LONDON — Russian soldiers in Chechnya have a simple but direct method of stopping your car if it has Chechen number plates. They fire a machine gun just in front of you, so close that the impact of the bullets makes mud spurt over your windscreen.
I have never seen a country so ravaged by war. The Chechen capital, Grozny, is a great seascape of ruins, mile after mile of concrete buildings shelled and bombed in two wars. In many villages, all the houses have been destroyed, their burnt rafters open to the sky.
Some of the damage is recent. In other villages, wild flowers and small trees have covered what used to be busy streets and farmsteads. Everywhere, fear is tangible. Again and again, mothers whose sons had disappeared and who had heard a foreign journalist was in the area risked Russian checkpoints to tell their stories.
I first went to Chechnya in 1999, a few days after the Russian army had invaded the territory a second time. As the Russian forces massed before advancing on Grozny, we visited the Chechen defense line. Looking at the shallow trenches where the heavily outnumbered Chechen fighters were waiting, it was obvious they had no chance of stopping the Russian armor.
From the beginning the Russians were determined to exclude the media, or allow it to cover the war only on Moscow’s terms. “Get the hell out of here or I’ll throw you in jail right now!” shouted a beefy Russian colonel, giving me a shove backwards when I tried to enter Chechnya officially, on a Russian-controlled road.
But the Chechens were also victims of self-inflicted wounds. In their first triumphant conflict with the Russians in 1994-96, their cause had been covered sympathetically by the foreign — and much of the Russian — media. Then kidnapping became the one growth industry in Chechnya, making the conflict more dangerous to report than any other in the world.
During the early days of the second war I was escorted by bodyguards provided by the Chechen President, Aslan Maskhadov, who clearly thought we were in more danger from home-grown kidnappers than from the Russians.
Given their military superiority, the Russians should have been able to consolidate the victories won in the first six months of the present war. It did not happen because their army was a rabble, living off the land, killing and extracting bribes from their victims’ families. The savagery of the Russian occupation has reduced the Chechens to a state of desperation, of which the attack on the theatre in Moscow is the latest fruit.
(The Independent)
