#9
Moscow Times
August 10, 2001
Dispatches From the Chechen Front
By Carlotta Gall
It seems incredible that seven years after Russia first intervened in
Chechnya to suppress its bid for independence, it is still waging a war
there. It is no longer surprising that Russia's politicians and generals
are so cynically careless about the suffering of the Chechen people and of
their own soldiers, but it is hard to understand how the Russian public
puts up with it.
Even if Russia was so weary and beaten up that it embraced Vladimir Putin
and his new war in the 2000 election, I cannot help thinking that the
public outcry at the Kursk disaster last August was not just about the
sailors drowned in that submarine, but about all the young lives lost in
service of a cruel and indifferent state, the tens of thousands killed over
a decade in Afghanistan, and now thousands more in the Caucasus.
The fate of Chechnya is largely forgotten or ignored internationally, which
is also shortsighted but not incredible. Few foreign reporters go there
anymore because of the difficulties thrown in the way by the Russian
authorities, and perhaps also because of their own reluctance or lack of
interest.
There have been two extraordinary exceptions to this during the second war
of the decade in Chechnya, which began in September 1999: Anna
Politkovskaya, reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and Anne
Nivat, Moscow correspondent for the French daily, Libďration.
Politkovskaya's A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, and Nivat's
Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya
are books produced from their reports. Both have appeared in English
translation.
Their accounts represent some of the finest journalism to come out of the
seven years of tumult in Chechnya. Both concentrate on the fate of
civilians and individual stories, and tell gripping, and often
heart-rending tales of people and combatants caught up in the war. Together
they amount to a profoundly anti-war testimony, showing so clearly how
mistaken the world and Moscow's leaders are to forget the war or ignore the
brutality which can only rebound on Russia and its leaders.
In this sense Politkovskaya's "A Dirty War" is by far the more important of
the two books. A Russian journalist known for her reports on social issues,
she began writing articles around the edges of the conflict in Chechnya,
until she was drawn in to rail against the injustice and social trauma of
every aspect of the war. The book is a collection of those articles,
written for the Russian reader but with an intensity and informative power
that will be appreciated by readers abroad.
The publishers have added an introduction by Thomas de Waal that helps
place the conflict in a larger historical and political context, and
examines how the second Chechen war began only three years after the first
ended with a peace deal. (Thomas de Waal and I co-wrote "Chechnya: A Small
Victorious War," published in 1997.)
De Waal blames the rebel commander Shamil Basayev for his invasion of
Dagestan in August 1999, and a murky mixture of Dagestani warlords and
secret service connections for the apartment bombings that killed hundreds
of Russians and led directly to the Russian invasion. I would add the very
aggressive hand of Vladimir Putin that Chechen officials said they had felt
in the months before the outbreak of war, when he took over as head of the
Federal Security Service. And I blame Russia for failing to work with the
Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in the interim years after the first war,
and in fact persistently seeking to undermine him.
Politkovskaya's book is a hugely important contribution because hers is one
of the few voices in Russia to question the morality of President Putin's
military campaign in Chechnya, which he insists on calling an
"anti-terrorist operation." She is troubled to witness the terrible wrongs
done to Chechen civilians as well as to the Russians still living there.
And she is caustic in her criticism of the authorities, whether small time
bureaucrats, brutish generals or the president himself.
"What earthly use to me is the Putin we see, prancing about on television
and telling us he's going to 'wipe out' the bandits after they're cornered
'in the toilet'?" she writes, repeating Putin's infamous phrase. "I want a
different Putin. Not the man who, in front of the television cameras,
climbed into the cockpit of a bomber wearing a pilot's helmet that was
obviously the wrong size, but someone who will go to the Staropromyslovsky
district and visit the Grozny old people's home," she says, writing during
a long campaign with her newspaper to help the old people trapped under the
bombardment of the city.
Politkovskaya appears ahead of the curve in Russia. The majority of the
population still supports Putin and his campaign against the Chechens, who
have been successfully branded terrorists by politicians and the state
media. But she warns that the brutality being meted out in Chechnya will
rebound on Russian society, turning the Chechens more resolutely against
Russia with every atrocity, creating brutal Russian soldiers who return
home violent or crazed, and trampling civic and human rights for society at
large.
She is modest in her aims. "My notes are written for the future. They are
the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why
I record all the detail I can," she writes.
Yet her understanding of the war and its consequences leads her to some
shocking conclusions and, when she feels like it, she weighs in with
withering comment or that cynicism so peculiar to Russian journalism.
"Abandon all logic, ye who travel here. Shake off your Moscow stereotypes
and conceptions," she writes. Far from the confident, purposeful army that
the authorities depict, storming forward without losses, "you see exhausted
men with unbalanced minds. Then there's the flu, scabies, rotting feet,
drunkenness and hashish."
Politkovskaya shows how morale among the Russian troops, which began at a
high level nearly two years ago, is now dangerously low. She writes that
the catchphrase among the troops is: "I've no wish to die," and as soldiers
run amok, she says, the dangers are increasing for the civilian population.
She describes a mad general riddling a cow with bullets in a senseless act
of cruelty, a scary encounter with two young OMON riot police who watch
violent videos and talk only of dismembering their enemies, and the
looting, killing sprees and corruption at checkpoints that were so common
in the 1994-96 war.
The authorities have to act differently, either focusing the war within
clear limits or a local arena, or else halting it altogether, she concludes
at the end of one report. "The settling of accounts lies ahead," she warns
in another.
