Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (19 page)

On May 13, the day before the gathering, Shakhidat and Aimani went to the home of Kadyrov’s father in the village of Tsentoroy to ask him to help them get a meeting with the “Acting President” at which they could hand over their letters and documents. The father told them to go to Ilaskhan-Yurt, saying that it would be more convenient to meet him there. They took his advice. On May 14, what happened happened, and by that evening the Prosecutor’s Office had issued the names of these three elderly women as the suicide bombers. On May 16, after inspection by forensic medical specialists in the Dagestan mortuary of Khasavyurt, the bodies of Shakhidat and Aimani were returned to their relatives, and on May 17 they were buried in Bachi-Yurt, their ancestral home.

The bandits who burst in in the night shouted, “Why did you bury them here?”

“Well,” I ask, “why did you, when in fact they lived in other villages?”

“So that they would be next to their mother’s grave. They no longer had anybody where they lived,” the relatives answer. They are convinced that Shakhidat and Aimani were not the bombers.

“How can you be so sure?”

“They both had too many things to take care of, and they just weren’t like that.”

Towards evening on the day of the funerals two men, Roman Edilov and Arbi Salmaniev, came to the family’s house. Although Dautkhadzhiev is the surname of Shakhidat and Aimani’s brother, their maiden name is Ablayev because their father had more than one wife and some children took their mother’s name. The Ablayevs and Dautkhadzhievs have adjacent houses in Bachi-Yurt. The wake was taking place after the funerals of Shakhidat and Aimani.

Edilov and Salmaniev are well known in Bachi-Yurt. Edilov is the recently appointed Head of the Kurchaloy District Interior Affairs Office.
Before that he was a soldier in Kadyrov’s “Security Service” or, as people here put it, “one of Ramzan’s gang.” Edilov is regarded as someone charged with defending the ruling family’s interests in Kurchaloy. Salmaniev, his deputy and another Kadyrov soldier, lives in Bachi-Yurt.

Salmaniev and Edilov declared the families guilty of the terrorist act committed by Shakhidat and Aimani. “Now,” they said, “you must pay in blood for the attempt on Kadyrov’s life and for the deaths of Ramzan’s soldiers.”

“Did you know this was coming?” I ask Akhmat Temirsultanov, the Qadi (Islamic judge) of Kurchaloy District and Imam of Bachi-Yurt.

The old man – respected, ill, stooped – pretends to be deaf in order not to have to answer the question. I press the point, but to no avail. Even the Qadi and Imam is desperately afraid of falling into disfavor with the Kadyrovs. That fear can today be felt throughout Chechnya, fear of a kind unknown even a year ago. People have learned from the blood-letting, and only the bravest will whisper, “We are afraid of Kadyrov.”

“Does anybody else, do the families of other people who died at Ilaskhan-Yurt, bear a similar grudge against you? Have you been warned by them?” I asked Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva. The ritual of declaring a blood feud is strict. It is not something undertaken lightly, and a qadi or imam should be involved in the procedure.

“No, nobody else has a grudge against us because they know Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty. The Prosecutor’s Office admitted it made a mistake.”

And so it did. A thorough examination of the bodies of Shakhidat and Aimani, conducted at the insistence of the investigative team at the Prosecutor’s Office leading the inquiry into the bombing, showed there was no need even for a forensic medical examination. The nature of their injuries proved it had not been them. A death sentence caused by a slip of the tongue.

Ivan Nikitin is a tall young man who wears trainers and has a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. He is the leader of the team investigating the “act of sabotage and terrorism” within the framework of
Criminal Case No. 32046. Nikitin’s team was set up by the Republican Prosecutor’s Office and is based in Gudermes, close to Ilaskhan-Yurt, in order to be able to question witnesses conveniently.

“These women, Baimuradova, Visayeva and Abdurzakova, were not wearing the explosive devices,” Nikitin confirms. “They were simply standing two metres away from the epicenter. I told Qadi Temirsultanov that when he came to ask whether they were guilty or not. I could see he needed to know that in order to avoid a blood feud.”

“Tell me, then, why was the Prosecutor’s Office in such a hurry to declare that they were the bombers? Here we are with four completely guiltless people killed, one of whom had a two-month-old baby she was breast-feeding.”

