Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (25 page)

A reporter for
Chechenskoye obshchestvo
calculated that some US$30,000, including the rouble equivalents, ended up on the Olympus
Restaurant’s marble floor. The young ladies duly picked up the money. When one of the competitors suddenly burst into tears, Ramzan arranged for her to be given a diamond-studded Chopard Swiss watch. The watch with all its diamonds materialised instantly in Gudermes, the tears were dried, and a watch bought with money extracted from the citizens of Chechnya was publicly thrown at the feet of another of their number.

The years will pass, all things will pass, and nobody will have any desire to recall any detail of these Hundred Days with their oaths of loyalty to the Kadyrov cause. But what of the girls who in May 2006 crawled around on that restaurant floor? What of the young journalists who put their signatures to a publication titled
Kadyrov, the Peacemaker
, at a time when hundreds had been tortured to death in Tsentoroy? How will they live with themselves? I cannot imagine.

PS. On the morning of May 31, Kadyrovites (who no longer officially exist, as they have been reassigned to the Interior Ministry) caught resistance fighters in the hill village of Nesterovskaya in Ingushetia. As reported by the Russian Interior Ministry Troops Press Office, “Brigands, pursued by members of the militia, crossed the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia and hid in house No. 91, taking hostage the people living there.”

In the house surrounded by the Kadyrovites live the Khaikharoyevs, the family of Field Commander Ruslan Khaikharoyev, a kidnapper killed in 1999. With the family was Ruslan’s 19-year-old son, Rizvan, who, as their neighbours testify, was not a resistance fighter. When the fighters wounded a militiaman, the Kadyrovites retreated, taking with them Rizvan Khaikharoyev. He was pushed into the boot of one of the vehicles, which they positioned opposite the house. They used it for cover and began a two-hour gun battle. When everything fell quiet, Rizvan was hauled out of the boot and one of the Kadyrovites fired a pistol at the back of his head; another finished him off with his assault rifle. The murder was committed in full view of the people of Nesterovskaya, an extra-judicial execution committed by men who are now officially counted as members of the Interior Ministry Troops of the Russian Federation.

THE KADYROVITES WILL BE BEATEN: FOR NOW, ONLY IN INGUSHETIA

September 11, 2006

On September 7, a huge fight broke out at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Alkhasty on the Chechnya–Ingushetia border. Men in military fatigues approaching from the Chechen side and claiming to be the security detail of Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov became impatient at the “cheek” of the checkpoint guards. These were Ingush Interior Ministry troops of the regiment guarding the administrative border, and they demanded to see the documents, military orders, and other forms required for taking firearms across the border. The Kadyrovites started waving their arms about and firing in the air.

Three militiamen were injured as a result, two of whom are in hospital. The Kadyrovites proceeded to cross the border without authorisation. Officers of the Ingush Interior Ministry issued warrants for their arrest, vowing to give them a good beating if they were found in Ingushetia. Ramzan Kadyrov’s entourage issued a statement claiming it was all lies, because their people do not take armoured personnel carriers across the border.

Whoever it was who turned up in APCs on September 7 – current Kadyrovites, former Kadyrovites now reclassified as officers belonging to battalions of the Russian Interior Ministry, or some other kind of thugs – what happened is a manifestation of the long-established Kadyrov syndrome whose principal distinguishing features are insolence, loutishness, and brutality masquerading as courage. In Chechnya the Kadyrovites beat men and women at will, in exactly the way the Wahhabis beat people in the days of Maskhadov’s Ichkeria. They behead their enemies just as the Wahhabis did, and the institutions of law and order turn a blind eye or even officially refer to this behaviour as the result of a heightened national awareness following the Chechen people’s irrevocable choice in favor of Russia.

In Chechnya itself there has been no attempt to halt the spread of this infection. Rather, it has been encouraged. “Come on, guys, we’re something else. We’ll show them who’s boss. We have every right!”
The Kadyrov syndrome is catching on among Chechen teenagers who are known as the New Wahhabis, or the R. Kadyrov Fan Club. They “graduate” from the Fan Club and take their place in adult life and the world of work.

