Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (43 page)

The Chitayev brothers knew that Chechen appellants to Strasbourg were in a uniquely dangerous situation. Before hearing any verdict, very many of them would be murdered by “masked members of unidentified security agencies wearing combat fatigues,” as they are routinely described.

The Chitayevs did not, however, withdraw their appeal. On the contrary, they responded conscientiously to every inquiry from the European Court of Human Rights, wrote supplementary explanations, and were very active. Neither did the Russian state authorities leave them in peace. They were threatened with criminal cases, arrests and retaliation. The more vigorously the Chitayevs defended themselves, the greater the pressure which was brought to bear on them.

On June 30, 2005 their case was finally considered in Strasbourg. You read the court record with a sense that something is missing. Everything the Chitayevs allege has documentary confirmation: all our government’s replies to inquiries from the Court of Human Rights about the degrading treatment of the Chitayevs are bald, unsubstantiated assertions, mere fantasy along the following lines: “On April 12 when the plaintiffs’ house was inspected eight military greatcoats and four military jackets were found … video recordings of interviews with Shamil Basayev, a videotape of the documentary film
Nokhcho Chechnya: Day of Freedom
, photographs of Arbi Chitayev with a rifle.”

The suggestion is that here was a hotbed of resistance fighters and abductors of soldiers, never mind that the greatcoats belonged to the Chitayev brothers themselves, of whom there are four; or indeed that these are Soviet-era military greatcoats dating back to the days when the brothers were serving in the Soviet Army.

The result of this approach does not reflect well on Russia: a
“decision on admissibility” is effectively a ruling in favor of someone whose appeal has been accepted for consideration. The basis and approach of the future verdict is already evident in the decision on admissibility, as is obvious in the Chitayevs’ case. The Chitayevs will win their case against the Russian Federation because it has failed to provide any justification either for their arrest or for the looting of their home.

Every stage of the deliberations in Strasbourg has been followed by the Russian authorities, indeed an official government representative has been present at every hearing, including the last one on June 30. While they still had time, before the final verdict, the regime resuscitated their criminal case against Adam, Arbi being beyond their reach. Here we again find the eight military greatcoats and tape of an interview with Shamil Basayev. A warrant was issued for Adam’s arrest and locating him was not difficult as he was not hiding, indeed living at his officially registered address. Not merely a law-abiding citizen, but one tenaciously determined to have the law respected, Adam was arrested and sent under convoy to Chechnya.

This is barefaced retaliation for his appeal to Strasbourg, the state’s attempt to get even with someone who is not prepared to behave like a sheep.

KHODORKOVSKY AND THE PRISONERS AND STAFF OF PENAL COLONY 14/10 MAY BE IN DANGER

April 3, 2006

People divide into those who believe in conspiracies and those who don’t. I belong to the latter category. Conspiracy stories strike me as dull, whether they are about the violent seizure of power, or the Count of Monte Cristo. The weird tangles produced by real life are a thousand times more dramatic.

I have before me a document which, however, has not come
Novaya gazeta
’s way by chance. It was brought here by its author, a self-assured individual with a military bearing. He produced his identification
documents, his passport, certificate of graduation from a military college, and certificate of release from a place of detention.

“In February this year,” the document reads, “I agreed to take part in a certain operation. The location was Krasnokamensk in Chita Province. Its nature was as follows:

“During the night a group of six persons in two armoured vehicles, having rammed through the fencing surrounding Institution 14/10, were to break into the compound of the labor camp. Having broken through to the sector indicated by the group’s Commanding Officer, they were to adopt a defensive position and retain it for five minutes. After this they were to leave by the same route, abandoning the vehicles after a few kilometres and disappearing.

“The rendezvous was to be on April 20 in Khudzhand, Tajikistan. There all the participants would receive genuine passports as citizens of Tajikistan and, in the guise of seasonal workers, would be transported overland to the place of the planned events. They would be registered and prepared for the operation approximately 100–150 kilometres from Krasnokamensk. All equipment essential for conducting the operation would be prepared by another group functioning independently. The group would move out at the very last moment. The precise destination was known only to two of six men, myself and the group’s Commanding Officer. The others were operating blind and would receive material recompense. Now, concerning the reasons why I am appealing to you. My principled belief is that MBK has the basic right to take decisions concerning his own destiny. In reaching my decision on February 10 to participate I was certain that he was behind this operation. Now I am no longer 100 per cent certain of that.”

