SACW - 15 Oct 2015 | / Bangladesh: Targetting two independent newspapers / UN rights report on Sri Lanka / India: ink blot test; Rebellion by literati; internees of 1962 / Svetlana Alexievich

Wed Oct 14 16:21:49 EDT 2015

South Asia Citizens Wire - 15 October 2015 - No. 2873 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Why are intelligence agencies targetting two independent newspapers by blocking media adverts | David Bergman
2. Report to the UN Human Rights Council on Sri Lanka: An Evaluation | Rohini Hensman
3. 2015 Rebellion by India's literati against intolerance and growing assault on free speech
4. India: Shiv Sena Chauvinists Blacken the face of book release organiser in Bombay: Editorial commentary
5. 1962 Indo China War and its Shocking fallout on India's Chinese
6. India: Destroying Hinduism from Within | Apoorvanand
7. Letter from South Asian, Black and Minority Ethnic womens groups and feminists in UK to India's Prime Minister Modi
8. Music Has No Borders: Cultural Personalities Condemn Communal Forces Preventing Ghulam Ali from Singing in Mumbai
9. How far left of Partition? | Ishtiaq Ahmed
10. Shulamith Firestone: The Sexual Counter-Revolution

11. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: Text of Prof. Chaman Lal's to Sahitya Akademi as he returns the national translation prize given to him in 2001
 - India: Neoliberalism, Hindutva Supremacism and Challenges before Revolutionary Movement (subhash gatade)
 - India: Ground report: How rumours about cow slaughter triggered riots in Mainpuri
 - India: By buying Modi's excuses for communalism, we’re all colluding in murder (Kavita Krishnan)
 - India: The lynch mob (Venkitesh Ramakrishnan in Frontline)
 - India: Real Agenda of RSS Pracharak-Turned-PM ( Mani Shankar Aiyar)
 - Modi and the Hindu Hard-Liners - Editorial in The New York Times, 14 October 2015
 - India: Supreme Court protects Teesta Setalvad from arrest till Dec 8
 - BJP's mother ship RSS says secularism is a disease and writers returning their rewards are intolerant
 - India: Of cow lovers and human haters (Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal)
 - India: Hindus should stop worrying about Muslims and start worrying about themselves, their children, their youth (Apoorvanand)
 - India: Shiv Sena is going back to its violent past to stay in the public eye (Sachin Kalbag)
 - India: Ghoulish game - The morality of protecting the Indian cow (Mukul Kesavan)
 - India: End the Sena’s veto power ( Editorial in The Hindu, 12 October 2015)
 - India's Writers Step up Protest (selected URLs)
 - India: Nayantara Sahgal responds to the Akademi President’s Remarks
 - India:: “The support of the people at the top is emboldening such people to kill rationalists”: Interview with Narendra Nayak

::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
12. India: Now that a prairie fire is lit | Jawed Naqvi
13. Dadri lynching to ink attack on Kulkarni: India faces an ink blot test | Ajoy Bose
14. India: [right to information] RTI on my side | Aruna Roy , Nikhil Dey
15. Indo-Pak friendship body demands case against Shiv Sena over cancellation of Ghulam Ali's concert
16. Boys in Zinc | Svetlana Alexievich

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1. BANGLADESH: WHY ARE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES TARGETTING TWO INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS BY BLOCKING MEDIA ADVERTS | David Bergman
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Dhaka, Bangladesh - Officers from the army's intelligence agency have instructed major companies to stop advertising in Bangladesh's two leading independent newspapers, sources told Al Jazeera.
http://sacw.net/article11756.html

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2. REPORT TO THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL ON SRI LANKA: AN EVALUATION
by Rohini Hensman
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One of the most striking features of the report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Investigation on Sri Lanka, 2015 is its consistent effort to be even-handed in its view of Government of Sri Lanka and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam responsibility for atrocities. Significantly, it does not find evidence that the government or its armed forces engaged in genocide, instead, the crimes are described by the report as consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity. This analysis finds the report of OISL as contributing to a process of securing the rights of victims and their families, reforming institutions so that similar bloodbaths do not recur in the future, and bringing about reconciliation.
http://sacw.net/article11767.html

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3. 2015 REBELLION BY INDIA'S LITERATI AGAINST INTOLERANCE AND GROWING ASSAULT ON FREE SPEECH
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More than 40 authors have handed back major honours in a stand against ‘vicious assaults' on cultural diversity
http://sacw.net/article11766.html

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4. INDIA: SHIV SENA CHAUVINISTS BLACKEN THE FACE OF BOOK RELEASE ORGANISER IN BOMBAY: Editorial commentary
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http://sacw.net/article11765.html

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5. 1962 INDO CHINA WAR AND ITS SHOCKING FALLOUT ON INDIA'S CHINESE
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Buried inside the ‘Himalayan Blunder' of 1962 – the humiliating India-China war – is a tragic story that is not known to most of India and quietly ignored by successive governments. It is the story of how over 3,000 Indian-Chinese – men, women and children including infants – were summarily arrested without trial and placed in a disused World War II POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan.
http://sacw.net/article11747.html

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6. INDIA: DESTROYING HINDUISM FROM WITHIN | Apoorvanand
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Hindus should stop worrying about Muslims and start worrying about themselves, their children, their youth. They need to worry about the attempts being made to criminalise their minds and hearts
http://sacw.net/article11763.html

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7. LETTER FROM SOUTH ASIAN, BLACK AND MINORITY ETHNIC WOMENS GROUPS AND FEMINISTS IN UK TO INDIA'S PRIME MINISTER MODI
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As women concerned with combating violence against South Asian, Black and Minority Ethnic women and girls, we are writing to express our deep disquiet about your government's approach to gender violence.
http://sacw.net/article11762.html

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8. MUSIC HAS NO BORDERS: CULTURAL PERSONALITIES CONDEMN COMMUNAL FORCES PREVENTING GHULAM ALI FROM SINGING IN MUMBAI
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We, the following writers, artists, film makers, poets, musicians, dancers, theatre persons and art lovers strongly condemn the act of the Shiv Sena preventing the renowned singer Ustad Ghulam Ali from singing in Mumbai. The concert was organised in order to commemorate the death anniversary of Jagjit Singh, another very well-known ghazal singer.
http://sacw.net/article11761.html

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9. HOW FAR LEFT OF PARTITION? | Ishtiaq Ahmed
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Ishtiaq Ahmed continues his series on the tumultuous history of the Left in the Subcontinent
http://sacw.net/article11671.html

