Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (11 page)

Could not peace have been given a chance?

THE “MARCH 8” CASE: THOSE WITH MASKHADOV WHEN HE WAS LIQUIDATED ARE SENTENCED

December 5, 2005

The Supreme Court of the Chechen Republic has sentenced Vakhid Murdashev to 15 years’ imprisonment, Viskhan Khadzhimuratov to seven, Musa Yusupov to six, and Ilias Iriskhanov to five and a half. By recent Chechen standards these sentences are considered light. The
young lads the security services seize, torture and force to confess to “terrorism” usually get 17–24 years.

Why this should be one can only guess. In throwing the book at boys nobody knows anything about, judges are taking no risks and ingratiate themselves with the authorities. In the case of Maskhadov’s associates the risk is obvious: there are plenty of pro-federal officials in Chechnya who continue to pay Basayev a “resistance levy” to buy their way out of trouble and avoid execution as collaborators.

That, however, is not the main reason. It did not become clear in the course of the trial who actually killed Maskhadov. The state prosecution, without producing a single witness, made public the conclusion of a ballistic test which claimed that Maskhadov was killed by a bullet fired from a Makarov pistol belonging to Khadzhimuratov, Maskhadov’s bodyguard and nephew.

Why should the court suppose he was killed by a bullet? The results of the post-mortem were not published, so the cause of death remains unknown and you can bandy about whatever ballistic “evidence” you choose. Khadzhimuratov did not admit responsibility for the killing and the court ended up falling between two stools, apparently accepting the claim that Khadzhimuratov had fired the shot, but not finding him guilty of murder.

The obvious conclusion is that the purpose of this trial was to create a myth about how Maskhadov died. The verdict makes clear what legend was required for public consumption: the federals had virtually nothing to do with the assassination, it was the Chechens themselves who killed their leader. Moreover, it was all within a single family: Maskhadov was killed by his nephew, so if there is to be any settling of scores it will be contained within the family.

Is this what we expected from the Maskhadov trial? Of course not. We expected to learn the truth about his death, but that has been kept secret, so we can look forward to endless rumors, inventions, gossip and myths for years to come, as was the case when Maskhadov’s predecessor, Djohar Dudayev, was assassinated.

THE MAN WHO RE-EDUCATED FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS

September 21, 2006

On September 13, in a now notorious border checkpoint battle between the Chechen and Ingush militias, the Deputy Commander of Chechnya’s OMON Militia special troops, Buvadi Dakhiev, was wounded in the head and died shortly afterwards. The causes of the battle are clear enough and have been much debated and publicised. I want instead to describe some aspects of Buvadi’s character which could not be written about while he was alive. It is more than a tribute to the memory of a man who on a number of occasions helped me in my work during the war, at times probably saving my life.

Buvadi was a special person, riven by contradictions and with a split personality. He used to remind me of the monument on Khrushchev’s grave in the Novodevichy Monastery cemetery in Moscow, half of which is pitch black, while the other is white as snow.

On the one hand he was an archetypal member of the security services, like so many others in Chechnya, an officer of the pro-Moscow Chechen militia; but he dated from well before the present times, when criminals and former resistance fighters have started running at Kadyrov’s beck and call. He was typical of those who opposed President Djohar Dudayev, and from 1995 dedicated himself to serving in the Chechen OMON special operations units, which marked him out as a wholeheartedly pro-Russian officer when Chechnya was only a part of Russia. For this he received medals and the Order of Courage, and was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. Buvadi refused to live in Chechnya while Maskhadov and Basayev were in power, and when the Second War began, he was in the foremost ranks of those opposing them.

At times the things he was involved in were extremely cruel. Let us not beat about the bush: those working in the Chechen OMON are not children in ragged trousers sharing sweets. The people who work there do so in order to shoot, and they shoot to kill before someone kills them. The units arrested people who were sometimes never seen again. They beat them, and worse.

