SPECIAL FEATURE
CHECHNYA: A DECADE OF WAR by Heidi Bradner
This 80-page photographic essay with accompanying text is only available in the printed edition. It is not available for online viewing.
PREFACE
On New Year’s Eve 1994–95, Russia ordered troops into the city of Grozny. It was a show of force that ended in massacre for most of the soldiers, whose units were sent into the urban metropolis without backup or escort.
I witnessed and photographed the aftermath of this badly planned campaign. At that time, I could not imagine the chain of events this doomed assault would trigger for Chechnya and also for me. What was a military and political mistake that could have ended there, instead turned out to be just a glimpse of the death and destruction that Chechnya would suffer in the coming decade.
“For ten years they did not let us breathe,” a friend told me on a trip to Grozny in December 2004.
Russian forces invaded a second time in 1999 with promises to restore law and order. The bombing, artillery strikes, assault and the brutal aftermath that followed reached levels of violence even more destructive than the first war. Chechnya sank into a black hole – inaccessible to the media, closed to international organizations – where human rights abuses went unseen, unpunished, and unknown to the outside world. Abduction, torture, and extortion were daily realities of life in Chechnya’s new millennium. People faced such levels of oppression that it bordered on genocide, a far cry from the law and order that the Kremlin said the military would bring. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has since put Chechnya on its Genocide Watch list.
The horror of Chechnya’s second war produced extremism that was not part of the Chechen resistance ten years ago when I first went there. Mass hostage takings in Beslan’s school and in a Moscow theater and the simultaneous downing of two passenger planes by women suicide bombers are examples of this new expansion of the war.
Almost every family in Chechnya has had loved ones killed. A recent report by Medecins Sans Frontieres said nine out of ten people have lost someone close in the war and one in six have witnessed the death of a close relative. Two-thirds said they never feel safe. Eighty percent said they have seen people wounded. Almost every respondent reported they have been in crossfire or under bomb and artillery attacks.
Almost every family is searching for loved ones who vanished after arrest or the feared “mop-up” (zachistka) operations by the Russian military. “The lucky ones are the ones that find a body,” said one man, a teacher, who has been looking for his nephew for over two years.
In my work I have tried to give a human face to the many victims of this war: the Russian teenage conscripts; the young generation growing up without education or normal childhood; the missing and the disappeared; and civilians who have had no recourse to justice or to a political system that could usher in a lasting peace. After suffering more than ten years of violence, abductions, death, fear, checkpoints, and unemployment, Chechens long for a normal life.
This 80-page photographic essay with accompanying text is only available in the printed edition. It is not available for online viewing.
Heidi Bradner is an American photojournalist who has been documenting Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Russia, and the Caucasus since 1990. In 1995 she began a project that has continued for more than ten years – photographing both sides of the conflict in Chechnya, Europe’s longest running but least visible war. Images from the project have been awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence and the Alexia Foundation Prize. Additional recognition for her work has included awards from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, Photo District News, and the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. Bradner now lives in London and is working on a project about Siberian and Arctic cultures. She is a contributor to the Panos Pictures Agency. Chechnya: A Decade of War© 2005 Heidi Bradner