Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (20 page)

How many of them were there?

Sixty or seventy.

Who won?

It was Basayev’s ex-Chief of Staff. He said I should be hung up by the arms and have a thousand cuts made on my skin. They went away and conferred. I thought they were deciding how to kill me but when they came back they started beating me again, intermittently. They would beat me and then ask, “Are you going to do it then?” The third time I said I couldn’t take any more and would do what they wanted.

So what was it they wanted?

They wanted me to take a landmine into Rustam’s house and blow up Malik Saidulayev when he arrived. I agreed. Ramzan shouted, “Do you think I’m going to let you have the presidency? Even if Malik gets elected I will shoot every last one of you.”

He was talking about organising the assassination of Malik Saidulayev? Ramzan was commissioning it and you were to carry it out? They were to give you a landmine?

Yes.

What if you had not agreed?

They would have killed me.

After you agreed, what happened?

They stopped beating me and dragged other people from the cells. There are cells for prisoners which open directly into Ramzan’s courtyard. I saw three prisoners myself. I don’t know what they had done. They shot two of them in the legs in front of me. The third, who had already been
shot in the legs, was put in a car and taken away. Then they gave me tea, as if now I was one of them. They gave me something to eat. They brought some girls who sang and danced. They let me go the next day. I am supposed to tell them when Malik is coming to see his brother, and then they will immediately give me the landmine. I have gone into hiding. I have taken my family away. Ramzan warned that if I did not do what I promised he would massacre me and my family. I sent a statement to the Prosecutor-General. If Kadyrov Senior becomes President, my only option will be to join a group to fight him. What can I do? We just have to survive. I won’t let them take me alive a second time.

Hiding behind his black glasses, Ibrahim hobbles off. Everything that happened to him this August is typical of life in Chechnya in the run-up to the election. One could substitute names of other people who have been tortured in the same place and for the same purpose. The real pre-election campaigning by Kadyrov’s emissaries is mass intimidation under the slogan, “With Kadyrov, or Death!”

What we see looming is truly an election of despair. The Kremlin has created a monster worse than those which preceded him, and now he is not so easy to get rid of. If Kadyrov wins, it is inevitable that he will settle scores with his opponents, that they will retaliate, that there will be more bloodshed and atrocities, mistrust and radicalisation. That will be a war, whether you call it civil war or the Third Chechen War.

WHY KADYROV TOOK AGAINST OLD BALU: PRESIDENTIAL POWER IN THE ZONE OF THE SO-CALLED “ANTI-TERRORIST OPERATION”

November 20, 2003

Does Kadyrov want to be a real president? Does he want to live up to the election results declared on October 5 and, in accordance with the Constitution, protect the people of Chechnya from war, abductions, starvation and humiliation? What is he doing? What sort of a bargain are the populace getting?

For the past five months Marat Isakov has been searching high and low for his 77-year-old father, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov, Village Elder of Dyshne-Vedeno, a well-known man respected in this region as authoritative, upright and devout. In fact, as the people of Vedeno say of him, as pure as gold. He has made ten pilgrimages to Mecca, has stood up against the Wahhabis, and you will not find a house here where Old Balu, as he is affectionately known, has not buried the departed, reconciled enemies or counselled the young.

For some time, however, the elder Isakov had been an obstacle, in Kadyrov’s opinion. Old Balu failed to support him, spoke out against his methods, and on June 21 this year, during the period between the referendum on March 23 and the election on October 5 when Kadyrov was sweeping away all opposition, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov was abducted by “unidentified military personnel,” from the street next to his own in Dyshne-Vedeno, as he was going to a wake. His family have no doubt that the Kadyrovites were behind it.

Zeinap, Said Mahomed’s 75-year-old wife, who has borne him ten children and shared 60 years of her life with him, wrote letters to everyone she could think of, from the Prosecutor of Vedeno District to President Putin and Patriarch Alexiy. She enclosed a copy of his labor record book as a worker at the Vedeno forestry mill and as a blacksmith, his awards, expressions of appreciation for his numerous successes in socialist competition. It was all futile. “Information regarding the circumstances of the detention and present whereabouts of S. Isakov is not in the possession of any of the Ministries of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Chechen Republic.” In today’s Chechnya, this is a fearsome dismissal which leaves no grounds for hope. It came to Zeinap signed by the Military Prosecutor of Army Unit 20116, Judicial Colonel I. Kholmsky.