For a couple of years all this was festering only in Chechnya, with occasional outbreaks in Dagestan, mainly in the bordering Khasavyurt District. Now, however, the Kadyrov syndrome is spreading. Today many Chechens living outside Chechnya and even outside Russia are being infected with the virus.

Those around them have also moved on, though. By no means everybody is taken in by the televised fairy tales depicting Ramzan Kadyrov as a Hero of Russia. Many are getting very tired of the Kadyrov syndrome and it has produced a countervailing tendency in the form of a movement called “We Will Beat You.” Not everybody is willing, like many Chechens, to let the Kadyrovites walk all over them. This is what led to the anti-Chechen disturbances in Kondopoga, Karelia, and now also this incident in Alkhasty.

3. The Cadet

The failure of Russia’s rulers, despite their public pronouncements, to support the rule of law has allowed war criminals to flourish in Chechnya. The courage and tenacity required to stand up to forces bent on perverting the course of justice is illustrated by several cases which Anna Politkovskaya reported; as a result she successfully had evil men brought to book
.

THE CADET AFFAIR: THE DISAPPEARED

September 10, 2001

Imagine that a group of unidentified men in Army uniform burst into your house, drag off a member of your family, and …

And nothing. Someone existed but now they don’t. It is as if they have been rubbed out, like a matchstick man from a school blackboard. You can rush around, go out of your mind, beg for at least some modicum of information, but the official who should be searching for them quite straightforwardly advises you, “Forget it.” And that is the end of that.

The most appalling tragedy in Chechnya today is the disappeared, those who vanish without trace. Officially they currently number about 1,000; unofficially, almost 2,000. They have been disappearing throughout the war, right up to the present, from different towns and villages and in different circumstances, but all such stories have two common characteristics. The first is that those who disappeared were last seen being taken away by soldiers; the second is that the numerous ramified law enforcement agencies of Chechnya are incapable of finding anyone.

Once a month a special meeting on abductions is held in the new government offices in Grozny. Another job ticked off the list. It is usually chaired by Vladimir Kalamanov, the President’s Special Representative
for the Observance of Human Rights and Freedoms in Chechnya.

The Chechen Prosecutor, Vsevolod Chernov, does most of the talking, because it is primarily his responsibility to find the disappeared. Also present, of course, are representatives of the main Army base at Khankala, who attend with ineradicable scepticism written all over their faces. Those present from the National Military Prosecutor’s Office sit as silent as the grave. The meeting stretches out interminably, the various gentlemen discussing matters wearily and finding it difficult to conceal quite how boring, and indeed objectionable, they find all this.

Losing patience, Taisa Musayeva jumps up. Her voice quavers. “What are you talking about here? I have just one wish for the lot of you: that you should find yourselves in my place. Nobody is looking for my husband, or has any intention of doing so.” Taisa is 25, and does not know whether she is a wife or already a widow.

On July 2, during the now notorious brutal mass security sweeps in the hill villages of Assinovskaya and Sernovodsk, Taisa’s husband, Zelimkhan Umkhanov, was taken in front of his entire family from his home on Kutalov Street in Sernovodsk and driven away to an unknown destination. The whole world duly came to hear about these security sweeps, the President had his say, and for the first time in the long months of this war he waxed indignant about the senselessness of the “special measures” employed. The Prosecutor-General publicly assured us all that a meticulous inquiry was in hand.

“That was a lie. There is no inquiry,” Taisa hammers home her truth. For two months, the families of 28-year-old Zelimkhan and 22-year-old Apti Isigov, also abducted by the military from Sernovodsk, have been unable to persuade the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office even to take a statement from them about what they witnessed. The relatives have been scurrying round the Republic after Prosecutor Chernov, begging him to accept their evidence. To no avail.

What is it that the Prosecutors in Chechnya are keen not to know? Perhaps this might at least be of interest to their superiors in the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office? Well, they do not want to know,
for example, the identification number of the armoured personnel carrier in which masked individuals abducted Umkhanov and Isigov without even glancing at their passports. It was “4025.” Neither do they want to know the radio call sign of the vehicle, “88;” or of the commanding officer in charge of the abduction, “12.” The number of the military Urals truck which accompanied the abduction was “O 1003 KSh.” On July 3 both Umkhanov and Isigov were sighted in the back of this truck. It was parked in Assinovskaya and the abducted men were lying covered by a tarpaulin. They were alive and asked for water when they heard voices nearby. There are witnesses to whom the unfortunate men managed to say that they had not been allowed out from under the canvas for more than 24 hours.

