Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [55]
These, however, are only details. Three important truths were established in London on November 13. The first is that, for the first time in many years of a monstrous war, the federal authorities and the Chechens have been communicating with each other in legal language rather than the language of armed conflict, security sweeps, ambushes and explosions. The forum for this was a British court which demonstrated that it was concerned only with hard evidence and had no interest in political expediency.
The second is that it has been established in a court of law, not in the newspapers or on television, not in the drawing rooms of the establishment or at conferences, after lengthy examination of the evidence for and against now marshalled in several volumes, that, as most of us already knew but were unable to prove, what is happening in Chechnya is not an “anti-terrorist operation” but a war.
The third is that, after the London court ruling, it is impossible to go on pretending that our country is on the road to democracy. There are no reforms; instead we have authoritarianism, subservient courts, torture in places of detention and racial harassment. The framework of international relations is collapsing because it has been shown in court that the system the Russian regime talks about simply does not exist. Russia is a radically different country from the one which the politicians pretend exists. We have a brutal war, racism and violence as the means of resolving all issues.
That is the end of the story of the London court proceedings in respect of Akhmed Zakayev. The Government wanted to show the world how cool we are and how we stand for truth, but succeeded only in showing our true nature. The Russian Government is the laughingstock of Europe because it has no substance, only wild pretensions.
The fact that the court ruling was going to go against the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office became clear in Sheremetievo-II, the Moscow airport from which I was flying to London to hear the verdict.
I handed over my passport. The young frontier guard tapped at his computer for a long time and finally said,
“You have problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“You know yourself.”
“No I don’t.”
What had popped up on his screen was that the bearer of this passport was to be detained and subjected to general unpleasantness and all manner of additional and humiliating searches.
“Why?”
“That’s a military secret,” he replied. One would have liked to think he was joking but there was no hint of a smile.
The woman in charge of the shift arrived, a pretty girl, Yuliya Demina. She took away various things that she had no right to take: my passport, my ticket. She ordered me to stand in a particular place and not to move, and then she went away. She was gone for a very long time and the plane was about to leave. The young guardian of the border came out of his booth and prattled on again about “problems” which “you know yourself.”
“Are you going to have problems coming back in?”
“What do you mean?”
“You might not be allowed back in, for instance.”
It’s the usual approach in this, the era of the Second Chechen War. You can become nobody at any moment, especially if you have witnessed something. No laws are required to do that, as was proven in London, where I was permitted to fly to at the very last moment.
Part III: The Kadyrovs
THE WAR SUPERMARKET. EXTERMINATING CHECHENS IS NOW SELF-SERVICE
June 26, 2000
The Kremlin continues its Michurinist labor of planting and nurturing civil war in Chechnya as assiduously as the late father of Soviet hybridisation. Its most recent contribution was made on June 8, when the President signed an order appointing 49-year-old Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov “Chief of Chechnya” (Director of the Provisional Administration). Kadyrov is associated by