Obviously MBK is the imprisoned ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Krasnokamensk is a town on the outskirts of which Penal Colony 14/10 is located, where he is imprisoned.

If I understand correctly, the document describes a plan to organise an enforced “escape.” There could be only one outcome of any such attempted departure from the colony for Khodorkovsky (and not only for him): a bullet. “Shot while attempting to escape during a break-out
planned by members of the Yukos oil company organised crime group.” And that would be the end of the “Decembrist Exile” soap opera with its endless court cases on every pretext, its indefatigable lawyers, its Open Russia Foundation, its chemicals and destinies, its discussion of the right to scholarly activity in prison camps, the visits widely reported in the press, and so forth. The soap opera would have a stop put to it, and no doubt Khodorkovsky’s colleague, Leonid Nevzlin, would finally be extradited from Israel. Is all this credible? Entirely.

Then again, perhaps it is all complete nonsense, the lunacy of an individual citizen. Such things happen. But what if it isn’t? There could be yet another possible outcome: a prison uprising might appear to have happened, and who would be the ringleader of a riot in 14/10? Naturally, a person who aspired, or so the Kremlin claims, to great power. They would have been quite right to detain him in punishment cells, and indeed to have liquidated the rioter.

There are stories, as every journalist knows, which it is better to publish than keep to yourself. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this may save somebody’s life. If we are to give credence to the plan outlined above and our informant’s explanations, then the lives of prisoners in Corrective Labor Camp 14/10, of Khodorkovsky, and also of officers staffing the colony are presently under threat.

Should a newspaper report the probability of a deadly threat to somebody? Undoubtedly, in order to avert a possible tragedy. The enforced “escape,” no matter who was preparing it or for what purpose, is hardly in Khodorkovsky’s interests. The attempt to implement the escape might lead to the death of other prisoners and officers of the camp, the more so because the “seasonal workers” for the “breakthrough group” proved on closer inspection to be former military men, some of them ex-KGB officers, with a less than unblemished reputation. Some, indeed, had served prison sentences.

And what if it is a complete hoax, and
Novaya gazeta
is merely being implicated in an imaginary plot? We will sigh with relief, and thank God it was nothing more serious. And will ponder a fact which is in any case obvious: that in the expanses of the former USSR the
spinners of government PR have a place for retired officers with a prison record. Good old USSR.

AN ALLEGED PARTICIPANT IN A PLANNED ATTACK ON KHODORKOVSKY’S PENAL COLONY HAS BEEN FOUND GUILTY

In the Basmanny Court in Moscow sentence has been passed in the case of Vladimir Zelensky. Zelensky informed
Novaya gazeta
’s columnist, Anna Politkovskaya, of a supposedly imminent attack on the penal colony in which Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, is imprisoned. Zelensky was sentenced to three years in a strict-regime corrective labor colony for “knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism.”

This bizarre episode has amazed Zelensky’s lawyer and other participants in the trial, and left numerous questions unanswered. Zelensky himself refused to give evidence, readily pleaded guilty, and asked only that the trial should be over and done with as quickly as possible.

What Zelensky actually said before his arrest is described in Anna Politkovskaya’s article. Zelensky phoned Anna Politkovskaya in spring this year, saying he trusted only her and had important information relating to Khodorkovsky. He gave her a note about the alleged plot to force Khodorkovsky to “escape.”

Zelensky named a certain Babakov as the organiser of the plot, a former agent of the Tajikistan KGB, and insistently asked for a meeting to be arranged between him (Zelensky) and Khodorkovsky’s relatives or some of his former colleagues, like Leonid Nevzlin.

The tale had the air of a hoax or complete nonsense, but a subsequent psychiatric examination of Zelensky revealed no mental problems. When arrested in Chita he was found indeed to have a fake passport in the name of a citizen of Tajikistan which he had been using to cross the border and also a plan detailing the attack on the colony.

