The bombing escalated sharply with the first daytime raids on the city on 22 December [1994]. It was mid-morning when seventy-five-year-old Alexander Shevchenko ventured outside for a breath of fresh air. The Russian pensioner moved carefully over the ice on his walking stick towards a few stalls where women were selling bread and chocolate. Traffic was moving along the street, crossing the river to the main square just 100 yards away.
The apartment next to Shevchenko's had been bombed in the night. He stared in disbelief at the mound of rubble and at the broken rafters sticking skywards that were all that was left of his neighbours' building. The earsplitting blast had rocked his own building and his neighbours had urged him down to the basement. 'It was terrifying, terrifying,' he said, his whole body shaking, still in his pyjamas under his coat. `They are not people who are doing this, they are wild beasts, savage.'
As he spoke, the sound of jets sent the crowd of people running for cover, suddenly diving right overhead, the roar of the engines escalating to an urgent scream, People fled in panic, not knowing where to run, bumping into each other as they scanned the skies and looked round for friends. Two huge explosions shook the ground with a deafening bang. Then followed a moment of complete silence as debris, branches, brick dust rained down on figures crouching on the ground. The sound of falling glass tinkled to a stop. Then people were shouting. The women running the kiosks were hurriedly packing away their chocolate bars and sweet drinks with shaking hands. This was the first time planes had bombed in daylight hours, and suddenly no one felt safe. A column of black smoke rose above the trees. A truck and car on the bridge just 300 yards away were on fire, the bodies still inside. More mangled bodies lay in the street. The missiles had blown a huge crater in the black earth of the river-bank and sliced into the trees of a small park. A man's body lay where he had been walking, a red stain in the snow where his head should have been. The death toll was least six; the bridge, presumably the target, was untouched
Across the city at a crossroads in the Mikrorayon district half a dozen cars and buses were blazing after another terrifying bombing raid. People were out clearing the debris from the previous night's bombing when the jets returned. At least twenty people were killed, including American photographer Cynthia Elbaum, a young freelance. It was the first war she had covered and she had not even told her parents she was going to Chechnya. Like many of the Chechens at the bomb site, she had absolutely no warning and no chance to take cover. That day the planes ran sortie after sortie on the city centre, flattening houses and apartment buildings, rocketing major intersections and roads. The city centre now looked, felt and smelled like a battlefield. Ash from the burning fires and explosions turned the snow black, broken glass crunched underfoot and torn-down trolleybus wires trailed in the streets. Trees snapped off by the explosions left ragged, gleaming yellow stumps and the acrid smell of burning and explosives hung in the air. Incredibly, the Russian government press office denied there had been any bombing or any damage to apartment buildings. [Sergei] Kovalyov sent Yeltsin a telegram from Grozny, calling on him to stop `this crazy massacre' and pull the country `out of this vicious circle of despair and bloodstained lies'.
from: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998
No comments:
Post a Comment