“Stoi!! Stoi!! Stoi!!” someone was shouting in Russian at the top of his lungs. “The soldiers will think you are attacking and shoot to kill.’”
I will take credit for that stunningly obvious piece of advice.
I was changing roles. It was time to work to save my friends, not interrogate them.
I don’t know how many bus runs I made that day, up and back from the Sernovodsk mosque and back to Post 13, picking up the small waves of women and children and elders who had managed to march away from Samashki under white flags. The young men were not so lucky. A small unit of soldiers, most likely FSB (KGB), intercepted the new refugee survivors about one hundred yards before they reached Post 13, winnowing out virtually all males between the ages of fifteen and fifty, stripping them in the field to check for the telltale bruise marks on their shoulders that would suggest they were fighters, and then tying their hands behind their backs and forcing them aboard trucks headed for the notorious “filtration” center at Mozdok.
The testimony of all the women and elders I spoke with was identical.
The town had been utterly sold out. Blasted to bits on the night of the sixth and morning of the seventh, it was next subjected on the days of the seventh and eighth to a massacre by marauding soldiers, most, if not all of whom were allegedly doped up on a pain-killing, brain-deadening, rampage-inducing cocktail of promodol, dimedrol, and booze.[18] There were somewhere between one hundred and two hundred dead.
That sounded like news to me. And it sounded like news to all the other correspondents now in the area, their numbers growing by the hour. But it did not sound like news to any of the press organs with which I maintained an association.
“We want pictures of the dead, not allegations from the living!” said one best-nameless editor to whom I had pitched the massacre story via Sheets’ sat-phone.
Uncle Larry was filing another update, based on the testimony of my friends. He managed to convince a young Chechen woman named Xazman Umanova to take his camera into Samashki beneath her skirt and shoot everything she saw. Xazman had done so, but the material was so out of focus that it was unusable.[19] He took her eyewitness testimony instead. The AP got their own clutch of quotes from survivors, as did the AFP, VOA, and everybody else. Everyone was filing, filing, filing about Samashki.
The only person not filing was me.
Vodka that night. Gallons of it.
The crowd around the Sernovodsk mosque has grown to several thousand.
Alisutanova, Tamusa Magomedovna; Amirkhanov, Alvi Adamovich; Arsaev, Arbi Zalimkhanovich… reads Alexandr Guryanov from a list of names somehow compiled by Memorial under chaotic circumstances. It is not clear whether this is a list of the living or the dead.
“Brothers and sisters, the world must know of the deeds of Samashki!” sings Zinzie Terazawa, the leader of the wandering order of Russian Buddhists that call themselves Nipponsan Mihotse.
“Let Clinton, Major, Kohl, and Mitterand come to Samashki for their summit!” demands Maria Kirbasova, the head of the Soldiers’ Mothers’ movement, referring to the upcoming May 9 Victory Day celebrations in Moscow marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Allies’ victory over Hitler.
The monks and mothers and other attendant Russian religious pacifists, as well as Chris Hunter and the Quakers are back, planning a chant-march-zikr down the road from Sernovodsk to Samashki, breaching the barrier at Post 13.
They march. We march. We are them and they are us, Orthodox Jew silent marching, zikr-dance Muslim ecstatic chanting, Buddhist drum-beating. One hundred yards from the barrier, the colonel who used my flak jacket for target practice and the baby-faced sergeant come out to greet us with a dozen soldiers with their guns at the ready.
Halt, they say. We do. A discussion ensues; the marching mood dissipates; another wave of refugees trudges around the far side of the APC. And then a white land cruiser with the markings of the International Committee of the Red Cross is driving toward us, coming from Samashki. It stops at the barrier.
Odd.
Jean-Paul Corbaz, director for the North Caucasus region of the ICRC, gets out. Talking to the cameras, he explains how he has just been taken on a tightly controlled tour of Samashki, after previously having been refused access on multiple occasions by the Russian high command.
“There are many ways to take a town in accordance with the rules of war,” Corbaz says carefully. “By all indications, this was not the case in Samashki.”
That tightly worded statement is a complete break with the ICRC policy of never sharing anything in the field with the press. It is a virtual condemnation of the Russian high command, and a war crime inference.
That is news.
Not without bodies, say all the editors I petition.
Vodka that night. Buckets of it.
13
WITNESS
“The true scale of the tragedy that struck the Chechen settlement of Samashki on April 12 [April 7-8, ed.] will be revealed at a later date, but even now it is clear that it can be equated with Lidice, Khatyn, and Son My.”[20]
“Silence hung over Samashki today. Everywhere, it seems, there were bodies.”[21]
“They are pulling me,” said Uncle Larry, hanging up his sat phone.
“They say there is nothing more we can do with this story without real pictures.”
This was extraordinarily bad news. Lawrence was my car, my phone, my rent. Without Sheets, I had no resources. But however frustrating, I had to admit that I was about to give up, too. I’d been burning up a lot of time at fifteen dollars a minute on Uncle’s satellite phone, trying to get someone, anyone, interested in the Samashki massacre story, but with no results. No bodies, no story, said everyone I ever worked for, and I was getting a little tired racing to the Slepsovski airport every evening to beg or bribe pilots or passengers to courier the tapes I shot that day to the ABC Moscow bureau in the vain hope that they would use something.
“Let’s just make one last run.”
“I just don’t get the point any more,” said Sheets. “We have done this story to death.”
“Please.”
Back through the muddy streets of Slepsovski down to the market, over the bridge left then right toward Assinovskaya before jagging left again down the tree-lined road to Sernovodsk. There was Memorial’s Alexandr Guryanov at the mosque, a mass of people gathered around him as he continued to read from his list of dead or living. A couple of the monks associated with the Soldiers’ Mothers’ March were chanting at the corner of the field, attracting the listless attention of several more newly arrived journalists. Sheets and I drove on, pausing to take keepsake pictures of each other under a poster of Djohar Dudayev someone had nailed to a telephone pole. The banner underneath read: Freedom or Death!
Next came Post 13.
But there was something different, something wrong.
There was no APC blocking the road.
We stopped where the APC should have been and went to the Post canteen to find our baby-faced sergeant. He was drinking tea with a plump peroxide blonde dressed in camouflage.
18
Evidence of widespread drug use among the Russian assault troops came in the form of chemical analyses of the trace elements left in the scores, nay, hundreds of syringes found in the streets of the town by
19
Umanova would improve with time, winning the “Stringers’ Choice” award in the annual Rory Peck Commemoration in 2000 for her incredibly brave coverage of the second Chechen war; she is now in exile.
20
Dmitry Balburov,
21
One was the American national Aukai Collins, who lost a leg in fighting. Cf. Amy Barrett, “Holy Warrior,”