by Anna Politkovskaya
This is not a weighty political analysis of the conflict in Chechnya, but a collection of newspaper articles by Politkovskaya in which the focus is on the "inhumane empirical detail".
Much of the book consists of personal stories. Many of the people of whom those stories are told are no longer alive. Reading it is certainly a depressing experience. The Chechnya described by Politkovskaya and by those who are given a voice in her articles is a physical and moral wasteland, one in which basic human values have been eroded by nearly a decade of bloody conflict.
The Russian military wage war primarily on a defenceless Chechen civilian population, not on the Chechen armed factions. There are no ground rules in this war. And the Russian soldiers themselves have been brutalised by the savagery of the conflict: "Many of them suffer from severe psychological disorders, alcoholism and drug abuse."
The Chechens nominally fighting for national liberation or some other noble cause are no less brutal towards the Chechen civilian population than the Russian invaders. And the Chechens fighting on the side of the Russians are the most brutal of all.
In Chechnya the "opposing" sides collaborate to murder, rape, rob and ransom the civilian population: "The Feds (Russian troops) and the Chechen thieves have formed solid criminal gangs".
Chechen society is trapped in a spiral of social regression. Odd exceptions apart, people are engaged in a primitive struggle for basic survival which has squeezed out values of human solidarity and sympathy with the sufferings of others. When Politkovskaya writes, "this is real fascism", she is referring not to the behaviour of Russian troops (valid though such a description would be) but to the destruction of social bonds in Chechnya.
Attempts to expose the brutalities of the conflict in Chechnya are at best fruitless - no-one cares - and at worst paid for in blood. In one of the articles in the book the interviewee reels off a list of names of persons previously interviewed by Politkovskaya and subsequently murdered for having spoken with her.
That Politkovskaya has escaped death (but not arrest and ill-treatment) in reporting the conflict in Chechnya is purely a matter of luck. Respect for the freedom of the press does not come into it.
The war in Chechnya has rotted the material of society not just in Chechnya but in Russia as well. The first Chechen 'war' (1994-1996) provoked a wave of protest in Russia. The second and ongoing 'war' is met with indifference: Despair runs through the book and that despair inevitably defines the book's concluding comment: "Will we survive 2003? I have no affirmative answer. And therein lies the whole tragedy."
From the book:
"Torture is the norm. Executions without trial are routine. Marauding is commonplace. The kidnapping of people by Federal soldiers in order to conduct slave trading (with the living) or corpse trading (with the dead) is the stuff of everyday Chechen life. 'Human substance' disappears overnight, without a trace, as in 1937. And in the mornings, on the outskirts of town, there are cut-up disfigured bodies that have been thrown out after curfew. This is state versus group terrorism."
"Her pit was no more than four feet deep. It had no roof, but it was impossible to stand up straight, since logs were placed over it. So for twelve days she crouched or sat on a piece of carpet thrown in by a soldier. And all this in winter too! She was taken out for questioning three times. The officers connected bare wires to the fingers both her hands and threw the wires across her neck, from behind. During this time her relatives were given a task by these officers through go-betweens: to come up with ransom money."
"The war in Grozny has depraved everyone weak enough to give in to it. Night-time criminals attack the ruined homes of people who are already wretched enough as it is. The gangs combing the ruins at night are a fraternity of criminals from the Chechen ranks, mixed with servicemen of the same stripe who are here 'on duty'. And they don't give a damn about their ideological and national differences, or the fact that they belong to opposing sides."
"He too was taken to the concentration camp on the outskirts of Khatuni. The soldiers put cigarettes out against his body, pulled out his nails, and beat him on the kidneys with Pepsi bottles filled with water. Then they threw him into a pit that they called a 'bath'. It was filled with water (in the winter, too). After throwing the Chechens there, they tossed in some smoke bombs. The lower-ranking officers who conducted joint interrogations told them that they had nice arses and raped them."
"Hundreds of people are cursing and fighting with each other in a frenzy. Some women are out of their minds with hunger and are cursing and ripping a three-day ration card out of each other's hands. I also see some people in the crowd spitting at others. They are tubercular. Out of eternal bitterness towards the world, they're trying to infect those who are not yet coughing up blood. Another hungry crowd is storming the locked iron gates of the factory. People start to yell unearthly things - how they'll stab and hang each other, what body parts they'll cut off, and to whom they'd hurl them to be eaten. This is an utter loss of human feeling, total alienation."
"The soldiers and many civilians are depraved by the war to the utmost degree. They have formed a lethal combination: the military Chechnya ruled by the fist, the prison-pit, and the sub-machine gun has fused with the ostensibly peaceful Chechnya where they prefer fraud, nepotism and lack of control."
"The second Chechen war has added new pages to the country's history, comparable to both Guernica and Katyn [a town in Belarus whose population was massacred by the Nazis] in terms of the number of victims, and the ruins, bloodshed, and consequences for the whole world. And it is not at all important that no-one has recognised this yet; the time will come when everyone will speak of it."
Score: 7/10
Reviewer: Stan Crooke
