The Oath - Sample Chapter

At the beginning of August 1994, I gave up my house and left Moscow to go home. Zara was five months pregnant with our second child, and I had sent her and Maryam home a month earlier. Although my family tried not to alarm me when they telephoned me in Moscow, it was becoming clear that the situation in Chechnya was deteriorating rapidly. In addition to the hijacking of buses in neighboring North Ossetia for which Chechens were blamed, there were numerous armed skirmishes, and from everything I heard and read in the Moscow media, which were invariably biased against the Chechens, it was clear that talks with the Kremlin to avoid war were going nowhere. I feared the worst. Boarding the plane for Grozny, I had a premonition that I would not be returning to Moscow soon.

When I stepped from the plane at Grozny airport, I was startled to see how militarized the city had become. Chechen militia in camou- flage fatigues cradled rifles at the bottom of steps. Army jeeps lined the edge of the airfield, and soldiers guarded the route into Grozny. On our way to Alkhan Kala, the taxi driver recounted the latest shootings in the city. Listening to him, I had the feeling that Chechnya was on the brink of civil war.

“There are gunshots going off all the time,” the driver said. “Everyone who can is leaving, but they say they are closing the borders.”

I looked out the taxi window. Vendors were selling sacks of flour and vegetables out of the back of trucks. Everywhere, women lined up for food. I reminded myself to check our storeroom at home to make sure we had supplies of flour, sugar, and dried meat. Given the tense atmosphere, I was sure prices would be going up. When I reached home, everyone seemed well, though I saw the worry on the faces of Zara, Malika, and Nana; I tried to crack a few jokes to cheer them up. Everyone worried about the kind of world our children would grow up in.

The next day, a visit to the First City Emergency Hospital in Grozny, where Malika still worked as a nurse, confirmed how bad things were. Plastic bags, cigarette packets, newspapers, and discarded food were scattered all over the courtyard. Dogs hunted for scraps in the piles of garbage and around the periphery. Vendors peddled medical supplies in the hospital corridors because hospital supplies were running out. Inside the building everyone wore street clothes, and you couldn’t tell the staff from patients or relatives. Doctors now asked patients to supply everything: medicines, painkillers, bandages, food, bedding, nursing care, even fuel for the emergency generators and heating. Meanwhile, the armed skirmishes between political opposition groups kept the wounded coming in.

A few days after my arrival, I walked past the Presidential Palace and saw a burned-out Russian tank. The Russians, in an attempt to intimidate the population, had rolled several tanks into Grozny, parking them outside the Presidential Palace. It was a show of force guaranteed to create a reaction. A bystander said someone had thrown a grenade down the turret of one of them, igniting ammunition and fuel. The explosion had hurled the turret across the street and revealed a gaping hole under the tank. Nearby lay three incinerated corpses. Looking at the charred bodies of the young Russian soldiers, I felt sickened. It was the first time I had seen bodies reduced to roasted hunks. So this was what awaited our country, I thought.

By now I realized that returning to Moscow was out of the question. When I had recited the Hippocratic Oath with my graduating class, I had sworn to treat anyone in need, and Chechnya was going to need help. I couldn’t in good conscience be in Moscow doing face-lifts for wealthy patients. I decided to take a job at the hospital, although it meant working without pay. Lots of doctors were leaving Chechnya. “If I had a profession like yours,” my cousin Musa said, “I’d get out of Chechnya and find work somewhere else. This situation is going to go on for a long time.” My parents, my sisters, and Zara feared for me. “War is a terrible thing,” Dada said, advising me to leave the country. “Doctors are always in the line of fire.”

I found it hard to ignore the wishes of my family and friends, but I knew that before long the wounded would flood the hospital and doctors and nurses would be needed. I had to stay. Thanks to my work at the clinic and my business deals in Moscow, I had saved a fair amount of money, which I had brought home and given to my mother to hide in the special place that only she knew about. I also had a cache of medical instruments and some supplies, which I had stored in my house for the clinic I dreamed of starting. Compared to so many, I was very lucky.

So began my new life as a war surgeon at the First City Emergency Hospital. I expected to face danger, but I believed that a talisman given to me by a Muslim sage in Krasnoyarsk would protect me. Inside the tiny pouch, which I always wore around my neck, was a piece of folded paper. The old man had told me that my whole life was written there in Arabic. “You will have a long and interesting life,” he had predicted.

