Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (15 page)

We remind our readers that the main event of the previous hearings in the Zakayev case on July 24 was the cross-examination of 35-year-old Duk-Vakha Dushuyev, formerly of Grozny, who was listed in documents of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office as a witness for the prosecution, but in court in London under oath began giving evidence as a witness for the defence, relating how in November–December 2002 he was tortured in Chechnya by members of the FSB who demanded that he give false evidence against Zakayev, to which he agreed. It was precisely this plotline which on September 8–9 received a sensational new twist.

Investigator Konstantin Krivorotov himself proved to have been “zombified” by the Russian Criminal Procedure Code. Junior Judicial Counsellor Krivorotov, Investigator of Particularly Serious Cases of the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office, no matter what he was asked in the Bow Street court, even if a question was entirely specific and required only “Yes” or “No” as an answer, responded with a long lecture on the subject of the Criminal Procedure Code, explaining how wise and benign it was, what blessings it brought to those arrested and under investigation, and what vast opportunities it gave representatives of the investigative agencies for treating suspects humanely.

Only, nothing to the point. It was futile to try to stop Investigator
Krivorotov when he was in full flood on the theory of Russian law. He became irate, demanded that he should not be interrupted, and even wagged his finger threateningly at the courteous British lawyers.

Why was that, you may ask? Quite simply, Investigator Krivorotov had a different task. He had been brought here to flannel, to confuse, and to divert the case from details, because the details of the saga of Duk-Vakha Dushuyev are potentially lethal to the extradition case.

But everything in its place. Krivorotov, the ardent supporter of the Criminal Procedure Code, found himself in London only because of Dushuyev’s testimony. At the end of November 2002, when the Prosecutor-General’s Office, demanding the extradition of Zakayev from Denmark, sent supporting documentation of very low legal quality and Zakayev was about to be released, Dushuyev was caught at a checkpoint in Grozny and taken, hooded, to Khankala. Under torture, he was offered his life in exchange for bearing false witness against Zakayev. He was taken to the FSB building on Garazhnaya Street in Grozny, next door to the Prosecutor’s Office. Investigator Krivorotov wrote several statements which Dushuyev was told to sign. A television crew was summoned to the FSB building to record the “voluntary confessions of Zakayev’s bodyguard,” which were then shown on NTV. Dushuyev was held in prison for two months on a charge routine in Chechnya – “membership of an illegal armed group” – but this was then dropped on the grounds that he had supposedly confessed, and he was released. Dushuyev left Chechnya that same day and fled through a number of countries before deciding to find Zakayev’s lawyers and admit what he had done. Such were the events which brought him, and consequently Krivorotov, before Judge Workman.

“Tell me, Mr Krivorotov, would Mr Dushuyev have been able to reveal any ill-treatment of himself during the course of the investigation? Before this hearing in London?” James Lewis, a lawyer acting on behalf of Investigator Krivorotov, asks a question which seems important to him. Mr Lewis is acting for the British Crown Prosecution Service, which is supporting (such is the way things are done here) the demand of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office for extradition of Akhmed Zakayev.

“There is a clear procedure,” Krivorotov says, staying firmly in his
theoretical realm. “Dushuyev had several opportunities to state that impermissible methods had been used against him. In the first instance at the Preliminary Investigation, to me. The Criminal Procedure Code …”

The courtroom is verging on despair. Only Sergey Fridinsky, Deputy Prosecutor-General of the Southern Federal Region, who has publicly vowed to have Zakayev returned to Russia, looks pleased. Today he is present in London and smiles into his moustache with satisfaction when Krivorotov gets on his hobby-horse.

“What was Dushuyev believed to be guilty of when you brought criminal charges against him?” By now it is Zakayev’s barrister, Edward Fitzgerald, asking the questions. He approaches in a roundabout way, and why this detail should interest him is unclear. “Was it illegal to be Zakayev’s bodyguard? After all, the government of which Zakayev was a member was recognised by President Yeltsin.”

“It is news to me that Maskhadov’s government was recognised by the President.” For the first time Investigator Krivorotov replies honestly. He is genuinely taken aback. Nevertheless he rapidly regains his composure. “Under the Russian Constitution there is no provision for the Minister of a self-proclaimed republic to have an armed bodyguard. Dushuyev was bearing arms at that time illegally. From 1999 Dushuyev was a member of an illegal armed group, the Chernorechiye Front. That is why charges were brought.”

