Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [56]
The three weeks since June 8 have served only to confirm the worst predictions regarding Mr Kadyrov’s appointment. The conflict between Chechen and Chechen has flared up with new vigour. The news images are following the same script as when civil war flared up in Tajikistan.
Within these three weeks, only three heads of district administrations out of 18 have agreed to work under the middleman Mufti. Twelve of them sent an abrupt demand to President Putin, the “Letter of the Twelve,” either to change his edict or expect sabotage. When Moscow chose to ignore this, a meeting of administrative heads in Gudermes on June 16 considered a proposal to try to persuade the Center to at least delay Kadyrov’s accession to the throne by a couple of months, until the end of the harvest season. The reason is that people need to be able to harvest the 85,000 hectares they have sowed with such difficulty without the fear that Kadyrov’s coming to power heralds either a renewal in the near future of combat operations or that the Kadyrov gang, whose existence he no longer bothers to deny, will simply set about brazenly filching the harvest, every hectare of which has been watered with blood and tears.
What is more, Chechnya is being abandoned by members of the Provisional Administration led by the already ex-Acting Head, Yakub Deniev. They too first sent a petition to the Kremlin (the “Letter of the Forty-Four”) in which they categorically stated that they would find it morally unacceptable to work under a man who had declared jihad on Moscow only for Moscow to hand him the throne of Chechnya, and who was now also demanding that he should have control of the budget.
Blood has been shed. A well-known Urus Martan imam, Umar Idrisov, has been assassinated, and PR games immediately began in connection with his tragic death. As if in response to orders from above, most of the media declared the Imam to have been a supporter of Kadyrov, which he never was. Indeed, Idrisov was a determined opponent of Kadyrov and refused to recognise him as Mufti or condone his pretensions to being the chosen spiritual leader of Chechnya. People have immediately connected the assassination of the Imam and the lies in the media, and have concluded that Moscow is artificially inflating Kadyrov’s standing, not holding back even from murdering the Imam so that they could pretend he had been martyred because he supported Kadyrov.
What, specifically, are the grudges most Chechens hold against the middleman Mufti?
In the first place, money. In 1992 Kadyrov was the treasurer of a mass pilgrimage of Muslims from Chechnya to Mecca. Kadyrov collected between $300 and $500 from each of them, only for the King of Saudi Arabia to pay for all the Chechen pilgrims. Kadyrov did not return the $220,000 he had collected. Outrage ensued, a criminal case was brought, and for six months Kadyrov was held in a pre-trial detention facility, after which the case was dropped by the Prosecutor’s Office and, on the orders of then President Dudayev, Kadyrov was released.
The next detail of his portrait is more recent. It concerns one of Kadyrov’s first acts after his appointment, and also tells us something about his morals. Budruddin Djamalkhanov, by now already the exdirector of the provisional administration’s liaison department with the security agencies, relates, “My father-in-law, Nasukha-hadji Akhmadov, built a mosque in 1989 in Kurchaloy, which was later turned into a madrasah. My father-in-law supported it to the best of his ability, but in the spring he asked the provisional administration for support. Koshman [the Russian Government’s representative in Chechnya] agreed, seeing that the children were at least being taught something there. At this point came Kadyrov’s appointment. Naturally, all the papers with the detailed budgets,