The Oath: A Doctor Sworn to Know No Borders

September 22, 2003

The September/October Book Sense 76 includes The Oath: The Remarkable Story of a Surgeon's Life Under Fire in Chechnya, by Khassan Baiev with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff (Walker), a powerful book suited for a graying season with shorter, darker days. Most Western readers know of Chechnya through fleeting, horrific, and often confusing news headlines. Author Khassan Baiev takes us into the torn heart of his country, presenting the Chechen people, their culture, and their terrible history.

He fondly recounts the story of his boyhood in a Chechen village and his own remarkable progress, especially given fierce anti-Chechen discrimination in Russia, from prize-winning athlete to physician. Baiev's is a Horatio Alger story until the tragic conflicts between Russia and Chechnya transform him overnight from successful plastic surgeon to beleaguered, heroic doctor in a war zone.

The Oath is the stuff of nightmares. War is hell, and Baiev makes us face the unbearable human suffering that makes this truism gruesomely real. Finally, on the verge of physical collapse himself, Dr. Baiev spends over 48 hours nonstop, wading through pools of blood, performing innumerable amputations with a carpenter's saw, while the maimed and dying pile up in hospital corridors and in the snow awaiting his attention.

Almost as difficult to imagine as the horror, death, and gore are the scenes Baiev describes of a world riddled with incongruity, deception, and disorder. As the first Chechen-Russian war begins in 1994, while he's still in Grozny, he writes, "Every night, through the sound of explosions, we listened to the Russian military spokesman on TV tell the world that no bombing sorties had occurred over Grozny that day." When war is under way, Baiev comes upon a group of children "playing war" using sticks for guns and shouting, "You're dead" at one another while real guns blast away in the background. It seems impossible that a human being could maintain sanity in this landscape. Yet Baiev perseveres, erecting and re-erecting countless makeshift hospitals and continuing to patch people up the best he can while bombs are literally falling all around -- and on -- him.

Although he has been recognized by many human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Baiev has been driven into exile from his bloody, beloved homeland because he treated victims from both sides of the Chechen-Russian war. At a climactic point in his memoir, Baiev is tempted to let a wounded Russian kontrakntik die so he will not be able to rape and terrorize women and children. But then the doctor recalls the words of the Hippocratic Oath and thinks, "If I started deciding who would live and who would die, where would it end?"

In The Oath, Baiev explains how he became a man hunted by both Russian special forces and Chechan extremists, and how now he is a haunted man. Having sought a new life in the U.S. with his immediate family, he can never forget the country he was forced to leave or the ceaseless violence that rends it and his innocent countrymen.

BTW recently interviewed Khassan Baiev by e-mail. Nicholas Daniloff assisted Dr. Baiev with his answers.

BTW: Your original interest in medicine was stirred by a Hollywood movie about a famous actress disfigured by plastic surgery and your desire to help repair her face so she could accept an award. Why did this film have such an impact on you, a boy from a Chechen town that seems so remote from a movie star's plight?

KB: We always watched American films, when they were available, with the greatest interest. In the Soviet Union, people looked on America as a highly advanced country where things worked well. So, seeing a woman disfigured by incompetent surgery shocked me. The sight of her damaged, infected face sparked in me a desire to learn about medicine and surgery and to help unhealthy people in the future.

BTW: Why do you think people in the U.S. don't really know about the situation in Chechnya and the terrible human rights abuses happening there?

KB: People in the U.S. know little about Chechnya because the Western media, and the American media in particular, give next to no coverage. This is partly because the Russians don't let American correspondents roam freely across Chechnya. Also, President Bush has made a deal with President Putin not to criticize the abuses of the Russian military in Chechnya in return for intelligence help in the war against terrorism. As a Chechen far from home, I receive daily reports of atrocities both from relatives who have remained in Chechnya and through reports on the Internet. Despite what the Russians say, the Chechen-Russian war is not over.

BTW: During an escape from war-torn Grozny, you see "a woman, dressed only in a light blue nightdress, walking barefoot along the road. She was about 35 and surrounded by three boys, between the ages of around five and 10, whom I took to be her sons. In her arms she held an infant girl." Why does this particular image stick in your mind as "symbolizing the tragedy of [your] country?"

KB: The woman in the nightdress symbolized the tragedy of my country because she was extremely vulnerable and was being pushed around by events over which she had no control. In wartime situations, you learn to find shelter quickly. Often you don't have time to put on your shoes. That apparently happened to her. She didn't have time to get dressed. And she had so much to lose: the babe-in-arms, and her children walking beside her. How could she protect them and herself dressed only in a night dress in the middle of the day? Chechnya was like that too. Brave, but facing overwhelming force over which it could not easily gain a decisive victory.

BTW: One of the reasons you say you wrote The Oath is to "introduce your readers to the Chechen people." One of the remarkable things your book demonstrates is Chechen hospitality, which requires, among other things, that "even if your worst enemy seeks refuge in your house, you must offer him hospitality." How does this code of hospitality lead you into some extraordinary situations in The Oath, and what does it tell us about the Chechen people?

KB: Our Chechen traditions require that if your enemy comes to your house and you allow him in, you are then responsible for his safety. Probably the best example of that hospitality is that I took in Russians soldiers. They were the enemies of my people; they came to Chechnya armed to fight. But taking them in, I had to protect them. It is typical of Chechens that they are ready to take in strangers, house and feed them. It is one of our finest qualities.

BTW: You observe that both the U.S., your newly adopted country, and Chechnya, your native land, had to fight for independence and that by today's standards the English would have called George Washington a terrorist. What are you saying about the current use of the term "terrorism?"

KB: The word terrorism is being used today in a very loose way. For President Putin of Russia, the fight against terrorism is a license to kill; some would say to exterminate the Chechen people. We should never forget that there are many good people among the Chechens and they do not deserve all to be tarred by the brush of "terrorism." In the U.S., President Bush uses the word terrorism to justify many things including the holding of suspected Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo without formal charges or access to defense lawyers. The war against terrorism, it turns out, is a justification to do anything you want.

BTW: What are you doing now -- will you practice medicine again?

KB: I have just finished [The Oath], and I am heading a foundation to send aid to the injured children of Chechnya. It will be a long time before I can ever practice medicine again. In this country I will have to pass the qualifying exam for foreign physicians, and probably take courses to qualify again as a surgeon. --Interview by Molly Sackler

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