Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [144]
On February 12 I went to meet Rybkin as he arrived from Moscow at London’s Heathrow Airport. He looked pale and exhausted and sported a resigned smile. His story essentially fit Sasha’s and Kalugin’s scenario. The next day he repeated it at a press conference at the Kempinski Hotel.
His Ukrainian contacts, he said, had taken him to a flat in Kiev. He was offered some tea and sandwiches and felt drowsy. He did not know what happened next. He woke up four days later in a different apartment, where he was shown a compromising video of himself. As he spoke about it, he seemed close to tears. It was made by “horrible perverts … I don’t know who did it,” except that they spoke Russian. “I know who benefited from this,” he added.
Following the press conference we urged Rybkin to undergo toxicology tests. They detected nothing unusual. His presidential race and political career were over.
On the day of Rybkin’s press conference, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, Chechnya’s exiled former president, was assassinated in Doha, Qatar, when a bomb blew apart his car as he left a mosque with his teenage son. Russia’s security services denied any involvement in the attack.
Doha, Qatar, July 1, 2004: Two Russian secret agents, Anatoly Belashkov and Vasily Bogachyov, are convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for the assassination of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. “The Russian leadership issued an order to assassinate the former Chechen leader,” states the judge at the trial. He adds that the plot had been discussed and set in motion after a meeting at Russian intelligence headquarters in Moscow in August 2003.
The attack on human rights organizations came in the president’s annual state of the nation address to Parliament, on May 27, 2004. Putin lashed out at “some” nongovernmental organizations, which, instead of representing “the real interests of the people,” are serving “dubious group and commercial interests.” The NGOs, he said, are only interested in securing funds from “foreign bodies and influential Russians.” This is happening “amid a global competitive (economic) war” against Russia, in which “political, economic and media resources are being used…. Not everyone in the world wants to deal with an independent, strong, and confident Russia.”
“Our calls to end the war in Chechnya have annoyed the Kremlin,” commented Lev Ponomarev, whose group, For Human Rights, had been accused by a Justice Ministry official of inciting prison riots using funding from Berezovsky’s foundation.
In response to Putin’s speech, Boris pledged additional funds to the IFCL. I set out to organize a trip to Washington for the national chairperson of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers and the head of one of their regional committees; they would take with them a strong antiwar message. The Kremlin’s policy in the Caucasus only breeds terrorism, they argued. They spoke before Congress, urging the United States to increase funding for democracy in Russia, which had been dramatically reduced in the years of the Bush administration. Then they went to see Tom Graham at the White House. But he told them the same thing that he’d said to Sergei Kovalyov more than a year earlier: We sympathize with you, but the United States is not prepared to confront Putin over Chechnya.
Beslan, North Osetia, September 1, 2004: A group of Muslim rebels take nearly twelve hundred children and adults hostage in a school, wiring it with explosives. On the third day of the siege gunfire breaks out and the building is stormed by Russian special forces: 344 civilians, including 186 children, die in the ensuing explosions and shooting. The Maskhadov government condemns the attack. Warlord Shamil Basayev claims responsibility.
The horrific news from Beslan—of terrorists rounding up innocent schoolchildren in a gymnasium and hanging explosives on a rope over