Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (29 page)

Investigator of the Prosecutor’s Office, Nizhnevartovsk V.A. Churikov

This is one more serious crime linked with The Cadet which is being investigated, and we can only welcome this victory for the law. The question remains, however, whether The Cadet, who supposedly “does not pose any threat to society” and is currently at large, represents a threat to Anna Politkovskaya, whom he has threatened to kill. And what about the other witnesses and victims?

We believe the answer can only be “Yes, unquestionably.” We would like to know the view of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Novaya gazeta

“STOP WORRYING …”: THE CADET ADMITS HIS GUILT AND TRIES TO APOLOGIZE

December 5, 2002

You can’t take a mentally ill person to court. You have to pity a sick person and get treatment for him. Some people may disagree, but that is what I believe.

Sergey Lapin, whom readers of our newspaper are more familiar with by his Chechen nickname of The Cadet, has written to our editorial office. He reads
Novaya gazeta
, and accordingly we are publishing this Reader’s Letter.

Moscow

To A. Politkovskaya

Dear Anna,

I read a piece about myself in the last issue of
Novaya gazeta
, No. 36, the one addressed to the Prosecutor. “The lives of
Novaya gazeta
journalists are again threatened” and that was because of my letters from the pre-trial detention facility in
Pyatigorsk and I have altered my decision now. That is, I have changed my mind about shooting you with a sniper’s rifle. Specially because I haven’t got one and it would be silly for me to pay for one just because of you. Stop worrying I don’t need you. Which is what I told the court and so they let me out as not a danger to society. I wrote because I had nothing to do and it was a joke. I am not such a complete fool to write letters with death threats to you and report my exact location. I was joking so I can just write you another letter and you can even print it in your “column” so everyone can read it and see my literary talent. It can be part 2 of my letters to you. I think it reminds me of somebody but perhaps it only seems that way to me because this is all my own literary work, and not anybody else’s. Anyway The Cadet writes

REPENTANCE

I am writing you this letter
Because I want you now to see
That I don’t care if I’m your debtor
Or if you look down on me
At first I thought I’d just keep mum
And you’d have never known of that
You’d have thought I had gone dumb
But then I thought that was just sad
And so this poem now I write
It’s difficult to make it suit
And make it all come out all right.
To torture you and maybe shoot
and cut your throat and strangle you when I am drunk …

The Cadet

The letter needs no commentary. This former militia officer is just very sick, a common condition given the way the Second Chechen War has developed under our supreme Commander-in-Chief, Vladimir Putin. The majority of soldiers who have served in Chechnya need serious
rehabilitation but are not getting it, and the state machine which propelled them into the tragedy now spits on them from the great height of its Kremlin bell-tower. As it does on the rest of us.

We will not take out proceedings against a sick man: I forgive him and accept his “repentance.”

Let it be clear, however, that in our opinion Sergey Lapin should be condemned for the crimes he committed in Grozny, and this newspaper will do everything a newspaper can to report fully the trial of Criminal Case No. 15004. We will do our utmost to prevent his being represented as some perverse new “Hero of Russia” in the mould of ex-Colonel Budanov, rather than showing him to have been a fiendish torturer and killer.

THE SERGEY LAPIN CADET CORPS: HOW MANY PROSECUTORS’ OFFICES ARE THERE IN RUSSIA?

August 7, 2003

Strange things are going on. The Prosecutors’ Offices in different parts of Russia are declaring unilateral independence. There seems to be no controlling hierarchy and they seem to have no nationally established goals and obligations. In short, there is no “dictatorship of the law,” each of them within their own region making up the law as they go along. The struggle for independence from each other of the city, district, regional and national Prosecutor-General’s Offices is demonstrated in the quite extraordinary way they are pulling in different directions in the case of The Cadet, No. 200201389/46.

Novaya gazeta
has written about this saga more than once. Our indignation that, after all that had happened, The Cadet was still employed as a militia officer in Nizhnevartovsk led to his being charged and sent to prison in Pyatigorsk. Not, however, before he had had time to contact our offices to express his great displeasure and threaten to kill us. Afterwards, when he was surprisingly released from prison as posing no danger to society, he went on to withdraw his previous threats in writing, mentioning that he could no longer afford to buy a sniper’s rifle.

