came nearly a year later, in March 1996. While a small unit of Chechen fighters staved off an attack with hunting rifles and knives, the Russians pounded the place for ten days. "It was savage," recalls Mousa. The Russians used aerial bombardment and fuel air bombs known as "vacuum bombs" - which explode above ground killing everything in a wide range. Virtually every dwelling had some kind of damage, or was levelled. People who survived the attack crawled out of their bunkers amazed to see that others had lived through it. When the first war ended, many of the people who had fled from Samashki began to return home, shocked at what they found. "So many were dead, or their houses were just black holes," says Mousa. "Others found all their animals gone. Women who had fled found their men had been taken away to camps." Then, in October 1999, just as people were beginning to believe that they might be sending their children back to school, or getting enough money to go to get food to last through the winter, it started again: this time, a new war. Human Rights Watch, the independent monitoring group, says an attack started on October 15, with the heaviest assaults taking place about ten days later. "Dozens of Samashki civilians were injured or killed," they say in a statement which also quotes one resident, Hava Avturkhanova, whose daughter was injured during the attack, who claims that "95 per cent of Samashki's dwellings were aflame" by October 27, and that many residents were killed or wounded. After that, the sensible fled, taking what was left and going to Ingushetia, preferring the life of a refugee to the life of a terrified citizen who doesn't know when the next shell is coming. The ones who stayed on, such as Taissa's family, either did so because they could not afford to run away, or because they stubbornly refused to leave their village. As a result, the Samashki residents who have stayed are a shattered but resilient lot, living out their tortured days in a haunted ghost town. There is the frail, but dignified doctor, Abdul Wahid, who every day puts on his yellowed shirt and faded tie and a battered overcoat and walks to his "clinic" - a few rooms in a former kindergarten. "We can't heal, we can only give injections," he says wistfully. There is no ambulance - it was shelled in October and stands blackened and burnt, a testimony to the brutality of war, in the middle of the road. The drugs at Dr Wahid's clinic are outdated, and the Russians have taken his instruments, even the clinic's table and chairs. But Dr Wahid, who was deported along with most of the Chechen population to Kazakhstan in 1944, is strangely untouched by bitterness or frustration at the inability to perform his work. "When they took us away on that cargo train in 1944," he recalls, "everyone was saying, 'Where are they taking us?' We thought they were going to throw us into the sea or kill us in some faraway place." But he was determined to survive and that instinct has allowed him to stay alive this long. As a child, it took him two years to learn the new language, Kazahk, so that he could go to school, and he struggled through medical school in a foreign tongue. But the experience, if anything, has made him stoical - he appears to accept his grim lot in life, trying to treat tuberculosis and heart disease with a few aspirin, Vitamin B that expired in 1998, and outdated Novocain. But the frustration of trying to patch up the remains of bloodied, mutilated children must wear him down. He shrugs. "I continue. I try not to complain," he says, adding that the clinic opens every day at 8.15am, and they begin to light the kitchen stove and warm the place, just so people know that they are there. "We can't really do anything, and for the very sick - people with cancer - there is nothing," he says. "But still, they know we are here. That in itself is a comfort." Down the road, the school is closed today following a rocket attack in which children were killed the day before. The school's teacher, Sara Mogammedovna, a stern but cheerful 42-year-old, has educated an entire generation of Samashki children. "I have been here for 20 years," she says. "And from an educational point of view, this war has kicked us back 100 years." She used to love to teach her children Russian literature, the beautiful stories of Chekhov, the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Tolstoy. "We used to think it was the light of Russia." Now, she says, she can't bear to speak the language. "They annihilated our souls," she says. "I can't speak about their heroes any more." Standing outside her closed school - by order of the Russian command - she points at the bulletholes that scar the building. "At last count, I lost 100 of my children," she says, adding that during the first war, when the Russians entered Samashki during "cleansing operations", they would walk by groups of children and shoot at them. "We don't teach children history," she continues. "The children teach us. I sleep in the same bed with my ten-year-old. He says, 'When I am 13 or 14, just let me go and kill one Russian.'" She sighs. "The children of Samashki saw when they opened the doors of those cellars where people were burnt alive. How can I educate them after that?" Down the road, as twilight arrives, Mashoud, the 70-year-old village elder, sits with two other men watching the winter sun go down over Samashki. In the fading light, the elderly man has the painful look of defeat etched on his strong features. Elected by a "tamoot" - a group of men - it is Mashoud, as head of the Samashki Administration, who makes the journey every day to the edge of the village to negotiate with the Russian command. He negotiates with them for "issues about daily life" - for food, for electricity, for curfew rights, and in return is expected to keep the Chechen fighters out of the village - a difficult role for him to play. On one hand, he is a Chechen, with patriotic feelings. On the other, he has watched his people suffer enough and wants to avoid any confrontation he can. "When Samashki fell on November 11 (last year), I asked the fighters to leave," he says. "I begged them, because this village has seen enough bloodshed. I said, please, I am afraid for my people." He then wrote a letter to the Russian Government, swearing that no "wahabi" (Muslim extremists) or fighters remained inside, "so please leave this place in peace". It was not to happen. Since November, whether or not there have been fighters inside, the village has sustained attacks from the Russians. And although the official line from Moscow is that the war is now over, 50,000 Russian troops remain in the Chechen region. Sometimes their attacks are in the form of house-to-house cleansing operations, sometimes it is artillery, sometimes it is rockets from helicopters. On the day that Taissa cooked me lunch, the house next door was rocketed, four school children were killed, a housewife was severely injured, and a row of houses on the street were damaged and burnt. There had not been an attack for weeks, and the people were beginning to feel a false sense of security - lounging outside their houses, milling around in the wan winter sunlight. Then, out of nowhere, came the terrible crack of a bombardment. "Just when you think you are safe," said Mousa, "they f you." The irony is that Samashki, like many Chechen villages, is home to ethnic Russian families. Valya, a 62-year-old Russian grandmother, lives with her family in one room down a muddy alley next to a field that was once for cows. For lunch, she is making a pot of rice with boiled milk. It is the same meal the family will have for supper. It is the same meal they have eaten all week. Her house is destroyed. Only one room functions, and she has taken care to keep it warm and neat, with blankets where the family sleeps neatly rolled up during the day on sofas. Her son-in-law, a teacher in Samashki, was killed in a bombing, and now her daughter and their two children are living with Valya and her husband. Another son died during a bombing raid, she says, from "fear". Originally born in Ukraine, Valya met her Chechen husband in Kazakhstan after the Second World War. In the 31 years that she has lived in Samashki, as a Russian in a Chechen village, she says she was never treated with any kind of discrimination. "They were good people. They accepted me as one of them." Now, with her own countrymen destroying her village and her family, she is no longer proud to be Russian. "I am ashamed. People say, 'Look what your brothers are doing!' But the Russians aren't my brothers any more - the Chechens are. We are suffering in this war together." The days I spent in Samashki passed listlessly. They begin early - the women rise at six and boil water for tea, or begin to make the bread. Everyone tries to carry on the life they might have lived before, but it is difficult when the economy of a village - as well as its soul - has been ground down. The days were spent ducking in and out of bomb shelters, depending on the intensity of the shelling. Nights were spent huddled around a radio, with occasional knocks at the door in which everyone sat up looking terrified: warnings of house-to-house searches came frequently. A neighbour would enter and say excitedly: "The Russians are in the western part of the village," and then everyone would frantically gather their things and move to another house. Sometimes there would be whispered messages about certain fighters who needed to be fed and housed as they passed through town en route to the mountains, and instructions about where they were hiding. At six in the morning, the old woman in the house where we had been moved to hide rose early and began to bake a pancake, a Chechen specialty, served with curd cheese and plum jam. She had promised to make it, and she was determined, shelling or no shelling, to make it for her guests. But as the tea was boiling and the house was just beginning to warm with the heat of the oven, an old villager burst into the house and said that he counted 62 tanks at dawn driving down the main road, but that the Russian commander claimed to be lost on his way to another village. "They're back! They're back!" he shouted. Everyone tried to calm him. But it didn't help the tension in the village; more people were trying to find their way out of the place, convinced that it could not stand a fourth attack, and that this time they would not be lucky. When I ventured out to find the village elder to ask his opinion, I was told that he fled that morning, for Ingushetia. "It's not safe any more," his friend said. "Everyone should go." We left Taissa, Turpo, Mousa and everyone else at midday. They were going to stay on. We said goodbye with sadness; we knew we would probably never see each other again. By the time we got to Ingushetia, walking over the border, we heard the news from passing refugees that Samashki was already under heavy attack. © Janine di Giovanni |
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