“In a war where the enemy hides among civilians, there will be civilian casualties,” General Kulikov stated. “In wars like this, civilian casualties outnumber military ones.”
The commander also noted that his own forces had taken a “surprisingly large” number of casualties during the course of the tough operation. That, he suggested, was the reason why those first journalists and human rights observers to visit Samashki after the battle found so many syringes littering the streets of the town; so many wounded soldiers required immediate relief. Finally, concluded the general, should anyone doubt his assessment of the liberation of Samashki from the Dudayevist bandits who had taken control of the town from its normal, peaceful inhabitants, they were encouraged to check the record of the ICRC and journalists. The former had found everything perfectly normal, given battle conditions, while the latter had been given complete and free access to the town, with the exception of those whose papers were not in order.
I did not even bother to ask a question in the face of these patent and provable lies.
“Who is the best television producer in Russia?” I demanded of ABC’s Steve Coppen.
“Kisilov,” was his one-word reply.
He was referring to Yevgenii Kisilov, founder, producer, and presenter of the award-winning (and almost revolutionary) weekly news program called Itogi, or “Agenda,” on the independent NTV station. In a few short years, the program had became something like the equivalent of 60 Minutes for Russian television viewers.
“You know him?”
“Of course.”
“Then please call him and tell him I will donate my tapes, because I hate lies.”
I was over at Voice of America reporter Elizabeth Arnold’s apartment when the weekly Itogi came on the next Sunday night. In addition to her fiance, a crime-busting cop named Rafi, the viewing crowd consisted of Elizabeth, myself, and a man who introduced himself as Maksharip. With a jolt, I recognized him as being the English-speaking Chechen historian-cum-guerrilla I had encountered outside Samashki back in February, before I had ever met Hussein. Having put down his gun, he was back in Moscow looking for a new “fixer” job in the Western press, selling access to the people who are thought to have abducted Fred Cuny.
The main people missing from the little press-success party were Lawrence Sheets and Sonia Mikich. The former was already back in Chechnya trying to get an interview with Djohar Dudayev in his bear lair in the mountains, while the latter was completing her future award-winning work on the Soldiers’ Mothers’ March by following the brave ladies on the most recent leg of their quest.
At nine P.M., we gathered in Elizabeth’s den and turned on the tube.
After a brief digest of the week’s events, Yevgenii Kisilov announced to his audience of millions that the bulk of the program would be devoted to events in Chechnya, and specifically the village of Samashki.
An advertisement. Maybe two. Then Colonel-General Kulikov’s press conference, with all the attendant schmooze. Commentary from Kisilov, concluding with a line something like “we’ll be back with a slightly different perspective after the break.”
An advertisement. Maybe two. Then Kisilov.
“Thanks for staying with us,” he said. “Our insider’s report from Samashki comes not from one of our regular reporters, but the Amerikanski Journalist To-mas Gol-tes…
Flip to self-shot Goltz, in Muslim prayer cap, standing in front of the bullet-ridden “Samashki” sign in mid-March.
“It doesn’t look like much, but for the residents of this muddy farm town in the Chechen plain, it is a place worth fighting for. Its name is Samashki, which in the Chechen tongue means ‘the place of deer.’”
In contrast to the usual visual diet of triumphant Russian soldiers pushing forward against “bandit nests filled with militant Islamists,” there followed generic material on the perfectly normal people of the town, and its bombing, and then newer material, of soldiers at Post 13 stopping Red Cross vehicles heading toward refugees trudging down an empty road. Finally, shots of a stricken village filled with corpses in the streets or on the way to the cemetery.
“Reportadja To-masa Gol-tza,” intoned Yevgeni Kisilov, ending the broadcast.
I had just become a Russian television personality.
It was now time to replace that 90-second news brief on ABC with a 90-minute documentary along the lines of the Itogi piece, exposing the full horror of the Chechen war, and to explore ways how to stop it. I made up a target list of channels and networks I would contact: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox—the works. One of them was sure to bite.
Not.
On April 19, 1995, someone blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City—and the massacre at Samashki was instantly relegated to footnote status in the annals of an obscure and forgotten war.
14
GDEJE FRONT? (WHERE’S THE FRONT?)
The fiftieth year anniversary of Victory in Europe Day loomed, and Moscow was the venue. Bill Clinton, John Major, and Francois Mitterand were all Boris Yeltsin’s special guests, scheduled to arrive in the Russian capital to celebrate the Allied victory over fascism. The most delicate diplomatic question was whether any units that served in Chechnya would be included in the march-by parade of arms.
Covering the parade was not, however, why ABC wanted me to stay in Russia. Peter Jennings and a host of other State Department, diplomatic, presidential, and foreign news network bigwigs would be doing that and taking care of celebration meetings, greetings, and other press protocols. The Network Most Americans Get Their News From needed a fireman. In television press lingo, that meant they needed someone to station in Chechnya, just in case anything untoward and nasty happened during the big bash. It made no difference that they really had no intention of using anything I might shoot. I got a salary and expenses and a camera, and they got an emergency asset pinned to the ABC assignment board. Chechnya: Goltz.
They wanted me and I wanted the war.
It was a match made in heaven.
My assignment, such as it was, was to capture a day in the presumably miserable life of a Great War veteran still resident in Grozny. The piece, filled with as much irony as possible, would include said veteran attending the brass-band VE-Day celebrations in Grozny, and then flip over to the veteran at home, remembering how the Red Army had conquered Berlin in May of 1945. The obvious point was to compare the state of the German and Chechen capitals, fifty years apart.
The reality, however, was for me to just “be there.” And the fact that I was nothing more than a resource statistic was made clear by the home-video camera I was issued. It was American system NTSC—in other words, a camera that was incompatible with the European PAL system needed to make a satellite uplink. What this meant was that I was expected to send tapes to Moscow via courier, meaning the airport in Ingushetia. This was difficult enough when covering Samashki, and more or less required that I be at the airport to beg or bribe someone to courier my material to Moscow by four in the afternoon. Although only some fifty miles farther away from the airport than Samashki as the crow flies, Grozny was in fact much farther away in terms of time, due to checkpoints, ruined roads, and the general, unknowable chaos of war. If I were to record anything of interest in and around the Chechen capital, it had better happen before noon, because anything that happened after could never be delivered on time, and would instantly join the general category of yesterday’s papers—i. e.: no longer news.