“The search for the disappeared could be completed, we believe, in a matter of hours,” write the mothers of the Sernovodsk men in a letter to President Putin. On August 28, having lost hope of finding any help in Chechnya, they wrote to Moscow: “All that is needed,” the mothers advise the President, “is to assemble those in charge of that special operation (who are all known), to question a number of soldiers and officers (who are also known), and, if necessary, to conduct an identification parade. There are witnesses living in Sernovodsk.”

The mothers are simple women, untrained in detective work, but simply stating the obvious. They do not know that hundreds of Chechen families have already been down this road. Nearly all of them wrote to the President with information in their possession which made it possible to find the disappeared in a matter of days. Given the will, of course. And that is the snag.

On January 2 this year Zelimkhan Murdalov, a 26-year-old man from Grozny, was walking down the street when he was suddenly assaulted by six men in combat fatigues, stripped, and bundled into a car in full view of the passengers on a bus which had stopped nearby. Later, two women on the bus, a mother and daughter aged 73 and 40, came forward as official witnesses of the abduction. They tried to help Zelimkhan, and suffered for their pains. The 73-year-old had her false teeth broken when she was punched on the jaw by “soldiers.”
Both were knocked to the ground and had shots fired over their heads. Undeterred, they later had the courage to identify their attackers, members of the October District Interior Affairs Temporary Office from the Khanty-Mansiysk Combined Militia Unit.

Murdalov was very unlucky. The Khanty-Mansiysk detachment have an atrocious reputation in Grozny. In the Militia Unit’s headquarters Zelimkhan was handed over to Major Alexander Prilepin, Head of the Criminal Militia and better known by his code name of “Alex.” Also to Investigator Zhuravlyov and officer Sergey Lapin, alias “The Cadet.” The latter had this name shaved on the back of his head. A later inquiry established that it was they who personally presided over and took part in the torturing of Zelimkhan.

In the early hours of January 3, The Cadet dragged Murdalov to a cell in the temporary holding block, where he was seen by other prisoners.

His fellow cell-mates saw the results of the militiamen’s sadistic orgy. The bone was sticking out of Zelimkhan’s right forearm. His right ear had been cut off. His ribs had been broken. He was unconscious. The prisoners began saying a prayer over him, in the belief that he was dying. They demanded a doctor who, after inspecting the victim, pronounced that urgent surgical intervention was essential. The officers refused, declaring that the man had shown himself to be a real Chechen, tough, unwilling to surrender, and therefore perfectly able to survive without medical treatment.

On the morning of January 3, the prisoners heard someone warn over a radio link, “The Prosecutor is at the frontier …” The response to this unannounced inspection was, “Let him wait.” (“The frontier” is how they referred to the Unit’s security checkpoint.) A doctor came, injected Zelimkhan for a long time, and he was dragged away by the arms. In the evening the prisoners were informed that Murdalov had been taken to hospital but had escaped. Nobody believed this, and they assumed that as Zelimkhan was plainly in no state to move, let alone run, he must have died that morning. In order to avoid repercussions, his killers had evidently hidden the body. The October District Office is surrounded by ruined houses from which explosions are constantly
being heard. Nobody knows who causes them or why but, as the whole of Grozny knows, the area is suffused with the stench of corpses.

Once Murdalov had been dragged away, the Prosecutor was allowed into the cell and registered that there was nobody there by the name of Murdalov. He apparently did not think to enquire why he had been denied access for such a long time.

The Prosecutor appeared in the October District Interior Affairs Office only because he had been forced to go there by Zelimkhan’s parents, Rukiyat and Astemir Murdalov, who had pulled all the strings at their disposal. They are well known in Grozny. From then on until now, it was the parents, not any lawyers or investigators, who have conducted the real inquiry into the circumstances of their son’s abduction, and who have effectively compelled the Grozny Prosecutor’s Office to do its job of opening Criminal Case No. 15004 into his abduction, torture, and subsequent disappearance.