Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [127]
Clever people say now that it would have been foolish for them to have rushed to negotiate in Beslan, foolish because it would have meant certain death. Quite possibly. What of it? Those who are guilty have to take responsibility. What actually happened was that innocent children bore the consequences of the cowardice and stupidity of those who, you may remember, chorused at election time, “We take full responsibility on ourselves.”
You will remember too that, before this, the only person in our recent history who decided to save his own skin rather than the lives of women and children was Kadyrov Senior (who was in any case assassinated on May 9 this year). In October 2002, when the terrorists who had occupied the Nord-Ost musical announced they were prepared to release 50 women if Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov came to them, he refused. Shortly afterwards, Putin signalled that Akhmat-hadji was his favorite in Chechnya.
Zyazikov, Kadyrov Junior and Alkhanov are all three of them Putin’s current favorites, and they have done exactly the same. The one person who did dare to go in, ex-President of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev, got the brush-off from the Kremlin. Now the new anti-terrorist initiative consists of allotting each of these cowards a senior officer and 70 special operations troops. That is who will be averting future acts of terrorism.
Except that cowards are incapable of averting acts of terrorism: cowardice is powerless in the face of terrorism. Obviously. Those senior Interior Ministry officers can only serve to preserve the lives of the Big Three the next time the balloon goes up. They will do nothing for the rest of us.
The conclusion is simple: neither Zyazikov nor Alkhanov, nor Ramzan Kadyrov can be allowed to remain in their jobs. It is a death sentence, not for them, but for us. And that is only in the first place. In the second place, what can we oppose to terrorism? How are we to stem the tide of terrorist acts and gradually put an end to them? What we need most is courageous authorities with a transparent plan to counteract terrorism. Then what? What needs to be changed in the North Caucasus to minimise the probability of future terrorist acts?
Here is my proposal. It is the plan of a journalist very critical of much that has been going on in our country during the first term of Putin’s presidency, and that is still going on now. These are ideas about how it may be possible gradually to regulate the Chechen crisis; and that this crisis is at the root of all that happened in Beslan and immediately before Beslan nobody apart from Putin seems to be in any doubt.
Here is what we should do now about suicide attacks in the North Caucasus; about Maskhadov; about the fact that the ranks of the resistance have been swelling this year more than in any of the previous years of the Second Chechen War; about the detachments of mercenaries active there and in adjacent territories; about the growing numbers of those seeking vengeance for the murder or disappearance of their nearest and dearest; about the unprecedented depravity of the troops; about the federal death squads operating outside the Constitution, persecuting civilians and carrying out extra-judicial executions; about federals who “wage war” only for the statistics, for combat premiums, for rank, decorations, and not in order to seek out and take out outlaws; about the absolute corruption of the Kadyrov regime, supported by the Kremlin and hated by the population; and as a result, about the level of distrust of the federal authorities among all sections of Chechen society, which today is completely off the scale.
What gives me the right to pronounce on this and to propose a plan? Only my experience of working in Chechnya over many years. This is, of course, a journalist’s experience, which consists mainly of constant