chechnya

Chechnya is in the grip of what could be described as an epidemic of cancer... According to the republic’s one working cancer clinic, as many cases were recorded in the first five months of this year as in the whole of 2006. “Today we have 1712 patients, how can you explain that?” said Petimat Khamidova, the head of the clinic.

Khamidova, who has worked in this field for 30 years, said there had never been so many cancer patients before war broke out in Chechnya. “Most frequent are cases of lung cancer, breast cancer, cancer of thyroid gland, skin cancer, gynaecological disorders,” she said. “We used to have very few cases of lung cancer here.”

I hesitate to write about the atrocities we saw because I fear that people will think I am exaggerating. I saw dozens of charred corpses of women and children lying in the courtyard of the mosque, which had been destroyed. The first thing my eye fell on was the burned body of a baby, lying in the foetal position. The flesh had burned off the arms and you could see the white of the finger bones. I could not tell if it was a girl or boy. I saw a wild-eyed woman emerge from a burned-out house holding a dead baby. Lorries with bodies piled in the back rolled through the streets on the way to the cemetery.

Smoke billowed over the city. Houses were heaps of rubble, flames leaping from their roofs. Twisted metal, beams and lumps of plaster smouldered in the streets. So many corpses lay decomposing in the streets that the checkpoint soldiers wore handkerchiefs over their faces to block the smell...

I stood before the Presidential Palace, gagging on the stench, unable to move. Scores of burned-out tanks, army personnel carriers and jeeps belonging to the Russians littered the street. Under them lay rotting bodies.

I heard it said that there were a hundred explosions in a single hour in Grozny, the heaviest bombardment... since the Second World War. At least 100,000 civilians remained there, trapped in bunkers or dying in the rubble of their apartments. Every day, dozens of wounded were transported to Atagi. I had never seen anything like the terrible internal wounds - shredded intestines, liver, kidneys and sexual organs reduced to ground meat - caused by the lethal fragmentation bombs.