CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
By Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild

June 5, 2001 – (Women’s Review of Books) The Soviet Union has collapsed, but its principal part, Russia, remains the largest country in the world. Chechnya, one of several Muslim republics within Russia, is located in the north Caucasus, between the Caspian and the Black Seas, and is bounded on the south by the independent state of Georgia.

Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya by Anne Nivat, translated by Susan Darnton. New York: Public Affairs, 2001, 238 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

War is so unjust and ugly that all who must wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
Leo Tolstoy's Diary
January 6, 1853, Chechnya

The Soviet Union has collapsed, but its principal part, Russia, remains the largest country in the world. Chechnya, one of several Muslim republics within Russia, is located in the north Caucasus, between the Caspian and the Black Seas, and is bounded on the south by the independent state of Georgia.

Most of the Muslim entities within Russia are peaceful and content to be part of the state. The Chechens, in contrast, have waged wars for independence since the mid-nineteenth century, when it took the Russians thirty years to subdue the Chechen leader Shamil and his forces. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Chechens were incorporated into the Soviet Union only after a struggle. Chechen leaders allied themselves with the Nazis after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. For this the Chechen people paid dearly: Stalin, born in the neighboring region of Georgia, ordered the deportation of the Chechens en masse to Kazakhstan and the dissolution of their ethnic republic on February 23, 1944. Stalin died in 1953; the Chechens were only allowed to return in the early 1960s, during Khrushchev's rule.

The current conflict in Chechnya first burst into armed warfare between 1994 and 1996. Re-ignited in 1999, it shows no signs of abating despite massive Russian use of force. Especially since the renewed fighting, the Russian government has clamped down on independent reporting on Chechnya, targeting both individual journalists and media networks. In the last few weeks, a hostile takeover of the private network NTV by the state gas monopoly Gazprom threatens the most prominent source of independent news in Russia about Chechnya.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the first two Presidents of Russia, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, have staked their reputations on forcibly quelling the attempted secession of the Chechen republic. Suspicious and still unsolved night-time apartment bombings in Moscow and Volgodonsk, which killed over two hundred people, and a Chechen rebel incursion into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan, served as the pretext for Russian military action. This resort to force just happened to coincide with the run-up to the December 1999 parliamentary elections and allowed Putin, named Prime Minister and then heir to the Presidency by the enfeebled President Yeltsin, to seem young, virile anti decisive.

As Anne Nivat shows in her book, it is those who live in Chechnya, both Chechens and Russians, who bear the brunt of the suffering and death. Nivat, a freelance reporter for the French dailies liberation and Ouest-France, frustrated by failed attempts to win official permission to cover the war in Chechnya, went there anyway. Her aim in writing this book is to "tell the pitiful and pointless story of war and to show the plight of a proud people, these Chechen men and women, with whom I bore the unbearable." Her gutsiness has produced a penetrating portrait of the conflict the Kremlin seeks to control.

Taking advantage of the relative invisibility of females, the then thirty-year-old Nivat disguised herself as a Chechen woman and traveled throughout Chechnya from September 1999 to February 2000, writing an eyewitness account of the continuing conflict. She had been to Chechnya twice before, at the end of the first Russian-Chechen war in 1996, and at the end of January, 1997, to see firsthand the special Presidential elections won by the pro-independence Asian Maskhadov, who remains unrecognized by the Russian government. Fluent in Russian, and accompanied by her guide, appropriately named Islam, Nivat managed for six months to criss-cross the border between Chechnya and its sister republic Ingushetia and interview major Chechen leaders, some Russian
military and secret police, as well as many ordinary people caught in the crossfire.

The maxim that one person's freedom fighter is another's terrorist applies here. The Russians justify their tactics by claiming they are fighting terrorism. Rebel leader Shamil Bassayev responsible for the incursion into Dagestan, argues that the Russians are the "real terrorists," still maintaining their "imperialist ambitions."

Nivat's guide Islam is a 24-year-old former boyvik, Russian for a member of a revolutionary fighting group, whom she met during the previous war. Obsessed by the memory of a close friend who died fighting in 1996, he expresses his duty to remember his fallen comrade, falls into deep depressions and muses about the meaning of life. He guides Nivat through pitchdark fields and forests, under the noses of Russian troops, finds them shelter, helps her endure bombing raids and in a rare moment of tenderness and beauty amidst the horror breaks his reserve and Islamic law by bathing with her in a hot spring at dawn. At one point Nivat observes that Islam's life, so foreign to hers, "has much more meaning." But such romanticization of the rebel is a minor note in the narrative. For the most part, she remains sceptical of the claims of rebel leaders.

