Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (28 page)

Firstly, he demanded the arrest of the officer who had inspired him to perform these feats, “Alex,” to use his Chechen code name, but known to the outside world as Major Alexander Prilepin.

Secondly, when taken to the crime scene, the grounds of the October Temporary Office, he at last pointed out the location of the pit where the Khanties threw the bodies of those they had tortured and killed.

Yet the anomalies get worse. The Chechen Prosecutor’s Office made no attempt to excavate the pit, on the grounds that the rains had arrived. As a rule, it is the relatives of the disappeared who voluntarily carry out such exhumations in Chechnya. Here that was impossible because the grave was in a high security zone. As a result, the pit, whose contents might have become major evidence of the crimes committed by the Khanties, was handed over into the safe keeping of the Khanties themselves. What do you think? Have they had enough time by now to destroy the material evidence, namely the bones of their victims?

The wailing of the mothers, sisters and wives of the victims of the Khanty-Mansiysk Unit is constantly to be heard in Grozny, and accordingly:

We demand to be told by the Interior Ministry of Russia how much longer the Khanties will be allowed to remain in Grozny;

We insist that Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov should immediately intervene in this ongoing travesty;

We request that the families should have the bones of their dearest returned to them;

We beg Russia’s most senior officials to start behaving like human beings.

Hello, Prosecutor-General’s Office – is anybody there? What is going on with Criminal Case No. 15004 which, according to
Novaya gazeta
’s information, has been hastily removed from Chechnya? Where is it? Are pages being torn out of it? Are replacement pages being inserted? What guarantee is there that the file will ever be placed before the courts?

Give these undertakings to society. Finally!

PUT THE WITNESSES IN JAIL? ONE OF THE MOST BRUTAL WAR CRIMINALS OF THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR HAS BEEN RELEASED FROM PRISON

July 8, 2002

Sergey Lapin has been set free from the pre-trial detention facility in Pyatigorsk. Such is the ruling of the Pyatigorsk Municipal Court, acting at the behest of Lapin’s self-appointed defenders from the Regional Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office in the North Caucasus. The grounds for releasing him were simple: The Cadet is no danger to society and can roam free while awaiting trial.

Lapin was arrested in February 2002 and was taken under guard to the investigative detention center in Grozny, where the crimes had been committed. The investigation progressed for a time, but then the atmosphere surrounding Case No. 15004 began to change and The Cadet was transferred to Pyatigorsk Prison. The investigators working on the case were switched around like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, and eventually they were all in Essentuki and not in Chechnya at all. As a result nobody treated the excavation of mass graves at the October District Interior Ministry Temporary Office as a matter of any urgency.

In the end what we were beginning to suspect was found to be true: the materials of the investigation had been blatantly “weeded,” and incidents dropped from the indictment which were central to bringing criminal charges against others, together with whom, and often with the direct authorisation of whom, Lapin had committed his crimes. In places the tampering was laughable: the Prosecutors started referring to the officers who were so carefully being exculpated as an “unidentified group of individuals;” this at the end of an investigation where there were not only witnesses but also documents which made it unambiguously clear who was on duty at the Office on which days and at which hour.

It was no laughing matter, however, when the Khanty-Mansiysk Unit was returned to Grozny (on the instructions of President Putin, as we were officially informed by Ivan Golubev, Deputy Interior Minister of
the Russian Federation), and the witnesses in the case, until then left to their own devices in Grozny, could no longer risk sleeping two nights in the same bed.

And now we hear that Lapin has been set free until the trial.

There is something fundamentally wrong in Russia. Life has been turned upside-down and the law has no substance. The entire range of public services is put to work on behalf of the criminal: the lawyers, Prosecutors, courts, – and even, sad to relate, public opinion. There is precious little help for the victims, especially if they happen to be Chechens. Today the party which has suffered, Murdalov’s family, do not even have a lawyer, paid or unpaid, despite the fact that this is required by law. They have no protection from the Prosecutor’s Office because they have no money, having long ago spent all their resources in searching for Zelimkhan.