Nikitin understands perfectly. He sighs and parries with “It is all the fault of the media.” In fact, it was none other Sergey Fridinsky, the Deputy Prosecutor-General of Russia for the Southern Federal Region and Nikitin’s immediate boss, who announced the names of the alleged bombers before anything was known for certain. Nikitin declines to comment on this and refers me “upstairs.” Needless to say, “upstairs” the officials in the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office are in no hurry to comment on their own murderously irresponsible utterances.

Back in Bachi-Yurt. Zina Dautkhadzhieva, the mother of the executed Liza, also has very little to add. She is terribly afraid of saying something she might regret, something which might prove fatal for some of her other children.

“You have to understand, the Kadyrovites are everywhere, and to declare a blood feud on Kadyrov today is …” The Bachi-Yurt villagers try to explain the situation but can’t.

“Is what?”

“It is to take on too much. It is a death sentence. That’s the way life is here.”

It seems there is nobody capable of protecting them, neither the Prosecutor’s Office, nor President Putin, nor the United Nations.

Edilov and Salmaniev went away, and because their accusations seemed so preposterous, so completely at odds with all the rules and customs, the men remained at home. Nobody went off to hide, as is
traditional when somebody declares a blood feud or is preparing to do so. In those circumstances the men at risk do not sleep at home. They all stayed, and on the night of May 17 were executed: two of Aimani’s sons, Khanpash and Movsar Visayev; Aimani’s brother, Said Mahomed Ablayev; and Shakhidat, their niece.

Why? Because this has now almost become a custom. The Kadyrovites can do anything they please, even things forbidden by tradition. They live as if there will be no tomorrow, despising the laws, written and unwritten. If Ramzan wants land in Gudermes for his petrol station, he takes it without even bothering to inform the Ministry of Education to whom the teacher training institute standing on that land belongs.

So now instead of the Gudermes teacher training institute there is Ramzan’s petrol station. That is how it is with business, where money is involved; but the same thing applies to blood, to the torrents of it shed at the hands of the Kadyrovites. For they are in charge of this blood-letting; everybody in Chechnya knows that if you need to take revenge on someone for spilling blood, you go to work in Ramzan’s division. You will be welcomed and given weapons and their blessing to exact retribution. The Kadyrovs are in the business of setting everybody against everybody else. What for? In order to consolidate their own power. Where there is no order, there remains only blood and fear to secure the base of your throne.

BALLOT BOXES OR FUNERAL URNS?

August 25, 2003

Power struggles are never noble or fine, but the power struggle in Chechnya, taking place against the backdrop of a war now in its fifth year, is as nauseating as a reusable traitor.

Ibrahim looks like a pirate. Scars are healing under his hair and his eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. He was hurt very badly. He limps clumsily, his weight falling heavily first on one leg then on the other, a common sign here of someone beaten on the kidneys. Ibrahim Garsiev, the 36-year-old father of a family, is from Tangi Chu. He is a
bodyguard of Rustam Saidullayev, the brother of opposition politician Malik Saidulayev.

On August 7 he was driving from home through the Urus Martan District when he was stopped by “unidentified masked individuals wearing combat fatigues,” the usual Chechen story. They disarmed him, took him to the district militia station, and started interrogating him.

“They wanted me to confess to blowing up a military water tanker in Tangi Chu and killing Batalov, the Head of the District Office for Combating Organised Crime,” Ibrahim relates. “But that was just for show. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Department is a decent man. He said, ‘Look, at least admit to having a hand grenade. That will be better for you, you will only go to prison for a year. Otherwise the Kadyrovites will kill you. It is they who are calling for your head.’ ”

Ibrahim, however, dug his heels in, and shortly afterwards was hooded, pushed into a car, and driven off.

In Chechnya the “Kadyrovites” are units subordinate to Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of the “Chief of Chechnya.” Ramzan is the head of “Daddy’s ‘Security Service,’ ” and behaves in a manner reminiscent of President Yeltsin’s bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, who interpreted his role so broadly as to behave like the second-in-command in the state hierarchy.

