Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (22 page)

The Kadyrovites all own cutting-edge mobile phones, especially those in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, closest to the Big Man. They have plenty of easy money and this is how they amuse themselves. They video everything and everyone, but mainly themselves and their amours. I have seen it myself, and they have boasted to me about how cool their mobiles are, and how much better than mine.

Videoing criminal acts like the armoured car and the boot episodes is not, however, an occupation for anyone with ambitions to remain
alive and stay close to the Boss in the future. It is time to speculate: who has allowed themselves this liberty?

Not long ago in Vedeno District several dozen Kadyrovites transferred their allegiance to the resistance fighters. This went almost completely unreported, but the fact of their defection is not denied even by Khankala, the generals at Regional Operational HQ who direct all the continuing monstrousness in the North Caucasus.

We may suppose that it is these renegade Kadyrovites who have been distributing compromising material they had been storing up. Did it help them to be accepted back into the ranks of the resistance fighters, which is where most Kadyrovites originate? Unlikely. The recordings are an incidental detail, and for now it is an open question why they were not killed when they attempted to return to their former colleagues.

Who is the video’s target audience? This is really the important question. Who is the intended “consumer” of the mobile phone recordings of SRRK? The Russian public? Nobody out there has had any illusions about Ramzan for a long time. Even in Kremlin circles, most realize that Putin made a bad mistake in choosing the Kadyrov family to be his team in Chechnya.

Chechnya’s voters? The influence of the Chechen electorate is no longer of interest to anybody. A Parliament has been elected which, when the times comes, will appoint Ramzan Kadyrov President. The Deputies there are no threat to anyone. They worship their Prime Minister with their knees knocking, and this video is of no concern to them.

I have no doubt at all that this mobile video has been released for the benefit of just one person in Russia: Putin. It is for showing in an auditorium where the only spectator obstinately refuses even to pretend he is concerned about the vileness of what he cobbled together from the material most readily available.

PS. We formally request that the Prosecutor-General’s Office should treat this as a witness statement. We are prepared unhesitatingly to forward the recordings in
Novaya gazeta
’s possession.

[The response was that on April 24, 2006 the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case into the incident of the attack on federal soldiers, which occurred on October 7, 2005 in Grozny. The other videos were to be examined in the context of an existing criminal case.]

A HEAD ON THE GAS PIPELINE. KADYROV’S MEDIAEVAL BARBARISM – IN JULY 2006

August 3, 2006

According to a report by the Memorial Human Rights Center, on July 28 in the district center of Kurchaloy armed Kadyrovites exhibited a severed human head on a gas pipeline in the middle of the village. This was the outcome of events there the previous night. At about midnight two resistance fighters had been ambushed on the western outskirts. There was a firefight, one of the fighters, a Kurchaloy man, Khozh-Akhmed Dushayev, was killed and a second, Adam Badayev, was captured.

At dawn some 20 cars with armed men congregated in the village by the Interior Ministry District Office and placed Dushayev’s severed head on the gas pipe. Beneath the head they hung bloodstained trousers. Dushayev was identified by residents living near the Interior Ministry building.

This was all directed by an aide of Prime Minister Kadyrov, Idris Gaibov, a former Head of the Administration of Kurchaloy District. Onlookers heard Gaibov phoning Prime Minister Kadyrov and reporting that they had killed “Devil No. 1 from Kurchaloy and hung up his head.” (“Devils” is how the Kadyrovites refer to Wahhabis.) After that, the Kadyrovites spent the next two hours photographing the head with their video cameras and mobile phones.

On the morning of July 29 militiamen from the Kurchaloy Interior Ministry District Office removed the head, but the bloodstained trousers were left hanging there. At the same time, officers from the Interior Ministry and members of the Prosecutor’s Office began work at the site of the conflict. Local people heard one of the Interior Ministry officers asking his subordinate, “Have they finished sewing that head
back on yet?” Soon Dushayev’s body was brought to the scene of the ambush with his head sewn back on.

