Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (18 page)

This stealth technique is Kadyrov’s modus operandi. These abductors are not Kadyrovites at all, but most probably agents from the federal Central Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. This leads to the very unpleasant conclusion that GRU agents are either acting under direct orders of the Kadyrovites, abducting citizens on their instructions, or that, if they find they have abducted the wrong person, are handing him over to the tender mercies of Kadyrov’s “security service.”

I have talked to officials in the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office about the Kadyrov gang often enough to know that they are fully aware of what is going on and have tried to oppose this lawless mayhem. But they have also admitted that Kadyrov’s “security service” acts as it does because Kadyrov is now effectively beyond the reach of the law, thanks to his intimate relationship with the Russian authorities.

This state of affairs is not going to last for ever. Interests will diverge, and when they do Kadyrov and the Kadyrovites will be in an unenviable position. It is difficult to imagine anywhere on the planet where they will be able to find refuge.

ABUSE OF ADMINISTRATIVE AND MILITARY RESOURCES, UNBRIDLED AMBITION WITH GANGSTER TENDENCIES, ONLY THIS TIME THE ELECTIONS ARE NOT IN RUSSIA, BUT IN CHECHNYA

September 23, 2002

We continue sketching in our portrait of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, the “Chief” of the Chechen Republic appointed by President Putin more than two years ago.

Why is Kadyrov allowed to act without constraint? Why is it all ignored by the intelligence agencies? As usual, when things are complicated there are simple explanations. The answers in this case are crude and cynical. The victims who are traced to Tsentoroy are tortured and disappear purely because of Kadyrov’s electoral weakness.

The former Mufti is possessed by a desire to be “democratically elected.” Whatever the cost, he wants to feel the equal of Maskhadov, enjoying the same measure of legitimacy. Kadyrov may today be Chief of the Chechen Republic, but only because he was appointed, which is not the real thing. In actual fact his power is derisory, but he wants genuine power, and he craves it so insanely that common sense is banished.

Accordingly, the illegal armed group commonly known as Kadyrov’s “security service” is hunting down his enemies, by which he means those who would be obvious rivals if the militarised political process in Chechnya ever finally came to the point of an election.

His primary enemies are the so-called Ichkerians, those who served in and supported the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and President Maskhadov, the Islamist Wahhabis, members of their jamaat groups, terrorists who sympathise with any of the above, and anybody associated with the separatist ideals of Djohar Dudayev, who supported the idea of Chechnya seceding from Russia.

These are the targets against whom the Kadyrovites direct their main efforts and, naturally, they enjoy the support of the Joint Military Command and FSB who are responsible for conducting the “anti-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus.” Since all debate about what methods of combating terrorism are acceptable and all criticism of excessive violence has long ago ceased, Kadyrov’s manifest enthusiasm for death squads raises no eyebrows.

The absence of constraint fosters depravity and enables Kadyrov to settle scores with anyone who has offended him in times past. This goes beyond political or ideological enmity. The bodyguards’ second target seems at first to be entirely random individuals, but in fact many of these are people who in their youth in some way offended Kadyrov, or were less than supportive of his religious career.

The third, special category of people likely to be murdered by Kadyrov’s “security service” are the unofficial leaders of Chechen villages, people who – by dint of the military situation, of villagers’ despair at what is happening, and because there is no protection – have become very active in their districts and villages and demonstrated leadership qualities. The Chief of the Republic has discerned a threat to his electoral prospects in their growing grassroots popularity. Not in the sense that they might themselves be elected: Turko Dikayev, for example, had no such ambitions. They have simply shown that they are capable of mobilising their villages, and would be unlikely to mobilise them for Kadyrov.

Turko Dikayev was one of Kadyrov’s personal friends. They went back a long way, but this did not save him. In recent months Turko had found himself in this category of popular unofficial leaders. It was not something he sought, and resulted only from the suffocating bureaucracy which left him performing essential tasks everybody else was too scared to do.

