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The Fall of Grozny by Janine di Giovanni February, 2000 (The Times of London) THE darkened room is full of wounded Chechen fighters who retreated from Grozny last night over a minefield. There's the smell of blood; heavy and warm; the sticky puddles of it all over the floor. Fresh amputees mumbling or screaming in pain, lying on dirty cots. They were tricked. The story goes that a Chechen commander bribed a Russian commander with $10,000 to let his men escape Grozny unharmed. But the Russian had gave them a route over a minefield. It's a terrible story. As soon as the fighters realised they were walking on mines, it was too late to retreat. Some of the older ones, braver ones, went forward, calling out to their friends, "See you in Paradise." Others stepped on the remains of the bodies of their colleagues, bits of leg or arm or torso, to shield themselves from whatever mines lay below. The ones that survived arrived here, in this suburb called Alkan Khala, in their winter white uniforms covered in blood. They dragged the stiffened, frozen dead behind them by the arms or the legs. Some were crying or tossing their guns onto the cold earth. Anger, sorrow, fear. It is so hard to admit defeat. The commanders lied to me, they told me Grozny had not fallen. But the soldiers told me the truth. "If we got out of the town, it means we're going to do something more effective," one of the commanders kept repeating. He said he and his men were headed to the mountains. Another commander said, "This is winter. What can we do in the winter? Just wait and see what we do in the spring." A third commander looked at me suspiciously. He says that the Chechens no longer need Grozny. They are regrouping and considering tactics. "What does Grozny mean now? Empty walls? Empty buildings?" he says. "There are more beautiful cities for us to take. Even Moscow. We have enough trained guys. We have enough will to fight." At the first aid centre, the doctor operates by generator, which flick on and off. There are dozens of amputations to be done, without much painkillers or much anaesthetic. When I walk by, I see the flickering light, I see more blood coating the floor, but I can't stay long to hear the screaming. In a small room, a lone doctor in bedroom slippers performs an amputation with minimal anaesthetic. The patient lying on the wooden table squirms. But that's all. He just squirms. A sobbing woman wanders from room to room, looking for her brother. "Where is he? Please tell me where he is." She finds her young soldier brother shortly afterwards, dead and covered with a white sheet on a stretcher in the corridor. The fighters who are somehow not wounded, many of whom have been inside the city since October, wander through the first-aid centre, helping the injured. Dirty syringes and ancient drips litter the floor; bloodstained stretchers are propped against walls. One soldier tries to stitch a wounded friend's bloody feet with a needle and thread while the man faints from pain. "Come on, buddy," he says, slapping him lightly. All the time the bombardment continues. Dje, a 26-year-old woman fighter, says the past few weeks inside were a living hell. "The Russians are dropping every kind of bomb imaginable," she says. "Cluster bombs, deep penetrating bombs that wipe out the basements, even chemical bombs. The only thing they aren't dropping are nuclear weapons." Dju is more honest about the city falling. She says she received the order from her commander to gather her things and leave Grozny through the Russian defence ring. At one point, along a 60-yard corridor, the Russians were so close, she says, they could practically see each other. "But they don't like to fight us man to man. They have artillery and planes - we have fighters." The greatest pain was losing her comrades, crossing that minefield, knowing so many were going to step on the wrong piece of earth. She says she is worried about her friends she left behind in Grozny. She says there are still several thousand Chechen fighters inside the city centre, as well as 40,000 civilians, mainly ethnic Russians, the elderly, women and children who cannot get out, even if there were a way. I leave the first aid centre and walk to a shelter. There are two shelters in the village, one for women, one for men. Inside the womens' shelter, there's a crib set up for babies, and a stove. "We're organised," says an older woman. "We have to be." There are jars of pickled vegetables, which they offer me. I refuse. A younger girl tells me the bombardment – the aerial bombs coming down every so often, the tank rounds more frequently, the mortars – are not the real problem. "No, the