Home

Up

'I would listen to their screams, see their faces' By RICHARD HALICKS The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 09/17/04 Dr. Khassan Baiev traveled last week to Emory and Georgia State to talk about life in Chechnya. The Journal-Constitution interviewed him with the help of a translator. Sometimes I would not leave the hospital, would not go out to see what was going on, to talk to other people. I amputated so many legs, I would come to feel that no one outside could be walking normally. That no one had two legs. That I cut off the leg of everybody. In the village, people were saying I would go crazy, or I would have a heart attack. Even when I would manage to catch three or four hours of sleep, in my dreams I would only dream about my patients. I would listen to their screams, see their faces. The Chechen fighters knew where the minefields were, but in the swirling snow they became disoriented and unsure. Fleeing their capital Grozny with thousands of others in January 2000, the Chechens walked straight into the mines. Some were dead when they hit the ground. Others bled out in the snow. Russian snipers and tank gunners on a nearby ridgetop picked off many more. Scores had legs and feet shattered or blown away. A few hours later, 300 of the wounded had walked, crawled or been dragged on sleds to Dr. Khassan Baiev's tiny hospital in Alkhan Kala, a suburb of Grozny. It wasn't a hospital, really, just a house with a 13-by-13 room where Baiev did surgery. He was the only doctor there. People were literally lying down all over, on the steps, in the hallway — I couldn't walk through the hallway because of all the people. Many of them simply could not fit inside the house. They were put down outside. Blood formed red ice crystals in the snow as the wounded waited for attention. Baiev and his staff applied tourniquets to hundreds so they wouldn't bleed to death before he could treat them. Working 48 hours straight, Baiev would perform 67 amputations and seven brain surgeries. Twice he passed out from exhaustion, and nurses dragged him into the bitter cold and rubbed snow in his face to revive him. He used no general anesthesia, no surgical instruments, no power. His one pair of rubber gloves, washed and reused dozens of times, finally fell apart. So the surgeon worked on barehanded. One of the few drugs Baiev had was xylocaine — "what they give you at the dentist" — for anesthesia. So he would inject this local anesthetic and then saw a limb off, take out an eye, perform brain surgery. I had only a metal hacksaw that I borrowed from a neighbor. Sometimes the neighbor would need the hacksaw, so I would send the nurse to give it to him to cut what he needed, and then he would bring it back for me to continue doing the amputations. Even the brain surgeries I was doing with a regular household drill. The kind that you turn with your hand. When the saw blade became dull from cutting so much bone, he sawed harder. His bare hands became a mass of blisters, which in turn became raw, bleeding wounds. Severed arms, hands, legs and feet would stack up in a corner of the room, until an assistant could take them out for burial and a quick prayer, according to Muslim custom. The second person he treated during that marathon was the Chechen field commander, Shamil Basayev. Last week, Basayev claimed that his group was responsible for recent acts of terror in Russia, including the massacre at a school in Beslan and the suicide bombings of two aircraft. Even in 2000, the Russians had a $1 million bounty on Basayev's head. The doctor and the field commander had known each other as schoolboys. Baiev estimates that Basayev, who had stepped on a mine, lost more than half his blood. Baiev amputated the right foot above the ankle. Then he set to work on the dozens of other people he would treat in the next two days. There was, of course, no post-op treatment. There weren't even any beds. Even after severe loss of blood, even after I would amputate legs or hands, they would stand up and go home. Their relatives would help them, and they would go home, as if I had pulled their teeth. Finally the young surgeon's hands were swollen and numb. The muscles in his arms were constantly in spasm. His exhaustion was so complete that he could no longer work. His tour of hell was over. Rebellions and wars Chechnya is the tiny, mountainous place on the Russia's southern flank that declared its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Russia sent armies into Chechnya in 1994 and again in 1999 to put down the rebellious Chechens. In local shorthand, these are known as the first and second wars. Baiev, now 41, left his home in Chechnya to study medicine in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. He trained as a plastic surgeon and ultimately settled into a comfortable life doing facelifts and the like for wealthy patients in Moscow. He had married and was starting a family; the money in Moscow was good, the clinic well-supplied. But then he went to Ingushetia, a province next door to Chechnya, to volunteer in an emergency room during fighting between the Ingush and another neighboring province. My life changed 100 percent. I saw what firearms really do to people. I saw a lot of corpses of Ingush people. I saw torture — all kinds of burns, all over their bodies — on women and children. When the war started in my country in 1994, with no question, with no second thought, I returned because I knew that a lot of people would be hurt and that a lot of people would need my help. During that first war, Baiev quickly established a pattern of caring for anyone hurt by the fighting: Chechen troops, Russian troops, civilians, women, children, the aged. The Russian army was angry with him for treating Chechens; Chechens were angry with him for taking care of Russian soldiers. But in the main both sides left him alone, because, he says, they knew "I was doing what I was supposed to do." During the second war, this would change. The worst suffering he saw was not among the combatants. The vast majority of the wounded were peaceful civilians, he said, many of them children caught in the shelling or maimed by land mines. The second war began in late 1999, the invasion this time ordered by Vladimir Putin, who had taken over as acting president from Boris Yeltsin. According to Baiev, this time the Russians used "kontraktniki" — contract soldiers, or mercenaries. Ill-trained and mean-spirited, these men often were criminals pulled from Russian jails and offered a chance to work off their sentences by fighting Chechens, he said. His "descent into hell" — the time of the 48 hours of surgeries — began just weeks after the second invasion. A short time later, his hospital was destroyed. Even after that, for days, when people were injured I was going to their homes and, in their kitchens, on their kitchen table, I would perform surgery under light powered by their car batteries. By now, Baiev was completely burned out, suffering from depression and extreme stress. His hands barely worked. The Russians were looking for him, having sworn to kill the "bandit" doctor who was caring for Chechens. I reached a point psychologically where I just could not bear it anymore. You could see the war in my face. He decided to get out. He claims that a Russian colonel from the Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB, helped smuggle him out to Ingushetia. When he arrived in Nazran, the Ingush capital, he found his wife and five children waiting for him. From there, with the assistance of Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders and other groups, Baiev flew to the United States, where he hoped to recover. He and his family settled in a suburb of Boston; their sixth child was born there. Part of his recovery was the creation of his book "The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire," with journalists Nicholas and Ruth Daniloff. It was published a year ago by Walker & Co. The other part of his recovery was purely physical. Strong and athletic, Baiev had been a longtime practitioner of judo and of the Russian martial art sombo. In 2001, after intensive training, he won the World Cup Sombo Championship in France; on the medal platform he raised the Chechen flag. At local colleges Baiev was in Atlanta last week as a guest of Emory University and Georgia State University; he spoke at both schools and showed slides and video of his experiences. With him was Mirsad Krijestorac, a Bosnian journalist who met Baiev in Washington and now often travels with him to help with scheduling and translating. The interview that produced this report took place at Emory last week, with Krijestorac acting as translator. I'm talking as a doctor, not as a politician. Everybody should understand that this war is not recent; it goes back 400 years. People have to know the history of Chechnya and the history of Russia to understand why, every 50 years, a new war erupts. That is partly the reason that I wrote the book — to explain that background and to also explain how a lot of innocent, peaceful civilians, and also a lot of innocent Russian soldiers, were dying. In a way, it's kind of like a scream.