At the present time The Cadet nevertheless faces court proceedings, while simultaneously contributing, to the best of his ability, to the internecine strife between the Prosecutors’ Offices of Russia. No sooner had the Basmanny District Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow summoned me for further questioning (the last time was on July 30) than Investigator G. Rodionov wrote to demand that the original of Lapin’s letter withdrawing his death threat should be produced, this having long since been delivered to the Nizhnevartovsk Prosecutor’s Office. On August 2 an official letter, Notification No. 104402 of July 24, 2003 from the Nizhnevartovsk Prosecutor’s Office, was brought to my front door.

I hereby notify you that pursuant upon the results of the preliminary investigation of Criminal Case No. 200201389/46 I have issued a ruling that the criminal case (prosecution) should be closed on account of S. Lapin not having committed any offence provided for under Article 109 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Senior Investigator of the Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Nizhnevartovsk, E.N. Shchinov.

The date, we note, is one week before my questioning in the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office, where I was officially assured that the case was continuing and hence further investigation, for example analysis of the handwriting of the letter, was required. Now, no less officially, Senior Investigator Shchinov appears to have closed the same case.

Which of our territorially sovereign Prosecutors’ Offices is to be believed? On whose breast should I lay my weary head and crave protection? It is a serious question. And that is not all. There is in addition to the City and the District also the Prosecutor’s Office for the Southern Federal Region under the direction of Sergey Fridinsky, from which come even more rulings on the Cadet affair. And then there is the Prosecutor-General’s Office, directly subordinate to Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov. They have their own, fourth, version of how events may unfold.

Almost a year has passed, during which time the case has been closed and reopened four or five times by different Prosecutors’ Offices.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office opens it and issues demands, the Nizhnevartovsk one closes it and does not want to receive anything. The Southern Federal Region reopens it, and the Basmanny loses it and forgets all about it.

One could simply resign oneself to all this and put it down to Russia’s age-old inability to get its act together. The telephone isn’t working, the fax has been switched off, there’s been a downpour, a snowstorm is expected, there’s been a blizzard of bureaucratic paper. But what if someone really does need the state to protect them from some weirdo with a grudge? The feuding of the Prosecutors’ Offices rules out any possibility that such protection will be forthcoming.

There is one further possible explanation for what is happening, summed up by the expression, “they are reeling us in.” Officialdom is doing everything in its power to ensure that The Cadet, who stands accused of war crimes committed during the Second Chechen War, should have the best possible chance of eluding justice.

Look out for yourselves, readers! If by chance your hitmen have failed to do their job, beware of Prosecutors’ Offices. That is the real Corps of Cadets. The National Association of Prosecutors for Aid to the Accused. If your hitman has not yet proved himself, he can be sure of a sympathetic ear in a Prosecutor’s Office. If not in one, then in another, because they all work entirely independently.

SHOULD THE CADET BE ARRESTED FOR ABSCONDING?

October 23, 2003

Today The Cadet, Sergey Lapin, until recently a militiaman in Nizhnevartovsk, is one of more than a million federal military personnel who have served in Chechnya. He came away with an evil reputation as a torturer and abductor. Now, in addition, The Cadet/Lapin has shown himself to be a coward. On October 14 neither he nor his lawyer showed up at the court hearing.

Let us recall the background. In January 2001 there was no more
dreaded place in Grozny than Pavel Musorov Street where the Khanties – the Khanty-Mansiysk Combined Militia Unit – were stationed. On January 2, a group which included Lapin abducted 26-year-old Zelimkhan Murdalov in the street. He was dragged into the Khanties’ compound, brutally tortured and then disappeared without trace. It was a typical atrocity for Chechnya but had an untypical aftermath, because in this instance it proved possible not only to get a criminal case opened against Lapin, but actually to have it brought to court.