real problem is in the morning when the Russians will enter this village and clean it," she says matter-of-factly. "What do you mean – clean?" I ask. "They throw grenades in the shelters and in the houses of the people" she says. "The fighters will be gone by then, but we have no where to go." By late afternoon, as the light dims and the deep Caucasus cold sets in. I go back to the hospital. Chechnya is totally isolated: there are no foreign aid workers here, one doctor, no U.N. and aside from me, a German photographer and a French reporter, no journalists. The place could get blown off the map and no one would know. "Or the Russians can kill you and who will ever witness this?" says one soldier. At the field hospital, the soles of my heavy boots are full of blood. The bottom of my jeans are lined with a thin stripe of red. The mattresses where the young fighters - all in their 20s - lie are also soaked red; the doctor is now on his fourth amputation. On the second floor, in a small room at the end, a 26-year-old fighter named Muslim lies in a corner with half a foot covered in a bloody rag. He has been defending the capital since August and came out last night. "I stepped on one of those mines that injure but don't kill," he says. "It was a gift from the Almighty." The man in the next bed was not so lucky. He was blinded by a "frog" mine, which springs into the air before exploding. The place where his eyes once were has swollen like grapefruit. His face is purple with bruises and he mutters incoherently as his comrades try to soothe him. Then a famous Commander comes in the room. We all stand up. The commander stands by the blind man's bed for a long time with a look of terrible regret on his face. "To go into the centre of Grozny now is suicide," one soldier says. "There is nothing left there, nothing! We defended it until it was time to leave." Later the famous Commander shouts at me, wanting to know why the West has done nothing but stand by and watch the disintegration of Chechnya. "Our first war was for independence," he says. "When we fought for independence, they called us bandits. Now, when we fight for Islam, they will call us terrorists." "I don't know," I says, embarrassed, staring down at my bloody boots. The wounded soldiers, in their agony, call out Allahu akbar – God is Great – to each other. But Yeva, a young lawyer, says the war is not really about religion - it is about freedom. "Can't anybody help us? Don't we warrant any mercy from the world?" *** Later, I walk through the frozen night. My breath comes out in puffs. Mousa, a soldier who is with me says, "I wish you could see Chechnya in the spring! The wildflowers are so beautiful." Now the stars are beautiful, and the red light of the tracer rounds. I don't sleep at all at night, I sit up eating a bowl of beans and telling jokes with the youngest soldiers. There is nothing else we can do. At dawn, they get orders and leave. They are walking along the railway tracks to the mountains and they ask me to come, but I know the Russian helicopter gunships that have been bombing us all night will follow them and kill most of them. "I'll stay," I say. "But you will die when the Russians find you," says one. The light is grey. The soldiers take the dead with them. The villagers are going too, dressed in that familiar refugee clothes – layer upon layer of coats and dresses and scarves and hats. They pull sleighs of supplies. They've decided to walk through Russian lines, through the tanks. They say they will dress me up like a Chechen and when the Russian soldiers speak to me, they will pretend I am mute. I don't speak Chechen. I am too frightened to eat. One old woman gives me pickled corn and bread, shakes her head as a mortar crashes in the distance and a machinegun rattles. "Hear that?" she says nonchalantly. "This is the music we live by." Somehow, I get out. I drive through the Russian front lines, through the tanks with a Chechen and a baby on my lap. AS we drive forward, I see the tanks entering the village. To clean it, to punish it. Another village, a few days later THE bombing began shortly after lunch. I was talking quietly to a Chechen man. The crack of the bomb, very close, stunned us. Then he stood up. "Bunker! Bunker!" he screamed. We stumbled into our shoes and grabbed warm clothes. It only takes half a minute from the moment your brain registers danger until the time you arrive in a safer place, but that time stretches like hours. I remembered enough to know I had left my documents in my rucksack back in the house. "My passport," I said. "Fuck your passport," he said. "The house is about to get bombed." But my greatest fear is not having my papers. "Please, I have to go," I