Going from being a cosmetic surgeon who worked with small pieces of flesh and bone to practicing emergency medicine took some getting used to. In the next months, I learned that gangrene was my enemy because it attacks a human body like a rabid animal, devouring the flesh. Dirt enters wounds so easily; bacteria flourishes; yellowish pus bubbles up from under the skin; the flesh decays. The only course is to remove the dead tissue surgically; otherwise, the advance may be so rapid that amputation is the only way to save the patient’s life.

At the hospital I found a major problem was how to deal with the poor, who couldn’t afford to buy supplies from the vendors. I devised a scheme whereby people who had money helped those who didn’t. I handed a well-off patient a list of hospital supplies for his or her treatment, followed by a request to triple the amount.

“What you don’t use I will give to someone who can’t afford it, in your name,” I said.

Persuading patients to accept free help was difficult sometimes. Debts based on friendship are debts to be repaid. If you are not in a position to return a favor, you are reluctant to accept it—like the old man who entered my office with a fast-growing tumor on his palate. The moment I saw him in his sheepskin hat, leather boots, and buttoned tunic with circular collar, my heart went out to him. The way he held himself with such pride reminded me of the old men of Makazhoi.

“I have this thing in my mouth,” he complained. “Recently, I haven’t been able to eat, and it bleeds a lot. The dentist said I should come to you.”

He had a tumor that would block his throat within a week or two.

“We need to operate immediately,” I told him.

He remained silent.

“I don’t take money for my operations,” I said, sensing his embarrassment. “If you don’t believe me, go ask the people waiting outside in the corridor. If you can’t afford the medicines, I have some in reserve.”

He said nothing.

“We are all in this terrible situation,” I continued. “All I need is your consent; then I can schedule an appointment.”

He rose to his feet, smoothed down his tunic, and prepared to leave. “It’s too much of a bother for you.”

“It’s no bother,” I pressed him, knowing the urgency. “I’ll do it tomorrow. Who knows? I may be needing your help one day.”

“You won’t need me.” He gave me a toothless grin.

“We always need your help,” I insisted, “because you are older and wiser. Young people need your help.” He seemed to appreciate my words of respect and finally agreed to the operation. While it was still summer, I managed a quick trip to Makazhoi, where I fell in love with a Caucasian sheepdog puppy, a ball of white fluff with black nose and eyes and a long feathery tail. The owner of the litter gave him to me and wouldn’t accept any money. For over six centuries sheep herders have bred these powerful mountain dogs to guard against wolves and thieves. I named the puppy Tarzan and took him back to Alkhan Kala to train as a guard dog.

At the end of August, sporadic bombing began over Grozny. It started at 5:30 one afternoon, just as the light was fading; thunderous explosions from the direction of the military airport at Khankala, some ten miles east of the city. The windows of the operating room shook, doors rattled, and the floor under my feet shuddered. I rushed into the street with the other nurses and doctors and looked up. Two planes appeared through the twilight, low on the horizon—first one, then the other, the noise of their engines growing louder as they approached. They streaked across the sky before us, then turned south, circling the city and making another high-speed dive in the direction of the airport. As they passed, I looked for the markings on the wings; there were none. Then I saw their rockets streak earthward, trailing white plumes. I closed my eyes, said a few words of prayer, and waited for the explosion. My thoughts went to my family, hoping they were all right.

Within an hour the wounded started pouring in. This was my initiation into the effect of bombing. Bullets, rockets, mortars, shrapnel —each produces its own kind of wound. A small piece of hot metal makes only a small wound, but a bomb can pulverize the body. A few weeks after the first attacks, as Malika and I were driving home after work, we experienced a bomb explosion firsthand. Approaching Grozny’s oil district, we heard the screech of a plane going into a dive above us. I stepped on the gas to get as far away as possible. An explosion, a street away, rocked the car and almost overturned it as we came to a stop. We jumped out and ran back to see if we could help. “What have they done? What have they done?” Malika screamed.

