Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (42 page)

Most of the residents don’t understand what she’s talking about. At 81 you shouldn’t really need to prove that you are not the worst member of society. At that age all you want is to be able to rest at the end of your life, on a state pension.

At the meeting of “Our Home” Wanda Voitsekhovskaya has been sitting motionless for several hours. Everybody has been talking except her. She holds her head proudly and her beautiful eyes have a firm gaze. She looks indomitable. But one to one, Wanda is nervous and much less self-possessed.

“I am homeless, an outcast and a beggar. I have no sleep, no life, no rest.” Wanda has great difficulty speaking because of high blood pressure. “I had everything then: a house, a dacha, a garage, a car. In Grozny. I lived there from 1950. I was sent there when I graduated from the Kiev Engineering Institute. I worked for 38 years in the same place as a planner. My husband was crippled in the Second World War. In 1992 my daughter married a very good man and came here to Moscow. He has a room in the Komsomol Automobile Factory hostel and that’s where all of us live now. My husband died in 1996. I was in a terrible state when my neighbours in Grozny saw me to the train and sent me back to my daughter. I thought it was just for a short while. I thought I would qualify for a pension.”

Wanda sleeps on a divan now with her 12-year-old grandson. On the neighbouring divan is her younger grandson. It is a tiny room where you can either sleep or get up and go somewhere else. There’s nowhere to sit. For someone old and ill it is intolerable. Because her age means she gets very tired, Wanda has become convinced she is just a burden on her children.

“I am very ill, facing complete immobility. I want to stay on my feet as long as I can so as not to be a trouble to anyone. I collect empty
bottles to pay for medicine. Why has the state shifted its problems on to our children’s shoulders? I can’t understand. Why can’t I be allocated my own little corner? It wasn’t me who destroyed everything I had in Grozny.”

Valentina Kuznetsova is frail and beautiful. She does not take off her headscarf or her coat. Her hands are clenched and her lips pursed. Valentina holds herself in so as not to burst into tears. A feverish flush blotches her cheeks but she is constantly shivering and shifting, even when sweat is pouring off the others because of the stuffiness. Chronic malnutrition is the companion of refugees. It strikes everybody regardless of their merits and Valentina, who was an engineer in Grozny, had many of those in her former life. She is 78 now. In January 1995 she and her elder sister Alexandra were dragged half alive from their cellar in Grozny by soldiers of the Ministry for Emergency Situations and sent to Moscow when it was discovered that they had relatives there. It was a perfectly reasonable course of action.

Almost ten years have passed, and throughout that time Valentina has lived in Moscow with her bedridden 80-year-old sister in the utility room of School No. 1142.

“Of course the conditions are a nightmare,” says Headmaster Iosif Protas. “Valentina at first worked as the school caretaker, but then we were ordered to employ private security firms. We couldn’t just throw them out on to the street. My conscience wouldn’t allow that. The old ladies have been taken in by their nephew now. He is off travelling somewhere and his apartment will be free for a time. They have left us, but their accommodation problem is no nearer a solution. The authorities won’t allocate them anything. I don’t understand how they can behave like that.”

They can behave like that very easily. The legal situation of elderly Russian refugees from Chechnya is as follows: under the law they are “internally displaced persons.” That status is awarded for only five years and some of the old ladies gained it. They fought to get it from the Migration Service, which in the last decade has been reorganised several times. Refugees with that status at least had the right to move unhindered around Moscow and to receive free medical care. Others
were less fortunate: the migration officials firmly refused it to these guiltless victims.

When the five years came to an end, those with the status found themselves no better off than those without. In the eyes of the Migration Service they had no rights whatsoever. So, five years is as long as the state is prepared to take any responsibility for fulfilling its obligations towards citizens who have lost everything through the state’s own actions. For five years the state is obliged to look after internally displaced persons, to provide accommodation, a welfare payment and health insurance. This supposedly gives them time to build a new life, to start afresh after they have irretrievably lost what they had.

Our state has simply cheated the “internally displaced persons” from Chechnya. It has strung them along for five years and provided them with nothing. The Migration Service announced that its assistance was time-limited and when that expired it would divest itself of all responsibility for them.