A native of Sochi, Krasnodar District, Vladimir Zelensky is a former soldier who graduated from the Saratov Higher Military Command
Academy of Chemical Warfare Defence. He had been sentenced to six years in jail by a Novosibirsk court for causing grievous bodily harm but was released on parole in August 2004 with almost three years of his sentence suspended, which the Basmanny Court has now re-imposed. He confessed unconditionally to the charge of knowingly communicating false information about an act of terrorism.

Zelensky refused to choose a defence lawyer and the court appointed Anatoliy Avilov, Chairman of the Basmanny Court in 1992–5, to act for him. Avilov finds the case puzzling. He suggests that Zelensky’s story was so implausible from the outset that no crime was committed. Neither can he understand why Zelensky should have admitted the charge before he had even been formally identified, hence before it was clear whether the man who came to
Novaya gazeta
’s offices was in fact him or a different person with a passport in his name.

“It is all very strange,” Avilov says. “Anyone making a knowingly false statement will usually try to stay out of sight, but Zelensky came forward. Why he should have done that is something only he knows, but I believe it is entirely possible that somebody impersonated him.”

A number of curious coincidences invite us to think this has been a deliberate dirty trick. After Zelensky came to the newspaper with his story, two public statements were made: the first by a Deputy of Zhirinovsky’s far-right Liberal-Democratic Party, who informed the press that
Novaya gazeta
was in possession of important information which it was withholding from the law enforcement agencies. The second, by a prominent political commentator, also accused the editors of withholding information about an imminent crime.

These speakers made their declarations very categorically and with great aplomb, unaware that by then we had passed all the information to the relevant agencies.

Following Vladimir Zelensky’s sentencing on the basis of these very strange happenings, we have a number of questions:

1. Why would a man who had not been identified and who could have pleaded not guilty completely accept the charge, decline a lawyer, and wish to return to a strict-regime labor colony from which he had only recently been released?
   
2. Where would a former soldier, unemployed and only recently released from prison, have found the money to travel around the country; and how did he come by a false passport in the name of a citizen of Tajikistan of such high quality as to enable him to pass freely through border controls?
   
3. Is not the conclusion of this case against Zelensky a ploy designed to preclude a deeper investigation and to conceal the identity of those behind this failed dirty trick?
   

[On October 11, 2006 Anna Politkovskaya was to have given evidence in court in relation to the Zelensky case, either confirming or not confirming the identity of the man in the dock.]

7. Planet Earth: The World Beyond Russia

Anna Politkovskaya did not only criticize the Putin regime and Russia’s “security forces;” she was not uncritical of the West. Nevertheless, she admired civilised and enlightened attitudes when she encountered them there, and hoped they might be transplanted
.

THE PRINCIPLE OF DENMARK: A PRISON WHERE THEY DON’T BEAT BUT RESPECT THEIR PRISONERS

February 1, 2001

It is generally accepted that we Russians do not like ourselves much. Clear proof of this is the appalling state of our 195 pre-trial detention facilities in prisons. For the second year in succession the inspectors of the Council of Europe have described conditions in these as tantamount to torture. Out of a total of over one million people in detention, almost 300,000 are awaiting verdicts in pre-trial detention facilities and prisons. According to Oleg Mironov, the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, 85,000 of these have no place to sleep (the facilities and prisons are 226.3 per cent over capacity), more than 90,000 are suffering from an active form of tuberculosis, and more than 5,000 are HIV-positive. Nor are prisoners given an easy time by their warders: in 1999, 3,583 officers in the penal system were punished for violations of the law and 106 were charged with crimes committed in the course of their duties. Their activities directly affect almost two million people, since that is the number of prisoners who each year pass through Russia’s pre-trial detention facilities, almost twice the number of people serving a sentence imposed by a court. The main reason for this is unjustified arrest, which remains the usual
means of fighting crime; as a result every fifth man in Russia has experienced prison. In 1999, 263,645 complaints were received by the Prosecutor’s Office about the methods of investigation and questioning used by members of the Interior Ministry, and one in four was upheld. Seventy per cent of complaints about court verdicts received in 1999 by the Human Rights Ombudsman contain claims that violence was used to obtain testimony during interrogation or preliminary investigation, and that this led to the imposition of an unjust sentence.