An example of this in action: how funds are collected for Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s election campaign. As a majority of ministers in the Chechen Government admit, Ramzan names a sum of money which their Ministry is to contribute. We are not talking thousands of roubles here, but thousands of dollars. The Minister draws up a list apportioning the levy between officials in accordance with the post they occupy. Deputy ministers have to contribute up to $5,000, while heads of departments or boards are assessed at $1,000–2,000 per head. The officials are warned that if the Ministry fails to deliver the sum demanded by Ramzan, they will be sacked. Civil servants are desperately afraid of losing their jobs because wages funded by the state budget are the only more or less stable form of income in Chechnya. As a result, half of Chechnya is today in debt to the other half. Everybody
has borrowed and re-borrowed from each other in order not to come to the attention of the Kadyrov family.

After the officials, there are Chechnya’s markets. This is the Republic’s second most important cash cow. Unfortunate Chechen women – teachers, doctors, housewives, nurses, and journalists – stand in the markets, which is how most families have managed to feed themselves throughout the war. The Chechen men are at home trying to avoid security sweeps and checkpoints, and the Chechen women are trading. Every such market trader also has a tribute levied on behalf of Akhmat-hadji. The approach is the same: Ramzan names a figure to the market’s Director, who then allots everybody a contribution.

The officials, naturally enough, did not protest, but the women went on strike. They had each been assessed for $500 (political services in Chechnya are, you will note, quite pricey), and said they would not return to the market until the demand was made more reasonable. The strike collapsed, however, when the Kadyrovites threatened to murder the families of one or two of the ringleaders, and the money was handed over. You can judge for yourself how remarkably fair and democratic the coming elections are going to be.

The word “Kadyrovite” in Chechnya is applied to a large number of decentralised and anarchic detachments, each armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry, including Israeli rapid-fire rifles and murderous Berettas banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Officially there are 61 people in Akhmat-hadji’s security detail but if we include units under Ramzan’s command, some of the militia firearms teams, and all manner of special operations units with which Chechnya is teeming and into which Kadyrov has succeeded in infiltrating his own people, the official figure rises to 1,200.

In reality, however, throughout Chechnya the Kadyrovites number several thousands. They themselves put the figure sometimes at 3,000, sometimes at 5,000. Where do they all come from? The divisions Ramzan Kadyrov controls today accept anybody who wants to go on fighting, for example ex-resistance fighters who have been amnestied. In effect, the amnesty declared by the Russian Duma obliges those
amnestied to be absorbed into the Kadyrov detachments. Amnestied former resistance units now form the backbone of the Kadyrovites. This summer they recruited in every district center and most villages. Fighters and members of the resistance who refused amnesty on these terms testify that those who did surrender were regarded by and large as brutes and criminals in their communities.

Although the Kadyrovites claim to be sweeping Chechnya clear of Islamic extremist Wahhabis, they are in practice clearing the Republic of anybody they want to get rid of. At present that means Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s political enemies.

Another recent example: Movladi Baisarov’s detachment is based in the village of Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, near Grozny. The detachment was previously commanded by Maskhadov’s deputy, Vakha Arsanov, and has moved directly from the ranks of the separatists into the Kadyrovite organization.

Baisarov’s men recently abducted three FSB officers and attempted to ransom them in exchange for one of their criminal comrades who had been arrested for his involvement in another kidnapping. The Baisarovites got away with it because now they count as Kadyrovites.

In the Urus Martan District Militia Station it was precisely one such turncoat that Ibrahim Garsiev found himself facing, namely a participant in several sensational kidnappings back in Maskhadov’s time, a man with a federal warrant out for his arrest but who is now the Deputy Head of the District Militia Station in Urus Martan.

It was this criminal who organised Garsiev’s kidnapping, knowing that he worked in Saidulayev’s security detail, and called upon the services of “unidentified masked Chechens wearing combat fatigues.” Ibrahim was driven off and soon found himself before Ramzan Kadyrov in the courtyard of his fortress home in Tsentoroy.

Were you interrogated by Ramzan personally?

Yes. He asked me what kind of vehicle Saidulayev used and how many bodyguards he had. I didn’t reply. I was beaten all over my body with a spade handle; Ramzan beat me himself. They strung me up by the arms from a tree and beat me. Ramzan was not the only person
directing this, there was a second person who later told me he had been Basayev’s Chief of Staff but was now Ramzan’s Head of Reconnaissance. Ramzan said he would give his gold watch to whoever thought up the cruellest death for me.