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Opinion note
In October 1996, I was appointed Head of Office at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) war surgical hospital in Novye Atagi, a small Chechen village south of Grozny in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains in the very south of the Russian Federation. The ICRC had opened the hospital here on 2 September 1996 in order to care for the war-wounded in the Chechen conflict. The delegation compound, which also contained the hospital, was a busy place, with a multitude of building projects going on at the same time. There was an international team of experienced medical staff running the hospital, and a number of supporting staff engaged in the construction and administration of the operations. Often the sub-delegation was visited by other supporting specialists working across all the Northern Caucasus delegations - for instance, those working on international humanitarian law dissemination or security. For security reasons, we were almost exclusively confined to the delegation compound, and a humming social life developed among those who worked and lived there.
In the early hours of 17 December 1996, two and a half months into this mission, everything changed.
When I woke up that morning, it was dark in my room - almost. Lying in bed I could see a few strips of light reflecting on the wall, the streetlight from the courtyard shining through the blinds. There were also the sounds of voices and what seemed to be banging noises.
Immediately I thought of an incident that had occurred about two weeks earlier, when I also woke up at about 5am to the sounds of voices and footsteps. At the time, wondering if it was a late-night party, I got up and descended from my bedroom to see what was going on downstairs, and I walked straight into a burglary. A large group of armed men was in the process of carrying boxes of material out of the building, including radio equipment and computers. Once they noticed me, they forced me into a corner and onto the floor, kicked me a few times and finished with their business.
This time, however, something was different. I felt a sense of dread. Not knowing what I should do, I sat up...