Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [31]
Gross was completely sincere and committed to the tasks for “peace” which he had been set by Putin’s Presidential Administration, and to the whole business of shuttle diplomacy entrusted to him. He told me all about it himself in Helsinki during those winter months. The main stopover in his shuttle trips was London, where he assured Akhmed Zakayev that this was the best way to proceed. Zakayev was in constant contact with Maskhadov and it was he who passed on all these hopes of peace and encouraged Maskhadov to believe that the long-awaited negotiations with Moscow might soon start.
In the meantime, the London negotiations of the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers with representatives of one of the belligerent parties collapsed. They collapsed for the very good reason that the Soldiers’ Mothers suddenly started adopting a hardline position in London, as if blithely unaware that failure was precisely what Moscow wanted from them.
This left Maskhadov with only one potentially promising, but in fact disastrous, way forward to peace: the “path of Gross.” He took the bait. Reassured by Gross’s blandishments, which he heard about from Zakayev and over the Internet, Maskhadov let down his guard and began regularly using a mobile phone. Russia had succeeded in killing his predecessor, President Dudayev, by locating him through his use of a mobile phone, and during all the previous years of the war Maskhadov had never touched one. Now his main method of communication became text messaging.
As one of the witnesses testifies: “Aslan Maskhadov used his mobile telephone for sending text messages. When I asked him why he didn’t ring anybody, he replied, ‘The whole world knows my voice. They would work out where I am instantly.’ ”
It was through mobile telephone traffic that Maskhadov’s whereabouts were established. More precisely, the intelligence services registered the fact that the source of the traffic was in Tolstoy-Yurt.
If we try to summarise what happened in the last months of Maskhadov’s life, we find that he was weary of the war and of living in hiding. He did his utmost to achieve peace by making major compromises; he accepted the need to take extremely radical steps, and, to demonstrate his willingness, announced a unilateral cessation of military operations on January 14, with an extension on February 23. In other words, throughout the winter of 2004–5 Maskhadov was, on the one hand, being drawn into the Kremlin’s games, but on the other was clearly outsmarting Moscow in the management of the peace process. “Management” is perhaps not the ideal expression, but it best approximates to what was going on during the winter on the Tolstoy–Yurt–Moscow–Helsinki-Brussels (where Gross’s round table was conducted)–London axis.
By March, Moscow was finding Maskhadov’s activity intolerable and the process moved beyond Gross’s control, even though he is an influential individual. “Maskhadov’s peace initiatives’ were a constant topic of conversation in the political salons of Europe: the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I know what I’m talking about because I was there. In the continent’s highest diplomatic circles Putin began to recede into the background, acquiring the reputation of a man who ‘would not compromise despite what common sense dictated,” a man “moving matters towards the next Beslan.” A moment came when Putin