“In other words, anybody who resisted the Russian troops in 1999 is considered to have committed a criminal offence?”

“Of course,” Krivorotov shrugs, glancing expressionlessly at Fridinsky and barking out the sentences he has memorised. “Anybody who opposes the federal troops is guilty of an act endangering society. In accordance with the Criminal Code.”

So the case proceeds, constantly returning inexorably to the central question to which Russia has no answer: what was and is actually going on in Chechnya from a legal point of view? Who is resisting whom there, and why? And how is the situation to be resolved?

This time Mr Fitzgerald is interrupted by Mr Lewis, to whose back the indignant Deputy Prosecutor-General Fridinsky has addressed a
remark. Discussing the political aspect of the Prosecutor’s Office’s work is not permitted.

“Fine. Explain how Dushuyev was provided with a lawyer.”

Reader, you should know that Aisa Tatayev from the Staropromyslovsky District Legal Assistance Service was brought to Dushuyev many days after he had been held in a waterlogged pit in Khankala, from which he was periodically dragged for interrogation under torture. She advised him to “tell them everything they want to hear.”

“Defence lawyers can be chosen by the accused, or appointed by the court. I knew where I could find Tatayev at that moment, and he was summoned. That is, I personally invited Tatayev.”

“How did you write the record of Dushuyev’s interrogation? Did you write down everything he said?”

“I have my own method. I first listen to everything a person says, and then note it down, asking supplementary questions. Dushuyev came with an admission of guilt, I listened, and then wrote.”

The official version, sent to London over Fridinsky’s signature on the eve of today’s hearing, is that Khankala was never involved, that there was no torture, that Dushuyev had invented everything. He came to the Prosecutor’s Office in Chechnya on December 1, 2002 of his own volition, wishing to confess his guilt in having participated in an illegal armed group, and the topic of Zakayev came up only by chance during his questioning.

“Well why, in that case, in the record which you compiled is there very little about what Dushuyev did, and a whole page about what Zakayev did, based moreover on hearsay? You were supposed to be investigating Dushuyev’s crimes, were you not? This seems strange.”

Investigator Krivorotov again changes tack and heads for the thickets of the Criminal Procedure Code.

“Fine. But did you know about Zakayev’s extradition case?”

“Yes. I realized that the record of Dushuyev’s interrogation would be used in the criminal case against Zakayev.”

“Then why in that record is there no indication that the witness was himself under investigation?”

“What would have been the point of that?”

“You knew that Dushuyev would be filmed by a television crew? In the FSB building?”

“I supposed so. The relevant request had been received from the FSB Press Department.”

“In writing?”

“Verbally.”

“Dushuyev had been detained and was in your custody, and you handed him over to members of the FSB, and they took him to their own premises for filming. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” Krivorotov is losing patience. He again wags his finger at the court. “It is Dushuyev’s right either to talk to the press or not.”

“It did not occur to you that this filmed interview, where Dushuyev, on the basis of hearsay, accused Zakayev of serious crimes, of illegal arms trading, might harm Zakayev’s case?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Does it not seem strange to you that Dushuyev was your suspect but that the FSB had access to him when it wanted? How did the FSB even know that Dushuyev was with you? Did you report that to the FSB? And if so, why?”

“No. I did not report it.” For the first time Krivorotov looks as though he is telling the truth. “When Dushuyev came to the Prosecutor’s Office with his admission of guilt, he was accompanied by FSB officers, and accordingly I released him to the FSB for filming.”

QED. Thus did Investigator Krivorotov slip on a banana skin. This admission was fraught with consequences: it meant that all the official documents, including those signed by Deputy Prosecutor-General Fridinsky, were untrue. The court could place no reliance on them because they had been found to contain lies. Moreover, it was evident from them that Dushuyev was right when he claimed that the Prosecutor’s Office in Chechnya did not work independently, that it knocked together whatever procedural papers were required, and thereby in effect legitimised the torture to which people were subjected by the FSB.

