Chechnya as Russian photographer sees it

Adrian Smith, Contributor, Jakarta

Unruly separatist claims are not just the preserve of Indonesia. The Russian Federation, once the center of the former Soviet Union, also has its Achilles' heel: Chechnya.

"While this conflict recently flared up during the breakup of the former Soviet Union, it has been going on for about 150 years. To be frank, the place and its people are just unmanageable," Sergey Drobyshevskiy, the Political Officer of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, claimed.

And, as an indication of its far-reaching effects, he, himself, has lost two schoolmates to the ongoing conflict.

It takes two to tango, but when viewing the photography exhibition Chechnya: Uneasy Time of Expectations at the Russian Embassy you might be forgiven for believing that it is a rather one-sided affair: That the Russian military are only bringing peace, food and medical assistance to this impoverished region and are cleaning it up of drugs and banditry.

All the 42 color photos on display have been taken by the Russian press photographer, Yuri Vladimirovich Tutov, whose work on the Caucasus has been published in Time, Stern and Spiegel.

His photographs paint a particular view of the Russian military's role in Chechnya. The smoldering backdrop of Grozny bombed to the ground, which make up most of what the rest of the world has seen of this battle zone, does not feature.

Instead, what you get are Chechen kids racing alongside Russian tanks on their bikes, Russian officials sharing a joke with local children and smiling Russian soldiers meeting the Imam of Chechnya.

And, as if to put to rest the easy assumption that there is a strict religious divide to this conflict, one photo features a Muslim Russian soldier praying.

But the discordant military-civilian divide is all too visible. The Russian soldier and Chechen shepherd are from two starkly different worlds, as is the 107-year-old Mohammed Imayev, Imam in the village of Veduchi, from the Russian border guards he is visiting. The viewer may well ask, where are all the Chechen men of fighting age?

As a whole, the "locals" are presented as a destitute people, their rural traditional way of life seemingly unchanged for millennia.

What is clearly evoked in this collection of photos is the tense situation many Russian soldiers must be going through in the enticing green and rolling landscape of Chechnya. In one photograph, a group of soldiers share a moment of brief respite with a joke, while lying against a mounted machine gun.

Another image captures a couple of soldiers ducking and weaving beside a field of crops. The prevailing uneasiness and tension of the situation is further compounded by another image of a group of militiamen firing into the air haphazardly beside a Russian flag.

In this way, Tutov weaves in symbols that keep the viewer informed that, in this part of the world, weapons are never far beyond arms reach.

Roughly half of the exhibition is devoted to another troublespot, Tajikistan, which borders the north east of Afghanistan. Here, the issue of cross-border drug-trafficking is pictorially addressed.

Memorable images of blindfolded drug traffickers being escorted to the dusty mountainous border by border guards, or an opium, heroin trafficker being caught, bring home the stark reality of the desperate nature of the drugs trade at its source.

While the confiscated narcotics are proudly presented at a destruction site, the viewer is left wondering the fate of the traffickers, "Most of them are blindfolded and then released at the border after being warned not to do it again", Sergey Drobyshevskiy informed me.

While this exhibition portrays the "official version", it brings to light images of conflicts from two parts of the world that remain little understood and are, by and large, out of sight and out of mind.

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The photography exhibition, Chechnya: Uneasy Time of Expectations, is on at the Embassy of The Russian Federation, Jl. Diponegoro 12, Menteng, Jakarta, until March 6. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. Tel: 335290