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Editorial Note

People ask whether we believe Anna Politkovskaya’s murder was related to an article about torture which she was preparing, and which she had announced on Radio Liberty on Thursday, October 5, two days before her death. We are here publishing fragments from two items which our columnist did not complete.

The first contains eyewitness accounts of the use of torture, which is confirmed by medical reports. The second consists of a video which would have formed the basis of an article that was never written. The disk in Politkovskaya’s possession (and we would ask whoever passed her the recording to contact us), shows unidentified citizens being tortured. The torturers themselves took the video and appear to belong to one of the Chechen security agencies.

WE ARE DESIGNATING YOU A TERRORIST

Novaya gazeta, No. 78 (October 12) 2006

Dozens of files come my way every day which contain copies of materials from criminal cases against people imprisoned or under investigation in Russia for “terrorism.”

Why put “terrorism” in quotes? Because the overwhelming majority of these suspects have been designated terrorists. Now, in 2006, this habit of designating people as terrorists has not only displaced any genuine attempt to combat terrorism, but is of itself producing potential terrorists thirsting for revenge. When the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the courts fail to uphold the law and punish the guilty, and instead merely act on political instructions and connive in producing anti-terrorist statistics to please the Kremlin, criminal cases get cooked up like pancakes.

A conveyor belt for mass-producing “voluntary confessions” works faultlessly to ensure targets are met in the so-called struggle against terrorism in the North Caucasus.

Here is what a group of mothers of a number of young Chechens, found guilty by the courts, have written to me:

“For convicted Chechens the corrective labor colonies have effectively become concentration camps. They are subjected to racial discrimination and kept permanently in solitary confinement or punishment cells. Almost all of them have been sentenced on the basis of fabricated court cases without credible evidence. Confined under cruel conditions, their human dignity is violated and they learn to hate everything. Here is a whole army which will be returned to us with their lives wrecked and with a warped outlook.”

Their hatred frightens me. It frightens me because sooner or later it will burst its banks and everyone will become an extremist, not only the investigators who tortured them. These cases of designated terrorists constitute a battlefield on which two ideological attitudes towards what is being perpetrated in the “zone of the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus” confront each other. Do we combat lawlessness with the law? Or do we try to bash their lawlessness with our own?

These two forms of lawlessness clash and fire dangerous sparks into both the present and the future. The end result of this process of designation is a growing number of people who are not prepared to put up with it.

Ukraine recently extradited to Russia Beslan Gadayev, a Chechen arrested in early August when documents were being checked in the Crimea, where he lived as a displaced person. These lines are from a letter he wrote on August 29, 2006:

“When I was extradited from Ukraine to Grozny, I was immediately taken to an office and asked whether I had killed a member of the Salikhov family, Anzor and his friend, a Russian truck driver. I swore I had shed no one’s blood, neither Russian nor Chechen. They stated as a fact, ‘No, you killed them.’ I started denying it again, and when I repeated that I had never killed anyone they immediately began beating me. First they punched me twice in the right eye. While I was recovering my senses, they pushed me down and handcuffed me. They pushed a pipe behind my legs so I could not move my hands, even though I was already handcuffed. Then they grabbed me, or more precisely this pipe they had attached me to, and suspended