The result was that this August, in mysterious circumstances which point to the complicity of Kadyrov’s “security service,” Turko Dikayev was murdered. By this time, as a responsible and popular individual, he had become the Administrative Head of Tsotsan-Yurt in Kurchaloy District. Tsotsan-Yurt’s recent history has been appalling. The New Year of 2002 saw it subjected to one of the most brutal security sweeps Chechnya has known. On January 1, soldiers entered the villagers’ houses and wished them, “Miserable New Year!” The then head of the village simply fled. The soldiers were willing to negotiate the return of bodies only with the village head and it was at that point that Turko, as one of the Council of Elders of Tsotsan-Yurt, assumed responsibility.

We met in early March. In Tsotsan-Yurt’s central square there was a permanent wake for the victims of the security sweeps. Turko had been unable to sleep for days and was in a terrible state because of high blood pressure. In the spring the Army’s incessant raids on the tormented village were replaced by a new horror: almost every day mutilated corpses were being systematically dumped on the outskirts. The villagers were living in a state of constant shock and panic. They
appealed to Turko, but he found it impossible to persuade any officials from Grozny to come to the village. He did everything he could to ease the situation of his fellow villagers, attempting to negotiate with the federals, going to Grozny himself, and trying to obtain an audience with his old friend Kadyrov.

Kadyrov refused to see him, not even allowing him into the waiting room. All the while the head of Kadyrov’s “security service” was strutting up and down the corridors of the government building telling everybody this brutality was the only way to treat Tsotsan-Yurt because it was a bastion and symbol of lawlessness.

Let us be quite clear: Kadyrov left the village to survive as best it could with no support from him. He abdicated his responsibilities in Tsotsan-Yurt, and all that Turko did was refuse to betray his fellow villagers. He accepted that authority and did all he could for them at the moment of their greatest distress. He earned immense respect for that and, incidentally, made no secret that he had lost faith in the moral qualities of Kadyrov. And so he was killed.

Turko had a presentiment that something of the kind would happen, and told me that he saw Kadyrov as the gravest danger to himself. Like a runaway locomotive, Kadyrov was steaming towards elections of his own devising, and hurling aside anybody who might get in the way or speak out against him.

This answers our main question as to why the Kadyrov regime is as it is. His gang are smoothing the way for their chief to be elected President. His bodyguards abduct and torture people, his obnoxious son, in tandem with the head of the “security service,” judges them, and then they simply disappear. All because Kadyrov has this electoral itch, this lust for legitimation. He has been in power for two years now, but sitting on a stool, not a throne. He can talk about nothing other than his imminent ultimate victory over Maskhadov. Whatever you ask him, he always returns to that.

Kadyrov understands that only an election will set the seal on his victory over his former comrade, his one-time spiritual pupil, and his present-day Enemy No. 1. Kadyrov has even concocted a new
constitution for Chechnya to further his ends, because elections need to be constitutional. The only one Chechnya has dates from the period of Presidents Dudayev and Maskhadov, and under that Constitution Chechnya already has a President.

Kadyrov has agreed with the Kremlin that November would be the best time for a referendum on the new Constitution. They need to hurry, while Chechnya is still full of Russian troops who can vote the right way once his path to the throne has been cleared.

He has overlooked just one detail. In this squalid tale of murderous passion, the Kremlin – with its stubborn support of Kadyrov, support which frees him of all moral constraint – insists on ignoring the fact that Kadyrov Senior can only win an election in which the security forces, numbering many thousands, distort the “democratic” vote.

The two years during which he has ruled by fiat have been spent not in earning the respect of his electorate but in losing any he ever possessed. If Putin went into his election as an unknown quantity, which allowed for all sorts of manipulation, Kadyrov has no such option. He is poisonous, and the whole of Chechnya knows it. How can you entrust government of the country to the likes of Kadyrov, who has no prospect of ever enjoying any sort of approval rating from the electorate? The result is that he has to resort to extreme measures. Is Putin not guilty of a crime against people who are infinitely weary of waiting to be freed from the imposition of war, disasters, funerals, dead bodies and torture?

If, Mr President, you do not know the names of decent people in Chechnya, ask those who do. It is so elementary, and lives will be saved.

