Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [166]
And yet, are the numbers of those wishing to cause explosions being reduced? No. They are increasing. Very few still believe the myth that we have only to catch bin Laden to be able to live in peace. Increasingly, it occurs to people that the secret services find the hullabaloo about international terrorism highly profitable, and that the secret services themselves are part and parcel of what is sometimes the war against terrorism, and at other times just terrorism plain and simple.
We live in times when non-state terrorism is in a deadly embrace with state terrorism, the one complementing the other, and both of them targeting us. There is nowhere to hide. We are equally defenceless against our own secret services and against the growing number of those seeking revenge – for religion, for themselves, for their country, for their beliefs. There is no shortage of causes.
We run round in circles. The general fear of terrorist acts encourages a loosening of control over the secret services, who are supposedly doing what is needed but are in fact doing exactly as they please, and accordingly nothing useful. Who can be trusted in these circumstances? Nobody. The contemporary total lack of faith in the state authorities only strengthens the madness of tribalism.
Judge for yourselves: the lunacy of the notion that the FSB could be involved in the anticipated terrorist acts in France and the transporting of explosives to Paris by diplomatic bag seems clear. One might be tempted to laugh at this latest nonsense someone has put on the Internet. Standing between drivel on the Internet and us, however, are recent events in Qatar. In Doha, agents of the Russian secret services blew up Russia’s enemy Zelimkhan Yandarbiev [a former Acting President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria]. The agents failed to cover their tracks, were caught, and now have confessed to assassination.
What needs to be added? The Doha bomb proves, quite apart from anything else, that Russia has returned to the Soviet period in the sense that it is not only practising political terrorism within its own borders, in Chechnya, but is also exterminating people wherever it pleases. After Yandarbiev’s assassination, it is not so easy to laugh off the idea of diplomatic explosives.
We now know that for “our people” exploding a bomb in France is merely a matter of technique, not permissibility. Some in Russia support the tactic of political terrorism which came in with Putin, while others are categorically opposed to it. Be that as it may, the tribalism of the FSB (or GRU) is real. Everything is permitted.
We again face that question of who to trust. Who can you trust as you go down into the Metro, as you take your seat in a suburban train, on a steamer or plane, or fall asleep in your own home?
Nobody. This total lack of trust will sweep away the very governments which have sown it – be sure of that. But, as we already know, it is a royal path to ideological radicalism when some, in order to forget everything, join the skinheads; others are Islamic murid devotees seeking enlightenment or jihadists; others again are something else. It is impossible to predict what a brain infected with the madness of tribalism will dream up tomorrow.
The world must start coming to an agreement about our collective survival rather than continuing its coalitions for extermination and destruction. The race between different kinds of madness we are witnessing will, of course, bring this about sooner or later. The question is only, at the cost of how many victims?
HOT MONEY UNDERLIES THE KREMLIN’S SUPPORT FOR CHAOS IN GEORGIA
September 20, 2004
As we know, in the days immediately following