The Memorial Human Rights Center believes the desecration of Dushayev’s body by Gaibov was personal revenge. The villagers say that on June 10 Dushayev had killed Idris Gaibov’s nephew, Adam Gaibov, a soldier of the Yug (South) Battalion, and also beheaded him.

Let’s be clear about what happened here. One civilian government official, an aide to the Prime Minister of a government which is a constituent part of the Russian Federation, gave orders to soldiers who were not under his command to cut off a human head. The Prime Minister of that territory was aware of what was happening, or was at least informed about it while it was happening, and made no attempt to intervene. The Kadyrovites, who are now officially recognised as employees of the Russian Interior Ministry, carried out the order. Officials from the Prosecutor’s Office, the institution charged with supervising proper administration of the law, being fully aware of what had happened, merely told those responsible to hurry up sewing the head back on. Finally, all these misdeeds took place in full view of the children and adults living in Kurchaloy.

The question we have to ask is whether this is a component part of our new “sovereign democracy” or merely a side effect?

We look forward to hearing from the Military Prosecutor’s Office, the province of Sergey Fridinsky, whose duty it is to supervise the actions of members of the Russian Interior Ministry; from Yury Chaika, the Prosecutor-General, whose duty it is to supervise the behaviour of top-flight state servants, and also less exalted members of the Prosecutor’s Office.

The Chechen Prosecutor’s Office has confirmed the above report both in respect of the severing of the head and its being sewn back on, on July 28–29 in Kurchaloy. It has not yet indicated that it has opened a criminal case in this connection.

Vasiliy Panchenko, the Head of the Press Service of Russian Interior Ministry Troops, told
Novaya gazeta
, “As of August 2 no applications or requests have been received at the Headquarters of the Interior Troops from the Prosecutor’s Office, or by the Commanding Officer
of the Joint Military Command in the North Caucasus Region. Accordingly it is not possible to make any comment, but we are prepared to respond to any inquiry from the Prosecutor’s Office in respect of Interior Troops.”

The Press Service of President Alu Alkhanov of the Chechen Republic declined to comment.

LAYING DOWN ARMS, GETTING RID OF KADYROV

August 14, 2006

An amnesty is a good thing. Hope is always better than no hope, but how is the “2006 Amnesty” for resistance fighters proceeding in the North Caucasus? Why have those who have surrendered (officially there are about 80 of them) behaved as they have? Who are they? What needs to be included in the law on amnesty which will begin its passage through the Duma in September to encourage others to follow their example? What conditions and whose guarantees are needed by those who wish to surrender?

In search of answers to these questions I have travelled through Ingushetia, Dagestan and, of course, Chechnya. I have found the situation very different from how it is presented in reports by the intelligence services.

Discovery No. 1, and the most important one: those who have laid down their arms as claimed in the official propaganda simply do not exist. Nobody who was hiding in the forests and mountains or cellars has gone to the Prosecutor’s Office or has given an undertaking to stay at their registered address. Why not? What is the real situation?

First, Dagestan and Ingushetia. The situation in Chechnya is radically different from that in these other republics. Dagestan is currently home to the greatest number of active “jamaats” in the North Caucasus. In the anti-terrorist terminology of our intelligence services, jamaats are considered to be illegal armed groups. There are plenty of people in jamaats who could surrender if they chose to.

Surrendering Dagestan-style has, however, uniquely commercial
characteristics. There is already a going rate. You have to pay the Prosecutor 60,000 roubles to get him to formalise your surrendering with an admission of guilt. If you haven’t got 60,000 roubles you face the consequences, which Putin has described as “active measures against those who fail to lay down their arms.” In Dagestan they say wryly that the statistics about those seeking to take advantage of the amnesty tell us only how well the mainly district and city prosecutors involved are prospering.

On August 8 it was reported that, in another act of terrorism, Bitar Bitarov, the Buinaksk District Prosecutor, was killed by a bomb. During all the years of the Second Chechen War, this district has been the bloodiest in Dagestan in terms of terrorist acts, secret operations and skirmishes. Bitarov has been killed, but it is unlikely that this act of sabotage bore any relation to the new amnesty and its money-making opportunities. The resistance fighters know full well, and they have told me as much, that this 60,000 rouble pay-off will have to be paid, given the totally corrupt state of Dagestan, irrespective of personalities, to whoever is appointed to replace the assassinated Prosecutor.

