Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [133]
Putin chose not to do that. He had already announced that Maskhadov was a criminal and the only way to treat Maskhadovs was to pulverise them in in the shithouse. The chickens had come home to roost: in that dreadful situation in Beslan the President was a hostage to his own big mouth. His vanity did not allow him to go back on his words, and the lives of thousands of people took second place to his vanity. That is why Putin delegated the problem from a federal to a regional level, and as President of North Ossetia Dzasokhov had no authority to organise a corridor or guarantee safe conduct.
That was followed by the assassination of Maskhadov. He could have been questioned about many things afterwards. Instead, somebody gave the order not to take him alive but to throw grenades at him. Putin talks a lot about international terrorism, but if they had taken Maskhadov prisoner, who would have been better placed to say who is financing the terrorists, whether the resistance fighters have their own network of agents and bribe-takers in the Kremlin, and where the weapons came from that were used in Beslan? Quite clearly, Putin did not want Maskhadov taken alive.
You have stated on several occasions that there was no sign of international terrorist involvement in Beslan. On what basis?
The Commission has no evidence of the involvement of international terrorism in Beslan. The munitions were Russian, and nothing is known about who financed the group. Lebedev, the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, speaking at the Commission, talked a lot about how they had “terminated” things both abroad and in Russia, but what does terminate mean? Did they kill people? Did they bring them to court? Let’s see the reports of the investigative agencies and the court verdicts. There is nothing. The Commission has only a vague report. If I am given specific information I will change my view, but for the time being it is all just talk.
What percentage of those testifying to the Commission caused you to have doubts of this kind, that the quality of their information was dubious?
I didn’t count. I have given you the example of Lebedev. I asked him to name the emissaries of Wahhabism in Russia, and he replied that was not a matter for him. As regards Arab mercenaries, we were told some had been present in Beslan, but I appealed repeatedly to the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office to speak to the Saudi Arabian Embassy and find out if there were Saudis involved. Without that confirmation we really cannot make that categorical assertion. But actually, how much difference would it make even if Saudi Arabia did confirm some were present? From my point of view, none. Individual terrorists might go for a shoot-out, either for money or motivated by their religious fanaticism. There are plenty of people like that around in some parts of the world, but that does not mean they are members of an international terrorist network called al-Qaeda.
As for that mysterious tape which Torshin played during his public account, it was not discovered by the official investigators but supposedly by children, who handed it to an American journalist. On this tape a supposed Arab, Abu Dzeit, rattles away in Russian so fluent you couldn’t better it! Where is the file on him? Again, all the information comes from abroad. The Commission has nothing.
I state publicly as a member of the Commission that I heard nothing specific from the appropriate intelligence agencies. I saw no evidence from which I could conclude who Abu Dzeit was. If I look at the report of the American Congress’s 9/11 Commission I find extremely detailed information about each of the terrorists: where he was born, where he studied, where he took