Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (45 page)

The miracles did not end there, at least in the view of this citizen
of the Russian Federation. At 12:20 there was nobody at the entrance to Claridge’s other than an elderly commissionaire wearing a heavy grey wool uniform and a high Dickensian hat. It is customary for the commissionaires of very expensive London hotels to be grey-haired elderly gentleman who would have been retired long ago in Russia.

The commissionaire opened the door of my taxi and suggested that, if I was coming for the lunch with the Prime Minister, I would find it more convenient to use a different nearby door. I knew what he was up to. He was surreptitiously directing me to a queue where the British security services would filter would-be guests. They have their own, Irish, terrorists to worry about, after all.

So I marched through the main entrance, and soon realized I had got it wrong. All the aged commissionaire had wanted was to show me a shorter and more convenient route to the Prime Minister. I returned specially to my starting point to check and, while I was at it, looked around to see which rooftops the snipers were on.

There were none. Neither were there any lantern-jawed, shaven-headed security guards with searching scowls, or the bleeping metal-detector frames through which anyone in Russia is obliged to pass if they are likely to be within a kilometre of anywhere the President might show up.

At 12:45 Tony Blair arrived. At 12:50 the gong sounded for lunch. At 2:00 p.m. promptly we took our seats. My table was next to the Prime Minister’s. We tucked in to the starter, duck in aspic with milk sauce. Not bad but, to be honest, not that special either. Mr Blair was chasing it across his large plate, just like me.

The diners got on with their duck, and the gentlemen, all of them what in Russia we would call “directors of the media,” made no attempt to disturb the Prime Minister’s meal. Nobody ran up to him to ask questions while he was pretending to enjoy the starter.

At 13:19 Dennis Griffiths, the Chairman of the London Press Club, introduced Tony Blair to the guests and invited him to speak. What he had to say was intriguing, but for the most part consisted of declaring his love for the press and joking about the fact that he was wearing spectacles for the first time in his life.

A ripple of laughter ran over the tables and people clapped.

At 13.35, while Blair was still speaking from an improvised podium, orderly rows of waiters glided into the room bearing enormous plates. This was the main dish. Everybody got the same: a small piece of extremely tender braised or boiled pink salmon, with three tiny potatoes, a couple of sprigs of sweet basil, and a modest pile of kidney beans.

Blair, who as everybody knows recently had a fourth child, sat down and set about his salmon in exactly the way the hard-up father of four children would in Russia. The Prime Minister got through his diminutive piece of pink fish rapidly and with obvious relish.

He was now free, and I mounted my attack. The path to him was straight and clear, obstructed only by the remains of the first course and Blair’s press secretary, Alistair Campbell, a former popular columnist of one of the London newspapers. Alistair, however, was eating his fish, and everything was in place.

The response of the Prime Minister of Great Britain to my inquiry regarding the nature of his affection for Putin was brief but comprehensive. He replied, “It’s my job as Prime Minister to like Mr Putin.” And that was that. What more was to be said? The chef’s job is to cook the fish; the doctor’s job is to remove an appendix; the job of one head of state is to demonstrate how much he likes another head of state. It’s as simple as that.

At 14.10 speeches by members of the Press Club began and continued until 14.45. Blair listened politely. At 14.50 he quietly left, as had been previously announced in the program. There were no standing ovations or elaborate farewells. It was all very understated and British.

At this point dessert was brought in: tea or coffee and a piece of chocolate praline gâteau with coffee-flavoured custard. The Prime Minister was leaving but turned to the tables one last time. He glanced sadly at the unattainable plates of gâteau which the waiters, seemingly oblivious to the head of their government, were carrying past.

Everybody has a job to do, and nobody should try to stop them.
That really is the British attitude. If a waiter is bringing diners their gâteau you get out of his way, even if you are the Prime Minister.

WHO IN EUROPE WILL TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR A WAR IN EUROPE?

August 16, 2001

Here we are, almost at the furthest end of the Old World. A very high bank over a brooding black Norwegian fjord, and a small township climbing up this fjord cliff. It is small, self-contained, wonderful, and feels rather carefree. It is called Molde. Molde does not trifle with lakes or seas; what dominates here is the mighty Atlantic Ocean itself. You could get in a boat and sail to America – the whole world is on your doorstep. Within the borders of Russia few people are aware of the existence of Molde.