All this, however, is being extended to Lapin. He enjoys the sympathy of the Prosecutor’s Office, the understanding of the court, he has a lawyer, appreciative colleagues, and as a result of their efforts he is at large.

We await a prompt reply from Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov: are these actions by members of the Prosecutor’s Office in accordance with the law? Why does the reply need to be prompt? Because at any moment it may become too late. There is a major problem in Russia with officers who have served in Chechnya. The most modest estimates suggest that The Cadet has almost half a million comrades-in-arms in Russia, a large city’s worth of Cadets.

From the Editors:

It was The Cadet who, on more than one occasion, threatened to kill our columnist Anna Politkovskaya, after which she was first placed under the protection of the Interior Ministry, and subsequently obliged to move abroad. The Cadet acknowledged these facts without showing any remorse. We demand that […] Citizen Lapin should be re-arrested as we are certain that the life of the witnesses and of our columnist are again threatened.

HOLES IN THE PROSECUTORS’ SAFES: IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS FROM THE CADET CASE GO MISSING

August 8, 2002

A major problem relating to Criminal Case No. 15004 […] has been discovered. Documents of fundamental importance have disappeared. Although they were attached to the criminal case and had been numbered and indexed in the requisite manner, placed in the safe of Investigator Ivanteyev of the Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office in the North Caucasus, a safe located in Essentuki and kept locked, with a key in the custody only of Investigator Ivanteyev, nevertheless …

To tell the truth, the latest disappearance of documents is not unexpected. The way the case has been conducted for several months now suggested it would arrive at court laundered and “optimised” for the benefit of Lapin. That seemed to be the opinion of the members of the Prosecutor’s Office in Essentuki too.

But surprise, surprise! Copies of the missing documents are secure in the possession of
Novaya gazeta
whose safes, unlike those of the Prosecutor’s Office in Essentuki, have no holes through which papers can slip for which certain criminals, as the unforgettable film sleuth Gleb Zheglov used to say, “will give anything.” We kept copies in case of just such an untoward accident. Not everybody in the Nizhnevartovsk Militia is on Lapin’s side. Don’t ask how we came by these copies. For the time being, until the court hearings, we can only reply that they came from the bowels of the earth.

And so, dear reader, we invite you to view photographs of members of the Khanty-Mansiysk Militia Unit rampaging through Grozny, and as they appear in the photographs attached to Case No. 15004, identifying The Cadet’s accomplices.

Look closely at these faces. There is nothing unusual about them. They look like anybody else. They are the people around us. They are like us. Yet these faces belong to people who tortured, or killed, or who were jacks of all trades both torturing and murdering and blowing to bits the bodies of those they had murdered.

Why did they do it? Don’t look for special reasons: they just did.
They hated their victims. Hatred is the mantra of the Khanties, sanctioned from the very pinnacle of the state. For the greater glory of their mantra, these people were pulverised (not just figuratively, but literally), dozens of them just like themselves. We would probably never have printed these mug shots of the Khanties, not least because they are part of a criminal case and should not be made public. The Prosecutor’s Office, however, has left us no alternative.

In addition to the photographs, records of the interrogation of witness Dalayev have also disappeared. Lapin, trying to force him to incriminate himself, ground Dalayev’s teeth down with a file. Dalayev’s testimony is also important in respect of the disappearance of Zelimkhan Murdalov because he was the last person to see him when Murdalov was dragged by Lapin personally, a Russian militiaman with his nickname “Cadet” shaved on the back of his head, into the cell of the holding facility in the October District Office after being tortured. We will not deny that we too are looking for those records, in order that the Russian Constitution should win in its battle with those who are supposedly there to protect it, and so that the court should be in possession of all the available information.

