Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (41 page)

1991, October 5: Took part in occupation of the KGB building in Grozny. Still a secondary figure, under Labazanov and Gantamirov.

1991, November 9: Took part in hijacking a TU-154 passenger aircraft from Mineralnye Vody Airport. The hijackers were led by Said Ali Satuyev, a professional civil aviation pilot.

1991: Following a decision of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, supported by the Russian security agencies and, in particular, by the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Armed Forces GHQ, armed detachments of volunteers took part in combat operations in support of Abkhazia against Georgia. The detachment commanded by Shamil Basayev gained a reputation for being particularly brutal towards the civilian population.

After Abkhazia, Basayev and his rabble turned up as mercenaries on the Azerbaijan–Armenian front.

1995, June: Seizure of more than 1,600 hostages in Budyonnovsk, including 150 children. One hundred and thirty people died at the hands of Basayev and his thugs.

Autumn 1999: Apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk blown up. Russian intelligence services claim the terrorists were trained through the joint efforts of Khattab and Basayev.

2002, October: Audience of the musical
Nord-Ost
and others taken hostage in Moscow.

2004, June 22: Raid on Ingushetia in which approximately 100 people died. Organised by Basayev and the current President of the unrecognised [sic] Republic of Ichkeria, Doku Umarov.

2004, August 25: Two passenger aircraft blown up with the loss of 90 lives.

And finally, the most dreadful terrorist atrocity of all, the hostage-taking at the school in Beslan on September 1, 2004.

On the night of June 9, 2006 Basayev, Russia’s bin Laden, was “blown to bits,” according to a press release from the FSB Directorate in
Ingushetia, in a powerful explosion in Ekazhevo. He reappeared, piecemeal, on Tuesday, July 11 when his head was sent to Nazran for one type of identification, and his artificial leg to Vladikavkaz for another.

Such are the official announcements, and if we were not talking about the iconic death of a terrorist we have been trying unsuccessfully to catch for the past 10 years, they might raise a smile. By Wednesday, July 12, however, the intelligence services were putting out completely contradictory accounts of the death of Terrorist No. 1. Basayev was an idiot dynamiter travelling in convoy from abroad in a truck full of explosives and primed detonators; alternatively, Basayev had been betrayed by someone on his own side who had taken the bait of half a million US dollars.

In tripping over themselves, they laid the foundations for future myth-making, like that which for so many years now has surrounded the death of President Djohar Dudayev. Since only those with a “need to know” have any idea where Dudayev’s grave is, and because nobody else has seen him dead, many in Chechnya will tell you to this day that Djohar is alive and will return when the time is right; alternatively, that he is alive and has gone into exile with the connivance of the intelligence services; or, then again, that it was not in fact a missile that killed him but …

In other words, where reliable information is not provided, look out for myths. Many Chechens are saying today that this is not the end of Basayev. He too will become a legend, and tales will circulate that he has been sighted on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, or …

No matter what the circumstances of Basayev’s death, whether he was blown up or blew himself up, the important thing is that he is dead. This baneful factor has been removed from the equation. So, what is going to happen in Chechnya now? Which resistance fighters will follow which flag? The explosion in Ekazhevo was probably welcomed by some of them who were plainly opposed to Basayev, and saw him as a black sheep who disgraced everyone. Let us not forget that the detachment of Gelayev, who was subsequently killed in Dagestan, removed itself to Georgia precisely because it didn’t want to fight Basayev’s way. It was a moment of truth: should the strategy of
outrages like
Nord-Ost
and Beslan be continued, or should it be rejected and a policy adopted that in no circumstances should atrocities be committed against entirely innocent victims? Mid-2002 was a watershed moment when our intelligence services should have shown some intelligence, but the opportunity was missed.

Now we are in 2006, almost four years after
Nord-Ost
, and soon it will be two years since Beslan. There is a new group in Chechen society, mainly young people, who are vacillating and uncertain. They refuse categorically to wait passively for Kadyrov’s brutes to come for them in the night, but were reluctant to join the fighters if that meant ending up with Basayev, when Basayev meant Beslan.

