Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [126]
What do we actually know about the heads of the Anti-Terrorist Commissions in the South of Russia? Let us cast an eye over the files of some of these gentlemen whose duty was to prevent Beslan from happening and who, after it erupted, were personally responsible for conducting the operation to free the hostages.
Every age has its own characteristics. The Brezhnev era was typified by cynical dementia. Under Yeltsin it was think big, take big. Under Putin, we live in an era of cowardice. Take a look at those who surround him.
First, Mr Murat Zyazikov, the President of Ingushetia. Zyazikov has been in power for a little over two years, before which his career was spent entirely in the KGB and FSB. He is one of Putin’s professional cronies. Nobody is in any doubt that Zyazikov was strong-armed into the office of President of Ingushetia by Putin and his team. His presidency has seen the secret services run riot in Ingushetia, flouting the Constitution. Citizens have been abducted by the FSB and death squads, and as a direct consequence young people have been heading to the mountains to join the fighters and there has been a wave of terrorist acts. What did Zyazikov do, this abysmal Head of Ingushetia’s Anti-Terrorist Commission? He has just sat there in his presidential seat, a typical FSB goon.
An FSB goon is, after all, somebody who sees the world from behind other people’s backs. That’s their profession. They are invisible fighters against an invisible threat. The problems begin when the threat becomes visible and real, and the President needs to come out and organise effective resistance to outlaws like those who took over Ingushetia on June 21, 2004.*
That night dozens of people died while Zyazikov sat it out in his cellar, waiting to see what would happen and keeping his own highly important skin safe. No doubt the President’s life is very precious and important, so perhaps he really ought to be hiding in his cellar. But it is no more precious than the lives of everyone else.
The result of that night was the loss of many lives in Ingushetia, attributable to a total lack of organised resistance to the invaders. Another important result was that the fighters were encouraged to think about undertaking something similar in the future.
Let us look, then, at August 21, 2004 and the seizure of Grozny by resistance fighters in an exact replay of the Ingushetian scenario. Where were Putin’s favorites that night, Alu Alkhanov and Ramzan Kadyrov, who so often tell us on television that they have all but caught the last of the outlaws? They too were down in their cellars, rather than leading resistance to the fighters. They too were saving their precious skins for future battles against international terrorism. The result that time was the loss of more than 50 lives, and a further boost for the resistance fighters’ self-confidence.
Finally we come to Beslan, where brutes planted explosives around small children and demanded an end to the accursed war in Chechnya. What should Zyazikov, Alkhanov, and the redoubtable Ramzan Kadyrov – responsible for dealing with terrorism in their territories, who had given Putin every assurance that the enemy would never pass – have done on that first morning of September 1? They, along with Maskhadov, whose name was being bandied about by the brutes, should have been standing there in the school and, with all the means at their disposal, without attempting to haggle over guarantees of their personal safety, should have tried to talk these brutes, whom they themselves had created, into releasing the children. Only after that should they have wrangled over who was right and who was wrong.
What happened? Neither Zyazikov, nor Alkhanov, nor Ramzan Kadyrov,