say weakly, moving to get up. He pushed me towards the bunker. A kid ran in the house at lightning speed and returned with my bag, some blankets, and a kerosene lamp. Inside the bunker – a 10 foot hole in the garden – women with their heads wrapped in heavy scarves were already cowering with fear. Three other women climbed down the rickety wooden ladder, passing a fat two-year-old boy. He appeared too shocked to cry, but the 22-year-old girl holding him, her nerves frayed from the shelling, began to scream for her aunt to come down. There was another loud explosion. "Why us? Why us?" cried one of the old women. "Because February 1 is a holiday, and the soldiers get paid, so they get drunk and like to kill people," one man explained calmly. It was silent for a moment. I took the kid on my lap as his cousin buried her head in her hands. Then the women began to pray, their voices drowned out by new explosions. We sat together in the dank cold for an hour or so and waited. Finally, a villager came and shouted down into the darkness: "They hit the house two doors away. "Four kids dead coming home from school. One woman, her whole back is pierced by a rocket ..." I thought of the children I had seen that morning, walking on the snowy unpaved road to school with plastic rucksacks on their backs. School had just recently opened. They had seemed so excited and so normal as they had walked along holding hands and throwing snowballs at the horse and cart riding by. Inside the bunker, we sat. I tried to get up, to stretch my legs. I needed air. "Do you want to die, like those kids?" one of the women hissed. I sat down. The helicopters circled over for the rest of the day and then, as night fell and the curfew began, so did the shelling. Every time we tried to climb out of the bunker, we heard the whir of propellers close by and ran back in. The Russians had decided to give the village a thrashing. "Every time you think you are safe," Magamir, a 27-year old fighter from the first Chechen war, said, "they fuck you." This place is nine miles from Grozny. It's been occupied by Russian troops since November 11. It's a terrible place, synanomous with tragedy. It is thought to be the most-destroyed village in Chechnya and even though it has already been taken by Russians, for some reason it is still being punished. When we get out, we walk crunching our boots in the soft white snow. A group of villagers gathered in front of the bombed house, watching the flames lick around the structure before the beams collapsed. There's a former fighter called Said, screaming in English. "You see what they do to us? Do you see?" We take a quick tour of the village before heading back to the house. Nearly every house has been gutted by fire, bombing or looting. Nearly every family has lost someone: one old man, Zia, lost 60 relatives in a 1995 "massacre". His old face drips with tears. The night before, as we huddled near a radio, listening to Radio Liberty, a villager arrived to say that some locals had shot down one of the helicopters that was tormenting them, and the Russians were furious. Another arrived to say five houses were on fire on the next street from rocket grenades. Finally, more good news: another villager arrived to say the Ingush-Chechen border was sealed and no one was going in or out. We were trapped. Nothing to do but to continue with our thin and tasteless soup and listen to the shelling. The 21-year-old who cooked for us, shook as she poured tea. She ladles out the soup but she had none herself. "Eat, darling, eat," her aunt said. But the girl pushed her long hair back and shook her head. "I have lost all appetite since the shelling began," she said. The House of the Blind Grozny Only 30 residents remain at Grozny's shattered House of the Blind, where once there were 400. They cannot see the smashed ruins of the city all around them. But they know the wors is not over. They made it through the bombing but now they have emerged from the darkness underground to an empty future. "We just wait to see if someone comes to talk to us," says Lyubov Zilipayeva, a 53-year-old ethnic Russian who sits toying with a paper clip, a dirty wool hat pulled low over her sightless blue eyes. "To be honest with you, I don't expect anything to happen in the next year or two," says Nurdi Belershemenkhov, a Chechen who lost his sight in a car crash when he was 28. His tinted sunglasses are held on his head by a dirty shoelace and he has a bad cough from weeks of living underground. "Life teaches you not to expect good things. I've been waiting my whole life for good things to happen. I guess now they won't." His friend, Palenedin Dameployav, is wearing a Russian fur hat, no shoelaces in