It was a frightful scene. The bomb had plowed into a street full of people, leaving a hole about fifteen feet across and six feet deep. Asphalt, bricks, telephone poles, trees lay everywhere, as if a large excavator had dug up the area. The first thing I saw were three burned-out cars with drivers and passengers cremated in their seats. Next to the car lay a man who had been decapitated; nearby was a human arm attached to a blood-soaked sleeve, a child’s foot in a sneaker. Wounded people, corpses, body parts, and bloody items of clothing littered the street like pieces of refuse.Women screamed and beat their breasts, appealing to the vird of their clan for help. (Most clans have a vird, a disciple of Muhammad, to whom people in crisis appeal for help.) “Va Ustaz, va Ustaz! Gede tkhum!” they shouted. “Oh, Master, help us!” I approached what looked like an elderly woman, only to find her dead, her stomach split open, her colon and small intestines splattered in the dirt. I was used to operating on intestines, but that was nothing like this. The evening was chilly, and a steamy vapor rose from the woman’s entrails, along with an indescribable smell which lingered in my nostrils for several weeks, making it almost impossible for me to eat.

Soon passing cars began stopping, and we immediately started loading the twelve or thirteen survivors for a dash to the hospital.We managed to ship them off in about twenty minutes. Many of the rescuers were returning from the market, and they emptied out their shopping bags for the gruesome task of gathering body parts. It was a sickening job, which took us the next hour. Shreds of clothing were often the main means of identification. My knowledge of anatomy was helpful when it came to identifying which piece of bone or flesh belonged where, and to whom. But often recognizing the human scraps was impossible. The unidentified body parts were buried in a mass grave within the traditional twenty-four hours.

Driving home that night, Malika and I were deep in thought, thank- ful for our escape but stunned by what we had seen. Once home, Malika went to her room and cried. Dada and Nana listened to my account of what happened in shocked silence. “You must give up your work,” Nana said. “You must stay at home. Don’t risk it.”

History had taught us to expect attacks from Russia, but now that one actually had happened, we found it hard to accept. For more than seventy years, we had lived under Soviet rule. We were all supposed to be Soviet people, living in harmony, and many of us had good Russian friends. How could Russia bomb its own citizens? How could it bomb Grozny, where half the inhabitants were Russians? At first, the Kremlin denied the planes were Russian. Azeri planes were responsible for the bombing, Russian officials said, although they couldn’t explain why Azerbaijan would bomb us. Three days later, when the planes returned, our artillery shot one down and took the pilot prisoner. That night, the pilot confessed on local television to being Russian, and the newscasters showed how the Russian markings on the plane had been painted over.

Following that first bombing, people rolled up to the hospital in any vehicle they could find to remove their ambulatory relatives and friends to their homes or to a hospital outside the city. In their place came new batches of wounded. I wondered how long it would be before the bombs started hitting the center of Grozny. The first ones had been directed at strategic targets on the outskirts of the city such as factories, bridges, and oil refineries.

At first, it was difficult to work through the sound of falling bombs, but gradually, thanks to my athletic training, I was able to focus my concentration. Between operations I did push-ups and, when possible, withdrew to a quiet place to recall the inspirational words of our coaches before an athletic competition, admonishing us to be strong. We piled sandbags in the hospital windows; eventually, the thud of bombs became like the buzz of an annoying fly in the background. I was conscious of it but trained myself to ignore it. I was so focused on my work in the operating room that I forgot everything else.

On the afternoon of December 11, 1994, I was operating on a young boy who had taken a blast of shrapnel in the face, shattering his jaw and reducing his right eye to liquid. I scraped what remained of the eyeball from the socket, cauterized the blood vessels, and prepared the muscles to hold a glass eye. After I had placed gauze wadding in the socket and bandaged his head, I instructed the nurse to remove him to the ward.Walking back to the doctors’ lounge, I heard a thunderous explosion, followed by the sound of artillery. The building shook. The attack was clearly moving closer to the center of the city. Zara was due to deliver our second child by C-section in two weeks. That explosion convinced me that she should have the operation immediately, before the Russians launched an all-out attack and it would be impossible to get her to the maternity hospital. Troops were already massing on the other side of the border. I took off my scrubs, put on my street clothes, and rushed out to my car. I looked at my watch. It was 3:15 p.m.; in another hour it would be getting dark.

I drove to Alkhan Kala at great speed. “Get Zara ready!” I shouted to Malika as I ran into the house. “We are leaving immediately for the hospital.” I could tell by Zara’s face that she was frightened, but she didn’t say a word. Nana started crying.