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10. SHULAMITH FIRESTONE: THE SEXUAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION
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This edited extract from Shulamith Firestone's classic The Dialectic of Sex explores how approaches to mental health are always structured by relations of power. Firestone argues that feminism's absorption into institutionalised neo-Freudian cod-psychology deflected its initial assault on patriarchy—and that only political organization and struggle is capable of breaking through women's oppression.
http://sacw.net/article11757.html

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11. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - India: Text of Prof. Chaman Lal's to Sahitya Akademi as he returns the national translation prize given to him in 2001
 - India: Neoliberalism, Hindutva Supremacism and Challenges before Revolutionary Movement (subhash gatade)
 - India: Ground report: How rumours about cow slaughter triggered riots in Mainpuri
 - India: By buying Modi's excuses for communalism, we’re all colluding in murder (Kavita Krishnan)
 - India: The lynch mob (Venkitesh Ramakrishnan in Frontline)
 - India: Real Agenda of RSS Pracharak-Turned-PM ( Mani Shankar Aiyar)
 - Modi and the Hindu Hard-Liners - Editorial in The New York Times, 14 October 2015
 - India: A Hindu vote bank is a myth (Sagarika Ghose)
 - India: Supreme Court protects Teesta Setalvad from arrest till Dec 8
 - India: Why I Can't Support Gandhi On 'Cow-Slaughter' (Saroj Giri)
 - India: Spreading darkness (Editorial, The Statesman, 14 Oct 2015)
 - Secularism and sacred cows - India’s secular identity may be under threat (M Serajul Islam)
 - BJP's mother ship RSS says secularism is a disease and writers returning their rewards are intolerant
 - India: Of cow lovers and human haters (Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal)
 - India: Mumbai's Shiv Sainiks have a shameful history of intimidation . . . (Editorials in The Telegraph and Deccan Herald)
 - India: Hindus should stop worrying about Muslims and start worrying about themselves, their children, their youth (Apoorvanand)
 - India: Shiv Sena is going back to its violent past to stay in the public eye (Sachin Kalbag)
 - India: Anger beyond words (editorial, The Hindu)
 - India: Ghoulish game - The morality of protecting the Indian cow (Mukul Kesavan)
 - India: End the Sena’s veto power ( Editorial in The Hindu, 12 October 2015)
 - India's Writers Step up Protest (selected URLs)
 - India: Nayantara Sahgal responds to the Akademi President’s Remarks
 - India:: “The support of the people at the top is emboldening such people to kill rationalists”: Interview with Narendra Nayak
 - India: Dinkar in the time of the Dadri lynching (comment in MINT)

 - available at: http://communalism.blogspot.com/

::: RESOURCES & FULL TEXT :::
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12. INDIA: NOW THAT A PRAIRIE FIRE IS LIT | Jawed Naqvi
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(dawn, 13 Oct 2015)

AS droves of intellectuals began returning their state awards to protest the growing culture of intolerance across India, I exulted to Prof Romila Thapar: “You’ve lit a prairie fire.” She messaged back “No.” It was the outrage at what was happening that had triggered the outcry.

If she believed she had little to do with the surge of awakening she was wrong. It was in October last year that a very worried audience was glued to every word of a seminal address. To question or not to question, that is the question? Prof Thapar’s exhortation to India’s weak-kneed intellectuals was direct and urgent. Speak up or we all perish. After starting the fire, her modesty today doesn’t fit.

People were expressing their outrage because they were outraged! Does that make sense? If outrage alone could bring about desired change, then nobody would need Lenin or Gramsci or Rosa Luxemburg I muttered to myself. On the other hand, an alternate scenario lurking in India warns us that unguided popular anger could produce a Robespierre too, perhaps dressed as a Hardik Patel, who knows.

There is a real worry here despite the dominant left’s pursuit of last week’s mayoral elections in West Bengal. Remember this was the time when a popular prairie fire had begun. Just marvel at the communists’ bad sense of timing. A Bengali Marxist hero, former state finance minister Asim Dasgupta, was among the leading lights required to contest mayoral elections last week — he from the Salt Lake City where he lost. In Kerala, the party is lauding saint and social reformer Narayana Guru’s secular legacy to woo a low-caste community that holds the balance in the next assembly elections.
An alternate scenario lurking in India warns us that unguided popular anger could produce a Robespierre.

Across the road from the left’s pulpit, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a neo-liberal academic was suddenly berating Modi. His force of logic and candid appeal against Hindutva’s innate fascism had the flavour of an old page from the left’s party organ.

In the meantime, the country’s central bank chief Raghuram Rajan also of the neoliberal brotherhood has emerged as an outspoken theorist of how society needs to grow and prosper. The other day he chided Prime Minister Modi to pull up his socks on the social front, a rebuke for the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq by a Hindutva mob.

“The emphasis that prime minister … [has] … been putting on this being an economy which is trying to get it right and move forward on sustainable basis, I think that does not fit well with these kinds of incidents. And we need to figure out the way to reduce; and certainly, I think, there is a law and order issue there,” Rajan told India Today channel.

Mehta who was hitherto entranced by Modi’s reformist promise, now says the prime minister is willy-nilly responsible for the climate of unreason in the country. Pro-markets ideologues, including journalists from the political right — the veritable Orwellian sheep from Animal Farm — are also looking disenchanted by the master’s silence on violence against people’s food habits.

I think Rajan spotted the expanding prairie fire when he said that Modi had a law and order problem on his hands. In a way, India’s main problem is indeed one of law order. Since the law of the land is enshrined in the country’s agreeably democratic constitution, protecting the statutes in letter and spirit was all that was needed from the state to keep everyone happy. A literal implementation of Rajan’s law and order call could solve half of India’s immediate problems. In fact, it could also help improve relations with neighbouring countries. Who will bell the cat?

For if the law of the land were to be equally and truly applied for everyone, none who allowed communal pogroms under his watch could become prime minister. No ruling party president would dodge jail without a transparent trial in criminal cases of fake encounter killings. The butchers of hundreds of Sikhs, leading names lurking within the Congress party, would be serving at least a life sentence each. Dalits would not be lynched, abused or raped with impunity.

Neo-fascist men who assaulted Sudheendra Kulkarni, the host of Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book tour in Mumbai, would know better. Akhlaq’s killers would be arrested without the need to send the meat in his fridge to test if it was beef. There would be no communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. There would be no gang rape of a woman ever again, in a bus or inside an Arab diplomat’s house. If a man was hanged for terror, the debate would be about the morality of the death penalty, not about the alleged miscarriage of justice.

