The sweet shame of prosperityBy Usam Baysayev, special to Prague Watchdog Oslo, Norway On his blog an old acquaintance of mine has been wondering whether his life has improved after fifteen years of war. His answer is predictable: no, it hasn't. Only a completely cynical person, one who lives in an ivory tower and doesn’t care about what other people think, could say anything other. After all, there are very few people who can openly admit that the war is the reason for their wealth and celebrity. For it could well be a cause for shame to suppose that one’s biography is woven not from one’s own merits but from the misfortunes of others. I am not ashamed. When the war first started, I was just thirty. Thirty plus two days and several hours, to be precise. I had been out of work for a year and a half. The newspaper I was employed on had folded . Without the Soviet era subsidies and compulsory subscriptions it became unprofitable. Like the paper’s other employees, I was on the staff but stayed at home. I tended my house and garden, established a small business. It brought in a small income and had very vague prospects. However, it was enough for a Mercedes S-600 and speculative plans for a home extension with two or three additional rooms.
Nor can I say that my dreams ended there. My interests stretched quite some way beyond my domestic arrangements. I wanted to write. And for people to read what I wrote, of course, and thereby – I was no stranger to vanity – even to acquire a little fame. In the Chechen republic, of course. But if I got the chance, I wanted to travel a lot further. I had been fascinated by geography ever since childhood, knew the names of the capitals of nearly all the countries in the world off by heart and without looking at the map could say exactly where they were, and what oceans or countries they were next to. But I was pretty sure that nothing like that was ever going to happen. When the war came along, it strangely altered my life. For a start it took away one small detail – my property. During a “mop-up” of the village by federal troops in 1995 my father's house was blown to pieces along with everything that was in it. The family car was burned and all the livestock – the apple of my mother’s eye – was shot. The trees in the garden began to die from the wounds they received during the shelling. Now the garden is a pathetic semblance of what it was before. And worst of all, my family and friends began to leave. Singly and in groups. The war tore them away, leaving a gaping hole. It’s a hole that I will probably never be able to fill again. But without any particular will of my own I was caught up on the wave of the war and borne to the shore of human rights work. I happened to meet some members of the Memorial Centre who had come to the village to investigate the atrocities, and life began to spin with kaleidoscopic speed. By the outbreak of the second war I was an employee of the organization, and tried to investigate the crimes myself. I began to write articles and reports, and also books which I wrote in collaboration with others. I was asked to comment on this subject and that, invited to give talks, and even to interview people for jobs. I became a celebrity. Not a real celebrity, of course, but well known in certain circles. People now read the things I write and praise them more than they criticize them. (The slating on Kavkazan Hamaash doesn't count, the author hasn't really understood what I was trying to say, and certainly doesn't understand what he himself is trying to say). I have travelled all over Europe, lived in Washington for a time, working for an organization whose office building was located exactly halfway between the White House and the Capitol. I visited Africa, dipped my toes in the Indian Ocean. My life has seen qualitative changes. It has become more full of people and events, and in that respect it improved. But did my private life improve? It didn’t exist. Continuous involvement in the lives of other people, often dead, tortured or simply persecuted, cannot be called a private life. All those hours I have spent at the computer during the past ten years, poring over puzzles – the files that contain the stories of war crimes, treachery and falsehood. With the names and stories of thousands and thousands of people etched into my brain, driving out everything else. Families, children, relatives, their troubles and concerns. One only remembers others, and those others are very often victims of power, sacrificed on the altar of the elevation and/or enrichment of Russia's current rulers. And the more one remembers those others and talks about them, the more one sets oneself up. But not to say anything is impossible. It's inhuman to forget all those things. No, my private life has not improved. And so it was strange to hear that those who are now on the other side, those whom I often had to oppose, are not very happy with their lives either, even though they claim that life in the republic has perked up no end compared with fifteen years ago or more. Perhaps it’s the deaths of the relatives and friends they lost in the war that make them unhappy now? That is probably the reason for their their often-repeated: "War can't make things better, can it?" The fact is that war by itself cannot do anything. War is made by people. It is just an instrument used to achieve a certain goal. The killing is done by those who organize it, those who give the orders and those who unthinkingly (and also sometimes consciously) carry them out. To serve those people, finding excuses for what has happened, saying that life is better now than it was before and that tomorrow will be even better, means to accept the killings. There can be no place for human feelings. Including feelings about one’s nearest and dearest. The argument that the war is to blame for it all looks like an attempt to excuse oneself for being an accessory to other people's crimes. The money, the government jobs, the ranks and promotion, the luxury cars received for service to the state that murdered your relatives, the lack of feeling for them and their fate – and you say your lives have not improved? This I do not understand.
Picture: elysium.ru.
(Translation by DM)
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