My next stop was in Ingushetia, where the boldest and most militant jamaats operate. Only three people are claimed to have surrendered there. Their statements were shown on Republican television, but all three had been abducted several months ago. The procedure was what is by now entirely customary in Ingushetia: they were kidnapped by members of “unidentified security agencies” and later turned up in the pre-trial detention facility in Vladikavkaz, accused of participation in an illegal armed formation.

A detail common to all of them is that they are currently imprisoned. They are now in exactly the same situation as they were before they stated that they wished to be amnestied. None of them has been allowed to return home. The investigation against all of them is being conducted by a team at the Prosecutor-General’s Office led by Konstantin Krivorotov. His efforts to eradicate the causes which led to Beslan were supposed to decrease the enthusiasm for terrorist activity in the North Caucasus but have, unfortunately, had precisely the opposite effect. For almost two years his investigative activity has consisted of designating
people as terrorists while the real bandits roam freely through the forests and mountains, and plant bombs when and where they will.

Of the three Ingushes who surrendered (and that they had done so was announced by their relatives and lawyers long before Patrushev made his amnesty proposals), we know that they were tortured during the investigation and signed “voluntary confessions.” Lawyers defending different accused under investigation by Krivorotov’s team say no offers to include them in the amnesty were made by the investigators. They comment that the statements made by the three are merely part of a deal struck by their relatives to get their sentences reduced.

In other words, the amnesty in Ingushetia too is closer to plea bargaining than conciliation. It in no wise indicates an increase in the number of resistance fighters who have seen the light and want to return to civilian life. Those who have been “amnestied” have in any case been returned to “civilian life” in strict-regime labor camps.

“Do people who wish to avail themselves of the amnesty appeal to you or to the Parliament to mediate?” I ask Mahomet Sali Aushev, a Deputy of the People’s Assembly of Ingushetia and member of the recently created Parliamentary Commission on Violation of Civil Rights.

“No. That doesn’t happen.”

“In your view, is this amnesty going to bring about an improvement in the situation in Ingushetia, in terms of bombings, shelling and armed clashes?”

“This is not a true amnesty, it is simply an appeal for people to lay down arms. A number of people have taken to the forests. Some of them will never turn back from that path. There are, of course, those whom we might call romantics. For any of those who are vacillating this proposal is of course very important, but for the majority, some 90 per cent, the amnesty is an irrelevance. Somebody close to them has been killed, and they are seeking retribution. There is nothing for them to repent of. It is they who are waiting for those who have wronged them to repent. Actually, it seems to me that this ‘amnesty’ was not devised with us in mind. It is intended to have an impact mainly in Chechnya.”

And so to Chechnya, which has a defining role in the region. It is
asserted that almost 70 individuals have asked to take advantage of the amnesty, only none of them are fighters. There are a great variety of people who, for a great variety of reasons, have said that they would like to take advantage of Patrushev’s proposal. One baked bread for Dudayev, another once said he sympathised with Maskhadov, a third took food to the forests. The nearest we come to a resistance fighter, whom they are showing on television, used to be in Doku Umarov’s detachment, but on closer inspection even he turns out to have been trading in the Urus Martan market for several years now, not hiding from anybody. He has been given a hint that it might be in his interests to help inflate the statistics, and that is what he has done.

What is needed for the amnesty to be real and genuine? That is a question I put to everybody. To resistance fighters who have not the slightest intention of “going legal,” as well as to those who are asking their relatives to help them make contact with the law enforcement agencies while the opportunity is there. Also to commanders of pro-Moscow Chechen security agencies, many of whom are themselves former resistance fighters amnestied under guarantees from Kadyrov Senior. These are precisely the men who for a long time were considered to be the bulwark of Kadyrov Junior’s power.