In the immediate future, the likelihood is that Basayev’s followers will fall in with Doku Umarov, who has the same ideas about the terrorist character of the war from now on. The remnants of other detachments are unlikely to follow, so a flood of new recruits, who were deterred by the bloodthirsty presence of Basayev, is more than likely. What the final configuration of the separatists will be is the big question.

Time will tell. One thing, however, is already clear: until relations between Moscow and Chechnya are finally sorted out in a manner acceptable not merely to Kadyrov but to a majority of the population, the situation is unlikely to settle down. Basayev’s having been blown to bits is not the decisive factor, merely part of the process.

^*
On the night of June 21, 2004, some 300 resistance fighters occupied the city of Nazran; 98 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The resistance fighters seized 1,056 weapons and burned down several administrative buildings, including the offices of the Nazran Interior Affairs District Office.

6. Russia: A Country at Peace

As the following pieces illustrate, a recurrent theme in Anna Politkovskaya’s articles is the regime’s application of state resources to bolster its stranglehold on power rather than to deal with the huge and pressing problems of the population it rules
.

THE TUNGUSKA METEORITE LANDED RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF RUSSIA, AND SO DID WE

December 25, 2000

Yielding to the desire to find a contrarian way to start the new century, our newspaper decided to leave its mark somewhere nobody has left a mark before. Apart from the Tunguska Meteorite.

On December 22, the day of the winter solstice, we arrived at the very spot which, since the demise of the USSR, has been the geographical center of the Russian Federation, the Evenki Autonomous Region. There, in the main square of the township of Tura, the capital of Evenkia, we erected a suitable monument designed by the Moscow artist, Dmitriy Krymov.

Admittedly, the square in Tura doesn’t yet have a name, so if you do decide to visit it you will have to ask a passer-by where the monument to the center of Russia is. Anybody will be able to point it out, though, because everybody in Tura, apart from infants and the very ill, came to the opening ceremony. Oh, and also those who went instead to the local Palace of Culture for a concert by Dmitriy Kharatian and Alexey Buldakov. At
Novaya gazeta
’s invitation they made the more than seven-hour indirect flight from Moscow to provide a top quality celebration of the unveiling of the monument.

Ivan Bakhtin, the Deputy Governor of Evenkia, told us that even
half a day before the celebrations in Tura nobody really believed the monument would be erected, or that the visitors from Moscow would arrive, or that there would be a fireworks display, and a concert, and presents.

“Why was that?”

“Because today’s temperature is 48 degrees below zero, which for us is considered warm.”

But now, what our readers really want to know is what the center of Russia is like. There is no escaping the fact that it is highly symbolic. What gives meaning to life here, in all its variety, is the struggle for survival. If you want to live, you need to be focused. Relax, and you die. If you want to eat, make sure you shoot plenty of game in season. If you want felt boots and a fur coat so as not to freeze, barter the pelts of bears, reindeer and sable you have killed for clothing. And never be on your own. If you are alone and you have a fall, you are dead. The world is ordered in a primitive but strict and logical manner, as befits a symbol.

We learned that it is a stone’s throw from the center of Russia to the pole of cold. The snow was not just very abundant, it was all you could see. Fir and pine trees do not survive, and even birch trees eke out a dismal dwarf existence. The local taiga is exclusively larch so the larch tree should be the symbol of this symbol of Russia, ginger-red and recalcitrant, not the blond, languid birch.

There does seem to be a vast supply of land rich in diamonds, oil and gas. The trouble is that first you have to get here.