his cracked leather shoes, and he carries a white cane. Palenedin and his twin brother were blinded by glaucoma at the age of three. Before the wars he worked in a state-run radio factory and was a ham radio operator. "I used to talk to people in Alaska," he says proudly. "I could take apart and put together any radio." All that ended when Russian troops took away his radios in 1995, fearing the Chechen rebels would get their hands on them. "They took my guitar and my bedding too," he says. This time he managed to squirrel away a few bits and pieces - "parts of a telegraph machine that I was building. It was almost finished when the war started." Palenedin lives on the fifth floor of this gutted building. Iron bed frames dangle from balconies, and you can still smell the smoke. Despite the fact that white flags flew over it before the war, and it is the only institute for the blind in Chechnya, it was totally and brutally bombed. When Palenedin got out of the basement last week, he first went up to find his flat, climbing up the five floors with no walls and no banisters. For a sighted person, it is a perilous journey - one could easily fall on the rubble and plunge down five storeys. For a blind man picking his way through brick and shredded wood, it is all but impossible. "All of their touch marks - the doorsteps and the exits that they used to know to manoeuvre their way around - are gone," says Marina Sergeyeva, 34, the librarian. Her library, with its statues of Pushkin, Chekhov, Turgenev and Mayakovsky, is now, thanks to the Russian bombers, a piled heap of the braille books and books on tape that she had worked so hard to acquire. "We didn't have much before," she says, picking up a braille book. "Now we have even less." On February 1, their basement was rocked by deep-penetration bombs. A door blew off the hinges, injuring one man; the others panicked, trying to make their way to the exits. "It was awful, people stepping on each other," says Fatima, a nurse, who was hit by shrapnel in her chest. Everyone ran out but one woman, Gali, another nurse who is married to one of the blind men. Her body remained under the rubble for seven days. The blind went down to help to retrieve it. Then her husband laid it under the stove in the basement and wept by it every night, whispering "Sleep, my Gali, sleep." Lyubov Zilipayova, who worked in the radio factory alongside Palenedin and Naudi, says that the Chechen fighters inspected the House of the Blind and thought the basement a perfect shelter, "but they realised the danger they would put us into, so they went away", she says. For everyone else in Grozny, it's not over yet. There are rumours that all civilians will be evacuated from Grozny so the Russians can raze the city to the ground. "The fighting still isn't over, I know it," says Palenedin, standing in the food line with Nurdi hanging on his arm to collect a bowl of buckwheat. "Before the war, all of us worked. I know it's impossible now." The blind are joined in the line by the same filthy group of civilians every day - the same four children, the same crazy woman from Ukraine, the elegant woman with the fur-lined boots. "Oh there you are, you're still alive," one neighbour greets another. She stares at him coldly. "Of course I am, you didn't bury me yet," she says. St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 2000 Grozny The Russians have wiped Grozny off the map. It is uninhabitable, even for the packs of hungry wild dogs. Hussein, one pro-Moscow Chechen working as a volunteer grave-digger, tells me the dogs are tearing apart the bodies of the unburied throughout the city. "The dogs are eating the corpses," he says. I wander through the city in a trance. It is difficult to find a building not gouged by bombs or reduced to a pile of bricks. Apartment buildings with no roofs are booby-trapped and mined. There is no water, electricity, heating or telephones. When this war started, there were about 400,000 people living in Chechnya's capital. But Grozny now has only a small, ragged band of civilians: the brave, the stupid, the old, the ill. The ones who could not run away. They are the living dead, emerging from hiding places. They shuffle out of their cellars, clutching plastic soda bottles to fill with water. Some wear white armbands to distinguish them from fighters. Most are women, some are so old they are nearly bent double. When the military curfew descends at 6pm, nearly everyone goes back to the cellars, but those caught outside tell stories of drunken Russian Interior Ministry troops looting, shooting randomly into cellars, taking women away. The first unconfirmed reports of rape are filtering through. Alpatu, 40, says she left