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DEATH YOU WANT TO GET. " II II II SHAll The arms market is a grandiose term for a loose cluster of about 100 men and fighters huddled around lethal toys. The star of the show is a white Lada with a 50-caliber antitank gun sticking out of the back. The tall scarred man with the large white Chechen fright wig, glares at me from under his white sheepskin cap. He wags his finger at me and disappears into the crowd. The fighters don't want me taking pictures of the arms market, as if the fact that Russians are selling weapons to the Chechens is a dark secret they don't want the outside world to know. The local people don't like the arms market here either. They have asked the fighters to move it, to no avai I. They won't have to worry for long: the Russians are coming. No, to be more accurate, the Russians are here. But I am about to find that out the hard way. In two days 70 people will die when Russian SU 22 jets drop 500-pound bombs on the crowded marketplace. The local commander pulls up in a black Volga. He has had his lower lip shot away-probably in the last war-and a doctor has done a crude job of patching it together. I muscle my way through the crowd of fighters and bodyguards into his presence. He is surprised to see an outsider. "You want to go to the front," he says. "Why not?" "Do you dare?" Entering Chechnya is all about dare, about risk, about coming to terms with just how close to death you want to get. The Russians dared and lost in their last war between 1994 and 1996. The Chechens dared and won. Until October of 1999, when under the Russian justification that the Chechens had invaded Dagestan, the republic east of Grozny, and blown up three apartment flats, the Russians invaded what was supposed to be the independent Republic of Ichkeria (the name the Chechens give to their homeland). Or was this simply an internal matter of Russians doing police work to root out bandits and terrorists? One million Chechens and ethnic Russians felt the brunt of a World War II -style blitzkrieg 100,000 Russian soldiers began on their tiny 6,000-square-mile homeland. The Russians had also taken a page from the spin doctors in the Gulf War: plenty of promises, lots of briefings, but no actual hands-on, eyes-open accountability. There were over 400 journalists grumbling in Russian-controlled Nazran, bottled up and frustrated by the Russian bureaucracy. Sometimes a report would surface from inside Chechnya, and then nothing. Except for two or three local stringers, the rebel-held side of Chechnya was si lent, the conditions for the 700,000 or so people still inside the war zone existing only in vague speculation in reports filed from warm hotels in Nazran. The journalists dared not enter rebel-held Chechnya for fear of kidnapping, murder and disappearance. They forgot to notice in their fearful reports that here, once again, was a war in Europe. A war where evil things were being done beyond the sight of the outside world. A war sanctioned by Russia's allies as a crusade against terrorism and condoned with life-supporting loans and vague questioning statements. I felt that the Russians were committing genocide, indiscriminately killing women, ch ildren and men, destroying not only a place, but a people. If the journalists would not go, then I would. GROZNY I didn't want to stay in a bunker. I like sleeping in the house on the floor with the rest of the Chechen mujahedin. A bunker is hot, damp and foul , like a tomb. A house is bright, happy, a human place. A victorious brave place. I would rather die as an honored guest than a frightened rat. I am with Commander Aliturpelov in his newly-built house in the southern suburbs of Grozny. His fighters talk and laugh in the main room where the heat is. RPK machine guns, ammo belts, spare magazines and AK-47 "Automats," as they call them here, are strewn around the house. The white house is always full of fighters. Bearded men in their bulky cammo jackets and pants come and go throughout the day and night. Hugging, kissing and standing with one arm on each other's shoulder, they are like old friends. There is an obligation to update each other on what is happening, convince each other that they are winning and remind each other of the Russians' lies and incompetence. You learn very quickly to dislike the Russian military and the media war they wage here. 46

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