There are no cities at the center of Russia, only townships, villages and factories. There is no gas in the houses, although there is plenty underground; no water, no drains, no avenues or embankments, neither along the Podkamennaya River nor over the Nizhnyaya Tunguskaya. Both rivers flow this way and that the length and breadth of Evenkia. Nobody has thought of trying to build anything we would recognise as a respectable road. There are no railways, no metalled roads, only an all-season dirt road 14 kilometres long which links Gorny Airport and Tura. All the other “highways” are passable only in the winter. Hence the work routine of the local administration consists of just three things: firstly, keeping the winter roads in good order;
secondly, monitoring the forces of Mother Nature as she constantly destroys them; and thirdly, starting all over again. If you let your mind wander and stop monitoring the infrastructure every day, you will soon be unable to move at all. Your world will contract to the size of your own inner world and you will exist in a snowbound cell.

Who, you might ask, is capable of enduring such hardship? The answer is, only 20,000 citizens of Russia. Here, in the very heart of Russia, a meteorite fell in the early years of the departed century. It became known as the Tunguska Meteorite. And now we are here too.

HOMELESS OLD LADIES

November 11, 2004

They sit ranged along an institutional wall, old ladies who abandoned Grozny in various years and in various wars. Their coats date from the 1980s, their boots from Soviet times. Everything is worn and looks like somebody’s cast-offs. Hopelessness is in their faces and there is a sense such as you find in wards for people who have been abandoned and attempted suicide. This is a meeting of “Our Home,” a voluntarily run circle of 53 families which refugees of the “Russian language persuasion” from Chechnya organised for themselves. All are now of pensionable age, and what brought them together was a determination to fight the state for their legal rights, to obtain registration, official status, accommodation and pensions. We are in Moscow and it is now October 2004. For many, it is 10 years since their exodus and the start of their struggle. What success have they had?

Taisiya Tolstova is 81. She listens, sees, moves, and is altogether very active. Taisiya was wounded in the Second World War. She worked for 58 years, 34 of them as a teacher and 30 of those in Norilsk. She returned from the Far North to the capital of Chechnya where she was born, a fourth-generation Russian Groznyan. Now, three times a week, Taisiya cleans all 16 floors of an apartment block in the center of Moscow, all the stairwells and the landings in front of the lifts. She has no choice.

Her remuneration is exactly what she needs, a place to sleep, a little
room for the concierges. The women are paid to be there for 24 hours, but instead go home at night, leaving the room free for Taisiya. It is a small, cramped space, into which only a narrow divan can be fitted, but you can sleep there, even if you have to take turns with your mentally disturbed son, Volodya.

Taisiya prays for the people who live in this block. They are her only hope of not sinking into living in filthy cellars. Under the rules of our amazing country, she has lost the legal right to work. She has no status, and without registration you can’t have a job or any other rights. In the 10 years which have passed since she fled Grozny, having lost everything she possessed, she has received nothing from the state which might even partially compensate her losses, enable her to get her life back on the rails, and provide a future for her son.

Taisiya has a daughter who is herself a pensioner. She lives in Norilsk, but the city authorities refuse to allow old women to move there. Taisiya couldn’t go there directly when she left Grozny. Apart from her daughter the old lady has two brothers of her long-dead husband living in Moscow and the Moscow Region. At their invitation she went to stay with them 10 years ago, and one did everything he could for the widow. He went to great lengths to have her registered to stay in his accommodation, but he too is far from young. His family finally questioned why they had to go to such trouble. It was the state’s responsibility to look after the old lady. Of course it was, and here the old lady is now, cleaning 16 floors three times a week, with all her possessions in a mop cupboard.

“Wherever we go people scold us. ‘Why have you all come back to Moscow?’ they ask. But where else could I go? This is where my family were.”

“Where do you eat? You don’t have a hob here, or running water.”

“I also look after the people who sleep in the entrance to the block. This is a big building, there are always people lying there. That is where I cook.”

“Where do you wash?”

“The same place.”

“And the toilet?”

“I have to ask somebody to let me in.”

Ask yourself how long you would last under such conditions.

“Am I going to die under a roof of my own?” Taisiya wonders. She says to passing residents of the block where she is allowed to live, “Look, a journalist has come to see me. Tell her, does anyone have a bad word to say about me? Am I a bad person? Or quarrelsome?”