Isa got straight to the point: The foreign journalist wanted to hear about Vakha’s experiences under detention. And more. The foreign journalist needed to have it all on film, as evidence of Russian war crimes and atrocities against civilians.
“Okay,” said Vakha.
He began to clinically relate how he had been walking down the road minding his own business in between tending the sheep and planting the potatoes when he happened across a Russian checkpoint in the disputed Slepsovski zone and found himself detained along with a dozen other Chechen youth.
“They beat us all as a matter of course,” Vakha related dispassionately. “Then they packed us into a truck like we were sheep and sent us down the road to Mozdok.”
There is little doubt in my mind where Bertoldt Brecht got the name of the judge in his classic play about the Judgment of Solomon, Caucasian Chalk Circle. It was from a map of the Caucasus. But the difference in resonance between Mazdak, the stern but fair Biblical King, and Mozdok, the main Russian military base in the region, could not have been greater. It was a place that sent shivers up the spines not only of Chechens, normally so indifferent to the concept of suffering, but international human rights groups whose representatives repeatedly tried to gain access to the base, only to be turned away.
Mozdok, breathed Vakha. That is where things started to get nasty.
“They pulled us out of the truck and forced us to run through a double line of soldiers, who spit and kicked and hit us with truncheons. They aimed for the kidneys. Feel.”
He pulled up his shirt and guided my hand to feel the bumps and bruises on his back.
“Then they walked—actually stomped—on those who fell; happily, I was not of their number. I heard gunshots. They say there were summary executions, but I did not see such myself. Perhaps they were just playing with their weapons.”
The interrogators did not play around when using other methods, however.
“They bound me to a chair, locking my hands on a table, and then applied electric shocks to my fingers,” Vakha related, showing with one hand how pincers were applied to the other. “Then came… I am embarrassed to say this…”
“Go on,” said Isa.
“…then came the application of electrical shocks to the area of sex, the genitals.”
“How…” I asked slowly. “How did you get out?”
“There was an angel,” Vakha said softly. “Not a real angel, of course. But a foreigner. A foreign woman. They were taking us from one place to another, showing us off. I do not know. But, as we walked, this woman from the Washington Red Cross was there and as I passed her she whispered, Run, run—they are going to kill you all!’ So I whispered her message to the others as the Russians were herding us toward a helicopter, and I said to myself, ‘They are going to throw us off.’ Others had heard and spoke of the Russians taking four cars and pulling people apart, attaching ropes to each limb. I have to say I was so frightened that I decided that it was indeed time to run for my life.”[7]
Vakha and a small group broke lines, vaulted the security fence, hijacking a bus from Mozdok back to Ingushetia, and then to the safety of war-ravaged Chechnya to nurse their wounds and plot their revenge.
We drove back to Samashki, again without lights, the road again periodically illuminated by distant flares. Isa plunked a tape into the car’s cassette player, and the dirge music silenced any thought of conversation. We did not talk; there was too much to think about: electrodes, cattle-prods, helicopters…
Then someone was shouting from outside the car.
“Stoi!” they screamed. “Stop!”
Isa hit the breaks and the car skidded to a slow halt in the middle of an icy bridge over what I recognized as being the Assa River on the outskirts of Samashki. Lost in the mystical dirge music on the scratchy car speakers, we had just breached another checkpoint. Whether Russian or Chechen was almost a matter of indifference by now. I was getting so very tired of checkpoints. Isa felt the same way I did.
“What a mistake to know you, what a mistake to help you,” he muttered under his breath, and in Russian, so that I could understand.
“Bumaga,” demanded the man at my window, and I pulled out my controversial press pass from Achkoi Martan, hoping it was the right flavor.
“You will follow us,” said the apparent unit commander. Sandwiched between two other vehicles of armed men, we set off from the checkpoint on the bridge and into the labyrinthine muddy lanes of Samashki, eventually stopping in front of an extended brick wall boasting a massive iron gate with a double door for vehicle entry and a single for pedestrians.
“Wait here,” said the gunman, entering the compound. Then the steel door designed for human beings (as opposed to the larger door designed for machines) creaked open. I hoisted myself out of the car and walked through the steel gate to face whatever music awaited, preparing my line in as good Russian as I could muster. “Sir, I am sorry for having violated the security perimeter of your nearly surrounded town. As a completely independent and detached observer of the horrible war in your unrecognized republic I was merely attempting to document the brutality of the Russian campaign and the spirit of the…” That was the English version anyway.
Then I was inside the courtyard and a dog was yapping at my heel. At the far end, near the steps to the house, stood a stocky man with a Kalashnikov in his hands.
“Sir,” I began. “I am a correspondent and…”
“So you are the foreigner I have been hearing about,” said the commander.
“Yes, I am he, and I must apologize for any and all inconveniences that my arrival…”
“I have yet to interrogate a suspect in my courtyard,” said the commander, with a chuckle. “Take off your shoes and enter my home.”
I did so, as did Isa.
“These are my friends,” said the commander, indicating a knot of five or six men squatting in the bare-as-bones, kitchen-loading belt-machine-gun shells.
“Marsh vogil,” they said, blinking up from their task. “Welcome.”
A young woman busied herself making tea over the stove, while an elderly couple sat, silent and disapproving, in the far corner.
“So who are you?” asked the commander.
“Here are my papers,” I said, handing over my new press pass for inspection.
“So, what sort of pictures have you been taking?” the commander asked.
I started to explain what I had been recording, but realized that I was describing material that amounted to generic visual junk.
A man walking from a shot-up house to a shot-up outhouse; another man standing in a shot-up house framed by a shot-up window frame. Chickens cluck-running in front of the turret of a tank. My host and guide Isa pontificating about Russian-Chechen relations in anecdotal form about something so profound and important that it took him ten minutes to say “and we must be free.” Commander Santa Ali Claus saying much the same thing but looking better in beard and bandolier. The best stuff I had recorded was torture victim Vakha—and even if the content was good, I knew I had shot it all in bad light.
Yes, I could share a detailed shot list with the commander. If he did not believe me when I detailed said shot list, he could take a look at the (limited) material, and erase it all if it pleased him. There was nothing I had shot so far that I could not lose.
7
There is no such thing as the Washington Red Cross, and I wondered who Vakha’s angel might have been. Rachel Danbar from Human Rights Watch?