WUNRN
CHECHNYA FILM - ORDERED TO FORGET -
VILLAGE BURNED & DESTROYED - WOMEN DEVASTATED
For us as women, so much of our
history is not documented, especially when terror trumps documentation. What
happened in Chechnya in the village of Haybakh, was a horrific form of ethnic
cleansing. There are still women who remember, whose tears continue. May we
think of them as we watch this modern film that shows a glimpse of human
destruction. The lives of the surviving Haybakh Checynan village
women in this time of terror, were traumatized forever.
SCROLL DOWN WEBSITE TO SEE FILM
TRAILER SEGMENT.
The
Chechen film "Ordered to Forget"
(«Приказано
забыть») which tells how some 700 residents
of the Chechen village of Haybakh were burned alive at the time of the
February 1944 deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush nations on Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin's orders, was screened on June 20 at the Moscow International
Film Festival.
The premiere had originally been schedules to take place in Grozny last
month, but Russia's Ministry of Culture refused to certify the film for public
distribution on the grounds that, since the archives of the People's Commissariat
for Internal Affairs (NKVD, the forerunner of the present-day Interior
Ministry) contain no evidence that the atrocity ever took place, the film
constitutes "a falsification of history" that could give rise
to interethnic hatred, according to its Chechen producer Ruslan Kokanayev.
According to Kokanayev, it was intended to give an impression of life in the
Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) during the period
1939-1945, i.e. at the height of the Stalinist terror. "We try to show
that the story of Haybakh is interwoven with human tragedies," he
explained.
In
Haybakh, some 700 people, including twin infant boys born that morning, were
herded into a barn that was set alight. Those who tried to escape the flames
were mown down by mortar fire. Some 200 people died on the same day in the
Ingush village of Targim. Similar mass killings took place in the Chechen
mountain village of Melkhesty and at Kezenoy-Am, the mountain lake that Chechen
Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov is transforming into a resort.