Young Chechen artists draw horrific memories

By FRED WEIR

SLEPTSOVSK - Fighter planes circle the city like a swarm of angry bees, firing rockets at a cluster of burning high-rise apartment blocks. Down below, people are fleeing, dead bodies lie all around and even the trees are on fire.

The author of this terrifying vision is 9-year-old Ramzan Gamayev, a sandy-haired, tight-lipped Chechen boy who fled with his mother after Russian forces attacked Grozny last December.

He makes clear that his picture, done with coloured pencils, is not a work of imagination. "That's my house," he says, pointing to a building with black smoke billowing from every window.

A pair of running people represent himself and his mother. Then he indicates an inert figure lying on the ground. "That's my sister Sena," he says.

Ramzan is one of hundreds of Chechen children who come every day to this Unicef-funded clinic at the edge of the Sputnik refugee camp in eastern Ingushetia. Sitting at small folding tables, with sunlight streaming through the tent's canvas windows, a psychologist encourages the children to draw their nightmares.

"I couldn't draw a helicopter gunship to save my life, but most of these children can represent one perfectly, down to the smallest detail," says psychologist Tamara Khaduyeva, aged 30, who is herself a refugee from Grozny.

"They put their experiences on to paper, over and over again. And what they have seen is really horrible."

Unicef has collected about $US2 million ($4.4 million) from several Western Governments to help fund emergency aid for the tens of thousands of Chechen children who have streamed into refugee camps in Ingushetia since the war began in next-door Chechnya last October.

The money goes to provide basic school supplies, sanitation equipment and vaccines for more than 100,000 displaced children estimated to be living as refugees.

It also funds this small project in the Sputnik camp, where two professional psychologists and 10 specially trained assistants are trying to come to grips with the post-traumatic stress disorders they say afflict almost every Chechen child.

"A whole generation has been brutalised and psychologically destroyed," says psychologist Fatima Abdoulkhadjeyeva, also a refugee from Grozny.

"All that violence has influenced their minds. Gradually they start to hate the Russians. A new generation of rebel fighters is growing up here in the camps."

Mahmoud Gidayev, a 10-year-old with close-cropped brown hair, illustrates that point. He is drawing a picture much like those being done by dozens of other children around him, showing a helicopter pounding an apartment building with rockets and bombs.

But his explanation is different. "That's a Chechen helicopter," he says grimly, in answer to a question. And the burning building? "That's a Russian house."

The Kremlin's forces, who have occupied most of the separatist republic of Chechnya after eight months of bitter fighting, insist they have conducted the war with due regard for the lives and rights of civilians trapped in the line of fire.

But human rights experts and other observers say the Russian Army advanced through Chechnya behind a screen of heavy weapons fire that devastated everything in its path.

The psychologists say the horrific images the children keep putting down on paper are surely drawn from life.

"If someone wants to say that these children are making things up, then let them," says Khaduyeva.

"I don't want to argue about that. My purpose here is to help the kids face their experiences and hopefully to heal their minds."

She shows a series of pictures done by a 9-year-refugee named Zareta. In the early drawings the girl's home, a village farmhouse, is a charred wreck and several family members are lying dead outside. But by the tenth version of the same picture, the girl has drawn an underground bomb shelter, and her family are all depicted as living inside it.

"That's a huge victory," says Khaduyeva. "However horrible the things she has gone through, she has worked them out. She has allowed herself to hope."

Grozny, once a city of 250,000, is today a near-deserted ruin that looks like Hiroshima after it was hit by the atomic bomb. Most of its population now live in refugee camps in Chechnya and Ingushetia, a situation experts say will probably be permanent.

"We have to consider the scenario in which most of these refugees remain homeless and displaced for many years," says Fritz Lherisson, a special representative with Unicef, who oversaw the first phase of the aid programme.