Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (39 page)

We need to think now in order to survive, for all our sakes. In memory of the children of Beslan.

The cowards can help only by quitting. They have already done quite enough.

GROWING DOUBTS

December 1, 2005

It is finished. The conclusions of one of the parliamentary commissions into the Beslan slaughter have been published at a session of the North Ossetian Parliament. The inertia has been overcome, which can only be to the good.

Some of the report’s conclusions, however, create a strange impression. For example, Mr Kesayev, the Head of the Commission, assures us that the first telephone contact with the separatists occurred 28 hours after the start of the terrorist act, that is, towards noon on September 2. That is incorrect. Contact had been established two hours after the start of the terrorist attack, on the morning of September 1, as anybody who took an interest in the matter has known for a long time. Who initiated these contacts? Well actually, as it happens, I did, which is why I know. Indeed this fact of when contact was made with Maskhadov’s side was later recorded in the evidence of Alexander Torshin’s “Parliamentary Grand Commission.” Again, I gave that evidence in the Soviet of the Federation and Mr Torshin subsequently made use of it when discussing the Beslan tragedy in a television documentary on its first anniversary. The documentary was televised, and I can only suppose that somebody from Kesayev’s Commission must have seen it.

According to the Commission, the North Ossetian leaders (Dzasokhov and Mamsurov) attempted to contact Maskhadov but were unsuccessful. That too is incorrect. On September 3 Mr Dzasokhov spoke to Mr Zakayev, at that time Maskhadov’s Special Envoy in Europe,
and Mr Zakayev asked only for a corridor for Maskhadov to travel through. Mr Dzasokhov promised to make the arrangements, but didn’t lift his mobile phone again, and the assault began.

One other conclusion of the report: it is asserted that these contacts were in any case pointless, because Maskhadov and Zakayev were complicit in organising the terrorism. This leads to a claim that the North Ossetian leaders were right to rule out negotiating with these guilty parties.

The Beslan inquiries fail to consider the most important point: that all these questions (whether tanks fired on the school and when, whether there were Bumblebee helicopters overhead) would never have been necessary if the leaders had only negotiated. Higher-ups in Moscow, however, gave the signal to attack, and the small fry in Vladikavkaz did as they were told. Taking that hard-line path, they turned the tragedy into a full-scale military operation, with catastrophic consequences.

It seems legitimate to ask what, actually, was the point of this inquiry? Was it for the victims, firstly, so that they should be clear who was responsible for the deaths of their dearest? Was it for society, to avoid anything of the sort being repeated?

To avoid a repetition does not mean making sure that during the next terrorist attack the next FSB general thinks twice before bringing in tanks, and instead decides to use a top secret weapon which is silent, colorless, has no smell and can never be detected.

That is not what is meant at all. To avoid a repetition it is essential that next time the state authorities should immediately, without losing a minute, enter into negotiations, should know how far they are prepared to negotiate, and have negotiators to hand. And that that plan should be carried out fully, so that it never again comes to gunfire and explosions.

“THE PRESIDENT SIMPLY DISAPPEARED FROM THE LIST OF WITNESSES”

January 23, 2006

The first meeting in the New Year of the Federal Parliamentary Commission on Beslan, chaired by Alexander Torshin, will be held on January
26, 2006. As already reported, there has been a split. On December 28, just before the New Year holiday, an account of the work the Commission has done in the past 16 months was delivered, rather than the long-promised report. The account was manifestly superficial and derived from the assertions of the official investigation. Most of the Commission’s members kept entirely silent, true to their signed undertaking not to talk about material matters or how the Commission’s work was proceeding. One member with a different view is Yury Ivanov, a Communist Deputy in the State Duma, who replied to our newspaper’s questions.

