Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [38]
“Did he try to recruit you?”
“Never. He never tried to impose anything on me.”
“Where is he now?”
“He was killed.”
After a long pause, smiling, with immense pride, even joy, as if he was telling me his brother had been awarded the Nobel Prize, he said,
“He died in battle. As was right.”
Those who were eating and drinking at that moment, stopped. Showing that kind of pride in a Wahhabi in the center of the anti-Wahhabi movement he might quickly have followed his brother.
Then it was the turn of Kadyrov Junior. How he hated Buvadi! He kept trying to nail him as a resistance fighter. “You are helping them!” For the whole summer he was trying to get Buvadi kicked out of the OMON, to drive him out of Chechnya. That was when the disgusting process of “Chechenising” the war was instigated, and being vile started to be considered as honorable as being courageous. People would remind Buvadi, this soldier to the marrow of his bones, about his brother, and accuse him of being soft on the fighters because of his efforts to redeem black widows.
But Buvadi never did cease to be proud of his Wahhabi brother’s purity, or of his private campaign to rescue mothers for their children. He never even attempted to hush it up. A lot of people in Chechnya are today in Buvadi’s situation, with brothers on opposing sides. The civil war so undermined family morality that it became acceptable to publicly denounce your brothers if they failed to surrender to the right flag.
There are two versions of how Buvadi died. The “black” version asserts that he came to a place where Chechen and Ingush militiamen were having a violent disagreement, punched an Ingush militiaman, and was promptly shot. I don’t believe that. He might have shot someone, but I don’t see him punching anyone in the face. That was not his style, and he would in any case have known only too well what would come next in an argument between the two Vainakh peoples.
The second version is that Buvadi was not there when the altercation started, but was nearby and moved in to calm things down. He got out of his car, tried to persuade them to cool it, and somebody fired a round at him from an assault rifle.
I think that is far more probable, and would like to believe that Buvadi was his own man to the last, trying to prevent bloodshed. I know he was an expert in firing at living targets, but I believe Buvadi nevertheless spent his last moment in his white half. “Everybody is completely fed up with the war,” he told me a month before he died. “We should all just make peace.”
There is a desperate shortage of men like him in official Chechnya today: not angels, but human beings who agonise and suffer. In Chechnya there are ever more people who are as rudimentary as amoebas, for whom killing is no different to sipping a glass of tea. Amoebas are incapable of understanding another person who has been declared an enemy simply because he lives his life in a different way.
What does “understanding” mean in Chechnya? It means, not to kill. That is how you recognise tolerance, and for the present there is no other way. Even now there are those who continue to believe that playing at amnesty games is an indication of tolerance on Kadyrov’s part as he supposedly saves fighters’ souls and preserves the nation. Stuff and nonsense! They are binding people together through even more bloodshed, and see that as fettering them to their cause. Buvadi wanted to bind people by offering them a chance to live without his involvement. That was fundamental. He gave them a second life, although his job was to terminate their first. He gave it from the goodness of his heart, and there is no one to replace him.
The last time I saw him, we took a long time saying our goodbyes.
“I hope they at least have a rifle in the house where you are going to sleep tonight,” Buvadi grumbled.
“There is no rifle there. I don’t want one,” I muttered. “I’m tired of guns. We have had them for seven years already. Are you really not tired of them