Balu appears to have been swallowed up by the earth, a man “who enjoyed unchallengeable authority among all strata of the population,” as a collective appeal from the Citizens’ Assembly of Vedeno District to President Putin put it when they demanded that the old man be returned.

“It was odd the way even people who agreed to help, people who
go into the military bases, to Khankala, suddenly changed their tune one or two days later,” says Marat, one of Said Mahomed’s seven sons. “One day they would be saying, ‘Yes, I’ve seen him. He will certainly be released,’ but the next it was, ‘No. I don’t know anything.’ ”

“Why do you think that is?”

“It was if they had discovered something, and suddenly wanted out.”

Zeinap continues:

“He is ill, taking medicine. He has high blood pressure and stomach trouble. I sense he is no longer with us. He would not have lasted this long in prison. They might at least return his bones. We went to Kadyrov’s father to petition. I tried to go to Kadyrov himself but his bodyguard shouted at me and drove me away. If a resistance fighter gets killed in the fighting, the soldiers return his body to the relatives for 15,000 roubles. But here is someone who was not guilty of anything. None of his sons were involved in anything either, and we can’t even have the body. I went to the Army Commandant in Vedeno and said, ‘If someone is guilty, he gets put on trial; but if he is not guilty does he simply disappear?’ The Commandant had nothing to say.”

Old Balu was as uncompromising as he was legendary. He famously never bowed down before anyone. He ignored Kadyrov’s demand to all mullahs and religious leaders and did not urge his fellow villagers to vote in favor of the new Constitution in the March 23 referendum. Nearly everyone else grumbled but did as they were told. More than that, Said Mahomed categorically rejected Kadyrov’s methods for ruling Chechnya, for example when it was announced that the Islamic fast was not to be observed as required by the Islamic calendar but to be moved by one week. This was his way of finding out which mullahs would defy him. The majority were scared and complied, if without enthusiasm. They wanted to live. Said Mahomed did not comply. He said publicly, “We should fear the Almighty, not Kadyrov.” This, of course, was passed on to Kadyrov, and retribution was not long in coming.

“Kadyrov was just establishing which of the mullahs were on side,” says a fellow villager. “We were very afraid for Said Mahomed, we
begged him to go to his son in Moscow. Kadyrov was removing from his path anybody who enjoyed authority and was not on his side, but Said Mahomed refused. He said, ‘I am too old to run away.’ ”

Shortly before he was disappeared, old Balu went to Ilaskhan-Yurt where a religious festival which is important for Chechens takes place once a year. People pray together. As he was approaching the village, the old man saw that the United Russia party was electioneering in the middle of the religious festival, and of course Kadyrov was there in person. Isakov did not disguise his outrage and left immediately. Again, Kadyrov was informed.

Strong people usually have no difficulty respecting the authority of other strong people. It is the weak people who seek revenge. Very little time passed before they came for the old man, a whole column of armoured vehicles. Some 200 soldiers, all to seize one ill old man.

Said Mahomed went outside the gates. Zeinap tried to dissuade him but he replied that they would not harm an old man like him. He had been checked hundreds of times. He walked through the gates and that was the last anybody saw of him. Zeinap heard the engines of the armoured column roaring as it turned and drove off. She and his sons wrote letters to every conceivable institution. The villagers held a meeting to demand that Kadyrov and the Army immediately return their greatly respected elder. The Prosecutor’s Office even opened Criminal Case No. 24049, but the official responses, when they came, were mere stonewalling. “No special measures (security sweeps) were conducted in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno by members of the federal forces between June 20 and 23.”

