Starvation

I stand in the backyard of the Shali food factory among the starving crowd of people who are struggling for the cherished containers, and recall Putin's well groomed assistant Sergei Yastrzhembsky announcing that a humanitarian disaster does not exist.

Aishat Junaidova, the head of the Shali regional migration services (there are almost sixty thousand refugees registered here) says:

"Call Moscow's attention to the fact that this government handout is not enough to live on. Many of our refugees are for all intents and purposes condemned to starvation."

Of course, I promise to tell them this. But I promise very quietly. I don't even actually promise, but just nod and whisper something. And I don't explain anything either. It's hard to tell the condemned that, first, the Kremlin doesn't give a damn about my report and, second, the situation in Moscow regarding the war in the Caucasus is very complicated, and no one knows anything about it, because they don't want to. Third, even close friends don't believe my stories after my trips to Chechnya, and I have stopped explaining anything, and just sit silently when I'm invited anywhere. And finally, not even my newspaper, which opposes the current party line, is eager to print my reports from Chechnya. And if they do, they sometimes cut out the toughest parts, not wanting to shock the public. There are fierce arguments within the editorial staff over this issue, and it is more difficult than ever for me to publish the whole truth.

But I am silent about this, simply because for the people around me, who have suffered so much, I am the first civilian from there, from the other, nonwar world. No journalists come here. There's no one else they can tell what's going on.

To tell me about the starvation, Aishat has to shout over the howls of some women who are out of their minds with hunger and are cursing and ripping a three-day ration out of each other's hands. I also see some people in the crowd spitting at others. They are tubercular. Out of eternal bitterness toward the world, they're trying to infect those who are not yet coughing up blood. Or perhaps they're hoping that the healthy ones will jump aside out of fear and let them through to the boxes of canned goods.

A cordon of soldiers surrounds the trucks with G-4. With their automatic weapons tilted forward, they try to establish some kind of order among the exhausted people. But they have a strange expression on their faces too. Not of sympathy, but not of dumb cruelty either. It's more like a stupor from the kind of war they have to fight, against a crowd of hungry people. Later, month after month, I would see this many more times; most of the soldiers' faces in the second Chechen war would be just like these.

- Anna Politkovskaya, Chechnya: Dispatches from a Small Corner of Hell, 2003