Price of War Heavier for Blind Chechens

When the Russians started dropping bombs on Grozny last fall, Marina Seferova went outside with a pot of red paint and in large, uneven letters wrote “Home for the Blind” on the side of her concrete apartment block.

But if the librarian hoped that would earn some favorable treatment from Russian forces, she was out of luck. It seems, the residents of the Chechen capital say, as if the Russians suffered from a blindness of their own.

“The federals aimed well,” says 42-year-old Pakhurdin Daniyalov, an amateur radio engineer who lost his vision to glaucoma when he was 3. “They aimed at those like us who were least able to resist.”

For the last few months, about 15 of Grozny’s blind residents have huddled in a three-room apartment on the first floor of the building, cared for by a dozen volunteers such as Seferova who once worked for the Chechen Society for the Blind.

They’re all that’s left of what was once a community of hundreds of people without sight--engineers and craftsmen with apartments, jobs and lives of their own. Week after week, those who could find a way out fled. Those who remained were those few without family or any place to go.

The bombs struck Grozny’s sighted and blind with equal destruction. But in the aftermath, the blind are at a severe disadvantage. They can no longer navigate in the ruins of their city or their homes, where landmarks have been obliterated and new hazards lurk all around them.

They can do little except wait for help.

“All we do is sit here,” says 53-year-old Lyubov Zhilyayeva, perched stiffly on a metal bed across from a handful of others. She wears a gray knitted cap and gray knitted leg warmers. “We sit here like this all day long and hope maybe someone will talk to us.”

Their neighborhood is a wasteland.

The trees outside the house are branchless. The trunks are charred black. The walls are gouged and speckled from sprays of shrapnel. Chunks of concrete have spilled down from upper balconies onto lower ones. One shell knocked out an entire section of the top three floors, exposing a kitchen to the outside like a dollhouse, the dishes still in the cupboard.

The blind can’t see all that. But they can feel that the ground is no longer a friend. It is uneven from rocket holes and strewn with shattered bricks and bits of twisted metal. The sighted can step around such hazards. For the blind, they are as impermeable as a barricade and as dangerous as a minefield.

“We can’t go anywhere anymore. We can’t do anything. We can’t even repair the place ourselves,” Daniyalov says. “No one has responsibility for us anymore. We want to know--who is going to give us a place to live? Where do we go?”

In many ways, the story of the home for the blind is the story of the city as a whole.

Once upon a time, the blind in Grozny lived in this apartment block and in a nearby dormitory and held jobs at a nearby radio assembly plant, candle factory and metal workshops. They had a club, concert hall and a library with shelves and shelves of books on tape and in Braille.

They were people like Zhilyayeva, a former construction worker. She lost her sight to an unidentified infection 20 years ago and lost her husband four years later. With no children, she built a new life for herself among Grozny’s blind, living in the dormitory and working in the radio factory. An ethnic Russian, she felt at home among the mix of Chechens and other peoples from the Caucasus in the neighborhood.

“I was completely independent. I could do all the same things as a seeing person--the cooking, the laundry. I didn’t need anything from anybody. I could get around on my own,” she says. “Now I can’t go anywhere.”

After Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991, funding for the blind faded, but the community kept things going on its own. In 1994, the first Chechen war began. It lasted two years, leaving the radio plant in ruins and damaging most of their living quarters. But the residents rebuilt the candle factory and figured that they’d get by.

Then the second war began last fall. Unfortunately for the blind, the Chechen separatists chose as their stronghold the Oktyabrsky section of town, which is also where the blind live. It is less than a mile away from Minutka Square, the epicenter of the fighting until Russian forces captured the capital early this month.

“I won’t say it around the Russians, but the rebels weren’t bad to us,” Seferova says. “They gave us flour and sugar, and when they left, they gave us their food. At least they bothered to find out who we were.”

The Russians didn’t. She says they appeared to have confused the home for the blind--No. 41--with a rebel headquarters at No. 31. During the bombing, the home was hit more than the rebel house.

By January, only the 15 blind residents remained along with their friends and caretakers. For most of the month, the bombs came without pause. They huddled together, hungry, in the basement, where the sounds of the bombardment drove them nearly crazy.

“What you see on the screen at the horror movies, we hear with our ears,” Daniyalov says.

On Feb. 1, a rocket struck right outside the building. The impact blew in the basement’s door, which hit a 60-year-old resident in the head. They feared that he would die.

“There was a panic,” recalls Seferova, the librarian. “The blind couldn’t see, and they fell all over each other as they rushed to the far side of the basement.”

Fearing that the basement’s ceiling would collapse, they then fled upstairs. But one nurse ducked back downstairs to retrieve the bread they had left baking on the stove. Just then, a second shell struck, the basement’s ceiling collapsed, and she was buried.

The shelling continued for another week. Only when it stopped could they retrieve her corpse.

The volunteers have put plastic over the broken windows in the building’s only intact apartment on the ground floor. They have built a stove from a metal box and fry lavash--the local flat bread--on it. They live mostly off foods scavenged from the other apartments.

Once a day, they make an expedition across the street and bring back porridge that the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry started distributing last week.

They have drawn together in a makeshift extended family whose members have melded their fate.

“I won’t leave them. I can’t,” Seferova says. “Many people don’t know how to relate to the blind. They think they are defective or like children. But once you get drawn into their world, you learn how wonderful they are, how talented and active. You can never leave them. You can never quit.”