While Rajan’s prescription awaits courageous political patrons, a similar cleaning up is already under way in Pakistan. The Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence on the Muslim killer of fellow Muslim, the assassinated former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. I know Pakistanis who are waiting anxiously for the law to close in on Hafiz Saeed and Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, and other so-called anti-India assets. Taking Rajan’s route, the implementation of law and order can indeed rehydrate India’s wilting democracy. And yet Rajan’s is little more than an idealist’s dream. You usually don’t take the law and order route to fight fascism.

Prof Thapar’s exhortations are now out in a new book — The Indian intellectual. She feels though the essays may no longer be relevant, arguing that the prairie fire has now been lit. To put it differently, though, the fire could do with more kindling. It may also need to be watched and also guided, not least with lessons from history, lest the leaping flames devour their very own purpose.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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13. DADRI LYNCHING TO INK ATTACK ON KULKARNI: INDIA FACES AN INK BLOT TEST
by Ajoy Bose
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(The Economic Times - 14 October 2015)

The deepening disquiet across the urban intelligentsia at the recent surge of intolerance and prejudice underlined by last month’s Dadri beef lynching and now the ink attack on Sudheendra Kulkarni by Shiv Sena hoodlums is unprecedented. It is no longer a matter of a few bleeding heart liberals lamenting about human rights. Large sections of the middle class fear an impending assault on established social norms that could ultimately jeopardise their own way of life.

More and more people have started joining the dots between a series of disparate events over the past year: from ghar wapsi to attacks on churches, the murder of rationalist iconoclasts to an obsession with dietary habits. The composite picture that emerges at once threatens both the progress of India towards a modern nation as well as the rule of law.

Had these outrages been merely the handiwork of a few individuals and organisations of the lunatic fringe, it could have been dismissed as an aberration. However, what has compounded matters is the blatant manner in which ministers and leaders of government and the ruling BJP, along with allies like the Sena, have espoused a sectarian agenda.

On the beef-eating controversy, various political luminaries of the establishment have betrayed an embarrassingly obscurantist approach. While Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma declared how his “inner soul starts quivering on [the subject of] beef “, the agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh described cow slaughter as a “mortal sin”.

Incensed at a provocative taunt by RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav that Hindus too ate beef, senior Bihar BJP leader and chief ministerial aspirant Sushil Modi even declared the ongoing state assembly polls as “a contest between beefeaters and those who wanted to stop cow slaughter”.

Another central minister from Bihar, Giriraj Singh made dire predictions of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad “forcing all Biharis to eat beef ” if they won the elections. He criticised the RJD leader for not drawing a distinction between eating beef and mutton with the intriguing explanation it was “the same difference in the relationship one has with one’s wife and sister”.

The urban intelligentsia that had also voted in large numbers for Narendra Modi to take the country forward expected him to condemn the lynching and crack the whip on party extremists with a medieval outlook. But it took 10 long days for the Prime Minister to break his silence on the controversy and that, too, in a convoluted manner. Urging people at an election rally in Bihar to ignore irresponsible politicians, he asked them to follow the guidance of President Pranab Mukherjee, who in the wake of the Dadri atrocity had warned against the destruction of India’s core civilisational values including diversity, tolerance and pluralism.

There was still no outright condemnation or grief expressed for the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq, the Muslim blacksmith from Dadri, and for the critical injuries meted out to his son Danish, on suspicion of storing beef in their kitchen. Nor were there any words of prime ministerial sympathy and encouragement for Mohammad’s other son, Sartaj, a corporal in the Indian Air Force, and the rest of the family.

To make matters worse, at an earlier rally on the same day, Modi appeared to emulate the irresponsible politicians he later asked people to ignore by raising Lalu Prasad’s ‘Hindus too eat beef ‘ statement and admonishing him for doing so despite belonging to the cow-protecting ‘Yaduvanshis’. During a four-day tour across parts of south and north Bihar, I found an overwhelming majority of people disinterested in the beef controversy, despite palpable efforts by BJP leaders to make it into an electoral issue.

Yes, you, the man without the make-up

The Sangh Parivar’s failure to turn the beef controversy into a Hindusversus-Muslim issue could be linked to the recent controversy about meat prohibition during certain days in Mumbai and the promotion of vegetarianism, which has apparently antagonised not just the urban elite but aspirational middle classes celebrating a new consumerist life as well.

The perils of official apathy or even sanction to divisive propaganda and mob behaviour can’t be underplayed even at the cost of sounding paranoid. There is a belated recognition of the dangers and the recent spate of writers returning their Sahitya Akademi Awards in protest against the palpable atmosphere of intolerance is telling.

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14. INDIA: [RIGHT TO INFORMATION] RTI ON MY SIDE
by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey
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(The Indian Express - 12 October 2015)

Ten years on, it is a weapon for the citizen facing arbitrary power. It needs to be protected, taken further.

With the current attack on rights-based laws and that framework, there are difficult times ahead.

Today, India celebrates 10 years of the practice of the right to information. In this decade, this law, one critical to Indian democracy, has established the citizen’s right to make informed choices, not just once every five years, but every single day. Governments at the Central and state levels have been forced to concede to the democratic principle of sharing power. An estimated five to eight million applications are filed every year, making it clear how popular the law is. The more than 45 RTI users who have been killed bear testimony to just how much the act threatens vested interests. In posterity, those studying governance in independent India will be able to mark the patterns of a pre- and post-RTI era. It is, therefore, important to understand the immense contribution of the ordinary Indians who battled for years to get the entitlement and, since 2005, to implement the law.

Powerful and relevant local struggles can organically grow into national movements that enrich democratic practice. The demand for information was brilliant in its simplicity. People honed it locally on the nerve centers of unaccountable power. These demands for details of expenditures on roads, of life-saving medicines in hospitals, of disappearing rations, sent shockwaves through the establishment and shook the foundation of bureaucratic governance. The RTI has proved its efficacy from the panchayat to Parliament. Cutting through red tape and bureaucratic prevarication, it has exposed entrenched vested interests in policymaking and implementation, and undermined officials’ impunity in perpetuating both grand and mass corruption.

The modes of putting information to use in the public domain have been equally important. Jan sunwais evolved as a form of public accountability from a historic first hearing held in the village of Kotkirana in Pali district on December 2, 1994. The process of sharing information initially obtained through informal means and publicly verifying the evidence with local citizens galvanised people. The opposition grew in proportion, as when panchayat officials went on strike against transparency and public audits and elected representatives gave them support. It became clear that accessing information would need a sustained struggle and campaign.

