Thomas Goltz - Chechnya Diary

“Did you see that?” asked Lawrence.

“I don’t need to see it!” shouted Reebok Nike. “I know it’s true!”

I tried to imagine the men charged with such atrocities, men like Xamid, Shirvani, Ussam, Ali, and Hussein. It was impossible that they would do such things. But the little episode decided the matter for us. Even if we made the drive into Samashki at our own risk, we would probably never come out. Either we would be mistaken for Russian soldiers and be drawn and quartered along the lines alleged, and then made into tomorrow’s headlines, or we were being lured into a trap by the Russians, who would kill us out of general spite and then blame our deaths on Chechens like Hussein.

If he was still alive.

More Deep Purple acid rock from atop the APC blocking the road. It seemed to be the only tape the Russian grunts had. I would have offered them a change of tunes, but we only had one tape, too—a collection of Elton John’s incredibly overorchestrated Greatest Hits, which I got so tired of hearing that I banned Nodar from playing it while I was in the car. The Georgian driver was in a good mood. He had been trained to wait, and was getting combat pay. The cameraman was less happy. Either he was going through withdrawal, or he was expressing his frustration at not being able to shoot anything by sinking into a sustained funk and complaining about fever and stomach disorders. As for Uncle Larry, he was getting news-edgy.

“This is going nowhere, fast,” said Sheets after sitting around Post 19 for several hours. “Let us try the back door, if there is one.”

Reluctantly, I acceded. I wanted to wait, but it wasn’t my car. I was not even paying for my own bed in the shabby Hotel Sundja. I was there on sufferance. I had no rights, only friends.

We drove back down the empty road to Sernovodsk, inquired about a back road to Samashki, and were directed through the muddy streets of the town to a deeply rutted farm track snaking along the edge of a line of trees that serve as a windbreak. I wanted to believe the path was somehow connected to the abandoned water mill of Hussein’s youth. Maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t. We turned back when we noticed a red sign with a white skull and words in Russian that suggested very clearly that the area was mined.

Back to and through Sernovodsk and toward Slepsovski to another road Lawrence identified on his map. It went in the wrong direction, toward Achkoi Martan via the tiny settlements of Davydenko and Novi Sharoi, and was very likely the same bad road I took with Sonia Mikich and her ARD crew that nasty night when we and the monks and mothers were convoyed out of the region. In other words, it might theoretically lead to Samashki, but also it had been under Russian control for weeks.

I tried to explain this to Uncle Larry, but he would not listen and told Nodar to drive on. Then, within a mile of the turnoff west, we were stopped at a Russian guard post. A pack of cigarettes convinced the guards to let us continue down the bad track, allegedly to interview a garrison commander based at Davydenko.

“Be careful,” said the guard. “There are rebels in the forest.” Driver Nodar snapped on his flak jacket, then slipped a ceramic shock plate in the front envelope of the jacket. Then he took the back pocket plate and sat on it as protection against mine blast. Sheets and I reversed the order. We were sitting in the backseat, so we wore one plate in the back against bullets and sat on the second for protection against mines. Ha-ha, we laughed. The maybe-junkie cameraman in the passenger seat up front snoozed or slumped in his no-dope-related haze.

Davydenko consisted of a couple of houses near the road. The Russians had set up a tent camp and canteen in between the houses. Soldiers were everywhere. The maybe-junkie cameraman managed to shoot a few useless frames before being told to stop. We were led in quasi-arrest over to the local commander, a genial enough man from Perm, or some other obscure Russian city, who politely informed us that we had no business being in his sector, and to turn back the way we came. He added that, if instructed from above, he would be more than happy to host us and allow us to record a day-in-the-life of the regular soldiers under his command, as per his request. As for his assessment of the situation, well, all seemed rather quiet and under control, although that of course could change at any moment. Particularly worrisome were the mines the enemy placed on the road at night, obscuring them in pooled water and muddy tracks. We returned to Sernovodsk sitting on both ceramic shock plates and avoiding all pooled water and deep muddy tracks.

The situation at Post 13 was the same as before. “Smoke on the Water” ringing through the air, and silent smoke vectoring over Samashki in the distance. Other hacks were arriving on the scene. Chris Bird, of the wire service, and Paula Robatelle, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, French-language division. Next arrived two cars filled with a very pushy team from the British Channel 4, working on a general documentary on the war in Chechnya. They had just sort of stumbled onto the Samashki story without knowing what it was. Like everyone else, they were told they could not enter Samashki without the new special permissions issued in distant Mozdok. We told them of our experience, but they all decided to take the drive anyway.

The small crowd of newshounds staking out the distant town had the effect of creating a diversion, and the camera operators and wandering journalists instinctively started to act in silent collusion with one another, distracting soldiers while semisecretly filming the APC in the middle of the road, as well as elements of life in the camp trenches. Ha! A soldier on top of a bunker washing his hair! Ho! A blonde woman in fatigues emerging from the camp mess with a tray of steaming tea!

News…

Noodle dinner. Vodka and Turkish beer. The nightly pounding of some Chechen settlement or position by the Russian artillery. One thing was clear; it was no longer Samashki they were pulverizing. Probably Bamut, as Achkoi Martan had surrendered, the head of the Russian-appointed administration, Salman Khadjiev, had announced.

News…

“The desk wants some real copy,” said Lawrence after checking in with Moscow via his SAT-phone. “And they want some pictures to go with it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I am going to Grozny,” said Sheets. “Come along. We’ll try to be back by late afternoon.”

“Ok,” I said, heartsick. I felt that I was abandoning my people.

At the crack of dawn on the morning of April 9 we were pulling out of Slepsovski for Sernovodsk. Up and not so much over the Sundja Hills as along them, we drove down a sometimes dusty and other times muddy farm road that had become the main connecting road to the Mozdok-Grozny highway. It was a bone-rattling ride, until we finally hit asphalt. The main highway was still a pretty bumpy drive, due to deep holes and craters and the general destruction of tarmac-chewing tank treads. Every hamlet and house along the way seemed to have been shattered by aerial bombs or point-blank artillery fire.

I asked Nodar to stop so I could film some generic destruction.

“Don’t bother,” said Lawrence. “You’ll get enough in Grozny.”

This was an understatement. Starting with the outskirts of the city, Grozny was such a shattered mess that it boggled the mind. “Destruction not seen in Europe since Stalingrad,” was the usual way to describe it. Gutted, pockmarked, ten-story apartment buildings sagged like ugly Leaning Towers of Pisa, long emptied of their erstwhile residents. Less mauled, but still virtually destroyed structures suggested continued life through messages scrawled on exterior walls: Don’t Shoot! People Live Here!