Molde, however, is not entirely what it seems. There are people in this town whose whole lives were turned upside down by all that has been going on in Russia.

High above the fjord is the town cemetery, a neat, quiet, sorrowful place, and as unnerving as any cemetery where life meets death irrevocably, leaving only a gravestone in place of a once living, rebellious human soul. I heap red roses on the earth around a severe, grey Scandinavian stone which, at the cemetery’s very highest point, looks out towards the ocean. Facing the infinity of the Atlantic, the words chiselled into the stone read, “Død Tsjetsjenia. 17.12.1996.”

That means, “Died in Chechnya.” Ingeborg Foss, a 42-year-old Norwegian nurse who lived in Molde and left this quiet Atlantic coastal town on December 4, 1996, died together with five nurses and doctors, three of whom were Norwegian, in the Chechen village of Starye Atagi on December 17. She was ten days into her Red Cross mission, working in a hospital which had been set up there.

“Ingeborg rang me twice from Chechnya,” Sigrid Foss, Ingeborg’s 82-year-old mother tells me. “She said it was very frightening.”

“Did you ask her to come home? Did you try to persuade her? Did you insist, as a mother?”

“No,” Sigrid replies. “It was her destiny.”

Brief, to the point, betraying no sense of hurt, but what a scree of emotion there is in the heart of this woman, her face incised with wrinkles. Love of her daughter, grief at her passing, but also pride that Ingeborg proved so reckless for the sake of people she did not know but who were nevertheless ill. And, of course, the pain of irredeemable loss.

Long before Chechnya, Ingeborg had dedicated herself to working for the Red Cross. She had worked in Nicaragua and Pakistan but when the Red Cross offered her a contract in Bosnia, she suddenly refused, saying, “I have an aged mother. I can’t.” Nevertheless, she made up her mind to go to Chechnya. The Red Cross assured her that conditions were not as bad as people were saying, and that everything would be fine.

Sigrid catches constantly at her grey braids of hair, blown about by a strong wind which has sprung up here in the cemetery, high above the fjord. She is barely able to hold back the tears. Her eyes redden and her eyelids droop, and then she squats down and lays a hand on the dark brown fjord soil by Ingeborg’s gravestone. She steadies herself for a few moments before catching her grey hair again. She pushes it up, away from her eyes in defiance of the wind, and the gesture seems to help her gather what remains of her strength. They say here that the older women of Norway do not cry. It is not their way. They are strong, indomitable, familiar with suffering, and do not usually give way to tears. They lived through the Second World War, when Norway endured a brutal occupation, with partisans, a resistance, fighting, and many dead. Most later lived through great poverty and hunger, and it was only when they were very old that Norway became rich and was able to provide them with decent old people’s homes and good pensions.

Sigrid is one such Norwegian woman. You can tell that she is by nature very tough, like anyone who lives with the wind and the sea and who is used to seeing their family sail out, never to return. She is fully aware of what someone standing beside her in the cemetery may be thinking.

“Yes, losing my daughter has put ten years on my age,” she nods,
swallowing a lump in her throat in order to continue the simple story of her family. All her life Sigrid taught Norwegian and English, and of course brought up her own children, but her husband was a doctor. Sigrid lost first him, and then the daughter who had decided to follow in his footsteps.

Sigrid proudly shows me a certificate, Order No. 589, dated December 11, 1997, issued by President Aslan Maskhadov, awarding Ingeborg the highest decoration of the Chechen Republic. That award and a grave are all that Sigrid has left after the death of her daughter.

“Do you feel Russia has wronged you?”

“No. My grudge is against the Red Cross.”

Sigrid Foss says that she believes the organization in whose cause her daughter died was over-ambitious.

“At that time, between the two Chechen wars, the Red Cross wanted to establish a hospital against all the odds, as if to say, ‘Look at us! We can do something nobody else can do! The Russians are too frightened, and the Chechens don’t have the means.’ Their ambitions led them to assure Ingeborg there was no great danger, when in fact it was deadly.” Sigrid was told this by the Norwegian doctor who by a miracle survived, and who accompanied the stretcher bearing Ingeborg’s body back to Molde.

