#5
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2001
From: abe brumberg <ABrumberg@compuserve.com>
Subject: Chechnya
THIS ESSAY WILL APPEAR IN THE OCTOBER 19 ISSUE OF THE TIMES LITERARY
SUPPLEMENT, LONDON
PUTIN'S WAR
Abraham Brumberg
Anne Nivat
Chienne de Guerre--A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya
Translated by Susan Darnton
260 pp. Public Affairs, New York
Anna Politkovskaya
A Dirty War-A Russian Reporter in Chechnya
Introduction by Thomas de Wall
Translated and edited by John Crowfort
336 pp. The Harvill Press, London
Now that hat Russia's President Putin is emerging as yet another worthy
ally in the Anglo-American crusade against terrorism, there is a danger
that his claim of waging a struggle against a similar pestilence in
Chechnya may get an increasingly favorable hearing in the court of public
opinion. This would be unpardonable. For the claim is nothing but a
self-serving lie, the Chechens, in their vast majority, are not
"terrorists", and the war waged by Putin and his generals is an
exercise in
unremitting savagery.
Two recent books provide a searching light on what is really going on in
Chechnya today. Both authors are Russians. The first, in her early
thirties, lives in Paris and writes for Liberation, and the other, about
ten years older, is a correspondent of Novaya gazeta, one of the handful of
Moscow papers that have had the temerity (what with Mr. Putin breathing
down their necks) to report regularly on Chechnya. Both Anne Nivat and
Anna Politkovskaya are remarkably brave and unsparing in pursuing their
grim subject. Both are enraged by what they see, yet control their anger
enough to produce stark and seamless prose, well rendered into English by
their translators.
Both writers deal with the second Russian-Chechen war, which broke
out in September l990 and is continuing to this day, after a bizarre
"neither peace nor war" hiatus lasting nearly three years. Nivat's
Chienne
de Guerre, the slimmer of the two, is more personal than A Dirty War,
drawing the reader into the author's side of her experiences--wretched
meals with Chechen refugees, nights filled with restless dreams, hours of
listening to mothers and sisters whose menfolk had been taken away,
tortured and thrown back like so many sacks of discolored sand onto the
floors of their huts, or executed somewhere in the woods without any
explanations offered. (About the only lighter moment occurs when Nivat,
covered by a week of accumulated grime, has no choice but to share a bath
in a mud-hole with a Chechen fighter, her driver during the travels
through half-destroyed villages and rancid refugee camps.) She interviews
Russian soldiers no less miserable than their North Caucasian enemies,
military and political leaders on both sides of the divide: Wahhabis,
secular Chechens, teachers, Russian and Western human right activists,
surgeons who operate without anesthetics, without plasma, without bandages,
without the necessary implements or even aspirin--conditions that often
drive them to the brink of insanity.
Nivat does not demonize the Russians. Like a good reporter, she
tries to be scrupulous and fair. She notes the brutalities committed by
the Chechens, too. Yet most of her wrath is directed at the Soviet
military, both the regular troops and the mercenaries, the kontraktniki,
known for their particularly vicious behavior. It is the government side
that stands indicted for most of the horrors inflicted upon the Chechen
nation.
Politkovskaya's book comes to the same conclusion. Providing more
depth than Chienne, and furnished with an excellent historical introduction
by the British correspondent Thomas de Wall, this book also strives for
even-handedness, but, again like Nivat's, demonstrates that the
responsibility for most of the odious deeds committed during the war rests
squarely on the government. The picture that emerges from A Dirty War is
not, as one reviewer of the book put it, one of "corruption, mindless
brutality, horror and incompetence on both sides." This must be strongly
emphasized, since over the past two years some Western writers, who should
know better, have taken to issuing alarms that the war against Russia has
now fallen into the hands of fundamentalist West-loathing Moslems
determined to carry the banner of a new jihad into all parts of Central
Asia, in the process borrowing liberally from the psychotic pages of the
Taliban.
Not so. The fundamentalists--Wahhabis and others--comprise but a
small proportion of the Chechen fighters, and indeed are heartily disliked
by most Chechens. Furthermore, as Politkovskaya's book in particular
illustrates, while some of the atrocities are indeed committed by Chechens
whose often unscrupulous habits have been honed by bandit traditions and by
the hatred of their historical enemies, the crimes committed by the
Russians belong largely in a different category . The Chechens are
experts at corruption, some of it on a staggering scale, cheating friend
and foe alike, then pocketing the money or sending it abroad, kidnappings
(though by now the Russians have overtaken the Chechens in this area). In
addition, some Chechens have accepted fat bribes from Moscow to form and
administer "independent" institutions, but these too are falling by
the
wayside as Moscow refuses to honor its obligations to their allies, and
blithely reneges on its promises to build up the country's infrastructure.
(Not a single house has been rebuilt in Grozny, which to this day remains
deprived of water and electricity. At night drunken soldiers and common
criminals roam around in trucks robbing and shooting anyone foolish or
desperate enough to emerge onto the devastated streets.)
For this, of course, not only the Russians are responsible. But
the Russians excel in something in which even the worst of the Chechens
dare not compare--monumental cynicism and mind-boggling cruelty.
Two examples from A Dirty War will suffice. From times
immemorial, Russian military commanders would send their soldiers into
battle armed with two items--a bar of soap and half a litre of vodka. The
soldiers were also instructed to shout some appropriate slogans, which
during the Second World War was invariably "za Stalina, za rodinu!"
(for
Stalin and for Motherland). Putin's commanders in Chechnya have gone one
better: a newly arrived group of young recruits, wet behind their ears, are
greeted warmly by their new officers, who smiling and clapping them
amicably on their shoulders invite them to sit own at long table where they
are plied with good food and with vodka--the latter in particular. In
fact, the glasss are continuously replenished by the solicitous officers,
until the recruits all land on the floor, dead drunk. At which point the
officers and their helpers pick up the prostrate recruits one by one, herd
them into trucks, and send them, in the early hours of the dawn, to the
front. When the soldiers wake up, they find themselves surrounded by
snarling sergeants ordering them to get a move on and proceed to where the
battle is raging.
Another example. In a Chechen village surrounded and bombed by
Russian troops, soldiers lure the local fighters onto the street, and
promise to take them, for money, through a specially constructed
"corridor" into freedom. The corridor, however, leads them to a
minefield
where all perish, while the villages are all mercilessly shelled out of
existence.
Welcome all, including Messrs Blair and Bush, to Mr. Putin's war.
Abraham Brumbeg's report on the massacre in the Polish town of
Jedwabne,"Murder Most Foul," appeared in the March 6, 2001 issue of
TLS.
