Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [37]
“And then what happened?”
“Later they would talk, and after two or three days they would start to eat. A few even took off the hijab and just wore a headscarf in the Chechen manner. There was one who robbed us – she was a real Wahhabi! – but she was the only one. Later, when they had come back to life, I would fix them up with somewhere to live, either abroad or here in Russia. I looked for relatives they could live with, as far away as possible from big cities. I made phone calls, got agreements.”
I asked him about his motives: why did he do all this?
“What do they know, these girls?” Buvadi explained. “At their age we were in the Pioneers, going to Pioneer camps, going to the cinema, eating ice-cream. They have had none of that and that’s how they have ended up in this state. I feel guilty about them.”
“What is your conclusion about suicide bombers? Are they a lost cause?”
“No, for most becoming a Wahhabi is not the end of the story. It’s just that their empty minds have been messed with.”
I won’t name the names of young widows Buvadi saved. The point is that they know themselves who they owe their second life to. Having been sent far away from the Caucasus by Buvadi, they carried on phoning him, asking his advice on how to deal with particular situations, for example, right up until September 13 this year.
I think back to 2002, or perhaps the very end of 2001. It is the depths of winter and there is shooting and explosions, but at least Kadyrov Junior is still standing quietly in the corner while the grown-ups are talking. Grozny is teeming with underground jamaats, most of them consisting of people who are just kids aged between 14 and 16.
“I feel so sorry for them,” Buvadi told me. On more than one occasion he was in charge of operations to eradicate them. “We surround them. They know they’re about to die, and I can hear what they’re talking about over my radio.”
“Why are you sorry for them?”
“It’s the same as with the black widows. They’ve never had a life, never seen anything. I feel personally guilty that their childhood has been taken from them. How many times they have asked me, shouting from houses we had surrounded, ‘Uncle, let us die!’ I let them blow themselves up, because I know what would happen to them if we took them alive. There have been occasions when I passed on their final words to their parents.”
For some reason, this past August we spent far more time than usual recalling stories about the boys from the jamaats he had killed. Buvadi was glad that at that time the idiotic law had not yet been passed which forbade the return of their bodies.
“I gave their bodies to the parents myself. How could I do that now?”
In 2002 or 2003 we were discussing who he thought the Wahhabis were, and what should be done with them. At that time pro-Russian Chechens had only dreadful things to say about the Wahhabis, and killed them without a moment’s hesitation. Buvadi, however, took the liberty of saying out loud:
“There were some villains among them, but some were completely pure people. We killed them all indiscriminately.”
I remember exactly where it was he told me that: the second floor of the “white box,” the headquarters of the Grozny OMON Unit, in the office of the Commander, Mussa Khazimakhomadov, who was later killed. There were drunken officers from the Russian intelligence agencies, staggering around incoherently with the vacant eyes of killers. They were from the death squads of the Special Purposes Center of the FSB, and the GRU – Buvadi’s colleagues in the war. He set out some snacks, some bottles, and was telling this to them too.
“Pure people? How can they be pure if, as people say …” I repeated something monstrous about the doings of those they called Wahhabis.
Buvadi stopped me.
“My brother was a Wahhabi. He was completely pure. I never met anyone so pure before or after him. He was pure in every respect, in his thoughts