Yury Pavlovich Ivanov has been a Communist Party Deputy of the State Duma since 1994 and is currently Deputy Chairman of the Duma Committee on Development of the Constitution. He is no longer a signed-up member of the Communist Party, is aged 61, and is a well-known barrister. He defended Vladimir Kryuchkov, Director of the KGB, during the case against the 1991 putsch conspirators; Alexander Rutskoy after the shelling of Parliament in October 1993; and the Communist Party in the Constitutional Court.

Why were the members of the Commission pledged to secrecy? What fearsome secret is it that you all have to keep?

I have no idea. I firmly believe that all the officials who passed before the Commission should have been questioned openly and publicly, in the presence of the press. That is a fundamental principle. The Commission was working to procedures approved by Sergey Mironov (Head of the Soviet of the Federation) but the rules were not even discussed in the Duma. I was informed that all the members of the Commission had signed a secrecy agreement and accepted legal liability if they breached the undertaking. I should mention that the recently passed law on parliamentary inquiries contains no such requirement. Our procedure specified that all the Beslan meetings were to be held behind closed doors, despite the fact that the law on parliamentary inquiries requires quite the opposite: that all sessions should be held in public except in exceptional circumstances, where matters involving state secrets are being investigated.

What part of the evidence heard by the Commission bore any relation to state secrets?

There were no classified matters, no state secrets. After we had been working for a year and a half Alexander Torshin, Chairman of the Commission, declared that only 1 per cent of what we were discussing was secret. What I could see as necessarily secret was only some diagrams showing the position of snipers and revealing their names, and also those of members of the tank corps who fired on the building. That was all. Even if nobody had signed anything, we would never have dreamed of talking publicly about that.

Then why was it necessary to shroud the Commission’s work in this ambience of high secrecy?

Boris Gryzlov, the Chairman of the Duma, came to one of our sessions. It was one of the sessions, incidentally, where every one of my proposals was turned down. I recommended that you and Andrey Babitsky from Radio Liberty should be questioned by the Commission to establish why you were unable to reach Beslan at that time, and what was behind the scuffle at Vnukovo Airport on September 2 for which Babitsky was detained just before he was to fly to Beslan, and so on [see
above
]. I also wanted us to seek information about the Alexander Pumane affair. You may remember, several dozen FSB and Interior Ministry generals met at a district militia station in the middle of Moscow, after which Pumane wasn’t just killed there but so badly beaten that neither his mother nor his wife were able to identify him. They had made mincemeat of him and DNA tests were required. It was claimed at the time that Pumane had been planning to blow up the President’s motorcade on Kutuzovsky Prospect, and that it was all closely related to terrorism.

Gryzlov, however, declared all that to be irrelevant, nothing to do with the Commission. They didn’t even vote on my proposal. The paradox is that the procedure made clear that Torshin was the Commission Chairman in charge of all sessions while Gryzlov, as Chairman of the Duma, could only attend as an observer, not take the chair or issue rulings about my proposals.

To Mironov’s credit, he was more tactful. He attended the sessions fairly frequently, sat, listened, asked permission to speak, and had to be granted it. Mironov, however, also made it very clear what the Commission’s job should be: “You need to channel, channel, and again channel.” Then everything became clear to me.

Channel what?

The public mood. Our job was to reassure the public.

But the only way you could do that would be by establishing the truth
. I doubt whether even the truth would salve the suffering of the mothers of Beslan, but I emphasise that the Head of the Soviet of the Federation from the outset saw the Commission’s main task as being to channel public concern. He regarded the members of the Commission as public relations ditch-diggers. I believed instead that the Commission should be reporting the truth to society. I had been entrusted with establishing the causes and circumstances of the terrorist attack, and I should set them out clearly. The campaign of reassurance led to completely perverse interaction between the public and state authorities, for example when the investigators were obliged to appear before the victims in a Beslan community center and give a joint report at the very beginning of their inquiry. In my view, it was Putin and his administration who should have been explaining themselves to the victims at that time.

What are the main facts about Beslan which were excised when the account of December 28 was being written and which might have been fundamental to an assessment of the tragedy?

