Witnesses to the unthinkable

Chechnya, it seems, has become a place where monsters grow. The Chechen people have been bombed, starved and displaced through almost a decade of conflict that has murdered their sense of communal identity; the only activities that now appear to thrive in that blasted landscape are abduction and banditry. The Russian occupiers are depraved, made brutal by their unrestrained exercise of repression. The rest of the world, including the European Union, the United Nations and the United States, is morally compromised by accepting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s mendacious justification of the ongoing conflict in the breakaway Russian republic as a “war on terror.” On an individual level, those who witness the suffering in Chechnya have been forced to face their worst nightmares: Journalists have reached the limits of their ability to bear witness; doctors have had to face the inadequacy of their skills when everyone they encounter is a casualty and some of their patients want to kill them. Chechnya is a mire of human suffering that remains largely unreported -- to the quiet satisfaction of those complicit in its perpetuation.

Three books have emerged to break that silence. The content of any one of them would, I suspect, stagger the most hardened of us; reading three at once creates an odd, visceral resonance as three sets of recollections of the same events are recounted, each with its own perspective -- that of an American TV and print journalist, a Russian newspaper reporter and a Chechen surgeon -- and each shaded by the narrator’s guilt and anger at his or her helplessness. The first, Thomas Goltz’s “Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya,” is perhaps the most accessible. Packaged as a piece of “bang-bang” journalism -- Goltz was described by the former Brill’s Content media magazine as “one of the founders of the exclusive journalistic cadre of compulsive, danger-addicted voyeurs who courts death to get the story” -- it is, in fact, rather better and more sensitive than its marketing would suggest. He is self-deprecating and funny (as much as the tragic circumstances allow) and well aware of the implications of striving for distinction in an industry that sends its star workers to risk their lives for entertainment, for “great TV.” Goltz, who has written for numerous publications, hopes that his reporting will change the world but worries that having an effect depends on showing the deaths of people whom he has come to love and trust. His subjects are more cynical. Among the ruins Goltz meets Hussein, a Chechen guerrilla leader, and asks permission to film his tiny band in combat for a documentary he is making about “the Chechen spirit.” “I see,” the farmer says. “You want to build a career on this experience.”

This is the central question that should be asked of those who write personal accounts of being in wars: To what extent are we promoting ourselves on the suffering of others? The book opens with Goltz introducing himself as “a packager and purveyor of brutality,” risking danger as he stands atop the tallest building in a Chechen town with a camera and a large microphone that “many say greatly resembles a recoilless rifle with telescopic sight.” The town is called Samashki, a place that becomes notorious as the site of a Russian massacre of civilians, and the documentary film he makes does indeed advance his career. Goltz comes to question the values behind of this sort of journalism when he reads a student critique of an appearance he made at a university. Wondering “why interesting people are so often full of themselves,” the review suggested that Goltz’s presentation about the war was not about the suffering of its victims but about himself. “He was now entirely part of that war,” it said. “In his eyes, being a living testimony made him living evidence. Therefore other facts besides his presence were not required.” Acknowledging culpability, Goltz concludes with the stark statement that he never wants to see war again. However, the image of the tortured war correspondent, mind torn with nightmares, has acquired a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome chic that is unlikely to deter would-be journalists from going into this unforgiving arena and returning with the harrowing footage or unflinching personal accounts that will make their careers. They may not like what they become in the process, but after reading Goltz’s vivid book they cannot say that they weren’t warned.

An antidote to cynicism about the media is to be found in Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s excoriating book, “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches From Chechnya,” a personal, unblinking stare at the casualties of this war. It depicts people mashed by shells, children deranged with fear, victims brought alive by her pen as they die before her eyes. She carries the burden of those who were killed because they gave her information or tried to help her. Her measured accounts of grotesque and intolerable horror compare with the best factual writings of the World War II Italian correspondent Curzio Malaparte. Politkovskaya’s editors at the liberal Moscow newspaper Novoya Gazeta oppose the Putin government line on the war, but they cut the worst parts of her reports, fearing they wouldn’t be believed. Some of these expose the trade in the living and the dead; Chechens picked up by the Russian military are routinely tortured, then ransomed back to their families whether or not they have survived. Corpses command a higher price than survivors because of the familial obligation to give them a proper burial.