Who would dispute that the five-year rule is reasonable for young and middle-aged people who can be expected to find work and look after themselves? But what about those in their seventies and eighties? The disabled? How are they supposed to make a fresh start?

You may wonder why this report is confined only to Russian refugees from Grozny rather than including everybody who was forced to leave the zone of this never-ending “anti-terrorist operation” engulfing their beloved city.

It is because Chechen families, even if they themselves are living in poverty, will never fail to support their relatives. Such is the way they behave, and you simply will not find an 81-year-old Chechen lady scrubbing floors on 16 storeys. But Russian old ladies do. What is to be done? How is this situation to be resolved, quickly and effectively? The old ladies cannot wait.

In “Our Home” there are 53 families. These are the very poorest of all the homeless, people with no prospects. It is senseless to hope that resources from Russia’s super-abundant “proficit” budget are going to come their way. The officials would rather die than do without their kickbacks.

They must pin their hopes on the world of “socially aware business,” in favor of which [pro-Putin oligarch] Vladimir Potanin recently spoke so feelingly on television. The President bears personal responsibility for what is happening in Chechnya and for all its consequences, so let the Presidential Commission on Human Rights intercede for them with business. The Commission’s members include illustrious representatives of civil society like Svetlana Gannushkina, the Head of Citizen’s Aid, the most active voluntary committee in Russia defending refugees; and also Ludmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group. The President himself must be persuaded to support their petition by its Chairwoman, Ella Pamfilova. Fifty-three Moscow businesses should each buy an apartment, one for each family. They shouldn’t find that too difficult.

The meeting of “Our Home” dispersed. “The state wants to wait for us all to die so as not to have to spend money on us. I’m quite sure of that,” Zoya Markaryants remarks in parting. A former educationalist, her house in the center of Grozny suffered a direct hit. With the destruction of her home she lost everything she had, and now she is just another refugee from the war.

A HOSTAGE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

September 8, 2005

Anybody who watches the national Russian television channels saw the item. It was claimed that Adam Chitayev, a former resistance fighter with a federal warrant out for his arrest, had been detained in Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk Province. He was supposedly guilty of abducting both Russian servicemen and members of international missions, and was said to have been masquerading as a schoolteacher of English.

Russia has long been trained to believe this sort of thing. If a Chechen has been arrested, that’s as it should be, or if it’s not quite as it should be, then it’s better to be safe than sorry. Nobody gave a damn about Chitayev. Hundreds of criminal cases relating to so-called international
terrorism are cooked up like Siberian pelmeni dumplings the length and breadth of the country, on the principle of the more the merrier, and anyway you can’t tell the innocent from the guilty. Naturally, the arrest of some Chitayev or other was regarded as only proper, as what the law enforcement agencies are there for. But only by anybody who doesn’t know who Adam Chitayev is and, more broadly, who the Chitayev brothers are. In Strasbourg an increasing number of people do know. That, in fact, is where the answer is to be found as to why a man who was not hiding from anybody was suddenly arrested in faraway Ust-Ilimsk, only for it to be announced to the whole of Russia that he had been hiding.

The Chitayevs are appellants in
Strasbourg
v.
the Russian Federation
. What is more, they have almost won. This summer the procedure of having a case considered by the European Court of Human Rights, which takes many years, ended in an interim victory, a so-called “Decision on the Admissibility of Appeal No. 59334/00.”

The story of the Chitayev family is one to which
Novaya gazeta
has returned several times. Their fate was not unusual by Chechen standards in 2000. It befell many people, but very few decided to seek redress through the courts.

Arbi, born in 1964, was an engineer who had always lived in Grozny. Adam, born in 1967, was a schoolteacher. Like many Chechens he lived in Kazakhstan for a long time before returning to Chechnya in 1999, immediately before the war. Together with his wife and two small children he moved in with his brother in Grozny. “In autumn 1999 armed clashes began in Chechnya between Russian troops and Chechen rebels,” the European Court ruling reads, and, in accordance with the rules of Strasbourg, it is is based on documentation which confirms every word. “Grozny and its suburbs were the target of large-scale attacks by Russian soldiers.”

