Bucha: A street filled with bodies
An AFP team were the first journalists to discover the horrors of Bucha, a quiet commuter town near Kyiv, occupied by the Russian army for over a month, where Russian troops are accused of massacring hundreds of civilians. This is Danny Kemp’s account of what they saw that day. Some may find it distressing.
BUCHA - We saw three of them at first, lying in the dirt like piles of rags. That alone would have been bad enough. “Bodies,” someone in the car said, because it was all that could be said. Our driver screeched to a halt and we jumped out of the vehicle. A long grey road on the edge of Bucha stretched out under an equally grey Ukrainian sky. The three bodies lay next to a stack of construction materials and wooden pallets. As we approached we could see that one had his hands tied behind his back.
Yet it seemed to take a while before any of us — myself, photographer Ronaldo Schemidt, video journalist Nicolas Garcia, along with our fixer, our driver and our security consultant — actually looked up and down the rest of the street.
When we did, we realised that these three bodies were only the beginning. Dotted here and there, for as far as we could see in either direction, were more, many more. Corpse after corpse after corpse along this single debris-strewn street. This lonely place had become a special kind of hell for the inhabitants of Bucha.
A wave of shock and disbelief washed over me: this horrible scene could not be real. But it was. I looked at my colleagues, and that was when the professional instinct kicked in, helped by the robotic tiredness at the end of a three-week stint in Ukraine.
We began to work, because we knew that this was a huge story, one that could possibly lead to allegations of war crimes. We knew that as journalists we had to tell the world about it, and quickly. Ronaldo and Nicolas were taking images, the evidence to prove that the reports on social media about bodies in Bucha were true. I set about counting them.
We knew, too, how fast disinformation campaigns about such incidents can spread (and later so it proved), and how important it was to get everything right.
What we did not know was that within 24 hours, the images and the text we would produce would spark international outrage against Russia, and calls for sanctions that moved the war in Ukraine into a new and more distressing phase.
We had been trying for days to get into the once sleepy commuter towns of Irpin and Bucha on the pine-forested northwestern outskirts of Kyiv. The main checkpoint out of Kyiv had been closed to journalists since the death of US filmmaker Brett Renaud on March 13.
The answer at the checkpoint remained a firm “Ni” (No), even after authorities declared the towns liberated — this was the flipside of the tightly controlled Ukrainian media operation that had beamed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches into parliaments across the world. From the checkpoint we could hear the booms of constant shelling and wondered what the situation was like for people inside the towns.
A change of route finally got us into Irpin on the foggy late afternoon of Friday April 1. We discovered a wasteland of destroyed and badly damaged buildings, crushed and bullet-ridden cars, and burned out Russian tanks, almost completely devoid of any human population.
The next day, Saturday April 2, was grey, cold and drizzly as we headed for Bucha. The evening before we had seen videos on social media purporting to show someone driving through a street full of bodies in the town, but no journalists had yet reached the scene to corroborate that the videos had been filmed there.
We were on edge as we drove through Bucha's devastated streets, fearing that Russian troops had not pulled out and that there could be more fighting. At first we found stories of survival, like the group of elderly people who had survived without food, running water or electricity for a month. Ukrainian soldiers had started to hand out aid.
Then the mood turned darker. A body lay on the ground, half covered by a blanket, near the shell-blasted railway station. A local resident, wild-eyed and drawing hard on a cigarette, showed us what he said was the shallow grave of four people killed by Russians, dug in a neighbour's back garden and topped with a green wooden cross.
By now we thought we had enough material to describe the situation in Bucha. But our driver had been talking with soldiers and local people who seemed to confirm what was on social media, that a short drive from here was a street filled with bodies. The man who had shown us the graves offered to be our guide. Often these leads go nowhere, but it was worth a try. We got back in the car.
It seems strange that a human can look so inhuman. The face of the first body, a man in a brown hooded jacket and jeans lying on his side, looked so white and waxy it seemed almost unreal. Instead it was his hands, tied behind his back with white cloth, that brought the reality of his death home: the lines of slightly wrinkled skin, the discoloured nails. He was in the largest group of bodies, a cluster of three. The trouser leg of one of the others had ridden slightly above a sock, showing purplish skin. That was all too real.
Reporters often have to suppress the instinct that tells us not to intrude on people, and that is true even of the dead. At first it felt somehow wrong to look too closely at these people who had no way of saying that they did not want to be looked at. Then you realise there is no other way to try to find out how they died, and maybe who they were. These people, it became clear, were all wearing civilian clothes.
They all appeared to be adult males, but of various ages. And they all appeared to have been dead for some time. They had sallow, sunken skin and stiff fingers.I had not seen many bodies before that day, but some of the few I had were recently killed, and they did not look like this.
A reporter's task is simple enough in circumstances like this: you try to put the enormity or the horror to one side, you count the bodies and observe and describe. I walked up and down the street at least twice trying to keep a tally but there were so many I kept losing count, and on one occasion found another body lying in a courtyard that I hadn't seen. In the end I had to take photos of each one with my phone to ensure that I had the right number. On the third pass I was sure: 20 bodies.
posted by Zo Heri @ 5:30 AM
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