Chechnya Diary by Thomas Goltz

Author:Thomas Goltz [Goltz, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-20T07:00:00+00:00

With some sort of base to work from secured, it was how to get the Samashki material on the air. I had rather a rude awakening. A subdued and short explanation of the “problem” to Ted Koppel’s executive producer Tom Battag at ABC Nightline D.C. elicited an interesting response. Battag said that while he had the greatest respect for my courage and person, and could and would certainly vote for me when I ran for the papacy, he would not and could not sacrifice a potential long-term relationship with VNI by viewing my Samashki material independent of that agency. ABC’s competitors proved even more reluctant to know me. Either through the VNI grapevine, or maybe just the simple protocols of the television news business, it quickly became apparent that, while producers and shooters at CBS, NBC, and elsewhere might have had the highest respect for my courage and endeavor (frequent phrases), no one wanted to look at or consider the work. My entire stock of Samashki tapes was regarded as tainted goods.

Most exasperating was the lack of interest as framed in the rhetorical context of “What is the story?”

“The Chechen story” had been the siege and fall of Grozny and the retreat of the Chechen leadership to the mountains. Then “the Chechen story” had become an interview with Djohar Dudayev, preferably as he hunted bear in the mountains, or possibly a profile of the elusive Shamil Basayev, the diminutive commando leader who had so ripped up Russian armor in the capital and who was now leading the defense of the eastern front from his hometown of Vedeno. “The Chechen story” next became the battle for Fortress Bamut, a former Soviet missile base in the crotch of the mountains near the Ingushetian frontier, where rumor had it that Djohar Dudayev stashed his alleged nuclear arsenal. This story in turn attracted the American humanitarian worker Fred Cuny, whose disappearance and presumed execution then became virtually the only story from or about Chechnya that American print and electronic editors were interested in, thanks to the unspoken rule that, unless there was an American at the center of the story, there was no story.

And Samashki? What was that and where was that and why should anyone be interested in a group of guerrillas in a surrounded town in the northern plains of Chechnya that had been under Russian control for the past month or more?

It was maddening, insulting—and finally, enlightening.

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