Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [142]
The meeting of “Our Home” dispersed. “The state wants to wait for us all to die so as not to have to spend money on us. I’m quite sure of that,” Zoya Markaryants remarks in parting. A former educationalist, her house in the center of Grozny suffered a direct hit. With the destruction of her home she lost everything she had, and now she is just another refugee from the war.
A HOSTAGE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
September 8, 2005
Anybody who watches the national Russian television channels saw the item. It was claimed that Adam Chitayev, a former resistance fighter with a federal warrant out for his arrest, had been detained in Ust-Ilimsk, Irkutsk Province. He was supposedly guilty of abducting both Russian servicemen and members of international missions, and was said to have been masquerading as a schoolteacher of English.
Russia has long been trained to believe this sort of thing. If a Chechen has been arrested, that’s as it should be, or if it’s not quite as it should be, then it’s better to be safe than sorry. Nobody gave a damn about Chitayev. Hundreds of criminal cases relating to so-called international terrorism are cooked up like Siberian pelmeni dumplings the length and breadth of the country, on the principle of the more the merrier, and anyway you can’t tell the innocent from the guilty. Naturally, the arrest of some Chitayev or other was regarded as only proper, as what the law enforcement agencies are there for. But only by anybody who doesn’t know who Adam Chitayev is and, more broadly, who the Chitayev brothers are. In Strasbourg an increasing number of people do know. That, in fact, is where the answer is to be found as to why a man who was not hiding from anybody was suddenly arrested in faraway Ust-Ilimsk, only for it to be announced to the whole of Russia that he had been hiding.
The Chitayevs are appellants in Strasbourg v. the Russian Federation. What is more, they have almost won. This summer the procedure of having a case considered by the European Court of Human Rights, which takes many years, ended in an interim victory, a so-called “Decision on the Admissibility of Appeal No. 59334/00.”
The story of the Chitayev family is one to which Novaya gazeta has returned several times. Their fate was not unusual by Chechen standards in 2000. It befell many people, but very few decided to seek redress through the courts.
Arbi, born in 1964, was an engineer who had always lived in Grozny. Adam, born in 1967, was a schoolteacher. Like many Chechens he lived in Kazakhstan for a long time before returning to Chechnya in 1999, immediately before the war. Together with his wife and two small children he moved in with his brother in Grozny. “In autumn 1999 armed clashes began in Chechnya between Russian troops and Chechen rebels,” the European Court ruling reads, and, in accordance with the rules of Strasbourg, it is is based on documentation which confirms every word. “Grozny and its suburbs were the target of large-scale attacks by Russian soldiers.”
Arbi’s flat in Grozny was destroyed (as is confirmed by a certificate, attached to the case files in Strasbourg, from one of the apartment management boards in Grozny). “The plaintiffs, together with their families and possessions, moved to their father’s house in Achkhoy Martan. On January 15, 2000, members of the Interior Affairs Temporary Office (temporarily occupied by militiamen from Voronezh Province) conducted a search of the plaintiffs’ house. They took with them a new cordless telephone in its packaging.”
On January 18, one of