Samashki, in western Chechnya, on February 1 with three women friends, aged 39, 23 and 40. They arrived at the first Russian checkpoint in Grozny and produced their passports. Alpatu was lucky - she was last in the queue. The others were marched off and not heard from again. "They were soldiers from Dagestan and North Ossetia," she says. " I've tried to find my friends. What is strange is we haven't found the bodies." The rape stories are not limited to one side. Another woman, an ethnic Russian, comes forward weeping, clutching a photograph of a beautiful teenager: her 15-year-old daughter. "Chechen fighters came on November 15," she says slowly. "They burst into the room, wearing black masks and carrying Kalashnikovs. They said, 'We need her', that was all." She has searched three months in vain for the girl."Nothing," she says, rubbing her red eyes. "She just seemed to disappear." The Russian emergency services have set up four "feeding points" which include hot showers in an attempt to prevent an epidemic, as well as a full surgical hospital. But in the Staropromyslovsky district, once heavily populated and less damaged than other city areas, there were fewer than 200 people gathered. They wait silently for three hours in the freezing cold, shuffling their feet for warmth, for a bowl of buckwheat kasha, a cup of sugared tea and a loaf of dark bread. More are creeping to the hospital, complaining of shrapnel wounds, infections, illnesses or tuberculosis. Near Minutka Square, Lyobov Yasinsaya, 42, a Ukrainian doctor who has lived in Grozny for years, keeps screaming. She just opens her mouth and screams and screams. It's terrible to witness. She says she could not leave the city because her elderly mother and her four children were unable to travel. She came out of the cellar ten days ago. "We had to steal to get food and we often had no water. Now the war is over, I have been standing here for two weeks, and no one will help me!" She is covered with dirt and grime, her face hidden behind weeks of unwashed soot. She stares at her hands, cracked and raw. "I'm an educated person, I hate going around like this, but I have descended into the condition of a monkey." There's an old lady next to her called Dzhanat Aktulayeva. She's 62, says she has gone through two wars as well as deportation in 1944 to Kazakhstan. Her son was killed in the 1994 war and she raises his three children on her small pension. "We've been tortured," she says. "Life in Grozny has been hell on earth." ** I stay longer, a few more weeks. One night, on the crackling satellite phone, someone tells me the Russian secret service are looking for me. I'm in the country illegally, and my reports are being translated and broadcast on the evening news. "You have to leave," he says. "If they catch up, they will kill you and make it look like an accident. A land mine. A random explosion." I get to Moscow and stay in a grand hotel, shaking as I hand over my passport. I double lock my door and move the heavy wooden table in front of it. I run a bath. Total and utter paranoia. Frozen to the bone and filthy. When I lower myself into the water, it quickly turns brown. I get on a flight and go back to London, but I am numbed by the cold of Chechnya, by the weeks of writing down stories and testimonies in my small notebooks. I put the notebooks in a black box and vow not to look at them again, for a decade or two. One night, walking down St. James I see a famous film director coming out of a fancy restaurant. He has read my reports. He stops and shakes my hand. By chance, he is with the director of the Royal Society for the Blind. Then the image comes back to me: the tinted sunglasses; the white flag; Palenedin's radios. I ask him to help me, help them. He gives me some numbers, all of which prove fruitless. I try some charities in Moscow. Red tape and unhelpful Russian shrews. Eventually, I give up. I never go back to Grozny. In September 2001, trying to get to Afghanistan, I take a flight to Moscow. The passport official sniggers when my name comes up on the computer. He calls the airport police. They frog march me off to a dark room and leave me there. My cell phone does not work. They will not let me use their phone. They laugh at me and no one speaks English. I feel tears stinging my throat, hot and senseless. I am afraid. Eventually, they put me back on a plane to London. "Don't come back here," says the burly guard, shoving a beefy hand on my back. "What did I do?" I shout. "I have a visa! I'm allowed to come to this country!" He looks at me with icy hatred. He says one word and then pushes me onto the plane. Chechnya. © Janine di Giovanni |
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