Crash site - An Unbelievable Situation

After the horrific news of the downing of flight MH17 we were all a little too angry and frustrated to sleep. At 4 in the morning Bohdan received a call from a paper he strings for in Australia saying they would pay all his expenses to get to the crash site. So at 4 am we booked a taxi and all began the 150 km Journey to the village of Garabovo next to the crash site.

We'd had little sleep the night before so were hoping for a simple journey. This wasn't to be the case, the main roads were unbearably slow due to an excess of checkpoints so we had to use backroads a dangerous method as the site was in rebel held territory.

The first Ukrainian Checkpoint we came to wasn't a friendly one. They had been out in the field for too long the bespectacled guard was strange and distant, despite our credentials he refused to allow us through, "They kill journalists round here" He said to Bohdan, "Are you not scared?" Bohdan replied "No", we both just nodded. However as we do not speak Ukrainian and Bohdan does we do not feel like we really had a chance to answer with honesty.

After some rangling by the taxi driver we were allowed to pass on the proviso we sealed all windows and drove slowly through the large checkpoint corridor. This was to be one of the simplest checkpoints we faced that day, once we left SBU held territory things became more challenging. One of the first difficulties we ran into was the fact that the separatist had blown up one of the bridges we needed to cross so we had to take the "diversion" route which meant driving around in hilly muddy fields with no sign posts and only a couple of passing vehicles. After nearly getting stuck on several occasions and the drivers car taking a beating we finally made it back on to a road and soon we were rolling up to our first Separatist checkpoint.

We had heard that the rebels were irrational and could literally do what they pleased if they took a dislike to you, as we pulled up to the first checkpoint, manned by a rag tag group of men dressed in mismatched fatigues and 30 year old rifles, we felt a sense of foreboding. We agreed not to stare at any of them and keep our mouths shut until we got a gauge of how unpredictable they actually were.

Initially the guard was suspicious but after we revealed our journalist status he softened a bit: there had been many journalists passing through this area to get to the crash site so a few more was not suspicious. We passed through the small town it was guarding then moved on to a larger checkpoint for entry into Torez. The guards here detained us for a while but after we checked out they became very friendly and gave us precise directions to the crash site.

After another 2 hours on terrible roads that seemed to be intent on destroying our drivers car, we found the road leading into the crash site. The site was evident due to the large number of rescue vehicles parked in the clearing.

We were not prepared for what we saw. We knew it was going to be worse than we could imagined when Elliott spotted the corpse of a child lying in the grass by the side of the road. The site itself was an absolute mess, there had been no containment of the crash site, the rebels had simply let anyone who passed themselves off as a journalist wander in and start taking photos.

Bodies littered the fields, labelled with white flags but left to rot exposed to anyone near. The scale of the disaster was phenomenal it's very hard to imagine what 300 dead people means, it is easier to understand when you see 3 square mile field strewn with corpses and viscera.

There had been no attempt to cover the bodies, the velocity at which they hit the ground had made some unrecognizable as human, the force of either the explosion or the velocity at which they fell had torn their clothes off, it was only a minor detail but the fact that they were splayed out naked almost made the scene worse, an insult to the victims dignity. Attempts had been made to move the parts belonging to one person into piles and the corpse's faces had been turned to the ground to try and retain some level of anonymity, but even this seemed to have been done in such a haphazard manner that it was virtually ineffectual.

MHC (literally, the ministry of unusual events) officers milled round trying to clean up the area but something of this scale can not be resolved by 50 men with sticks marking dead bodies and sweeping up wreckage. We spotted the crushed remains of a woman, only her hand remained recognizable and on it was a wedding ring. This really made you realize that these people were someones, wife, daughter, son brother.

It is so easy to distance yourself from whats around you in situations like these but it is important to remember the people that have died, it could have been any of us in this situation. The news seems to be focusing on the political implications of the tragedy but the personal impact should not be sidelined, the families of the victims need to receive support and ultimately an ending to this nightmare. The bodies need to be sent to their respective countries as soon as possible so that everyone involved can grieve and begin to move on.

It was the small things like seeing a lonely planet somebody was using to plan their trip of a lifetime and a smashed apple computer which is what we are using to write this very blog right now that really punched a hole in the heart and made the political significance completely irrelevant.

We moved on from the human carnage to where the main fuselage and engines had slammed into the ground. The stench of jet fuel hung in the air so strongly it made your lungs burn. The fuselage was almost completely obliterated, strips of it lay in piles around the site. The only vaguely intact pieces of the plane were the hulking mass of it's engines and the skeletal remains of the undercarriage.

Jutting from the top of the undercarriage struts was a hand, poised like that of someone relaxing in an armchair, when you skirted to the other side you discovered the hand was not attached to anything, it's scorched stump flailing in the breeze.