The campaign built an effective and popular discourse on the right to information, using slogans and songs to articulate and communicate. The slogan “hamara paisa, hamara hisaab” powerfully asserted people’s ownership over public money and resources. The late Prabhash Joshi highlighted another slogan in his editorial in the Jansatta in 1996, “hum janenge, hum jiyenge (the right to know, the right to live)”. The RTI so defined was seen and used as a transformative right.

The straightforward logic of the struggle and campaign drew diverse groups into articulating the demand for a law. A 40-day dharna in Beawar in April 1996 led to the formation of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). Set up with the twin objectives of drafting the law and supporting the use of the RTI by citizens’ groups, it circulated the first draft with the support of the Press Council of India in 1996. State laws began to be enacted in 1997, and continued to be in force till the national law was passed in 2005.

The enactment of the RTI not only inspired a spate of other rights-based laws, but also embedded transparency and accountability within them. The structural design of social audits derived from public audits, or jan sunwais, is becoming a systemic part of democratic governance. Earlier this year, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India declared that social audits will be a part of the formal audit process. The mode of social audits is also spreading to other parts of the world.

The RTI has been India’s most powerful “weapon of the weak”, enabling citizens everywhere to question and hold to account the legislature, executive and judiciary.

They have exposed misdeeds by governments across the board, in the delivery of basic services, in land and mining, as well as grand corruption in arbitrary contracts, like in the allocations of 2G spectrum and coal blocks.

With the current attack on rights-based laws and that framework, there are difficult times ahead. The few instances of obvious “misuse” by blackmailers and eccentrics have been blown out of proportion in an attempt to discredit the RTI. Governments have excelled in delays and manipulations in appointing information commissioners. The consensual (informal) decision by all political parties to ignore the orders of the information commission mandating their inclusion under the RTI has exposed the degree to which the establishment can go to brazenly undermine the rule of law.

At one level, there is a sense of wonder that the law was enacted at all, defying prophecies that a corrupt system would never allow self-exposure. The truth is that the RTI did manage to build some statesmanship, and a consensus outside and in Parliament. Notwithstanding the implementation roadblocks, it is internationally acclaimed as amongst the strongest RTI laws in the world.

The end of the first decade sees the RTI movement poised to fight battles for accountability — the passage and implementation of the grievance redress, whistleblowers’ protection and Lokpal legislation. The unfulfilled potential of people’s participation in the pre-legislative consultative process awaits parliamentary sanction. The unfinished promise of proactive disclosure under Section 4 of the RTI Act,
the pendency in the commissions, the ever-looming threat of amendments, must keep the campaign alert to attacks to dilute the impact of the law.

“RTI laga denge (we will file an RTI application)” has become one of the most popular refrains of the frustrated Indian facing the arbitrary exercise of power. In fact, it needs to be taken further. Much eventually depends on an alert and vocal people.

The encouraging sign is that it seems like the argumentative Indian, who is now speaking truth to power, cannot and will not be gagged.

The writers are social activists and founder members of the MKSS and the NCPRI

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15. INDO-PAK FRIENDSHIP BODY DEMANDS CASE AGAINST SHIV SENA OVER CANCELLATION OF GHULAM'S CONCERT
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(The Times of India | TNN | Oct 10, 2015, 09.22AM IST)

While demanding to register case against Shiv Sena (Bal Thackeray) for allegedly threatening against holding concerts of Pakistani ghazal singer Ghulam Ali, the Aaghaz-e-Dosti has hailed Delhi's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government for showing willingness to host the maestro. Aaghaz-e-Dosti is an India-Pakistan friendship initiative of Mission Bharatiyam (India) and The Catalyst (Pakistan).

"With reference to the reports of threats to the programme of Ghulam Ali given by Shiv Sena, we, the members of Aaghaz-e-Dosti, condemn this act. We see that Shiv Sena is a radical outfit that not only in present case, but even in the past, has done things similar to this as its major politics is based on the ideology of hatred," alleged Aaghaz-e-Dosti convener Ravi Nitesh while talking to TOI on Friday.

Ali's concerts titled 'Ek Ehsaas' and 'Chaudhvin Ki Raat' were scheduled for Mumbai and Pune for Friday and Saturday, but both functions were called off following Shiv Sena's protests.
Ravi said they were working towards spreading peace with the very values of non-violence and fraternity and had appealed to the Indian government to act strongly against Shiv Sena and to lodge case against it.

He said people of India, in general, were fond of Ghulam Ali and they had registered their protest through social media. "It is the same Ghulam Ali who performed at Siddhi Vinayak temple of Varanasi in the home constituency of Prime Minister, and when he has to perform in Mumbai, he is facing threats, not by people but by these handful of political goons," Ravi alleged.

"Aaghaz-e-Dosti" believed that no one had the right to give such public threats, he said, adding that being a Pakistani national Ghulam Ali was not only a guest, but one of the most popular singers in the hearts of Indians. He said that they were of view that the concerns of Shiv Sena with Pakistan were baseless and direction less as Shiv Sena never tried to come forward for any positive efforts in bringing peace. "Being an inexperienced outfit in foreign policy related issues, its members are only showing their immaturity," Ravi alleged.

Read Full Press Statement at: 
https://aaghazedosti.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/press-statement-aaghaz-e-dosti-extends-support-to-ghulam-ali-and-demand-action-against-shiv-sena-goons/ 

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16. BOYS IN ZINC
by Svetlana Alexievich
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http://granta.com/

Translated from the Russian by Arch Tait

Svetlana Alexievich is the author of War’s Unwomanly Face, a collection of Soviet women’s memories of the Second World War, and Enchanted with Death, which looks at attempted suicides as a result of the downfall of the Soviet Union. Her other books include Voices from Chernobyl, The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories and most recently Vremia sekond hend (2013), currently untranslated in English. When ‘Boys in Zinc’ (Granta 34) appeared in a Soviet journal the author received death threats and was forced into hiding. It is extracted from a book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature.

o o 

In 1986 I had decided not to write about war again. For a long time after I finished my book War’s Unwomanly Face I couldn’t bear to see a child with a bleeding nose. I suppose each of us has a measure of protection against pain; mine had been exhausted.

Two events changed my mind.

I was driving out to a village and I gave a lift to a schoolgirl. She had been shopping in Minsk, and carried a bag with chickens’ heads sticking out. In the village we were met by her mother, who was standing crying at the garden gate. The girl ran to her.