Nivat's book, "Chienne de Guerre" is a lighter read, almost a travelogue
through wartime Chechnya. It bears the most appalling title — literally
translated it means "War Bitch" — apparently a play on the name of a
feminist group in France called "Chienne de Garde," and an attempt to make
something sexy out of the danger of being a war correspondent. The jacket
cover bears not one but two photos of herself, but none of the Chechens she
is writing about. Instead of giving background to the war, the preface is
all about Nivat.
But the window dressing is misleading, because most of the writing is in
the best tradition of war reporting. Her descriptive writing is her
strength; she displays a light touch, using short, succinct phrases, and
avoids drawing conclusions to what she is witnessing. She travels almost
purely on the Chechen side, staying in villages with families and friends,
sheltering from Russian bombardments with them, interviewing ordinary
people as well as several of the rebel leaders and commanders, and twice
meeting the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who is continuing to fight
from a base somewhere in the woods.
By necessity Nivat was mostly traveling incognito, outside the official
accredited trips. As a result, she has little material from the Russian
side, and what she does have is flat.
But her book brings the Chechen experience of the war alive and close up as
no other account has. She writes at the end that Russia has won the
propaganda war, if not the military campaign, but her reports and this book
will deny them of that victory. For it above all shows the Chechen
civilians as they always were, generous, hospitable, brave in the face of
impossible odds, educated and law-abiding, nothing like the terrorists so
commonly depicted by Russian officials.
Her eye-witness account of the disastrous rebel retreat from Grozny in
February 2000, and the terrifying bombing unleashed on the village of
Alkhan Kala afterwards, will surely be remembered as one of the great
pieces of reporting from the war, equaled only by the remarkable
photographs taken that day by Thomas Dworzak, unfortunately not reproduced
in the book.
She ends with a simple but important conclusion: that the war will not
cease until first Russia, and then the rest of the international community
work towards that end.
"One way or another the Russians will be forced to come to the negotiating
table," she quotes Maskhadov as saying in the summer of 2000. He said he
thought Putin had realized the generals who promised him a quick victory
were good-for-nothings, but that he could not yet acknowledge that
officially. "And the Russians will leave in the end," the Chechen president
said.
"A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya," by Anna Politkovskaya. 336
pages. The Harvill Press, $17.00
"Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter behind the Lines of the War in
Chechnya," by Anne Nivat. 273 pages. Public Affairs, $25.00
Carlotta Gall is a reporter with the New York Times in the Balkans and
covered the first war in Chechnya for The Moscow Times. Her book,
"Chechnya: A Small Victorious War," co-written with Thomas de Waal, was
published by Macmillan in London in 1997. She has been denied a visa by the
Russian authorities since October 1999.
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#10
Putin wraps up Ukraine opposition leader for Kuchma's birthday: press
MOSCOW, Aug 9 (AFP) -
Russian President Vladimir Putin wished his Ukrainian counterpart Leonid
Kuchma happy birthday Thursday as newspapers here accused the Kremlin of
going after Ukraine's top opposition figure at Kiev's bidding.
Putin telephoned Kuchma, who faces legislative elections in March next
year, on the occasion of his 63rd birthday to wish him "good health and
future success in the fulfilment of his state duties," a Kremlin statement
said.
The greetings came a day after Russian military prosecutors dropped a
political bombshell in Ukraine by saying that they had opened a criminal
inquiry into Ukrainian opposition figurehead, Yulia Timoshenko, over a 1996
corruption scandal that allegedly cost the Russian defence ministry 450
million dollars.
A glamorous 40-year-old who heads the centre-right Batkivshina party and a
key opposition bloc known as the National Salvation Front, Timoshenko has
been in and out of jail in Ukraine this year on what she claims are
trumped-up fraud charges.
Russian newspapers were in no doubt that Putin had thrown in his lot with
the scandal-wracked Kuchma, under pressure to resign in recent months over
allegations of involvement in the death of an opposition journalist.
"Russia helps to knock out Ukrainian opposition," the liberal Izvestia
daily splashed across its front-page above two photographs of Timoshenko,
at freedom and behind bars.
"A present for President Kuchma," the respected Kommersant daily headlined
its front page story on the surprise announcement from Moscow.
Commentators voiced scepticism as to why Russian prosecutors had waited
five years to launch their investigation into Timoshenko for allegedly
bribing Russian officials in a murky scam involving Ukrainian gas debts to
Russia.
"There is a question that begs itself: why has this affair only emerged
now, and was not passed onto the Ukrainian side immediately," Nezavisimaya
Gazeta daily wrote.
"It is clear there were political reasons. It was not in the existing
Kremlin leadership's interests then to provoke a scandal at the highest
political level," the newspaper added.
Timoshenko, former Ukrainian energy minister, has already twice been
arrested by the Ukrainian authorities on charges of forgery and allegedly
concealing millions of dollars in profits from Russian gas imports.
Released after a court ruled there was insufficient evidence to justify her
arrest, she claims the legal actions have been masterminded by the
authorities in retaliation for her opposition activity.
The Russian prosecutor's office said the charges were linked to the alleged
embezzlement of 450 million dollars by the former head of finances at the
Russian defence ministry, Colonel General Georgy Oleinik.
The money was paid to United Energy Systems of Ukraine -- a firm headed by
Timoshenko which was the main distributor for natural gas sold in Ukraine
-- which then used it to repay part of Ukraine's gas debts to Russia's
Gazprom.
In July 1995, customs officers found 100,000 dollars in Timoshenko's hand
luggage as she was about to fly out from Vnukovo airport in Moscow,
according to the Russian investigation.
Russian prosecutors said they had passed the case on to their Ukrainian
counterparts as the two countries have an agreement not to extradite one
another's nationals.
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