The silence of Europe

“Officially the war in Chechnya ended six or even years ago. But for me this war being fought now has an even more terrible aspect. No one believes anyone any longer. There’s so much mistrust. It seems we have returned to the period of Stalin, when people didn’t trust each other or were forced to be spies against each other, perhaps even again their own neighbours”, says MAJNAT ABDULLAEVA , a journalist who lived in Grozny (capital of Chechnya) until 2004, where she wrote for the Novaja Gazeta and acted as local correspondent to some foreign mass media. Author of a Chechen-language programme on Radio Liberty in 2003, she was finalist in the competition named after Andrej Sakharov “For journalism as action” organized by the Fund for the Defence of Transparency in Moscow. When the threats against her and her family became insupportable, she was forced to leave Chechnya and seek asylum in Germany. Now she is incorporated in a PEN Centre programme “Writers in Exile”, founded to give support to writers and journalists persecuted for political reasons. Laura Mandolini interviewed her. Majnat, what effect does the word Europe have on you? “I knew little of Europe. I grew up in a world – the Soviet world – that considered Europe as a prison. Now I am ‘forced’ to live in Germany, which is a country in which there are human values, and in which everyone, journalists, writers, politicians and ordinary people, have the same rights. I once had a girl friend, a theatre director who dreamt of directing a performance in Western Europe, in a non-Soviet theatre. But in the first days of the war in Chechnya, in 1994, she was killed by a sniper. When people speak of Europe, I am reminded of her. And I hear the silence of Europe when people speak of us, of the Chechen war”. Does a Chechen feel European? “From a geographical point of view, yes. It’s enough to think that the emigration of Chechens, during the war, was mainly towards Western Europe, not towards Saudi Arabia or Turkey, in spite of the fact that we’re Muslims, because the way we think and feel inside is European. The problem is that for seventy years we were inside the Soviet Union and after its collapse we were cut off from Europe, and from the rest of the world”. How is Chechnya seen from such a distance? How do you imagine it today? “Today it suffers from the lack of justice, the loss of any sense of belonging to the same community. Those who have committed crimes have not been punished, on the contrary they have been rewarded. I’m afraid of this society”. Have you been able to explain to yourself what has happened in your country? “The last European colonial and imperialist war was fought in my country, and all the occupying forces are trying to keep this colony under pressure to prevent it from becoming free. It’s a senseless war that began some 400 years ago and that has been pursued in alternate phases, with different intensities. The fighting has continued until the Chechen people, prostrated by suffering and exhaustion, stops its ‘resistance’ in order to be able to survive. But immediately after it begins all over again. And, depending on historical periods, this war has assumed different names and motivations. Now it’s called ‘struggle against Islamic fundamentalists, against terrorists’. In 1944 the Chechen people were deported to Siberia, with the result that a quarter of the population was exterminated, because it was accused of having collaborated with Nazi Germany. That’s strange, seeing that no Nazi soldier set foot on Chechen territory and more especially seeing that the Chechens, like all the men of the Red Army, took part in the war against the German invasion. Perhaps in fifty years time they’ll invent new ways to justify the Chechen massacre”. The equation Chechens = terrorists is now fashionable… “Indeed, and it’s on this assumption that East-West accords, strategies and contracts are brokered. No one says, on the other hand, that the Chechens were converted to Islam only some two hundred years ago and that the war between Russia and Chechnya is far older than that. The hope is that a point will be reached when the two countries will find an accord that will be to the benefit of both sides. Meanwhile, 200,000 people have been killed and the propaganda of hatred against the Chechen people shows no signs of diminishing. The thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in this war of course don’t help Russia: it won’t be easy to find this compromise. Who will be able to help us?”. Does anyone tell all this to the Russians? “They believe what they see and what they hear on TV. There is no journalism, there’s only propaganda. The only independent TV station has been shut down. But anyone who wants to find out the truth finds ways of doing so, especially thanks to the internet. Until the war doesn’t knock on your door, it’s easier to shut yourself off, retreat into yourself, pretend not to know what’s going on. The truth of what’s happening in Chechnya is very brutal and violent and people don’t want to know about it; they don’t want to feel guilty about it. It’s all too hard also for them to bear”.