Arbi’s flat in Grozny was destroyed (as is confirmed by a certificate, attached to the case files in Strasbourg, from one of the apartment management boards in Grozny). “The plaintiffs, together with their families and possessions, moved to their father’s house in Achkhoy Martan. On January 15, 2000, members of the Interior Affairs Temporary
Office (temporarily occupied by militiamen from Voronezh Province) conducted a search of the plaintiffs’ house. They took with them a new cordless telephone in its packaging.”

On January 18, one of the Chitayevs went to complain to the Interior Affairs Office and to demand the return of the telephone. It actually was returned, but on April 12 retribution followed. There was another search and more looting, but also an arrest, followed by yet more looting. Things went from bad to worse, despite the fact that everything of any interest had already been stolen: a video, a printer, televisions, a computer, a heater, and “two files of documents.” Interestingly enough, a list of the stolen goods was provided to Strasbourg over the signature of one Vlasenko, an officer of the Achkhoy Martan Interior Affairs Temporary Office.

Arbi and Adam were arrested. On April 14 their father, Salaudi, went to find out what had happened to his sons and was himself arrested, officially for violation of the curfew. He was released five days later. The brothers were held in the Interior Affairs Office for 17 days.

They were fettered to a chair by their handcuffs and beaten. Various parts of the body, including their fingertips and ears, were subjected to electric shocks; their arms were twisted; they were beaten with rubber truncheons and plastic bottles full of water; they were suffocated using adhesive tape, polythene bags and gas masks; dogs were set upon them; and pieces of skin were torn from them using pliers. Plaintiff No. 1 (Arbi Chitayev) had a gas mask put on his head which was pumped full of cigarette smoke. Plaintiff No. 2 (Adam Chitayev) was brought into a room and told he must confess to being a resistance fighter and taking part in kidnappings. When Plaintiff No. 2 refused to sign the confession, he was gagged with tape and beaten on the back and sexual organs. Simultaneously, another person pointed a rifle at him and threatened to shoot him if he moved.

On April 28 the Chitayevs, along with others detained in the Office, were taken away blindfolded and told that they were going to be shot.
In fact they were dropped off at the Chernokozovo pre-trial detention facility where

They were forced to run to an interrogation room, bending down and with their hands on their heads while the guards beat them on the back. In the interrogation room were an iron table and chair and there was a hook on the wall. They were kicked, and beaten with rifle butts and hammers on various parts of the body, concentrating on their kneecaps; straitjackets were put on them which were attached to the hook so that they were hanging from it, and beaten. Their fingers and toes were crushed using hammers and door jambs; their hands and feet were tied together behind their backs (the “sparrow” position) … The detainees were not allowed to pray under threat of further beatings.

The Chitayevs were lucky. They emerged from Chernokozovo in October 2000, having passed through all the circles of hell which are customary there but at least they were alive. They were outraged by their illegal arrest and torture, which made them rare among survivors of Chernokozovo, and this in itself testifies to their firm belief that the Russian regime had no grounds whatsoever for impugning them. The Chitayevs were not and never had been members of the Chechen resistance. It also mattered that they are educated, serious, socially active and progressive. Their indignation took them first to the Russian legal institutions – the Prosecutor’s Office and the courts – and then, when they were unable to raise any interest in their sufferings there, on to Strasbourg. Arbi and Adam Chitayev lodged official complaints, and Arbi took the difficult decision to emigrate from Russia, seeing no possibility of continuing to live in a country where such humiliations were possible. We met him abroad, where he was not enjoying exile and finding it difficult to make a living, but at least feeling safe. Four years on, remembering the details of his months of detention as he looked out of the window at life in Europe, he was shaking as if he had
Parkinson’s disease. Adam, however, decided to stay, moved to Siberia, and got a teaching job. In Strasbourg, meanwhile, the case, with the slowness which seems to be essential, edged up the queue of many thousands of appeals of his suffering compatriots, towards examination.