Politkovskaya describes how the Chechen identity, with its traditional mentality of fortitude, self-help and community cohesion, has vanished in the mud of obliterated villages, in prison pits, refugee camps and mass graves. “How could this have happened in front of the whole world?” she asks. “Under the supervision of international observers, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Doctors of the World, The Salvation Army, human rights advocates -- our own and foreign?” The consequence, she says, is a society plunged into a cycle of degradation, revenge and reprisal that will breed blood feud and psychosis for the next century. The beneficiaries are senior elements in Russia’s security apparatus and some Chechen warlords, complicit in sustaining the war through “joint special operations” that range from crude pillage and extortion to the suppression of independent information about the conflict. Those on both sides who work for peace or expose war crimes are routinely eliminated. Fortunes are being made and plans are underway to export this profitable venture by widening the war to the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia.

Readers may respond to her book like those who contacted her Moscow paper demanding to know why she writes about such things, why she is scaring them. “I’m sure that this has to be done for one simple reason,” she answers. “[A]s contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible.” Politkovskaya acknowledges, too, the complex motivations that keep her doing this work and its stark reward, comprehensible only to those who elect to spend time in such places. “I’m thankful for this war,” she admits. “The war is horrible, but it has purified me of everything that was superfluous, unnecessary. How can I not be thankful?” In the crucible of war, her writing too is purified, given a harsh lyricism that has found a way of illuminating a place of profound blackness.

The difficulty of illumination is at the core of the third book, “The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire.” Khassan Baiev, its Chechen-born author, left a promising career as a cosmetic surgeon in Moscow to return to his homeland just before the war of 1995. Through that conflict and a second Russian invasion in 2000, he worked to defend his people and help the wounded, treating friend and foe, combatant and civilian. The foes were Russian soldiers and some Chechen fighters who threatened to execute him even as he operated on them. The friends were his neighbors and childhood classmates who would come to him smashed and bleeding. Exhausted and traumatized, a death sentence on his head, Baiev eventually escaped to the United States, where he and his family now live. Not certified to practice medicine, he began writing. “I wanted this account of my work as a surgeon in Chechnya during the wars with Russia to transcend politics and stereotypes,” he says. “I wanted to tell the truth, and the truth consists of the good and bad, the serious and the not so serious. Often the truth is painful.”

Baiev admits at the start that among the problems complicating his pursuit of truth is a Chechen cultural machismo that prevents admitting fear or failure. Indeed, the book inclines rather in the opposite direction. Instead of insight, we are offered heroic destiny and mystical interventions by phantom voices, even an out-of-body near-death experience, a pitch-black tunnel, beautiful light and angelic figures. Drawn back unwillingly from heaven, the wounded Baiev says he awakened to find himself in an intensive-care ward. “This is not a man, this is a machine,” says the doctor examining him. “[A]nyone else would have died by now.” There are many other remarkable attributes that Baiev reveals about himself in the book. It is full of struggle and triumph, and he tells how he overcomes each obstacle with nobility and fairness, cheating death always at the last minute, and lives by the codes of Chechen tradition and a sportsman’s honor. Much of it is delivered in a dramatized, cliff-hanger style seldom leavened by description except where that intrudes abruptly, perhaps revealing the journalistic hand of the book’s co-authors. The medical descriptions also can be problematic. Some have the stilted density of extracts from textbooks. Others are difficult to visualize, even for a reader conversant with the practice of battlefield surgery.

It is the sheer horror of Baiev’s experiences in Chechnya that makes the book burst from these restraints and come alive. The narrative loses its formulaic structure to become impressionistic; we hear the drum-fire of Russian artillery, the screams of the dying and feel Baiev’s exhaustion as he plies his blunt bone-saw through another amputation. We understand his agony as friends die under his hands and the absurdity -- and essential humanity -- of operating on a wounded cow in the middle of a shelled town. Finally, the account of Baiev’s breakdown and painful rehabilitation is powerful enough to overcome melodrama, offering the prospect for redemption and healing that is richly deserved.

Even those of us who would claim some acquaintance with the experience of war can hardly comprehend the intensity of suffering seen and endured by those who have been through the conflicts in Chechnya. No one survives such encounters intact. The accounts of these veterans deserve to be read. *