I divide all the inquiries into Beslan into criminal and parliamentary categories. The Commission did not, and still doesn’t, have the tools required to fully establish the actual circumstances. We have no right to caution people about giving false evidence; to oblige witnesses to confront those they are testifying about; or to carry out tests ourselves. That means that any conclusions we draw in this area will be based 75 per cent on information from the official investigation, which may have been economical with the truth or distorted. We were supposed
to concentrate instead on the actions of federal officials. The national aspects were to be covered by a Commission of the North Ossetian Parliament under the chairmanship of Stanislav Kesayev which, in my opinion, did a good job. Their report is frank and honest, and that’s what really matters.

We should have started by evaluating the actions of the President and Patrushev, the Director of the FSB. Unfortunately, in all these 16 months the Commission did not consider the matter of the President’s responsibility for Beslan. We initially expected to question him; Putin was listed as a witness for a whole year, but suddenly disappeared.

The Commission passed no resolution to take Putin off the list?

No, and neither did it discuss why his name disappeared from the list of witnesses.

One other extremely important question, which I raised many times, was the matter of calling representatives of the Caucasian clergy. Nobody in the Commission seemed to object to hearing from the Wahhabis. I wanted to contact them all the time, to talk to them and understand them. Wahhabism is not banned. I began trying to find them. When we were hearing from the heads of the FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service, I asked them who the emissaries of Wahhabism were in the Caucasus. Either they do not know or they did not want to answer, but I remain convinced we should sit down together and talk. I remember I went to the Duma Committee on Religious Affairs and asked if they could give me the names of the leaders of Wahhabism, because I wanted to meet them. One of the vice-chairmen said, “Here is the telephone number of the main Wahhabi. He will tell you all you need to know.” I rang, and it turned out to be the number of Geidar Djemal, a well-known Moscow philosopher and political commentator. That’s our level of understanding of these problems.

If Putin had not been removed from the list of witnesses, what would you have asked him?

The Kesayev Commission confirmed that Zakayev had said Maskhadov was prepared to take part in negotiations. It is clear that Maskhadov’s
going into the Beslan school might well have resulted in the children being released. I am certain the resistance fighters would have deferred to his authority. They had stated that they were under Basayev’s command, but that Maskhadov was their President and that negotiations should be conducted with him. Putin, however, did not want Maskhadov turning up in Beslan because any raising of Maskhadov’s profile would immediately have deflated the authority of the Kadyrov gang.

When Kesayev’s report was published, the pro-presidential press claimed it emphasised that Aushev and Dzasokhov had phoned Zakayev and asked for Maskhadov to come, but that he had not made contact. That was wilful misrepresentation of the situation.

In my view, everything should have been handled differently: all television broadcasts should have been interrupted, the President should have appeared on all channels and announced that he was providing Maskhadov with a corridor of safe conduct and guaranteeing his immunity. Urgently, no matter where he might be, Maskhadov should appear in Beslan and order the resistance fighters to cease their action. Then he would be free to depart.

Putin chose not to do that. He had already announced that Maskhadov was a criminal and the only way to treat Maskhadovs was to pulverise them in in the shithouse. The chickens had come home to roost: in that dreadful situation in Beslan the President was a hostage to his own big mouth. His vanity did not allow him to go back on his words, and the lives of thousands of people took second place to his vanity. That is why Putin delegated the problem from a federal to a regional level, and as President of North Ossetia Dzasokhov had no authority to organise a corridor or guarantee safe conduct.

That was followed by the assassination of Maskhadov. He could have been questioned about many things afterwards. Instead, somebody gave the order not to take him alive but to throw grenades at him. Putin talks a lot about international terrorism, but if they had taken Maskhadov prisoner, who would have been better placed to say who is financing the terrorists, whether the resistance fighters have their own network of agents and bribe-takers in the Kremlin, and where the
weapons came from that were used in Beslan? Quite clearly, Putin did not want Maskhadov taken alive.