“I do not consider it substantive where Dushuyev came first, to the FSB or to us.” Krivorotov has suddenly realized what he has said. He explains that the majority of those arriving with an admission of guilt
go first to the FSB, and then the FSB brings them to the Prosecutor’s Office to formalise their confession. But the more he goes on, the more obvious is the lawlessness perpetrated in Chechnya with the blessing of the Prosecutor’s Office.

“Do you really not know that people are tortured by the FSB in order to obtain the evidence they want?” Although Barrister Fitzgerald is calm, it is evident that he already knows he has won. It had seemed at times, at the hearings on Monday and Tuesday, that this was a dead end. One side said one thing, the other the exact opposite, and how could it all be reconciled? How could one find the highest common factor which alone would make the dead-end submissions comprehensible to the judge, and hence also relevant to the issue of deciding on extradition? Investigator Krivorotov’s inadvertent admission that it was precisely the FSB who had dragged Dushuyev in to him had been brilliantly engineered by Fitzgerald. A subtle, virtuoso victory over falsehood.

“I don’t know anything about torture.”

Krivorotov is invited to familiarise himself with the official conclusions of the European Committee on Torture on precisely this issue. The investigator is forced to claim that he does not see what is going on right next door to him, but only a minute passes, and once again we see the man mesmerised by the Criminal Procedure Code:

“We in the Prosecutor’s Office are under an obligation to take legal action where facts such as these come to light.”

Of course you are, but the whole point is that for years you have been ignoring it!

Thus it was that Investigator Krivorotov became a witness for the defence, and hence against any possibility of extradition. Why? It had been been proved in court that the law enforcement agencies functioning on the territory of Chechnya are totally arbitrary and lawless. That is why Krivorotov could treat his listeners in a London courtroom only to long explanations about how things are supposed to be. He knew only too well how they are supposed to be, but he also knew that how they are bears no relation to that. Poor wretch. Anything goes, and nothing seems wrong. Barbarity becomes the norm.

At precisely 1300 hours Greenwich Mean Time Judge Workman interrupted Investigator Krivorotov with the magic words, “One hour for lunch.” By tradition, nothing on earth takes precedence over the lunch hour. The same inflexible rules, however, require that a witness whose cross-examination has not been completed should not discuss matters relating to what he is being cross-questioned about with anyone. This meant that while everybody else was having lunch, Investigator Krivorotov stood as lonely as a statue at the courtroom door, smoking nervously. Deputy Prosecutor-General Fridinsky walked past him from the Italian restaurant across the road. Others involved in the case made their way back for the afternoon sitting. One couldn’t help feeling sorry for Krivorotov, and an exceptionally humane impulse prompted your correspondent to go over and offer him a sandwich. Lord, how he recoiled! “No!” He shook his head as if he had been offered an arsenic sandwich. “But I have two. I have more than I need.” “No!” Investigator Krivorotov blushed and turned away, as if we did not know each other. Something wasn’t right.

THE PROSECUTOR-GENERAL’S OFFICE LOSES: LEGAL COSTS WILL BE MET BY THE RUSSIAN TAXPAYER

November 17, 2003

People can have entirely different perspectives: love Zakayev or hate him, support the Kremlin’s atrocities in Chechnya or fight them, rejoice at world leaders’ love of Putin or be horrified by it, but on November 13, 2003, shortly before noon Greenwich Mean Time, the entire Russian nation was given a good and deserved kicking by Europe. The Prosecutor-General’s Office had been asking for it for a long time. In Bow Street Magistrates Court, in the case of The Government of the Russian Federation versus Akhmed Zakayev, Mr Justice Timothy Workman delivered an outspoken and uncompromising judgment, beyond anything the most wild-eyed optimists had dared to hope for when they assured us that Zakayev would not be extradited.

The refusal of Judge Timothy Workman to extradite Zakayev
was based firstly on the grounds that Russia lacks an independent judiciary, so there can be no confident expectation of a fair trial; secondly, on the fact that racism flourishes in our country; and thirdly, because what is going on in Chechnya is not a rebellion or an “anti-terrorist operation” but a full-blown civil war instigated by the Russian Government itself in contravention of its obligation to avert wars, to extinguish them, and not to foment them within its borders.