Nivat provides plenty of evidence about the treatment of women by both sides. In a guerrilla war, the entire population becomes the enemy, and since many of the men are with rebel units in the hills, women are the targets of much of the violence directed against civilians. Nivat reports on rapes, random shootings, bombings of hospitals, senseless brutality on both sides. Most of the brutality reported is by the Russians. In the market of Achkhoy-Martan, Nivat finds about thirty women in galoshes picking through the muddy ruins. The night before, Russian soldiers tried to trade their grenade launcher for four bottles of vodka. The teetotal Muslim women had none; their market was blasted.

If women are often the victims of violence, they are also the glue that keeps life going through the hardships created by the war; Faced with the loss of the basic amenities of modern life (electricity, heat, hot water and telephones), women scrounge for food and water and miraculously find a way to prepare meals, always against the background of the grim mountainous beauty of their land. Nivat describes women "pulling heavy wooden sleds with ropes, hauling fifty-liter milk containers, now used for water. They fetch this water from nearby wells or from the frozen puddles by the side of the road. The air is cold and dry; the sky is a wintry gray. The mountains stand out against the horizon as if someone had delicately positioned them there." To overcome her own isolation, she carries a satellite phone and batteries; this is the only phone service available.

Nivat experiences sexism firsthand. In the famous open-air arms market in Grozny, women are not welcome. War is for men; they will spend fifty rubles--two dollars--on a grenade, or one thousand dollars--on a grenade launcher. The military leader of the rebels, a Jordanian Arab named Khattab, will not allow Nivat to get too close, ordering "Women over there," when she tries to sit next to him with her tape recorder. On another foray, she and Islam stumble into an all-male Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalist rebel camp. Nivat almost falls victim to a "polite kidnapping" by rebels hungry for home cooking and a woman's presence. In one of the rare humorous moments in the book, Islam saves the day by convincing Nivat's putative kidnappers that she really can't cook.

Those few, women in power who take an interest in the Chechen conflict can do little. Finnish Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen visits a refugee camp and hears Chechen mothers plead for peace. Unable to respond, she passes out oranges. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson's call for a "sustained, effective national response" by the Russian government to charges of human rights violations has not been answered. [1]

Not all Chechens are pro-independence; some show nostalgia for the Soviet Union. One mother claims that her daughter's killing would never have happened under Soviet rule. Others bemoan the loss of freedom to travel and earn money possible in Soviet times. The Wahhabis insist on strict adherence to the Sharia, or Muslim fundamental law. One teenage girl exclaims to Nivat that she wants the Russians to occupy Grozny, "because I'm sick to death of the charia, tired of not being able to move about freely and of having to wear a scarf."

Anne Nivat grew up in a family with a "shared passion" for Russia; Russian intellectuals often visited her home and her mother taught her Russian. Having seen "war's harsh reality," her sympathies are clearly on the side of those, mostly Chechens, caught up in this conflict. It is primarily the Chechens, or the closely related Ingushetians, or Russian spouses of Chechens, who come alive on her pages. The Russian soldiers or officials portrayed are generally anonymous, brutal, drunk, corrupt, dehumanized, a far cry from the inspiring thinkers of her youth.

The conflict, now a guerrilla war of skirmishes, ambushes and hostage-takings, continues, with repeated declarations of Russian victory, hauntingly reminiscent of claims made by US officials during the Vietnam war. If this conflict is to end, it must be subjected to the pressures of outside opinion and creative diplomacy. Before that can happen, it must be brought more fully into view. Anne Nivat has shown great courage in making visible the complexities of the Chechen war, and Chienne de Guerre joins a venerable tradition of war reportage.

ROCHELLE GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD has traveled often to Russia, although never to Chechnya. She is professor of Graduate Studies in the Graduate Program of Vermont College at Norwich University. At Norwich, the nation's oldest private military college, she has learned much about the military mentality.

(1.) "Chechnya: Mary Robinson's Report," The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2000. For the full text of this report, see http://www.unhcr.ch