The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War

An excellent account of Seierstad's experience in the Chechen society which has suffered a violent and barbaric plight for the last 15 years after two Russian invasions. She takes the reader to the Gataevs' home, which is a kind of orphanage to children who lost their parents in the Chechnya conflits. She describes their sad stories and discloses to the world a forbidden region of Russia, where no independent journalists can enter on their own. A must read for those interested in a fair and realist description of today's demodernized Russia and its rawest side of cruelty, poverty, misery and Medieval way of ruling.

I read this book after reading a few articles about what is going on in Chechnya. This book tells the stories of orphans, soldiers, rebels, villagers, politicians and presidents - all players in an absurd battle for power and spoils in a remote part of Russia. This book more than any other I have read displays the affects of war and territorial dispute on the people who are forced to live their ordinary lives while others fight, battle and kill for territory. The stories of the orphans and families of the rebels are simply heartbreaking. There are no heroes here and the back and forth struggle for control of this small area shows how the concepts of unity, honor and religion can all collide to make daily life almost unbearable. What a brave person the author must be to have risked her life to present this hidden saga to the world.

I don't like long book reviews - they give away too much. So let me be brief. This book interested me because I know so little about the conflict. It certainly educated me but it did more than that. Someone has once said that truth is the first casualty of war and this book demonstrates that with arresting narratives. Each side in a war spends considerable effort dehumanizing and demonizing the other. The stories in this book of those who suffer, and of some of those who cause suffering, bring the reader beyond sound bites, beyond stereotype and propaganda. The book is sometimes painful to read because of the pain it conveys, but for that very same reason, it is an excellent piece of journalism.

Asnes Seierstad wonders, early in this book, "how do you go to a war?" She's based in Moscow, covering what seem to her increasingly mundane stories of Russian life, and struggling to understand the nature of the war that has broken out in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. The story begins when she talks her way on to a military transport to Grozny and lands in the middle of what is now known as the first Chechen war, in the mid 1990s. But the book revolves around the aftermath of the second Chechen War, a decade later, when Seierstad combines the narratives of illicit trips (disguised and traveling under a false Chechen identity) and official 'group tours' organized for foreign journalists. It's the contrast between the two experiences that make up the principal drama of this book. On the one hand, she recounts the harrowing experiences of a mother who loses three of her four sons in various ways -- and whose fourth son returns after horrible torture. Set against the suffering, the absurdity of the current Chechen regime -- widely seen as a puppet government -- stands in even more striking contrast. In a park, police intervene when she is speaking to a local man. "We just have to make sure that people don't say the wrong things to you," the police chief tells her, earnestly. "Things that aren't true. We have to make sure that people tell the truth." The truth that emerges from these pages is that a conflict of this ferocity leaves few heroes or heroines in its wake. One candidate is the title character, Hadijat, who earns her nickname for taking in scores of orphaned, abused and abandoned children. The children themselves are tragic figures, struggling to build lives of some kind after being traumatized. Seierstad doesn't shy away from displaying the full complexity of the situation; Liana, one abused young girl, is a thief, lazy and a fantasist who steals the money set aside to buy bread for the whole children's home. There is no one who can fail to feel compassion for Liana's plight; equally, I can't imagine who would be willing to open their home to her. Seierstad is best known for The Bookseller of Kabul, a sharply-focused book about the aftermath of what then seemed to be the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This book, while less narrowly focused and a bit more rambling, is perhaps ultimately a more valuable one. While US and NATO troops are present in Afghanistan, a degree of public attention will continue to be directed there, and outrage rightly continues to grow about the horrific situation in Darfur. In Chechnya, however, it seems likely that people will continue to disappear and die unnoticed by the rest of the world. We deserve to be reminded of our apathy. According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, in the years since 1992, a total of 49 journalists have been killed in Russia for doing their job -- reporting the news. No fewer than 18 of them died in Chechnya, while anothoer 7 have disappeared without t

Either Asne Seierstad is seriously brave or seriously insane. In 2006, despite a ban on foreigners traveling without government sanction and escort to Chechnya, she disguised herself as a Chechen (which, for a Norwegian, involves dark hair dye and long, well-pinned scarves) and, with the help of friends, smuggled herself into the war-torn republic - one of the most dangerous war zones on Earth. Seierstad is no stranger to war zones. Her bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, recounts life in Afghanistan through intimate portraits of a middle class family, gained through her living incognito in that milieu. And her more recent A Hundred and One Days looked at life in Baghdad on the eve of the American invasion. In this instance, Seierstad is on a quest to meet the Angel for whom this book is named - a Chechen woman who grew up an orphan in the Soviet system, a self-appointed caretaker for the orphaned children of Grozny (the second war, by UNICEF's account, created 25,000 orphans). But, more fundamentally, she feels called to Chechnya, which she visited frequently in the 1990s, during the first Russo- Chechen war: The trips to Chechnya changed me. When I went back to Moscow to recuperate, I became depressed, had lost my drive. I just wanted to go back again. Real life was in the mountains, where people were waging a life-and-death struggle. Little by little I became almost anti-Russian, from being captivated by the poetry, the music, in search of `the Russian soul', I became aware of the racism, the nationalism, the corruption of senior government officials, the ignorance, the bleak history; as Anton Chekhov put it: `Russian life is like a thousand-pound stone, it grinds a Russian down till there's not even a wet patch left.' And so she dons her disguise, readying to fly to Vladikavkaz. The dark brown scarf is knotted firmly at my neck. `Now you look like one of us!' Two women from the North Caucasus, one a native, the other disguised as one, are going to board an aeroplane. Scarves on their heads, full skirts, clicking heels. `But most important of all: don't smile all the time, and stop looking around as you usually do. Your open expression gives you away immediately. Keep your head down, frown and look unfriendly.' There's no turning back now. A few pages on, after they have landed in Vladikavkaz and passed uneventfully from Russia into Ingushetia, their driver replies to her request to slow down with a fact Seierstad admits to having known, namely: "Anyone who's afraid shouldn't go to Chechnya." And so people like Seierstad go for us, suppressing fear with bravery or insanity (or a mixture of the two). The result, in Seierstad's case, is a moving and insightful portrait of a forgotten war in a forgotten corner of the Russian empire, of the people whose lives intersect with the Angel (Hadijat) and with the author's. Seierstad spent several months in this "post-war" Chechnya, living in Hadijat's orphanage and learning the child