“Don’t worry.” I tried to calm her.

“People say the Russians have crossed the border,” she said. I packed my instruments, some sterile gauze, and sheets, in case we didn’t reach the hospital in time. By custom, my brother Hussein— not I—should have accompanied Zara to the hospital to have a baby, but he and Rita were still living in Krasnoyarsk. As I was to discover, war forces people to ignore traditions.

By the time we reached Grozny, the streets were empty, the bazaar was closed, and shops and kiosks were boarded up. Everyone had retreated into their cellars. I pulled the car up in front of the Central Maternity Hospital and jumped out, leaving Malika and Zara in the backseat. The building was dark; the reception desk empty. I ran upstairs. Not a patient, doctor, or nurse was in sight. I ran back down- stairs and jumped in the car. “We need an anesthesiologist. We have to get Ruslan Yusupov!” I shouted, putting the car in gear. Ruslan Yusupov was a doctor who worked at the Fourth City Hospital.

We drove full speed through the empty streets to the apartment building on the other side of the river where Ruslan lived. I found everyone in his apartment building huddled in the basement. “Is Ruslan there? I need a doctor!” I shouted down from the top of the stairs. I saw a faint light and heard voices; in the darkness I made out a group of figures below. “My wife needs an urgent cesarean!” I called. Conversation stopped. Then to my relief, Ruslan rose from the floor and came up the steps.“Do we have an operating gynecologist?” he asked. “Aminat! We have to go and find her,” I said.

Ruslan got in the car with Zara and Malika, and I drove to Aminat’s apartment. She didn’t hesitate when I told her about Zara, although her relatives protested, saying it was too dangerous. I held my breath. She and I had worked together, and I had often helped her out. “He is a colleague,” she replied.“He would do the same thing for us.”

Back at Central Maternity Hospital No. 1, we rushed Zara up to the operating room. My help was no longer needed. I walked down to the courtyard to wait in the car. No lights illuminated the streets; the sky was black. Without people, there was an eerie feeling about Grozny; it was like a ghost town. In the distance I could hear explosions and the sound of gunfire. Out there people were dying, yet on the fifth floor of the hospital a new little individual was about to come into the world. Worried about Zara and the baby, I tried to calm my nervousness with prayer. Allah would decide the outcome:Would the child be all right?

After what seemed liked ages, Aminat emerged from the hospital, holding a bundle wrapped in blankets. “Congratulations! You have a boy!” Thrilled as I was to have a son, I hardly had time to look at the baby. I pulled 500 rubles (about $150 dollars) out of my wallet and gave it to her. It’s our custom to reward the doctor who delivers a boy.

“Get Zara out here,” I shouted. “We have to leave here immediately!” Ruslan and Malika carried an unconscious Zara from the hospital. I lowered the back of the front seat till it touched the rear seat and placed Zara, wrapped in sheets and a blanket, on this makeshift bed. After Malika got in the backseat, Aminat passed her the baby. Ruslan and Aminat squeezed in next to them. After we dropped the doctors off at their apartments, we started for Alkhan Kala, driving slowly without lights over the potholed streets, fearing that the slightest bump would burst Zara’s stitches. In the distance, the thud of bombs and the flash of red in the sky from the burning buildings told us the shelling was getting nearer. “Pray,” I said over my shoulder to Malika. After we arrived home, Nana came up with a name for our son: Islam. Most Chechens have both a religious name and a secular one. Islam had the two rolled into one: in Chechen the word is means “nine,” and lam means “mountain”; but in Arabic, islam means “submission.” Three days later, we slaughtered a sheep and invited the elders and other guests to celebrate the birth. The mullah read from the Koran. I marveled at how life goes on even when surrounded by death.

Through out December, bombing increased; sometimes as many as twenty-five air raids a day. The air filled with dust and the acrid smell of ash. People flooded from the city, some to refugee camps in Ingushetia, some to their mountain villages, leaving mostly ethnic Russians, who made up the majority of the population of Grozny, in the city. I felt sorry for these Russians, who looked on Grozny as their home. They didn’t have relatives to give them shelter and were vulnerable to the worst horrors of war.

