Modern manners
By Usam Baysayev, special to Prague Watchdog
Oslo, Norway
Yesterday I edited an article about a "zachistka” (sweep operation) in Kurchali. Kurchali is a village in Chechnya’s Vedensky district. It stretches along the gorge for quite a long way, and on the map one sees three Kurchalis: Upper, Middle, and Lower. In Soviet times they were all linked by one village Soviet, and are now are likewise joined by one administration. Or were at the start of the Chechen war, at least. In 2001 Russian units under the command of Lieutenant General Nikolai Bogdanovsky regularly disrupted this village. They looted homes, seized hostages and killed local people. And they did so in considerable fear of the insurgents, terrified that when they withdrew the latter would open fire on them, or worse, organize an ambush. At the end of October 2001 the men under the command of this gallant general forced the people to line up along the road, and behind a human shield of women, children and the elderly they left this dangerous but profitable place. As part of the "evacuation" they took with them some of the local residents’ belongings: carpets, appliances, items of female “toiletry” (to use the official term). Back in those days this sort of thing was perfectly routine. I know of hundreds of such operations, and have seldom had much trouble in describing the pillage and murder that took place. Over time I have worked out a blueprint for working with material of this kind. My words become sentences and the sentences line up into pages without too much mental agony or too many surges of, let us say, hatred. I have learned how to switch off my emotions, so that the pen or pencil doesn’t freeze on the page and the keys on the keyboard don’t stop clicking until the work is finished. Well, apart from short breaks for a cigarette. When I have to write about torture, I go into a kind of stupor. I don’t know why, but I am unable to find words to describe the details of what was done to the detained man, the things he was forced to endure. The aim of torture is to make the victim feel pain and fear. But there are hundreds of different ways of doing this. Sophisticated ones, using modern technology, or ones that are much less advanced, involving only a stick, rope or a polythene bag. But to show how it is all used, how it works, is at times a task I find impossible. Though I think I have quite a good knowledge of Russian, I’m unable to get it down on paper. Take Kurchali. When they left the village, using its residents as a human shield, the soldiers took four people with them. At least one of those people, a local school teacher, they subjected to torture. The report said that “a screwdriver was used to pierce the skin and muscles between his ribs.” To me this sentence seemed too lightweight. The man was given medical treatment. Did the doctors not wonder whether his internal organs had been damaged? In the report he was simply “pierced”, as if being fitted for earrings ... I began to look for alternatives. Could one use the words "punch through" instead of “pierce”, perhaps? No, that was too far-fetched. Human skin is not made of wood or metal, and no special force is needed to make a hole in it. And “punch through” could suggest the use of a hammer or something similar. The punching through would have been done with some additional implement, not by hand. Fortunately it had not gone as far as that. In this case the soldiers had acted a lot more carefully. Otherwise I would have had to describe the wounds on a corpse. Then perhaps "cut through" would be better? That was no good either: the instrument used was not a knife. They could have found a knife easily enough if they had had wanted to. After all, the bayonet is an indispensable part of a Russian soldier’s equipment. He always has it at the ready, whether he is an officer or an ordinary serviceman. But the screwdriver was used deliberately as an instrument of torture. In the end I settled for the word "jabbed". It seemed to give the best description of what the soldiers did to this man. After my editing the sentence looked like this: "... the skin and muscles between his ribs were jabbed with a screwdriver." I realize that it’s not perfect, but I had neither the strength nor the desire to give it any more thought. I can’t think of any wording that is better, and I know the real reason why. We all think in strictly defined categories. They are dictated by our way of life, our habits and the traditions of the society we live in. I don’t know about others, but I was lucky. In the Chechnya I grew up in there was no cult of violence, either in the city where I went to school or the countryside, or indeed anywhere in the republic at all. I don’t count children's fights, which now don’t even seem to merit the name of fights, and I almost never saw instances of cruelty. I do remember one or two killings, which were universally spoken of with shocked disapproval. They were enough to instil me with a mistrust of anyone who was capable of taking someone else’s life, who thought it permissible and necessary to plunge someone else's mother into mourning. “By killing the son he kills the mother, too,” the Chechen proverb says. But in those days even the killings were not the same – not so thorough, I guess. No screwdrivers, no severed ears and noses, no hints of earlier torture or abuse. Back then such things seemed out of the question. Most people simply did not think of them, they were not within their field of knowledge. Hence the poverty of language, the lack of words that might help one to transfer a particular action to paper or speech. Like most Chechens I didn’t think in such categories. Those things were forbidden, so what point was there in words? Time, however, moves inexorably onward. Now we are accustomed to torture. We are even beginning to get used it being practised by Chechens on Chechens. Slowly and gradually we are changing from being a primitive people for whom the ties of kinship are something sacred, in which blood means a lot and there are still certain taboos, to becoming a modern one. Our Chechen language has now been enriched by a whole range of "torture" expressions. Without using Russian one can easily explain to someone how to break fingers and ribs, how to drive needles under fingernails, and how to make a person suffer terrible and protracted agonies without actually dying. The next stage in our development is the emergence of specialized terms that have long existed in other, more "advanced" nations. These terms and the things they stand for are even a subject of instruction. Not everywhere, of course – only in special educational institutions. Enormous emphasis is placed on this subject in the training programmes of the special forces of the GRU and FSB. Anyone entrusted to work in those agencies must know how to conduct a forced interrogation, which parts of the body to squeeze, beat and cut, and then how to finish the victim off correctly. All of this is carefully spelled out and illustrated in the manuals and textbooks. Which are secret, of course, and therefore freely available on the Internet. To be read by anyone who is not too squeamish to get acquainted with them. I often feel unwilling to be civilized. But I realize that our primitivism is already a thing of the past, to which there can be no return. And I would so much like to turn the clock back at least fifteen years and be able to feel that every Chechen is my brother or sister. To know nothing of “zachistki”, killings and torture, not to spend hours searching for words to describe the actions of educated, supposedly modern people whose behaviour is more akin to that of savages. Usam Baysayev is a member of the Memorial Human Rights Centre
(Translation by DM)
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