PS An argument broke out in the
Novaya gazeta
office over whether we should write Security Service or “Security Service”? Anti-terrorist operation or “anti-terrorist operation”? Opinion was divided. From a grammatical point of view clearly there should be no inverted commas, but the present-day reality in Chechnya is so phoney as to make it impossible to observe grammatical rules. In Chechnya everything is in inverted commas, because an illegal war is taking place in a zone whose existence is itself illegal. An illegitimate government spawns lawless
soldiers. The knot has already been pulled so tight that it is difficult to imagine how it can be undone, even if at some magic moment enlightenment should come to those with power in their hands, and perhaps even a flicker of responsibility in their minds.

A BLOOD FEUD HAS BEEN DECLARED AGAINST THE FAMILY OF THE “ACTING PRESIDENT OF CHECHNYA”

June 16, 2003

In the remote Chechen village of Bachi-Yurt “unidentified masked individuals wearing camouflage fatigues,” speaking only in Chechen, executed four members of one family, the Ablayev-Dautkhadzhievs. Three men, aged between 45 and 55, were shot along with a 27-year-old woman, who leaves a two-month-old baby and two sons aged four and five. The executioners came for them in the night and said they were exacting blood retribution for the events of May 14, when female suicide bombers made an attempt on the life of “Acting President of the Chechen Republic” Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov near the village of Ilaskhan-Yurt. In the attack five of his bodyguards died; these the murderers described as their comrades, and said they had accordingly come to “take blood” for them.

Up till now, no monuments have been placed on the graves of those executed and the men of the family of the four who died do not visit the cemetery. This means they have declared a blood feud for the killing, this time on Ramzan Kadyrov, younger son of the “Acting President,” who, with his father’s full support and occupying the post of Commander of a mythical “Interior Ministry Special Unit” at his court, engages with his brigade in robbery, murder, and general score-settling with those he regards as his enemies.

“Well, Shakhidat and Aimani could not have been guilty,” Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva says, shaking her head and no longer wiping her swollen eyes. She is a grandmother and in May six of her family were killed. “Why did my daughter die? They dragged her here, to the cellar where we have a kitchen. I was shouting, ‘Take me, she has a baby!’
They replied, ‘You are not a blood relative. We don’t need you.’ Her children were crying. People in masks woke everyone from their beds and asked, ‘Who are you?’ Or ‘Whose are you?’ They took those they wanted down to the cellar and just shot them. My Liza first of all. What for? Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty of causing the explosion. Everybody knows that.”

The women around us are crying like kittens, moaning quietly. Liza’s old father breaks down. It is unbearable, because everybody can see what the continuation will be.

First, however, a chronology of this latest misfortune to befall Bachi-Yurt, and why these events happened.

On May 14 a terrorist attack took place in Ilaskhan-Yurt, a village in Gudermes District, during an election rally for the ruling United Russia party which coincided with the day of the Prophet’s birth. There were many casualties. Chechen television had assiduously invited people to come to the field near Ilaskhan-Yurt, promising a meeting with Kadyrov and gifts in his honor from United Russia. It was only after the bombing that Kadyrov claimed on television that the Ilaskhan-Yurt meeting was a religious celebration; the propaganda put out through the Chechen media before May 14 made it clear that this was pre-electoral campaigning on behalf of United Russia candidates, supported by the administrative resources of the state. The heads of rural administrations were instructed to organise buses to systematically bring their people to Ilaskhan-Yurt in order to swell the numbers.

People arrived in vehicles and on foot. For several days beforehand local television reported that Kadyrov would be speaking and, as a sign of clemency, would talk to mothers whose children had been disappeared during security sweeps. Thousands responded to that inducement. A crucial factor in the turnout of many thousands was this hint that Kadyrov would make an announcement about the fate of some of the disappeared. There have been thousands of them in Chechnya, and most of their relatives comb the Republic daily in the hope of finding traces of their dear ones.

Among the crowd were Shakhidat Baimuradova, her sister Aimani Visayeva, the mother of 11 children and long since an old-age pensioner,
and Zulai Abdurzakova. They were there for good reason. A typical part of the modern Chechen scenery, these are mothers fruitlessly seeking their sons, hoping by chance somewhere to come across an honest law enforcement officer. They always carry bundles of documents with them.