“A stretcher? Not a coffin?”

“That’s right.”

For Sigrid, 1997 and 1998 passed under the initial shock of bereavement, but then she wanted to establish the truth. Gradually, however, things took a bizarre, heartless turn. As if it was not enough that Ingeborg’s life had been cut short, Sigrid found she had no way, because of everything going on in Chechnya and Russia, to find out who exactly was responsible for her daughter’s untimely death.

What is left for someone whose child has predeceased them? Given that it is impossible to right the terrible wrong that has happened, they do at least want to know what that was. Alas, to this day Sigrid Foss does not even know whether there is an inquiry into the murder of her daughter in Starye Atagi, let alone whether it is making progress.

Everybody has forgotten her: Russia, because her daughter was
helping the Chechen population to survive, and at present that is unfashionable in Russia; Chechnya, because Chechnya has no time for anything other than trying to survive.

“Two years ago we had a phone call from the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. I was told they had no information. They did not even know whether an investigation was being conducted in Russia. I couldn’t make out who our Foreign Ministry was in touch with in Moscow about the murders in Starye Atagi. The Red Cross was no better. They sent me a letter a year ago saying there was no news. In five years you are the first person from Russia to remember Ingeborg and come to visit her grave.”

“But what about Norwegians?”

“No Norwegians have come either.”

“Død Tsjetsjenia.” Norway, Molde, Russia. I say goodbye to Sigrid Foss. Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another, and that you can sit it out in peace on your veranda admiring your absurd petunias?

Our greatest problem today is that this most basic and long-established truth has to be reiterated as if it had just come into existence. Neither that modest grave in Molde, nor the thousands of graves all over Chechnya, have acted as a wake-up call for Europe, which continues to slumber as if the war being fought within its bounds was not already in its twenty-third successive month; as if Chechnya were as far from Norway as it is from the Antarctic.

For all that, Chechnya is no less a part of the Old World than any of its other territories. Mr Kruse, a correspondent for Norwegian state television who has worked in Russia for many years, exclaimed in some surprise during our conversation to the effect that, “Oh, but Russia is a different part of Europe. You can’t apply the usual criteria. Even war criminals in Russia are not really war criminals. You can hardly blame the present fate of Miloŝevic on Russia’s leaders, given its great spiritual heritage and sheer geographical scale.”

Alas, this is an all too typical European attitude. Russia has today been categorised as a maverick territory where, with the tacit agreement of the heads of the European states, the European Parliament,
the Council of Europe and the OSCE all lumped together, it is apparently acceptable for citizens to live under laws quite different from those which apply to the rest of the European continent, laws which the rest of Europe couldn’t imagine living under in its worst nightmare.

That is why I gave Mr Kruse a hard time. I asked him why he thought it was all right for a Chechen woman to be killed for no reason, just because passing soldiers were in a bad mood, but not for the same fate to befall a Norwegian, or Swedish or Belgian woman. How was a French woman any different from a Chechen woman, or a Russian woman who happened to belong to a “great power”?

It isn’t all right, of course, but many people in Norway are taken aback by questions like that. It is obvious that Chechen women are no different, but that does not square with Europe’s self-contradictory desire not to fall out with Putin while retaining a semblance of civilised values.

All my conversations, meetings and interviews – in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, with reporters, at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, with the future Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, even in the Norwegian Human Rights Center (there really is such an office block in Oslo, where most of the human rights organizations operating in Norway are accommodated under one roof) – only served to further persuade me of something I already knew: Europe has no stomach for opposing the war in Chechnya. Europe is mired in double standards when it comes to human rights. One standard applies to most of Europe; it is distilled, splendid, civilised and tidy. For Russia, where democracy was born only a decade ago, there is another, naturally less distilled and pure. For the rebellious enclave of Chechnya, however, there is no standard at all, a void. Europe effectively condones the existence of a territory where atrocities go unpunished, and pretends that the war being waged there does not concern Europeans. There are few protests, no sanctions are imposed on Russian officials, and crimes that would never be tolerated in the rest of Europe – killings, extra-judicial persecution and executions – are seen as unproblematical in Russia and Chechnya. Indeed, there is even tacit acceptance of the monstrous notion that one
particular nation should bear collective responsibility for the actions of a few of its members.