Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [132]
What are the main facts about Beslan which were excised when the account of December 28 was being written and which might have been fundamental to an assessment of the tragedy?
I divide all the inquiries into Beslan into criminal and parliamentary categories. The Commission did not, and still doesn’t, have the tools required to fully establish the actual circumstances. We have no right to caution people about giving false evidence; to oblige witnesses to confront those they are testifying about; or to carry out tests ourselves. That means that any conclusions we draw in this area will be based 75 per cent on information from the official investigation, which may have been economical with the truth or distorted. We were supposed to concentrate instead on the actions of federal officials. The national aspects were to be covered by a Commission of the North Ossetian Parliament under the chairmanship of Stanislav Kesayev which, in my opinion, did a good job. Their report is frank and honest, and that’s what really matters.
We should have started by evaluating the actions of the President and Patrushev, the Director of the FSB. Unfortunately, in all these 16 months the Commission did not consider the matter of the President’s responsibility for Beslan. We initially expected to question him; Putin was listed as a witness for a whole year, but suddenly disappeared.
The Commission passed no resolution to take Putin off the list?
No, and neither did it discuss why his name disappeared from the list of witnesses.
One other extremely important question, which I raised many times, was the matter of calling representatives of the Caucasian clergy. Nobody in the Commission seemed to object to hearing from the Wahhabis. I wanted to contact them all the time, to talk to them and understand them. Wahhabism is not banned. I began trying to find them. When we were hearing from the heads of the FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service, I asked them who the emissaries of Wahhabism were in the Caucasus. Either they do not know or they did not want to answer, but I remain convinced we should sit down together and talk. I remember I went to the Duma Committee on Religious Affairs and asked if they could give me the names of the leaders of Wahhabism, because I wanted to meet them. One of the vice-chairmen said, “Here is the telephone number of the main Wahhabi. He will tell you all you need to know.” I rang, and it turned out to be the number of Geidar Djemal, a well-known Moscow philosopher and political commentator. That’s our level of understanding of these problems.
If Putin had not been removed from the list of witnesses, what would you have asked him?
The Kesayev Commission confirmed that Zakayev had said Maskhadov was prepared to take part in negotiations. It is clear that Maskhadov’s going into the Beslan school might well have resulted in the children being released. I am certain the resistance fighters would have deferred to his authority. They had stated that they were under Basayev’s command, but that Maskhadov was their President and that negotiations should be conducted with him. Putin, however, did not want Maskhadov turning up in Beslan because any raising of Maskhadov’s profile would immediately have deflated the authority of the Kadyrov gang.
When Kesayev’s report was published, the pro-presidential press claimed it emphasised that Aushev and Dzasokhov had phoned Zakayev and asked for Maskhadov to come, but that he had not made contact. That was wilful misrepresentation of the situation.
In my view, everything should have been handled differently: all television broadcasts