A Rare View of Chechnya
by Swanee Hunt, Rocky Mountain News

With her wire-rimmed spectacles and short gray hair, she looks more like a schoolteacher than a revolutionary, but Anna Politkovskaia - the only journalist covering the dirty war in Chechnya - has assumed heroic stature to many Russians. Midway between Moscow and Kabul, oil-rich Chechnya has been wracked by violence since 1994, when the region (once part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, incorporated into Russia in the 1860s) tried to secede from the Russian Federation to form a separate Muslim state. Upheaval and tragedy is an old story for the people of this region; in the '40s, more than a million were deported by Stalin to Siberia and Central Asia, under the pretext that they had collaborated with the Nazis.

Under Khrushchev, the displaced Chechens were allowed to return to their homeland. Fifty years later, the fighting has been fierce, with accusations from the Russians that Chechen terrorists are responsible for bombs causing high civilian casualties in Moscow and other cities. On the other hand, human rights groups claim that the Russian military has launched a brutal assault on the civilian population.

Whatever the political context, the chaos of war creates opportunities for abuses. Americans can take some comfort that when we turn on our TVs, independent media voices - live from Afghanistan or at Pentagon briefings - are an expected feature. But the freedom of press we take for granted in the U.S. is sporadic at best in the former Soviet Union. There, journalism can be a particularly dangerous endeavor. Rather than risking death from terrorists, last month Politkovskaia found herself a prisoner of Russian security forces, former KGB officers reporting to the Minister of Defense. She was, after all, causing trouble, investigating a massacre of six civilians-including the headmaster of the village school and a pregnant woman-at the hand of an elite battalion of ten Russian officers. The victims' bodies were burned. Didn't this reporter know she should have kept her nose out of it?

When nighttime fell on Politkovskaia in detainment, she became more anxious. "Bad things happen in the dark," she says simply. A Russian major helped her escape the camp. Politkovskaia spent the whole night walking through a snowy canyon, to avoid the checkpoints along the road. At 6 a.m., she arrived at a village under the control of Muslim fundamentalists. The people took her in, then after three days dressed her in a long skirt, tied a scarf around her head, and smuggled her out with three other village women.

Politkovskaia's reporting of human rights abuses is anathema to the Putin regime, which has harassed or completely shut down almost all Russian independent media. Does she put her life on the line - time after time - for some abstract notion of getting the truth out? For Politkovskaia, an eyewitness, life in Chechnya is no abstraction. The military atrocities have a deliberate purpose, she insists: to discourage refugees from returning home. Young boys are commonly raped. The economy has been completely destroyed; a newly rebuilt sugar factory, employing over 100 people, was intentionally demolished by Russian military. In one particularly poignant vignette, Politkovskaia describes a woman denied medical care during her difficult labor. "You have mothers!" she cried out to the soldiers around her. "No we don't," they answered. In fact, according to Politkovskaia, after the failure of the Russian army in the earlier fighting, the military commanders got smarter. The soldiers now sent to Chechnya have been selected from Russian orphanages, specifically so they will not have the constraints of conscience that come from growing up in a family. The baby, she adds, was born dead.

Politkovskaia's work is risky, but her output is prolific. As contributing editor for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, host of the Web program Vremechko, correspondent for Radio Freedom, and author of Travel to Hell: The Chechen Diary, she has won at least four major awards. Beyond her media work, she organized the rescue of 89 mentally disabled and elderly people as the Chechen capitol, Grozny, was bombed. And she's collected and distributed money, as well as five-and-a-half tons of food, medicine, and clothing for the destitute. Why does she undertake such missions? "A man could not possibly have gone where I have," Politkovskaia explains. "If not killed, he would have been turned back at checkpoints. But a woman…they usually say, 'What harm can she do?'"

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