Throughout the republic women called for a peace march to stop the Russian tanks from advancing. Whenever Chechnya has been under attack, women have joined the battle, even taking up arms in the nineteenth century when Shamil’s mountain hideout was bombarded by the Russian army. Many of the women from Alkhan Kala, including several of our neighbors, joined the march. On one day in mid- December, I could hardly get through the column of women on the Moscow-Baku highway. Women of all ages blocked the road: old women who could hardly walk, young girls, and mothers. The column stretched for forty miles from Grozny to the border of Ingushetia, where the Russian tanks waited.

I got out of my car and pushed through the crowd. Five old women, weighed down in bulky coats, separated themselves from the others and formed a circle, their feet picking up the hypnotic beat of the zikr. The zikr is not another traditional dance like the lesghinka but an ancient ritual rooted in the Muslim philosophy of Sufism. Onlookers joined the rhythm, clapping and chanting words of the Muslim Declaration of Faith in Arabic: “La ilaha illallah. La ilaha illallah!” (There is no God but Allah!)

These women were expressing the spirit of Chechnya, a spirit that struggles against terrible odds and helps the individual find peace with God. The zikr is danced at any occasion: at weddings, funerals, before an act of a blood revenge, before going into battle. Villages have their own versions of the zikr, but they all have the same purpose: to lift the soul onto a higher plane. During a zikr I have heard old men with rusty voices sing like opera singers, and the voices of old women soar with the angels. The ritual confounded the Soviet authorities, who couldn’t make up their minds if it was an illegal religious ceremony or a dangerous war dance. Whichever, they tried to ban it. Still, the secret police couldn’t prevent people from performing the zikr at funerals. Russia has never understood us, I thought as I made my way back to my car to return to the hospital.

That evening on the TV news, we saw an incredible scene: Row upon row of Soviet tanks lined up at Achkoi-Martan, a village on the border between Ingushetia and Chechnya. Then the TV showed the Russian commander, General Ivan Babichev, a hulking figure dressed in a sheepskin coat and fur hat, surrounded by a group of pleading women, who told him his tanks would advance into Chechnya over their dead bodies.

“We have not come here to kill innocent civilians,” he told them. “My tanks will not advance.” Then the general embraced the women.“We will find some kind of settlement to solve this problem,” he said.

Some people believe that General Babichev told the women he wouldn’t attack just to get rid of them. But I believe that he was a decent man who didn’t want to mow down civilians. A few days later, General Pavel Grachev, the Russian minister of defense, relieved Babichev of his command, and the tanks advanced anyway. Every night, through the sound of explosions, we listened to the Russian military spokesman on TV tell the world that no bombing sorties had occurred over Grozny that day. The number of doctors and nurses in the hospitals dwindled, and administrators walked off the job. By the end of December, only 15 doctors out of the original 500 remained at the First City Emergency Hospital. On December 31 a bomb hit the Kavkaz Hotel next to the Presidential Palace not far from the hospital. Already Russian troops had crossed the borders and were massing outside Grozny. Inside the city Chechen fighters, under the command of Colonel Aslan Maskhadov, a former Soviet officer, waited to repulse the attack. We suspected that the hospital could be the next target, but no one wanted to suggest leaving.

Our small team of remaining medical personnel gathered in the doctors’ lounge. We were all frightened, but we didn’t want to show it. I looked at my friend Movsar Idalov, a trauma specialist. He looked calm, but I knew that like me, he was trembling inside. We all turned to our elder, Khamzat Elmurzayev, a fifty-five-year-old surgeon; he would be the one to make any decision. Khamzat hesitated, then told us that everyone was leaving Grozny and that we should too. “We can’t stay here any longer,” he said. “We all need to go home to our villages and set up medical centers. That’s where help will be needed.

Six of the doctors volunteered to stay with the remaining patients, mostly elderly Russians, in the basement shelter where we had transported them when the windows blew out. Their relatives either had abandoned them or had left Chechnya. I packed my operating table and instruments into the car and headed home to Alkhan Kala just in time. Hours later, in the first minutes of New Year’s Day 1995, the Russian army launched a massive tank assault on Grozny. The first Russian-Chechen War had begun in earnest.

Chapter 5 THE EVE OF THE FIRST WAR

Chapter 5
THE EVE OF THE FIRST WAR