“There was just the pretence of an investigation and of inquiries,” Marat Isakov is convinced. “He was taken away by Kadyrovites. Kadyrov forces the mullahs to be corrupt, but my father was completely different. Kadyrov removes all genuinely religious people who separate religion and money. That has always been the way in our family. We kept out of politics and avoided friendship with government officials.”

Almost all the mullahs in Chechnya who found Kadyrov unacceptable, and openly said as much to the people, have by now been eliminated. The same is true of almost all the heads of rural administrations
in Chechnya. (The Chechen administrative system is based on enormous “villages” of up to 15–20,000 inhabitants.) But what, meanwhile, of the “President of the Chechen Republic”?

Having been proclaimed President, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov is today rarely to be found at his desk, and the way he spends his time can hardly be described as “leading the Republic.” Kadyrov’s life is divided between his fortress-home in Tsentoroy and Moscow, with a great deal more time being spent in the latter. This should be no surprise. Kadyrov cannot free himself from the past and continues to see keeping the Kremlin sweet as the first priority of his presidency, well ahead of working for the people. Truly he would need to move mountains in order to earn their respect. His “work” in Moscow of late has centerd on the long, drawn-out retirement of Alexander Voloshin, the Head of Putin’s Presidential Administration. Kadyrov was never away from the Kremlin while this was playing out, because his installation in power had been Voloshin’s swan-song project, and without Voloshin he was powerless. He started to become nervous when oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, and frequently travelled to Moscow to try to find a new and equally powerful patron.

Kadyrov in Chechnya is also a pretty gruesome spectacle. When he travels from Tsentoroy to Grozny, “to work,” so to speak, the arrangements are becoming even more spectacular than those in place for Putin’s journeys around Moscow. All roads and footpaths are closed, and cars and Kadyrov’s pedestrian subjects alike find themselves in a state of siege. He is scared that one of his subjects may decide to blow up the champion of their wonderful new life.

Kadyrov’s presidential ideal is also gradually becoming clearer. He has lately started hinting that it is the Turkmenbashi, the father of all Turkmen, who has turned Turkmenistan into the most oppressive of oriental despotisms in the post-Soviet territories. The Turkmenbashi is scared stiff of his people and roots out any semblance of dissent; he allows his officials free rein to thieve, and personally controls the corruption. He has an army of brutal mercenaries and influential backers beyond the borders of his land.

Who would deny that all the world’s dictators share a family likeness?
Kadyrov has Putin and the Kremlin as his backers; his murderous campaign against old Isakov and the mullahs; his regal progresses; and his levelling of society by the simple expedient of cutting off any heads showing above the parapet. As for corruption and officialdom, Kadyrov’s Chechnya is one big playground of graft and corruption.

One current example is what has happened to the promised compensation payments, the main plank of Kadyrov’s election campaign and something he and Putin were forever seen talking about on television. It is already November, and no compensation is being paid. The way Kadyrov organised it was to set up numerous special Payments Commissions (with a consequent sharp rise in the number of officials). These are headed by a phalanx of dodgy individuals, and a war is being waged between these officials and citizens who have lost their property and the roof over their heads. The purpose of this campaign is to loot the compensation fund. Just as he himself controls the oil pipeline, just as the Turkmenbashi controls the gas pipeline, so Kadyrov has made a gift to the officials of the compensation pipeline.

Senior compensation officials are hard at it, having mastered the well-known “tube of toothpaste” technique of squeezing out a percentage, a kickback. First they made sure that nobody could simply produce the documents proving their entitlement to compensation and get the money. People had to be registered and re-registered, lists had to be weeded and co-ordinated. Those removed from the lists had to make immense efforts to get reinstated, efforts expressed in terms of a percentage deducted from the compensation payment.

By now the population is so conformable it does not complain. In Avtury, the only person in the village to have received any compensation got 175,000 roubles instead of the 350,000 she was due, the remainder being siphoned off. She is happy and grateful to Kadyrov. In Grozny I could not find any such fortunate person who could say, “Oh, yes. I got the compensation and am building my new house.”

Either Kadyrov does not know what is going on, or Putin’s promises were a lot of hot air. And believe me, where there is money around, Kadyrov knows all about it.