My last meeting with Buvadi was in August in Grozny. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and bit grimly and guiltily into a watermelon. He was on edge and devoured the red fruit as if he was starving, doing his utmost to move the conversation away from a Chechen student who had been “swept” by his units and was thought to have been in their custody before simply disappearing. Now Alikhan Kuloyev’s mother, Aminat, an old-age pensioner, had joined the ranks of other mothers frantically searching Chechnya, and was begging anyone she met to at least put in a word with Buvadi. Perhaps he would tell her where her only son was.

I did put in a word, but Buvadi was saying nothing. He had nothing to say. There had been that student and now there wasn’t. Buvadi said, “He wasn’t guilty of anything.”

“Well, why hasn’t he been released?”

Buvadi said nothing, tearing at the melon’s skin.

On the other hand, Buvadi could just as often be kind as cruel, where many others were never kind. Everyone working in the Chechen security agencies can be divided into those who think before they kill, and those who long ago ceased to think. Buvadi did at least try to establish who he had in his sights, and that saved the lives of many, including some who would ordinarily have seemed doomed under the rules of the Chechen meat-grinder.

A few people in Chechnya knew that Buvadi tried to rescue the widows of commanders, women who were supposed to be slaughtered out of hand as “black widows,” likely future suicide bombers. How did he rescue them? After the widows were abducted, Buvadi would take them to his own home, which was completely against the rules.

And then what? They were in a kind of custody, a kind of quarantine. Buvadi would return home from work and talk to them for nights at a time. His house resembled a barracks, and Buvadi would hold women there for many weeks who, without any exaggeration, were potential suicide bombers. They were entirely ready for the job because, before they ended up with Buvadi, they had been trained by their husbands and their comrades in the handling of explosives and driving a bus, so that when the order was given they would crash it into whatever they were instructed to.

“Why did you take them in?”

“They all had children.”

“And did their children live with you?”

“Yes, they were here with their children. I wanted to see whether they were lost souls, whether they were still capable of bringing up their children, or were out of it already.”

In fact, none of the black widows left his house as a lost soul. The result of this odd re-educative work by Special Operations Agent Buvadi among the most spurned section of Chechen society was that mothers, often under-age mothers, were saved to bring up their own children. Buvadi’s processing really helped them to understand that their first duty was to be a mother.

“They would start by saying, ‘Just let me die for my husband.’ They wouldn’t accept a crust of bread from me,” Buvadi told me, “because it was infidel bread. They wouldn’t touch their children, as if they didn’t exist. They would just sit in their hijab as if they were dead, and that was it.”

“And then what happened?”

“Later they would talk, and after two or three days they would start to eat. A few even took off the hijab and just wore a headscarf in the Chechen manner. There was one who robbed us – she was a real Wahhabi! – but she was the only one. Later, when they had come back to life, I would fix them up with somewhere to live, either abroad or here in Russia. I looked for relatives they could live with, as far away as possible from big cities. I made phone calls, got agreements.”

I asked him about his motives: why did he do all this?

“What do they know, these girls?” Buvadi explained. “At their age we were in the Pioneers, going to Pioneer camps, going to the cinema, eating ice-cream. They have had none of that and that’s how they have ended up in this state. I feel guilty about them.”

“What is your conclusion about suicide bombers? Are they a lost cause?”

“No, for most becoming a Wahhabi is not the end of the story. It’s just that their empty minds have been messed with.”

I won’t name the names of young widows Buvadi saved. The point
is that they know themselves who they owe their second life to. Having been sent far away from the Caucasus by Buvadi, they carried on phoning him, asking his advice on how to deal with particular situations, for example, right up until September 13 this year.

I think back to 2002, or perhaps the very end of 2001. It is the depths of winter and there is shooting and explosions, but at least Kadyrov Junior is still standing quietly in the corner while the grown-ups are talking. Grozny is teeming with underground jamaats, most of them consisting of people who are just kids aged between 14 and 16.

“I feel so sorry for them,” Buvadi told me. On more than one occasion he was in charge of operations to eradicate them. “We surround them. They know they’re about to die, and I can hear what they’re talking about over my radio.”

“Why are you sorry for them?”