The mother had received a letter from her son Andrey. The letter was sent from Afghanistan. They’ll bring him back like they brought Fyodorina’s Ivan,’ she said, ‘and dig a grave to put him in. Look what he writes. “Mum, isn’t it great! I’m a paratrooper… ”’

And then there was another incident. An army officer with a suitcase was sitting in the half-empty waiting-room of the bus station in town. Next to him a thin boy with a crew-cut was digging in the pot of a rubber plant with a table fork. Two country women sat down beside the men and asked who they were. The officer said he was escorting home a private soldier who had gone mad. ‘He’s been digging all the way from Kabul with whatever he can get his hands on, a spade, a fork, a stick, a fountain pen.’ The boy looked up. His pupils were so dilated they seemed to take up the whole of his eyes.

And at that time people continued to talk and write about our internationalist duty, the interests of state, our southern borders. The censors saw to it that reports of the war did not mention our fatalities. There were only rumours of notifications of death arriving at rural huts and of regulation zinc coffins delivered to prefabricated flats. I had not meant to write about war again, but I found myself in the middle of one.

For the next three years I spoke to many people at home and in Afghanistan. Every confession was like a portrait. They are not documents; they are images. I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself. What were people thinking? What made them happy? What were their fears? What stayed in their memory?

The war in Afghanistan lasted twice as long as the Second World War, but we know only so much as it is safe for us to know. It is no longer a secret that every year for ten years, 100,000 Soviet troops went to fight in Afghanistan. Officially, 50,000 men were killed or wounded. You can believe that figure if you will. Everybody knows what we are like at sums. We haven’t yet finished counting and burying all those who died in the Second World War.

In what follows, I haven’t given people’s real names. Some asked for the confidentiality of the confessional, others I don’t feel I can expose to a witch-hunt. We are still so close to the war that there is nowhere for anyone to hide.

One night I was asleep when my telephone rang.

‘Listen,’ he began, without identifying himself, ‘I’ve read your garbage. If you so much as print another word… ’

‘Who are you?’

‘One of the guys you’re writing about. God, I hate pacifists! Have you ever been up a mountain in full marching kit? Been in an armoured personnel carrier when the temperature’s seventy centigrade? Like hell you have. Fuck off! It’s ours! It’s got sod all to do with you.’

I asked him again who he was.

‘Leave it out, will you! My best friend–like a brother he was–and I brought him back from a raid in a cellophane bag. He’d been flayed, his head had been severed, his arms, his legs, his dick all cut off … He could have written about it, but you can’t. The truth was in that cellophane sack. Fuck the lot of you!’ He hung up; the sound in the receiver was like an explosion.

He might have been my most important witness.
A Wife

‘Don’t worry if you don’t get any letters,’ he wrote. ‘Carry on writing to the old address.’ Then nothing for two months. I never dreamed he was in Afghanistan. I was getting suitcases ready to go to see him at his new posting.

He didn’t write about being in a war. Said he was getting a sun-tan and going fishing. He sent a photo of himself sitting on a donkey with his knees on the sand. It wasn’t until he came home on leave that I knew he was in a war. He never used to spoil our daughter, never showed any fatherly feelings, perhaps because she was small. Now he came back and sat for hours looking at her, and his eyes were so sad it was frightening. In the mornings he’d get up and take her to the kindergarten; he liked carrying her on his shoulders. He’d collect her in the evening. Occasionally we went to the theatre or the cinema, but all he really wanted to do was to stay at home.

He couldn’t get enough loving. I’d be getting ready to go to work or getting his dinner in the kitchen, and he even grudged that time. ‘Sit over here with me. Forget cutlets today. Ask for a holiday while I’m home.’ When it was time for him to get the plane he missed it deliberately so we would have an extra two days. The last night he was so good I was in tears. I was crying, and he was saying nothing, just looking and looking at me. Then he said, ‘Tamara, if you ever have another man, don’t forget this.’

I said, ‘Don’t talk soft! They’ll never kill you. I love you too much for them to be able to.’

He laughed. ‘Forget it. I’m a big lad.’

We talked of having more children, but he said he didn’t want any more now. ‘When I come back you can have another. How would you manage with them on your own?’

When he was away I got used to the waiting, but if I saw a funeral car in town I’d feel ill, I’d want to scream and cry. I’d run home, the icon would be hanging there, and I’d get down on my knees and pray, ‘Save him for me, God! Don’t let him die.’

I went to the cinema the day it happened. I sat there looking at the screen and seeing nothing. I was really jumpy. It was as if I was keeping someone waiting or there was somewhere I had to go. I barely stuck it out to the end of the programme. Looking back, I think that it must have been during the battle.

It was a week before I heard anything. All of that week I’d start reading a book and put it down. I even got two letters from him. Usually I’d have been really pleased–I’d have kissed them–but this time they just made me wonder how much longer I was going to have to wait for him.

The ninth day after he was killed a telegram arrived at five in the morning. They just shoved it under the door. It was from his parents: ‘Come over. Petya dead.’ I screamed so much that it woke the baby. I had no idea what I should do or where I should go. I hadn’t got any money. I wrapped our daughter in a red blanket and went out to the road. It was too early for the buses, but a taxi stopped.

‘I need to go to the airport,’ I told the taxi-driver.

He told me he was going off duty and shut the car door.

‘My husband has been killed in Afghanistan.’

He got out without saying anything, and helped me in. We drove to the house of a friend of mine and she lent me some money. At the airport they said there were no tickets for Moscow, and I was scared to take the telegram out of my bag to show them. Perhaps it was all a mistake. I kept telling myself if I could just carry on thinking he was alive, he would be. I was crying and everybody was looking at me. They put me on a freight plane taking a cargo of sweetcorn to Moscow, from there I got a connection to Minsk. I was still 150 kilometres from Starye Dorogi where Petya’s parents lived. None of the taxi drivers wanted to drive there even though I begged and begged. I finally got to Starye Dorogi at two o’clock in the morning.

‘Perhaps it isn’t true?’

‘It’s true, Tamara, it’s true.’

In the morning we went to the Military Commissariat. They were very formal. ‘You will be notified when it arrives.’ We waited for two more days before we rang the Provincial Military Commissariat at Minsk. They told us that it would be best if we came to collect my husband’s body ourselves. When we got to Minsk, the official told us that the coffin had been sent on to Baranovichi by mistake. Baranovichi was another 100 kilometres and when we got to the airport there it was after working hours and there was nobody about, except for a night watchman in his hut.

