Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya, Arch Tait

bombardment, and since January 9 Ali-bek has been unable to sleep. He maintains a full-time vigil at his wife’s bedside. On January 13, he managed to move her, pregnant and close to death, to the central hospital in Nazran but the outlook is not good. He can’t bear to look at her dreadful wounds and watch her convulsions. She desperately needs powerful, intensive-care drugs but as usual they are in short supply. In his sleepless nights Ali-bek writes poetry, a personal appeal to the Being who may or may not be sitting on high observing everything that happens here below. All Zarema had done was to go out to distribute presents to children.
    Whatever appeals may be addressed to the Almighty, relations between civilians and federal troops are just as soulless in Shali as in Martan Chu. There will be no inquiry into the killings in Martan Chu, the massacre of a family not meriting a criminal investigation. No prosecutor will question the shameless lies which tricked the Shamsudinovs into returning to their village. The implication is that the aftermath of the New Year crime is the personal problem of this luckless little girl andher Aunt Raisa, who now faces the task of trying to bring her up. Raisa views the future with unconcealed foreboding; in order to treat the child’s injuries adequately she would need a lot of money for the proper drugs, a top-class clinic and consultants, things she is not going to find in Martan Chu or anywhere else in Chechnya or Ingushetia today. Be that as it may, the Empire refuses to make an exception: Chechens are not allowed beyond the borders of Chechnya and Ingushetia. Not a single general is to be found with the decency to admit that he bears any guilt for Liana’s suffering, or that it is his duty to help her.
    The situation is identical in respect of Shali: no half-witted gun-layer has been blamed for devastating the central square, no criminal charges are being brought for the murder of civilians. Nobody has so much as apologized.
    Madina and Alikhan: A New Generation Consigned to a Hospital Bed
    Madina and Alikhan Avtorkhanov are cousins. Their mothers Khava and Aishat are sisters. Khava lived in Samashki and Aishat in Novy Sharoy in Achkhoy-Martan District. They were not far from each other, but the shelling left them separated by a whirlwind of deadly lead flying in all directions.
    In this war family reunions take place outside operating theatres. The sisters met in the treatment unit of Sunzha Hospital. Khava was at the bedside of 22-year-old Madina, while Aishat was looking after her younger son, 18-year-old Alikhan. (Her elder son died during random shelling of their village during the First Chechen War.) Madina, only recently a beautiful young girl but now worn out by operations and pain, her parchment-colored face and body a shadow of what they were, has almost certainly been permanently crippled by the injuries she sustained on October 27. Some of her bone has been cut away and they need to find somewhere for her to have an operation, and then somewhere for her to convalesce because their house at 27 Kooperativnaya Street has been destroyed.
    The history of Alikhan’s illness is no less grim. One leg has already been amputated above the knee as a result of the curse of gangrene. For several days the soldiers refused to allow the wounded to be taken out of their village. He has already lost the big toe on his other foot and so far attempts to stop the gangrene from spreading have been unsuccessful. Alikhan is a quiet, thoughtful young man who holds Russia responsible for destroying his life on October 23, the day he was injured. He has no plans for the future now. His only distraction is when one of the men visiting the hospital picks up his stump of a body and takes him for a “walk” along the corridors.
    Alikhan tells me that none of his classmates are still alive. He left school along with eight other boys and eight girls. All the boys have since been killed. He is