Valya has a very Russian face with a blond mop of hair crowning his tall frame. But he smiles a lot. The first time I noticed him sitting in the back of the Chechnya aid co-ordination meeting in Achkoy Martan, I simply assumed the uniformed man was one of the officers from the local military that had been summoned by the chair of the meeting.

As is usual in the course of such meetings, various heads of administration stood up in turn. Each made a plea for why the little assistance that was going around should reach their localities first. But then the soldier, Valya, also stood up. He made a call for help on behalf of the residents of the remote Vedeno mountain district where he was based. And he did so with an eloquence and conviction that embarrassed us all with our inability to be able to respond.

At the next meeting I found myself sitting next to Valya, and we spent half the session whispering as I tried to find out more about him. The professional army man from distant Siberia had found himself posted deep into "savage" Chechnya three months ago and had himself been attached as deputy commander to the military command in that small district centre. In the absence of an effective civilian administration, the military soon became the de facto authorities that were first point of call to assist with solving all sorts of basically civilian problems --- from obtaining essential paperwork to making available vital means to carry out urgent repairs on public utilities.

Some days later the time was finally ready to carry out a first exploratory mission to this southern region. Sure enough when we arrived in the centre of the town, Valya was there among a crowd of locals eager to get indispensable military travel passes. He apologised and broke free from the anxious men, to welcome us with a broad smile. He immediately pressed his point "You must go to the hospital, because they need help." But first he brought us inside the fortified military administration so that we could formalise our presence in this district. Soldiers were busy filling sandbags and the passages were blocked with stacks of ammunition.

Captain Igor, his commander, also warmly welcomed us, if somewhat extravagantly. Halfway through our distracted conversation, a sergeant interrupted us, in hand the papers collected outside by Valya. "We can't issue security passes if these men haven't got complete supporting documents," he pedantically explained.

"But they have lost everything else with their homes," Valya interrupted.

"These are the rules!" the sergeant replied impatiently.

This was an opportunity that Igor wouldn't miss. "Just fill in the forms with the details you have. I will take responsibility for what is missing. These people need to have documents." The performance continued, as we followed him outside where a crew from Russian prime-time TV news programme was waiting. A Vedeno town official pacing the courtyard was indulged with an expansive "Salaam Aleikum" and a Chechen-style embrace. Valya stood by bemused. But as soon we passed the main gate, Valya himself again disappeared into the crowd of eager men.

At the hospital we soon discovered why Valya had pressed us not to forget the reason that we had come to Vedeno. No patients could be hospitalised in the old hospital wing that had been improvised to house all that was left of the medical centre for this district. A handful of nurses and a paediatric doctor were providing care to a group of elderly locals. While Roman, our doctor, sat down with the senior staff and went through the elaborate question list we needed answered, and with the logistician Ruslan in the adjacent pharmacy having our first donations recorded in detail, I set off to explore the hospital compound.

When I located the original polyclinic, the ambulatory clinic that in this part of the world brings together all the town's doctors and various specialists for outpatient care, I was stunned.

Where a sizeable building once had housed the district's care givers, a ten-metre deep crater and piles of rubble occupied the space. But the annihilation that had been wreaked by a single bomb designed to take out fortified defence positions didn't prepare me not for the next sight.

This weapon had been conceived to obliterate troop concentrations with nightmarish efficiency, by laying a carpet of grenades that would explode a metre or two above the ground and disperse a shotgun like hail of metal in all directions. An area 50 metres wide and half a kilometre long had been peppered with these bombs, and the buildings within this strip had been shredded. Not simply defacing the outsides of the maternity ward, the paediatric wing and the laboratory building, the structures had actually been ripped apart. The roofs had been torn off and inside what had not been destroyed immediately, fire had taken care of.

I found a couple of hospital workers raking together rubble within a less damaged building on the edge. The older, Satsita was her name, tried to answer my questions. "No, il-hamdu-Allah, there were no patients at the hospital when the bombs struck. It was at dawn and by that stage of the siege we were only receiving patients during the day. If they had attacked then, like they did at the mosque just after Friday prayers, many people would have died. Some did nevertheless, as the grenades also fell on nearby houses with people inside. But there were no fighters in town anymore by that time, as they had all fled."

When, in the wake of war, outsiders like us come upon such traces of violence, it is often difficult to verify what actually happened. I found two others who more or less told me the same story. When later I could check up on the Geneva convention, it seemed to make it clear that civilian "collateral damage" - and hospitals are explicitly highlighted as such - must at all cost be avoided by combatants, unless it can be demonstrated that such facilities were being used for belligerent purposes.

Were there Chechen fighters entrenched in the hospital at the time? A hospital that it would have been easy to identify as such from the air, even without the help of maps?

On the way out of Vedeno, we encountered Ruslan's brother. He was the mayor of this remote town. He smiled broadly when he recognised us. "At last the world can see what has happened to our township." And with that he echoed a feeling I had repeatedly encountered throughout Chechnya. To people here, the world appeared to have dismissed the fate of these mountain people as irrelevant. As we bid farewell, I slipped in a question about the man who had so encouraged us to come here - Valya. "You know, we don't hate all Russians, we know who we have to fear. And Valya is not one of them. When last month he was away to take care of a family burial back in Siberia, he was really missed. He is a valiant man, that one."