‘We’ve come to collect… ’

‘Over there,’ he pointed over to a far corner. ‘See if that box is yours. If it is, you can take it.’

There was a filthy box standing outside with ‘Senior Lieutenant Dovnar’ scrawled on it in chalk. I tore a board away from where the window should be in a coffin. His face was in one piece, but he was lying in there unshaven, and nobody had washed him. The coffin was too small and there was a bad smell. I couldn’t lean down to kiss him. That’s how they gave my husband back to me. I got down on my knees before what had once been the dearest thing in the world to me.

His was the first coffin to come back to my home town, Yazyl. I still remember the horror in people’s eyes. When we buried him, before they could draw up the bands with which they had been lowering him, there was a terrible crash of thunder. I remember the hail crunching under foot like white gravel.

I didn’t talk much to his father and mother. I thought his mother hated me because I was alive, and he was dead. She thought I would remarry. Now, she says, ‘Tamara, you ought to get married again,’ but then I was afraid to meet her eye. Petya’s father almost went out of his mind. ‘The bastards! To put a boy like that in his grave! They murdered him!’ My mother-in-law and I tried to tell him they’d given Petya a medal, that we needed Afghanistan to defend our southern borders, but he didn’t want to hear. The bastards! They murdered him!’

The worst part was later, when I had to get used to the thought that there was nothing, no one for me to wait for any more. I would wake up terrified, drenched with sweat, thinking Petya would come back, and not know where his wife and child live now. All I had left were memories of good times.

The day we met, we danced together. The second day we went for a stroll in the park, and the next day he proposed. I was already engaged and I told him the application was lying in the registry office. He went away and wrote to me in huge letters which took up the whole page: ‘Aaaaargh!’

We got married in the winter, in my village. It was funny and rushed. At Epiphany, when people guess their fortunes, I’d had a dream which I told my mother about in the morning. ‘Mum, I saw this really good-looking boy. He was standing on a bridge, calling me. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform, but when I came towards him he began to go away until he disappeared completely.’

‘Don’t marry a soldier. You’ll be left on your own,’ my mother told me.

Petya had two days’ leave. ‘Let’s go to the Registry Office,’ he said, even before he’d come in the door.

They took one look at us in the Village Soviet and said, ‘Why wait two months. Go and get the brandy. We’ll do the paperwork.’ An hour later we were husband and wife. There was a snowstorm raging outside.

‘Where’s the taxi for your new wife, bridegroom?’

‘Hang on!’ He went out and stopped a Belarus tractor for me.

For years I dreamed of us getting on that tractor, driving along in the snow.

The last time Petya came home on leave the flat was locked. He hadn’t sent a telegram to warn me that he was coming, and I had gone to my friend’s flat to celebrate her birthday. When he arrived at the door and heard the music and saw everyone happy and laughing, he sat down on a stool and cried. Every day of his leave he came to work to meet me. He told me, ‘When I’m coming to see you at work my knees shake as if we had a date.’ I remember we went swimming together one day. We sat on the bank and built a fire. He looked at me and said, ‘You can’t imagine how much I don’t want to die for someone else’s country.’

I was twenty-four when he died. In those first months I would have married any man who wanted me. I didn’t know what to do. Life was going on all around me the same as before. One person was building a dacha, one was buying a car; someone had got a new flat and needed a carpet or a hotplate for the kitchen. In the last war everybody was grief stricken, the whole country. Everybody had lost someone, and they knew what they had lost them for. All the women cried together. There are a hundred people in the catering college where I work and I am the only one who lost her husband in a war the rest of them have only read about in the newspapers. When I first heard them saying on television that the war in Afghanistan had been a national disgrace, I wanted to break the screen. I lost my husband for a second time that day.
A Private Soldier

The only training we got before we took the oath was that twice they took us down the firing-range. The first time we went there they issued us with nine rounds; the second time we all got to throw a grenade.

They lined us up on the square and read out the order: ‘You’re going to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to do your internationalist duty. Anyone who doesn’t want to go, take two paces forward.’ Three lads did. The unit commander shoved them back in line with a knee up the backside. ‘Just checking morale.’ They gave us two days’ rations and a leather belt, and we were off. Nobody said a word. The flight seemed to take an age. I saw mountains through the plane window. Beautiful! They were the first mountains any of us had ever seen, we were all from round Pskov, where there are only woodlands and clearings. We got out in Shin Dand. I remembered the date: 19 December 1980.

They took a look at me. ‘One metre eighty: reconnaissance company. They can use lads your size.’

We went to Herat to build a firing-range. We were digging, hauling stones for a foundation. I tiled a roof and did some joinery. Some of us hadn’t fired a single shot before the first battle. We were hungry the whole time. There were two fifty-litre vats in the kitchen: one for soup, the other for mash or barley porridge. We had one can of mackerel between four, and the label said, ‘Date of manufacture, 1956; shelf-life eighteen months.’ In a year and a half, the only time I wasn’t hungry was when I was wounded. Otherwise you were always thinking of ways to get something to eat. We were so desperate for fruit that we’d slip over into the Afghans’ orchards knowing that they’d shoot at us. We asked our parents to send citric acid in their letters so that we could dissolve it in water and drink it. It was so sour that it burned your stomach.

Before our first battle they played the Soviet national anthem. The deputy political commander gave us a talk. I remember he said we’d only beaten the Americans here by one hour, and everybody was waiting to welcome us back home as heroes.

I had no idea how to kill. Before the army I was a racing cyclist. I’d never so much as seen a real knife fight, and here I was, driving along on the back of an armoured personnel carrier. I hadn’t felt like this before: powerful, strong and secure. The hills suddenly looked low, the irrigation ditches small, the trees few and far between. After half an hour I was so relaxed I felt like a tourist, taking a look at a foreign country.

We drove over a ditch on a little clay bridge: I remember being amazed it could take the weight of several tons of metal. Suddenly there was an explosion and the APC in front had got a direct hit from a grenade launcher. Men I knew were already being carried away, like stuffed animals with their arms dangling. I couldn’t make sense of this new, frightening world. We sent all our mortars into where the firing had come from, several mortars to every homestead. After the battle we scraped our own guys off the armour plate with spoons. There weren’t any identification discs for fatalities; I suppose they thought they might fall into the wrong hands. It was like in the song: We don’t live in a house on a street, Our address is the USSR. So we just spread a tarpaulin over the bodies, a ‘communal grave’. War hadn’t even been declared; we were fighting a war that did not exist.
A Mother

I sat by Sasha’s coffin saying, ‘Who is it? Is that you, son?’ I just kept repeating over and over, ‘Is that you?’ They decided I was out of my mind. Later on, I wanted to know how my son had died. I went to the Military Commissariat and the commissar started shouting at me, telling me it was a state secret that my son had died, that I shouldn’t run around telling everyone.

