Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [117]
Something wasn’t quite right about this wreath-laying ceremony. It wasn’t because, as so many people now believe, “the Chechens are to blame for everything.” Even less was it because I personally have anything against Chechens. Of course I haven’t.
But I really didn’t like the way most of the Chechens I know behaved during those 57 hours when everything was on a knife edge, when at any moment the Nord-Ost audience might have been blown sky high, when a message from influential Chechens addressed to those under Barayev Junior’s command would have carried far more weight than anything anybody else could say. That, at least, is how I felt. They said nothing. No statement came, and now their silence is a historical fact. That is the other reason I was so upset by those nauseating Frenchwomen.
Only Aslambek Aslakhanov, a Chechen and a Deputy of the Russian Duma, went in to talk to the terrorists, despite the fact that his act could have had extremely unpleasant consequences for him: he is, after all, an Interior Ministry general, and unambiguously a “federal” in the minds of those who took the Nord-Ost audience hostage. But Aslakhanov went in, despite his own young children at home. He went in, and that too is a matter of record.
But where were all the others? Where was businessman and politician Malik Saidulayev? Where were the Umars? (I’ve forgotten their surnames too, and really can’t be bothered trying to rediscover them.) I mean that rich Umar somebody who owns a hotel near Kievsky Station in Moscow. And what about Bislan Gantamirov, sometime Mayor of Grozny? And Salambek Khadzhiev? And so on and so forth, ad infinitum?
None of them spoke out; not even Kadyrov, whom most of the Moscow Chechens are so busy buzzing around when he comes from Grozny that you start having dark suspicions about vested interests on both sides. In his old age, Kadyrov has covered himself with ineradicable shame by valuing his own life higher than the lives of 50 completely innocent spectators of the Nord-Ost musical. The terrorists invited him, as the Chief of Chechnya appointed by Putin, to visit them in exchange for 50 hostages but he didn’t go, subsequently claiming he “hadn’t heard about it.”
During these 57 hours, the Moscow Chechens were whispering in corners. That was completely inadequate. They didn’t even decry Kadyrov, or attempt to persuade him to go down in history as a man who saved the lives of 50 women and children. For 57 hours the so-called Chechen diaspora, almost to a man, went underground, some of them turning up only in Copenhagen.
My own feeling is that this leaves a bad taste. It just wasn’t the way these people ought to have behaved. Perhaps I am completely wrong and I will be told later that the Chechens were terrified of the consequences, and that their main priority is to survive in a society now bristling against them even more than before, and so on and so forth.
No doubt that is all true, but can you really rank fears? The diaspora seemed heedless of the fact that the hostages were even more terrified of what seemed like their imminent inevitable death; and that for more than 100 of them (and we still don’t know how many more) those 57 hours facing death were the last hours of their lives. That is why today we are attending funeral after funeral where the priests lose their voices because even their highly trained vocal cords cannot cope with so many services.
So, should we sympathise with the fears of the Chechen diaspora? Absolutely not. You will have to excuse me, but I totally reject their fear. Everybody involved was scared, including those who mounted the assault and those on the receiving end of it. So let us come back to our initial question: why did the Chechens behave as they did during these 57 hours?
Because they are cowards. Faced with their own younger generation who have turned into uncompromising