A View from Geneva On the Chechens of Boston
I arrived in Boston on the eve of the marathon. The day after, the media buzzed with news of the attacks. Coming from Switzerland, the most peaceful place in the world, I was struck by the emotional and professional way these events were treated. Professional—within a few hours after a few poor images were analyzed, it was already possible to send photos of immediately recognizable suspects around the entire world. Emotional—an endless and obsessive media barrage makes a strange impression on an outsider. Is this event really the center of everything on the planet? Is it important enough to take precedence over every other tragedy, even a terrible, violent earthquake, or a hellish war, other events that create a thousand times more victims in another corner of the world? For a foreigner, when something happens in the United States, when the news becomes a sort of parochial navel-gazing and tragedy turns into spectacle, it’s evidently a measure of the influence of that nation where, from his very first speech, the current President announced: “And we are ready to lead once more” (a phrase, by the way, that the French newspapers translated badly, emphasizing the idea of domination, not leadership).
When it was announced that the suspects—first hunted, then found, then chased across the entire city—were Chechen, I had to rub my eyes in astonishment. Chechen? That’s unbelievably strange. Until now the Chechens had only one enemy: Russia. And a second enemy, themselves—that part of their own population that had sold itself to evil and made a profit from their appalling tragedy. In that small country, torn to sheds by an endless internecine war, by a pathological level of violence, the pro-Western partisans still have considerable clout. And when you know a little something about that conflict, the first thing to come to mind after Boston is “fuel to the flames.” In that part of the world, it’s always asked, “Who profits from restarting the war?” Who will profit? Who succeeded in manipulating those kids, in channeling their hatred and ideals, their refutation of impotence, into these irredeemable acts—criminal, kamikazi actions that only push their own martyred people even farther down?
I worked in Chechnya during the first war (1994-96). I’m one of the people who “will never forget.” I confess that I’m also unable to read about the war there, that I’ve tried to forget it, though it haunts me and serves as a marker for the existence of absolute evil. I was an interprète confidentiel, in short, I was in charge of relations between the military and delegates from the International Red Cross, and of visits to detention sites as well. I was present at police raids—our daily bread, and during the disappearance of hundreds of men, at night. I was witness to the torture used to extract false confessions, to prosecutorial corruption, to human trafficking, to “cleansing.” I have the memory of the smell in detention sites that they called “filtration camps,” where the men were like crazed beasts. I remember the constant shooting, every night, surrounding the city, surrounding us. And I remember the first, spectacular occasion when hostages were captured by Shamil Basayev, the rebel leader—and then all those other, less spectacular, unending occasions that increasingly kept us foreigners from working. One day, on site, I watched a live television broadcast and saw the situation in Grozny presented as “normalized”: a bus passing through the light, under the calm leaves of shade trees. Sitting in front of that TV, if I had looked out the window, I’d have seen a road cratered by bombs, a rusted wreck of a tank, and the burned disaster of apartment buildings where nightly raids still continued.
On that day I promised myself never to make my political judgements from afar.
There’s a point where my ability to reason stops. It’s here: the conflict in Chechnya went through some key periods. I myself was present during a tragic phase, just after carpet bombing reduced Grozny to ashes. I was present during the search for hundreds of thousands of dead and missing; I also saw the “normalization,” a shift in the lines of battle. And then the moment of pacification, the declaration of independence, momentary victory of the separatists, in the time before their name was changed to “terrorists,” with the amplified rhetoric and disinformation under Vladimir Putin. Even during this relatively auspicious period for the people in the region, there was still something hellish, atrocious, fixed in place by that war. The limits of the human had been overrun; it was beyond repair. The banalization of torture that we denounce today: that technique they call “kindling” (tying people—women, the elderly, children—together, dosing them with fuel, and lighting it), the coarse laughter of mercenaries, the amoral party setting the rules, Chechens and Russians both, pure cynicism, human traffic worth nothing, the playthings of sadists, all this was there from the beginning. In such things, terror had its revenge, the victorious return of terror, of the strong over the weak, of the forces trained by the state (or against the state): in prisons, in barracks, in the secret services, unleashed, uncontrollable. That’s what the young recruits meant, those half-naked “rabbits,” when in their supreme judgement they named their situation (and ours) by sticking a sign in the dirt on the southern edge of Grozny: “Welcome to Hell.” The logic of hell is such that, although you think you’ve reached the bottom, you can always go deeper. The Chechen war is caught up in this hellish situation, where the Putin regime has sent it into an even lower circle, and the infernal descent has not stopped.
This, for me, is in the background when I hear the words “suspects from Chechnya,” and “returned from Dagestan.” Yes, it’s possible. Pure hatred is the response of one part of the population, some of the young who’ve understood that life there is worth nothing, and that no one will come to defend them. Yet at the same time, the Chechens also have centuries of resistance to feed on, and they defend themselves from their oppressors by relying on their traditions (and Islamists aren’t part of those traditions). Isn’t it a bit strange the way that suddenly the “enemies” the United States must defend itself against are the very people that Putin suggested should be chased down and beaten, even if you had to follow them “into the shithouses”?
In any case, it is revealing that the parents of the two suspects accused the West of having a bad influence on these youths. In that part of the world, leaving tradition behind is what has grave consequences, and bad influences don’t come from religion—they come from the media and internet, turned into religions.
I have the privilege of coming from country that has no enemies, neither internal or external, and I don’t have neither brother, mother, or friend cut to pieces by the explosion of a pressure cooker at the end of a sporting event. I must therefore remain silent about the weight and measure of things that cannot be measured or weighed, because no sort of bookkeeping could record them—of such things one must stop speaking and pray. Yet I must say I found it awful to see that young body exhibited, like a trophy from a hunt or a war, with so many relieved citizens cheering over it. I fail to understand how anyone could cheer over anything of the sort, especially when the body belongs to a less than twenty year-old kid. The constitutional right to free speech permitting one to blurt out in a matter of minutes thousands of details about the lives of suspects that haven’t yet even seen a lawyer shocks my sense of justice. I felt a real, physical sense of relief in hearing President Obama say that he was not about to employ extrajudicial measures. And well, yes, you must never forget that the entire world watches America. What is allowed to happen inside your borders—these excesses, these democratic afflictions, these emotional swerves, and this form of propaganda—these are the same things one finds elsewhere, in the funhouse mirror of truly lawless states.
