Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [36]
At times the things he was involved in were extremely cruel. Let us not beat about the bush: those working in the Chechen OMON are not children in ragged trousers sharing sweets. The people who work there do so in order to shoot, and they shoot to kill before someone kills them. The units arrested people who were sometimes never seen again. They beat them, and worse.
My last meeting with Buvadi was in August in Grozny. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and bit grimly and guiltily into a watermelon. He was on edge and devoured the red fruit as if he was starving, doing his utmost to move the conversation away from a Chechen student who had been “swept” by his units and was thought to have been in their custody before simply disappearing. Now Alikhan Kuloyev’s mother, Aminat, an old-age pensioner, had joined the ranks of other mothers frantically searching Chechnya, and was begging anyone she met to at least put in a word with Buvadi. Perhaps he would tell her where her only son was.
I did put in a word, but Buvadi was saying nothing. He had nothing to say. There had been that student and now there wasn’t. Buvadi said, “He wasn’t guilty of anything.”
“Well, why hasn’t he been released?”
Buvadi said nothing, tearing at the melon’s skin.
On the other hand, Buvadi could just as often be kind as cruel, where many others were never kind. Everyone working in the Chechen security agencies can be divided into those who think before they kill, and those who long ago ceased to think. Buvadi did at least try to establish who he had in his sights, and that saved the lives of many, including some who would ordinarily have seemed doomed under the rules of the Chechen meat-grinder.
A few people in Chechnya knew that Buvadi tried to rescue the widows of commanders, women who were supposed to be slaughtered out of hand as “black widows,” likely future suicide bombers. How did he rescue them? After the widows were abducted, Buvadi would take them to his own home, which was completely against the rules.
And then what? They were in a kind of custody, a kind of quarantine. Buvadi would return home from work and talk to them for nights at a time. His house resembled a barracks, and Buvadi would hold women there for many weeks who, without any exaggeration, were potential suicide bombers. They were entirely ready for the job because, before they ended up with Buvadi, they had been trained by their husbands and their comrades in the handling of explosives and driving a bus, so that when the order was given they would crash it into whatever they were instructed to.
“Why did you take them in?”
“They all had children.”
“And did their children live with you?”
“Yes, they were here with their children. I wanted to see whether they were lost souls, whether they were still capable of bringing up their children, or were out of it already.”
In fact, none of the black widows left his house as a lost soul. The result of this odd re-educative work by Special Operations Agent Buvadi among the most spurned section of Chechen society was that mothers, often under-age mothers, were saved to bring up their own children. Buvadi’s processing really helped them to understand that their first duty was to be a mother.
“They would start by saying, ‘Just let me die for my husband.’ They wouldn’t accept a crust of bread from me,” Buvadi told me,