In the noise that accompanied the grand ‘war on terror’, some of the very crucial conflicts featuring oppression, occupation and human rights abuses were pushed to the international community’s back burner. Chechnya has been one such conflict — the resolution of which has now been effectively rendered non-essential.

In The Angel of Grozny, Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad documents a harrowing account of this conflict that continues to this day — albeit in a different character — and brings to notice the forgotten suffering of the people of this tormented region. The account elucidates the sometimes irreversible effects conflict has on a populace — effects that they may have no control over.

Be it Chechnya, Bosnia, Palestine or Iraq, children have turned out to be the most vulnerable victims in times of war. With entire societies being brutalised, there is little more to offer the children of conflict than a context of violence and abuse. ‘Since 1994 up to the present day 25,000 children in Chechyna have lost one or both parents... some of them live in cardboard boxes, in bombed-out apartment buildings or in pipes by a riverbank,’ Seierstad writes.

Timur, a character in Seierstad’s narrative non-fiction, has been one such child. Losing his parents at a very young age, he and his stepsister Liana were sent to live with their uncle Omar whose abusive conduct drove the two out and away.

The children were then sent into the care of Hadijat and Malik — a Chechen couple who looked after as many neglected children and orphans as they possibly could. It is after Hadijat — known in Chechnya as ‘the angel of Grozny’ — that Seierstad’s book is named.

Seierstad also refers to the hindrances and hazards that journalists reporting from Chechnya come across. She, who at one point even had to travel to the region in secret, writes: ‘[you] have to get authorisation from the Foreign Ministry... special permission from the Interior Ministry. Moreover, you are required to travel with a government representative.’

For journalists working in Russia, Chechnya, now more than ever, seems to have become a subject that cannot be touched. Many Russian and foreign journalists and human rights workers have had to pay for their work in the Caucasus. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights worker Natalya Estemirova have been among such cases.

Over the years, Chechnya has also changed — in some respects, even radically. The war and destruction has radicalised the region’s youth and nationalist leaders have been using religion as a rallying call for those who want a separate state. Young Chechen men who don’t work and have little to keep themselves busy with ‘want to go to Pakistan... want to learn Arabic.’

It is the same Chechnya where honour killing (of women only) is rife and a brother may kill his sister only on mere suspicion of ‘unbecoming’ behaviour and thereby reclaim his ‘honour’. Despite the heinous crime, the murderer is rarely, if ever, turned over to the police, who in most cases sympathise with the criminal.

For such circumstances, Jokhar Dudayev, the only Chechen to have ever held the general’s rank in the Soviet army, accuses the West. There are reasons why religious fanaticism has come to dominate Chechen life, he says.

Accusing Europe of betraying ‘humanistic ideals’ by ignoring what is happening in Chechnya, Dudayev says this abandonment has ‘forced us to become a Muslim society’. By now, as Seierstad notes, this society is producing characters, most of them men, who ‘need to have Sharia, like in the old days when they cut off hands.’

It was in this situation that Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s current president, ordered the closure of all public orphanages, rendering even more children without a home and hence easy prey to elements having terrorist agendas or even to Kadyrov’s own security force — the feared Kadyrovtsi.

Åsne also documents various accounts by individuals tortured by Russian agents and by Kadyrov’s men. Zaur, one of Hadijat’s adopted children, was also picked up by local authorities on suspicions of being a terrorist. And although he spent ‘just one afternoon’ with the Kadyrovtsi, ‘everything has changed.’

Referring to the Beslan school siege of 2004, the 2002 hostage-taking episode at a theatre in Moscow, and their repercussions on none other but the people of Chechnya, the author demonstrates how attacks on innocent Russian civilians have only served to weaken the moral standing of the Chechen separatist movement.

With the Russian government unwilling to give in to a separatist Chechnya’s demands, a Chechen is still likely to be discriminated against in the Russian state. Chechens ‘top the list of hate figures and have the lowest reputation among ordinary Russians... have trouble registering in Russian cities... getting jobs.’

Åsne’s marvellous account is most certainly a voice that speaks with obvious association and sympathy not only for the Chechens but for all who have been ‘dispossessed’ and ‘destroyed’ by a conflict that they are forced to endure. — quratulain.siddiqui@gmail.com
 

The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a forgotten war
By Åsne Seierstad
Basic Books, New York
ISBN 978-0-465-01122-3
341pp. $25.95