Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [103]
“I asked Krivorotov to find them, but he said, ‘They just cut off some flesh you don’t really need. My rank doesn’t allow me to question the person who cut your ear off. You need to appreciate my situation.’ Now I can’t hear. I am half-deaf.”
Judge Mezhidov bustles back into court and rattles off his ruling: “… be compelled to appear.” Not a word about the measures Prosecutor Zhuravlyova was demanding, no response to the behaviour of Lapin’s lawyer. From Mezhidov’s tone you would think he was dealing with a naughty schoolboy.
Grozny is in the grip of a fear which paralyses civic action and breeds apathy. The next hearing of the Lapin case is set for October 24. Perhaps at least Chechnya’s journalists, of whom only one was in court at this precedent-setting case, will overcome their fear. After them, who knows, perhaps the judicial authorities will square their shoulders and give hope to those living in Chechnya that all is not lost and that it is still possible to get at the truth.
TOTAL CADETOPHILIA ON THE PART OF THE PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE
November 3, 2003
On October 30 the trial of The Cadet in Grozny was postponed indefinitely at the insistence of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The trial was scheduled to start at 10:00 a.m. but Judge Mezhidov conspicuously failed to appear. By midday the public were becoming restless. Had he been taken ill? The security guards told me in confidence that the judge had left the court building.
What was going on? Those in the know explained that early that morning the telephone had been disconnected in the court on Popovich Street. This left the judge isolated, without any telephone down which he could be given instructions. At this point the Prosecutor’s Office got up to another of its tricks: at 10.10 Antonina Zhuravlyova appeared in Mezhidov’s office. She is an imposing, elegantly dressed blonde from Stavropol who is both the Prosecutor and Prosecuting Official in The Cadet’s trial. She informed Mezhidov that the Prosecutor’s Office was outraged by his actions and had lodged a supervisory appeal against him with the Chechen Supreme Court for his misconduct at the previous hearing when Mezhidov had dared to reject The Cadet’s demand that the trial be moved far away from Chechnya, to somewhere in Russia where he would feel less at risk. Zhuravlyova continued to berate the judge, warning him not even to think of ruling today that The Cadet should be arrested. One has to admire her foresight, since this was precisely the ruling everyone was expecting.
Mezhidov went to pieces. He couldn’t even use the telephone. He hastily absented himself and went to consult his superiors in the Chechen Supreme Court. What was he to do now about The Cadet, with the Prosecutor’s Office on the warpath?
At 12.13 word spread that he was back, and a few minutes later Mezhidov began the hearing. Stanislav Markelov, representing the plaintiffs, immediately demanded the arrest of the insolent accused. He presented the court with the opinion of Yury Savenko, President of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, a consultant with the highest professional qualifications and 42 years of service. This related to whether The Cadet was unfit to attend the court because of “problems of adaptation,” which he had given as the reason for his absence.
“According to current understanding, as registered in the international classification of illnesses, adaptational dysfunction is a state of protracted discomfort caused by local or prolonged stress. It is accompanied by reduced productivity in normal activity and is regarded as being on the borderline between normal reaction to stress or grief, and minor mental disorder. In the spectrum of mental disorders this is one of the least serious diagnoses, and is not dangerous. It cannot be used to justify non-appearance