Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [12]
More than three years later, the criminals still have not been caught: neither those who attacked Mikhail Komarov, nor those who paid them to do so.
* The Cheka was a state security service established in 1917. It was the forerunner of the KGB, now the FSB.
* Apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk were blown up, apparently by the FSB, with the loss of many Russian lives. The Chechens were blamed as a pretext for re-starting the war in Chechnya. An attempt to do the same in Ryazan was foiled, and was subsequently represented as a “training exercise.”
2. The War in Chechnya
The Chechen War was re-started in 1999, supposedly in response to a Chechen attack on neighbouring Dagestan and the blowing up of apartment blocks in Russian cities in which over 300 citizens died. It is widely believed that both these pretexts were stage-managed by the Russian Government itself, which would mean it was responsible for the politically motivated mass murder of its own citizens. The former Director of the FSB Vladimir Putin came to power in the 2000 presidential election as a would-be saviour of the nation on a wave of anti-Chechen hysteria. Anna Politkovskaya reported uncompromisingly on the war and on its accompanying atrocities.
Part I: Dispatches from the Frontline
LIBERTY OR DEATH? SOMETIMES THEY ARE THE SAME THING
March 27, 2000
These are appalling stories. Sometimes people say that to be on the safe side you should divide them by 10, or 100 or 200; but divide them as we may, they are still stories about atrocities.
On grey UN humanitarian aid blankets covering concrete barricades, a boy and girl are sitting, hunched and huddled. We try to talk about the future. I keep going on about prospects, the larger issues, the international dimension: “What plans do you have? What are you going to do with your lives?” Their replies relate only to the specific, the here and now: “Tomorrow we are going to the mountains to look for wild leeks. That is all there is to eat.”
I try again, about when things get better, what they hope for, about ordinary, human things: “Are there wild flowers already blooming in the mountains?” “There are unexploded bombs there, and a lot of soldiers,” comes the response, unhurried and unemotional, but behind the words hatred flutters like a banner.
These are Aslanbek and Rezeda, a brother and sister aged 18 and 20. In the First War they were in their early teens, in the Second they have hardened. If Rezeda still manages a fleeting smile, Aslanbek is as gloomy as the dirty concrete surrounding him. They both sat through all the bombing and shelling in cellars, until February 5 when their personal drama came to a head with the brutal killing by federal soldiers of their father, Salman Bishayev. He was 54 and was killed by federal troops in the courtyard of No. 3, Kislovodskaya Street in Grozny during a security sweep in Aldy, Chernorechiye District. They killed him and dragged the body away, and only after a 13-day search did Aslanbek and Rezeda’s elder sister, 30-year-old Larisa, find what they were dutifully looking for. It was she who scraped Salman’s brains from the walls into a bag in order to bury them. Then they all fled to Ingushetia.
Now home is a quarry on the outskirts of Karabulak, where a building materials factory once flourished and where there are still many half-ruined stone storehouses. Along with 30 housemates, 23 of whom are children or young people aged between 15 and 22, Aslanbek and Rezeda have taken up residence in one of these boxes in this concrete wasteland. They jokingly call their shack “The Disco,” but there is no music or dancing here. The furniture consists of plank beds, and the 23 boys and girls sitting on them have no light in their eyes, and their arms hang listlessly by their sides. The Disco