Scenes like this were dotted all around the sites, a torso, a foot, a leg. It was so common you almost became desensitized to the horror of what you were seeing. 

The faces of the people who died there is something we will never forget. The reality of it struck you when you saw more personal items like handbag's and mobile phones. 

We made our way back to site 1 and came across Pavel Gubarev, leader of the so called 'Donetsk peoples republic' Flanked by his aggressive team of bodyguards he struck a ridiculous figure as he strutted around the site spouting the party line that, "Ukraine is fully responsible for this disaster" There was no remorse in his face, no sense of sadness for what had happened. How a man can be so cold after causing what is one of the worst air disasters of recent times is unbelievable.

Surely there will be repercussions for the people involved in this tragedy, but until then the focus seems to be on who to blame rather than stopping this conflict and making Ukraine united again.

After the interview we decided that it was time to leave, our Australian photographer friend Bohdan completed a quick phone interview and we all jumped in the car keen to make it back to Mariupol.

A chilling recording between a rebel major and subordinate discussing the downing of flight MH17 already rationalizing what they had done with no remorse and no thought for the lives they have destroyed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbyZYgSXdyw#t=60

We were all very much in shock about what we had just witnessed and it was only the continuous  sound of mortar fire (that had been persistent all day) that snapped us back into the fact that we were deep in rebel territory and there was still very much a war going on.

After managing to get to the crash site and past the rebels with relative ease we were all relatively confident that it should not be too much trouble to get back out. We were wrong.

As the driver was not keen to have to drive back through the muddy hills he decided to try and take an alternate more direct route. We then ran into a much larger separatists checkpoint with big concrete pillboxes in the road made out thick slabs placed on top of each other.The hills on either side contained men talking and sitting around fires. After taking our passports and telling them we were journalists the mood started to get a little more sinister as a few of them grouped around the car. There was one guy who seemed relatively nice and seemed to be the mediator however there seemed to be a lack of order and management as they all shouted at each other deciding what to do with us.

Many were tattooed and most had battle wounds of some sort, reminiscent of textbook bad guys portrayed in action films. A guy with a fresh bandage around the top of his head took a particular disliking to us, after one guy waved us to continue the other shouted at him whilst on the phone and ordered him to not let us go.

We were told to park up deeper into the checkpoint. Only a few minutes later we were ordered to turn around as they were apparently concerned for our safety and they did not want to be held responsible as the road was currently unsafe. This came as a relief as even though our journey time would be extended they did not want to play the bad guys on this day.

An photo taken from the internet of some of the Separatists as trying to get any shots ourselves at this point was out of the question:

However after turning around and trying to find another route out we saw a yellow car belonging to the bandaged soldier, speed straight past us to the checkpoint ahead. We were again ordered to stop and eventually a big important looking man came over to the car and asked for our documents.

After Bohdan showed him his press pass, he said this was not enough and that we needed an official paper to have filmed at the site. The driver got a questioning as they seemed suspicious of how we had got in, through their checkpoints in the first place.

He started to talk about how he wanted to see the footage we had taken and although he never actually ended up following through we were all quick to switch our memory cards from the cameras as he was distracted on the phone. Eventually he came back to have a word with the driver and let us go. This just made everything more confusing and only seemed to back up the lack of organisation within the rebel group.

Relived we all made sure we had our cards safely hidden and managed to negotiate two more rebel checkpoints with relative ease.

We were relieved to reach a Ukrainian checkpoint and passed through a couple with ease however as dark fell we pulled up to a checkpoint and were told to get out of the car immediately. The checkpoints run by the Ukrainians definitely seemed to have much more order and it was always very clear about who answered to who.

One of the higher ranking men at this checkpoint who was clearly drunk took a disliking to Elliott and John in particular and wanted to see exactly what we had been filming that day. The men were suspicious as we had been in Rebel territory that day and booze and paranoia is not a good mix. The other younger men at the checkpoint were quite nice and although they were thorough at checking the car and everything in it, they were all keen to practice whatever English they knew.

John and the driver were asked to remove their shirts so the men could check for for gunpowder on their backs and hands from carrying and firing arms. Elliott preempted a similar search and stuck out his hands only to be laughed at by the soldiers as he was obviously far too tall and strong to be a terrorist.

We told the officer that we had no footage on us as we had uploaded it to the internet straight after shooting it and then deleted everything on our cards. They eventually let us go but sent us back the direction we came resulting in hours of driving on terrible pot hole filled roads late into the night. We made it back to Mariupol after some intense pothole collisions. To our driver we were thankful and grateful he (and ourselves) could never have expected to go through so much in one day.

Also the site of the crash today has thankfully been cut off for a 3 mile radius check out the BBC News website for more information…..