“It’s the same as with the black widows. They’ve never had a life, never seen anything. I feel personally guilty that their childhood has been taken from them. How many times they have asked me, shouting from houses we had surrounded, ‘Uncle, let us die!’ I let them blow themselves up, because I know what would happen to them if we took them alive. There have been occasions when I passed on their final words to their parents.”

For some reason, this past August we spent far more time than usual recalling stories about the boys from the jamaats he had killed. Buvadi was glad that at that time the idiotic law had not yet been passed which forbade the return of their bodies.

“I gave their bodies to the parents myself. How could I do that now?”

In 2002 or 2003 we were discussing who he thought the Wahhabis were, and what should be done with them. At that time pro-Russian Chechens had only dreadful things to say about the Wahhabis, and killed them without a moment’s hesitation. Buvadi, however, took the liberty of saying out loud:

“There were some villains among them, but some were completely pure people. We killed them all indiscriminately.”

I remember exactly where it was he told me that: the second floor of the “white box,” the headquarters of the Grozny OMON Unit, in the office of the Commander, Mussa Khazimakhomadov, who was later killed. There were drunken officers from the Russian intelligence agencies, staggering around incoherently with the vacant eyes of killers. They were from the death squads of the Special Purposes Center of the FSB, and the GRU – Buvadi’s colleagues in the war. He set out some snacks, some bottles, and was telling this to them too.

“Pure people? How can they be pure if, as people say …” I repeated something monstrous about the doings of those they called Wahhabis.

Buvadi stopped me.

“My brother was a Wahhabi. He was completely pure. I never met anyone so pure before or after him. He was pure in every respect, in his thoughts and his deeds. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear, did nothing evil.”

“Did he try to recruit you?”

“Never. He never tried to impose anything on me.”

“Where is he now?”

“He was killed.”

After a long pause, smiling, with immense pride, even joy, as if he was telling me his brother had been awarded the Nobel Prize, he said,

“He died in battle. As was right.”

Those who were eating and drinking at that moment, stopped. Showing that kind of pride in a Wahhabi in the center of the anti-Wahhabi movement he might quickly have followed his brother.

Then it was the turn of Kadyrov Junior. How he hated Buvadi! He kept trying to nail him as a resistance fighter. “You are helping them!” For the whole summer he was trying to get Buvadi kicked out of the OMON, to drive him out of Chechnya. That was when the disgusting process of “Chechenising” the war was instigated, and being vile started to be considered as honorable as being courageous. People would remind Buvadi, this soldier to the marrow of his bones, about his brother, and accuse him of being soft on the fighters because of his efforts to redeem black widows.

But Buvadi never did cease to be proud of his Wahhabi brother’s
purity, or of his private campaign to rescue mothers for their children. He never even attempted to hush it up. A lot of people in Chechnya are today in Buvadi’s situation, with brothers on opposing sides. The civil war so undermined family morality that it became acceptable to publicly denounce your brothers if they failed to surrender to the right flag.

There are two versions of how Buvadi died. The “black” version asserts that he came to a place where Chechen and Ingush militiamen were having a violent disagreement, punched an Ingush militiaman, and was promptly shot. I don’t believe that. He might have shot someone, but I don’t see him punching anyone in the face. That was not his style, and he would in any case have known only too well what would come next in an argument between the two Vainakh peoples.

The second version is that Buvadi was not there when the altercation started, but was nearby and moved in to calm things down. He got out of his car, tried to persuade them to cool it, and somebody fired a round at him from an assault rifle.

I think that is far more probable, and would like to believe that Buvadi was his own man to the last, trying to prevent bloodshed. I know he was an expert in firing at living targets, but I believe Buvadi nevertheless spent his last moment in his white half. “Everybody is completely fed up with the war,” he told me a month before he died. “We should all just make peace.”

There is a desperate shortage of men like him in official Chechnya today: not angels, but human beings who agonise and suffer. In Chechnya there are ever more people who are as rudimentary as amoebas, for whom killing is no different to sipping a glass of tea. Amoebas are incapable of understanding another person who has been declared an enemy simply because he lives his life in a different way.