My son was in the Vitebsk parachute division. When I went to see him take his oath of allegiance, I didn’t recognize him; he stood so tall.

‘Hey, how come I’ve got such a small mum?’

‘Because I miss you and I’ve stopped growing.’

He bent down and kissed me, and somebody took a photograph. It’s the only photograph of him as a soldier that I’ve got.

After the oath he had a few hours free time. We went to the park and sat down on the grass. He took his boots off because his feet were all blistered and bleeding. The previous day his unit had been on a fifty kilometre forced march and there hadn’t been any size forty-six boots, so they had given him forty-fours.

‘We had to run with rucksacks filled with sand. What do you reckon? Where did I come?’

‘Last, probably, with those boots.’

‘Wrong, mum. I was first. I took the boots off and ran. And I didn’t tip sand out like some of the others.’

That night, they let the parents sleep inside the unit on mats laid out in the sports hall, but we didn’t lie down until far into the night, instead we wandered round the barracks where our sons were asleep. I hoped I would get to see him when they went to do their morning gymnastics but they were all running in identical striped vests and I missed him, didn’t catch a last glimpse of him. They all went to the toilet in a line, in a line to do their gymnastics, in a line to the canteen. They didn’t let them do anything on their own because, when the boys had heard they were being sent to Afghanistan, one hanged himself in the toilet and two others slashed their wrists. They were under guard.

His second letter began, ‘Greetings from Kabul… ‘ I screamed so loudly that the neighbours ran in. It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I had not got married and had no one to look after me.

Sasha used to tease me. ‘Why don’t you get married, Mum?’

‘Because you’d be jealous.’

He’d laugh and say nothing. We were going to live together for a long, long time to come.

I got a few more letters and then there was silence, such a long silence I wrote to the commander of his unit. Straight away Sasha wrote back to me, ‘Mum, please don’t write to the commander again. I couldn’t write to you. I got my hand stung by a wasp. I didn’t want to ask someone else to write, because you’d have been worried by the different handwriting.’ I knew immediately that he had been wounded, and now if even a day went by without a letter from him my legs would give way under me. One of his letters was very cheerful. ‘Hurray, hurray! We escorted a column back to the Union. We went with them as far as the frontier. They wouldn’t let us go any further, but at least we got a distant look at our homeland. It’s the best country in the world.’ In his last letter he wrote, ‘If I last the summer, I’ll be back.’

On 29 August I decided summer was over. I bought Sasha a new suit and a pair of shoes, which are still in the wardrobe now. The next day, before I went to work I took off my ear-rings and my ring. For some reason I couldn’t bear to wear them. That was the day on which he was killed.

When they brought the zinc coffin into the room, I lay on top of it and measured it again and again. One metre, two metres. He was two metres tall. I measured with my hands to make sure the coffin was the right size for him. The coffin was sealed, so I couldn’t kiss him one last time, or touch him, I didn’t even know what he was wearing, I just talked to the coffin like a madwoman.

I said I wanted to choose the place in the cemetery for him myself. They gave me two injections, and I went there with my brother. There were ‘Afghan’ graves on the main avenue.

‘Lay my son here too. He’ll be happier among his friends.’

I can’t remember who was there with us. Some official. He shook his head. ‘We are not permitted to bury them together. They have to be dispersed throughout the cemetery.’

They say there was a case where they brought a coffin back to a mother, and she buried it, and a year later her son came back alive. He’d only been wounded. I never saw my son’s body, or kissed him goodbye. I’m still waiting.
A Nurse

Every day I was there I told myself I was a fool to come. Especially at night, when I had no work to do. All I thought during the day was ‘How can I help them all?’ I couldn’t believe anybody would make the bullets they were using. Whose idea were they? The point of entry was small, but inside, their intestines, their liver, their spleen were all ripped and torn apart. As if it wasn’t enough to kill or wound them, they had to be put through that kind of agony as well. They always cried for their mothers when they were in pain, or frightened. I never heard them call for anyone else.

They told us it was a just war. We were helping the Afghan people to put an end to feudalism and build a socialist society. Somehow they didn’t get round to mentioning that our men were being killed. For the whole of the first month I was there they just dumped the amputated arms and legs of our soldiers and officers, even their bodies, right next to the tents. It was something I would hardly have believed if I had seen it in films about the Civil War. There were no zinc coffins then: they hadn’t got round to manufacturing them.

Twice a week we had political indoctrination. They went on about our sacred duty, and how the border must be inviolable. Our superior ordered us to inform on every wounded soldier, every patient. It was called monitoring the state of morale: the army must be healthy! We weren’t to feel compassion. But we did feel compassion: it was the only thing that held everything together.
A Regimental Press Officer

I will begin at the point where everything fell apart.

We were advancing on Jalalabad and a little girl of about seven years old was standing by the roadside. Her arm had been smashed and was held on only by a thread, as if she were a torn rag doll. She had dark eyes like olives, and they were fixed on me. I jumped down from the vehicle to take her in my arms and carry her to our nurses, but she sprang back terrified and screaming like a small animal. Still screaming she ran away, her little arm dangling and looking as though it would come off completely. I ran after her shouting, caught up with her and pressed her to me, stroking her. She was biting and scratching, trembling all over, as if some wild animal had seized her. It was only then that the thought struck me like a thunderbolt: she didn’t believe I wanted to help her; she thought I wanted to kill her. The way she ran away, the way she shuddered, how afraid she was of me are things I’ll never forget.

I had set out for Afghanistan with idealism blazing in my eyes. I had been told that the Afghans needed me, and I believed it. While I was there I never dreamed about the war, but now every night I am back running after that little girl with her olive eyes, and her little arm dangling as if it’s going to fall off any moment.

Out there you felt quite differently about your country. ‘The Union’, we called it. It seemed there was something great and powerful behind us, something which would always stand up for us. I remember, though, the evening after one battle–there had been losses, men killed and men seriously injured–we plugged in the television to forget about it, to see what was going on in the Union. A mammoth new factory had been built in Siberia; the Queen of England had given a banquet in honour of some VIP; youths in Voronezh had raped two schoolgirls for the hell of it; a prince had been killed in Africa. The country was going about its business and we felt completely useless. Someone had to turn the television off, before we shot it to pieces.