What is more, it came to court in Grozny, despite several attempts by the Chechen Supreme Court to torpedo the first such trial of a federal serviceman. It was only thanks to the resolve of the Russian Supreme Court that Lapin’s trial opened in the October District Court of Grozny. The presiding judge was Maierbek Mezhidov, a professional who had practised for many years under all manner of regimes. As he intoned the customary, “Hearing of the case of …” the voice of the grey-haired judge was shaking, as if he were a schoolboy taking an exam. “He is so frightened,” people who have come to the courtroom whisper understandingly. Fear, of course, is something everyone in Grozny lives with; fear of suffering the fate of Zelimkhan Murdalov underlies the words and deeds of people who have lived many years in the embrace of war and death. Judges are no exception, despite supposedly enjoying the protection of the President himself. But the President is far away in the Kremlin, and the Khanties, who in the build-up to their colleague’s trial have threatened everybody associated with this case, are very near. There is no escaping them in Grozny.

“The accused, Lapin, has failed to appear at this hearing,” Mezhidov quavers. “No explanations have been received. Your submission?”

In his nervousness, the judge forgets the correct judicial procedure and calls upon the plaintiffs’ lawyer rather than the Prosecuting Official. Stanislav Markelov is the first Moscow lawyer in the course of this war to have risked coming to Chechnya to protect the interests of a Grozny family seeking a disappeared son. He is laconic but precise, and demands that Lapin should be arrested and brought under guard before Judge Mezhidov.

“In the past the accused has regularly disrupted the investigative process without providing reasons,” Markelov says. “This is a flagrant contempt of Russian law. The court should take appropriate measures.”

The judge looks horrified. This Moscow lawyer is outspoken in a way unheard of in Grozny. There is, however, no escaping the fact that Lapin’s behaviour is the height of insolence. It was a condition of his bail – granted more than a year ago when the Pyatigorsk Municipal Court ruled that this torturer and abductor “did not pose a threat to society” and promptly released him from prison – that he would immediately surrender himself to the court when summoned.

“And you, Murdalov?” the judge asks.

“I don’t just support the lawyer, I insist on this,” Astemir Murdalov, the father of the disappeared, replies abruptly. He is a hero. By his own titanic efforts he has done most of the investigative work in this case which should have been done by the Prosecutor’s Office.

“I invite the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office to speak,” the judge quavers.

The role of Prosecuting Official has devolved upon Prosecutor Antonina Zhuravlyova:

“I would be inclined to agree with this view, but having familiarised myself with the documents …”

Zhuravlyova has noticed that, surprisingly (or perhaps deliberately), the court itself has been quietly playing into The Cadet’s hands. Judge Mezhidov has simply failed to take the requisite procedural steps to ensure attendance of the accused. Is that credible in such an important case, the outcome of which is awaited by tens of thousands of people whose relatives have been disappeared by the federals in Chechnya? When an opportunity has finally arisen to use the law to establish what happened to one of them at least?

Prosecutor Zhuravlyova insists that the court should follow the letter of the law:

“The court should issue a summons through the court bailiffs. It should issue a warning to lawyer Derda [Lapin’s defence lawyer] through the Stavropol Regional College of Lawyers and raise the matter of disciplining him with the College.”

“The bench will retire to consider,” Judge Mezhidov murmurs and hastily leaves.

We don’t have long to wait. We talk quietly to other people in the courtroom. Shamkhan Khaisumov’s eyes are haunted. He has come here because for three years he has been searching in vain for his brother, Sharip, who was also abducted by the Khanties, from his own home opposite their compound.

“We call their base Buchenwald because we can hear the groaning all round the neighbourhood. I know exactly which Khanties were involved in my brother’s disappearance. Their names are Rauf Baibekov, Andrey Karpenko and Rashid Yagofarov. Several investigators have been replaced in the course of the case. The present one is Konstantin Krivorotov from the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office. I asked him to question a witness who could show him a place where the Khanties bricked in people they had abducted while they were still alive. Perhaps we might find my brother’s bones in there. I asked Krivorotov to inspect that brickwork, but he said they had been forbidden to travel to the scene of the crime because it was too dangerous. How about that? I have written to Putin, Gryzlov, Patrushev …”