Finally, a few words about the way the Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office of the Russian Federation in the North Caucasus works nowadays. It is the main center to which prosecutions for war crimes in Chechnya are sent. How can this sort of thing be possible? Why should the Prosecutor’s Office be so dogged in its whitewashing of war criminals? How has this institution been reduced to Essentuki plc, a state enterprise with extraordinarily limited liability?

From the very beginning of the Second Chechen War, the Prosecutor’s Office gained the reputation of being subservient to the will of the Kremlin, behaving like a baggage wagon trundling along in the distant rearguard of the Army in all matters relating to war crimes. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of its failures. In order even to have a criminal charge brought against a serviceman observed looting, robbing, abducting people, trading in corpses, torturing and murdering (to list only the most routine war crimes in Chechnya), it is essential to make the case “resonate,” as everybody from the District Prosecutor
to the Prosecutor-General himself will explain. A case resonates when the prosecutors get a kick up the backside from the public, from the pages of newspapers, from television screens. The mere fact that murders, abductions, looting and the like have taken place is not sufficient to get the Prosecutors to act.

This has been the state of affairs for three years now, since the beginning of the war itself. During this time dozens of people working for the Prosecutor’s Office have received government awards, titles and ranks for profaning their profession, while the few honorable activists who try to fulfil their obligations are relentlessly purged from these serried ranks, and the very best have actually been killed in Chechnya in mysterious circumstances. Like, for example, the fearless Alexander Leushin, the first investigator who took up the Cadet affair and was trying to have an arrest warrant issued when he was shot dead by “unidentified assailants.”

Naturally, “keep your nose out” has become a Pavlovian conditioned reflex for Prosecutors working in Chechnya and Essentuki. They salivate when they hear the bell. Because of this, we once again have a region in our country where the laws of the Russian Federation do not operate. It is called Chechnya. Where soldiers can do whatever their appetites dictate, and criminal cases brought against them, even when they have been opened, are subject to “laundering” in Essentuki, with a kindly nod towards the murderers, and quite extraordinary heartlessness towards their victims.

THE CADET AFFAIR: A CRIMINAL CASE IS OPENED INTO DEATH THREATS TO
Novaya gazeta
’S COLUMNIST, ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA

September 5, 2002

“Forgive my troubling you, but you have just 10 days to publish a retraction of your article ‘The Disappeared,’ otherwise the militia officer you have hired will be unable to protect you. Yours sincerely, The Cadet.”

This was the second message bearing this signature to arrive in
Novaya gazeta
’s electronic mailbox. We were obliged to take additional security measures, and Anna Politkovskaya left Russia under the Program for the Protection of Journalists.

Almost a year has passed. Criminal cases were opened against The Cadet and a number of other officers, charging them with abductions, diabolical murders, desecration of bodies and other extremely serious crimes.

Then something odd happened. Documents began disappearing from the case file, witnesses were afraid to give evidence, and the ruling that Anna Politkovskaya should be classed as a victim (she had after all received a death threat) was effectively overturned. To crown all this absurdity, the suspect Lapin was released upon signing an undertaking not to leave Nizhnevartovsk.

Novaya gazeta
has written on more than one occasion about this scandalous affair, in which, with variable success, a struggle is being waged against lawlessness. Here is the latest document we have received:

Notification

I hereby inform you that your application of October 26, 2001, addressed to the Head of the Directorate of Interior Affairs of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region regarding receipt by the offices of
Novaya gazeta
on September 15, 2001 by electronic mail of a message regarding the departure for Moscow of an armed agent of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Interior Affairs Department (personal code name, “The Cadet”), who had undergone sniper and sabotage training, was examined and on December 14, 2001 instigation of a criminal case was refused.

On July 29, 2002, the Prosecutor of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region withdrew the directive refusing to instigate a criminal case and a criminal case has now been instigated in view of an apparent crime as defined under Article 119 of the
Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (threat of murder or causing serious bodily harm).