It was a mothers’ war. They were in the thick of it. The people at large didn’t suffer, they didn’t know what was going on. They were told we were fighting bandits. In nine years a regular army of 100,000 troops couldn’t beat some ragged bandits? An army with the latest technology. (God help anyone who got in the way of an artillery bombardment with our Hail or Hurricane rocket launchers: the telegraph poles flew like matchsticks.) The ‘bandits’ had only old Maxim machine-guns we had seen in films, the Stingers and Japanese machine guns came later. We’d bring in prisoners, emaciated people with big, peasant hands. They were no bandits. They were the people of Afghanistan.

The war had its own ghastly rules: if you were photographed or if you shaved before a battle, you were dead. It was always the blue-eyed heroes who were the first to be killed: you’d meet one of those types and before you knew it, he was dead. People mostly got killed either in their first months when they were too curious, or towards the end when they’d lost their sense of caution and become stupid. At night you’d forget where you were, who you were, what you were doing there. No one could sleep during the last six or eight weeks before they went home.

Here in the Union we are like brothers. A young guy going down the street on crutches with a shiny medal can only be one of us. You might only sit down on a bench and smoke a cigarette together, but you feel as if you’ve been talking to each other the whole day.

The authorities want to use us to clamp down on organized crime. If there is any trouble to be broken up, the police send for ‘the Afghans’. As far as they are concerned we are guys with big fists and small brains who nobody likes. But surely if your hand hurts you don’t put it in the fire, you look after it until it gets better.
A Mother

I skip along to the cemetery as if I’m on my way to meet someone. I feel I’m going to visit my son. Those first days I stayed there all night. It wasn’t frightening. I’m waiting for the spring, for a little flower to burst through to me out of the ground. I planted snowdrops, so I would have a greeting from my son as early as possible. They come to me from down there, from him.

I’ll sit with him until evening and far on into the night. Sometimes I don’t realize I’ve started wailing until I scare the birds, a whole squall of crows, circling and flapping above me until I come to my senses and stop. I’ve gone there every day for four years, in the evening if not in the morning. I missed eleven days when I was in hospital, then I ran away in the hospital gown to see my son.

He called me ‘Mother mine’, and ‘Angel mother mine’.

‘Well, angel mother mine, your son has been accepted by the Smolensk Military Academy. I trust you are pleased.’

He sat down at the piano and sang.

Gentlemen officers, princes indeed!
If I’m not first among them,
I’m one of their breed.

My father was a regular officer who died in the defence of Leningrad. My grandfather was an officer too. My son was made to be a military man–he had the bearing, so tall and strong. He should have been a hussar with white gloves, playing cards.

Everybody wanted to be like him. Even I, his own mother, would imitate him. I would sit down at the piano the way he did, and sometimes start walking the way he did, especially after he was killed. I so much want him always to be present in me.

When he first went to Afghanistan, he didn’t write for ages. I waited and waited for him to come home on leave. Then one day the telephone rang at work.

‘Angel mother mine, I am home.’

I went to meet him off the bus. His hair had gone grey. He didn’t admit he wasn’t on leave, that he’d asked to be let out of hospital for a couple of days to see his mother. He’d got hepatitis, malaria and everything else rolled into one but he warned his sister not to tell me. I went into his room again before I went off to work, to see him sleeping. He opened his eyes. I asked him why he was not asleep, it was so early. He said he’d had a bad dream.

We went with him as far as Moscow. It was lovely, sunny May weather, and the trees were in bloom. I asked him what it was like over there.

‘Mother mine, Afghanistan is something we have no business to be doing.’ He looked only at me, not at anyone else. ‘I don’t want to go back into that hole. I really do not.’ He walked away, but turned round, ‘It’s as simple as that, Mum.’ He never said ‘Mum’. The woman at the airport desk was in tears watching us.

When I woke up on 7 July I hadn’t been crying. I stared glassily at the ceiling. He had woken me, as if he had come to say goodbye. It was eight o’clock. I had to get ready to go to work. I was wandering with my dress from the bathroom to the sitting-room, from one room to another. For some reason I couldn’t bear to put that light-coloured dress on. I felt dizzy, and couldn’t see people properly. Everything was blurred. I grew calmer towards lunch-time, towards midday.

The seventh day of July. He had seven cigarettes in his pocket, seven matches. He had taken seven pictures with his camera. He had written seven letters to me, and seven to his girlfriend. The book on his bedside table was open at page seven. It was Kobo Abe’s Containers of Death.

He had three or four seconds in which he could have saved himself. They were hurtling over a precipice in a vehicle. He couldn’t be the first to jump out. He never could.

    From Deputy Regimental Commander for Political Affairs, Major S. R. Sinelnikov. In fulfilment of my duty as a soldier, I have to inform you that Senior Lieutenant Valerii Gennadievich Volovich was killed today at 1045 hours.

The whole city already knew all about it. In the Officers’ Club they’d put up black crêpe and his photograph. The plane bringing his coffin was due at any minute, but nobody had told me a thing. They couldn’t bring themselves to speak. At work everybody’s faces were tear-stained. I asked, ‘What has happened?’

They tried to distract me in various ways. A friend came round, then finally a doctor in a white coat arrived. I told him he was crazy, that boys like my son did not get killed. I started hammering the table. I ran over to the window and started beating the glass. They gave me an injection. I kept on shouting. They gave me another injection, but that had no effect, either; I was screaming, ‘I want to see him, take me to my son.’ Eventually they had to take me.

There was a long coffin. The wood was unplaned, and written on it in large letters in yellow paint was ‘Volovich’. I had to find him a place in the cemetery, somewhere dry, somewhere nice and dry. If that meant a fifty rouble bribe, fine. Here, take it, only make sure it’s a good place, nice and dry. Inside I knew how disgusting that was, but I just wanted a nice dry place for him. Those first nights I didn’t leave him. I stayed there. They would take me off home, but I would come back.

When I go to see him I bow, and when I leave I bow again. I never get cold even in freezing temperatures; I write my letters there; I am only ever at home when I have visitors. When I walk back to my house at night the streetlamps are lit, the cars have their headlamps on. I feel so strong that I am not afraid of anything.

Only now am I waking from my sorrow which is like waking from sleep. I want to know whose fault this was. Why doesn’t anybody say anything? Why aren’t we being told who did it? Why aren’t they being put on trial?

I greet every flower on his grave, every little root and stem. ‘Have you come from there? Do you come from him? You have come from my son.’

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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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