Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [59]
One of the most terrible tragedies for Chechnya is the mass disappearance of citizens. Today there are almost 3,000 “disappeared,” although nobody can give a precise figure. Their relatives go out seeking them, on the earth and under the earth, among those on the Russian side and among those on the other side. When the war ends we can be confident that the best investigators in Russia will be the relatives of the disappeared.
It is these “investigators,” recruited by misfortune, who uncovered the Kadyrovites. For some time, the tracks of abductions had been stubbornly leading to the village of Tsentoroy, famously the place where Kadyrov lives. The evidence pointed to buildings adjacent to Kadyrov’s house, and more precisely to Kadyrov’s very agreeable country estate and the buildings occupied by his bodyguards. Another path led stubbornly to Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, a village on the road to Grozny.
A recurrent pattern emerged: while some did return to freedom from the Tsentoroy torture chambers, all that came from Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 was the coldness of the grave. Sometimes, by chance, the bones of those who had been traced to Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 were found, scattered or half buried by dogs.
With time, one further piece of information emerged: Kadyrov is busily buying up plots of land in Tsentoroy, displacing to other villages families he doesn’t want and replacing them with his bodyguards’ families. Dracula is building a castle hidden from prying eyes, whose inhabitants are tied to him by the powerful bonds of shared guilt.
Many conversations with relatives of the disappeared, who found that all roads led to Tsentoroy and Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, show that people at first simply didn’t believe the Kadyrovites would dare to return to their old ways, to the kidnapping notorious in the time of Maskhadov, before Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov was reborn as a law-abiding and Kremlin-fearing gentleman.
Gradually, however, the facts began to speak for themselves; acts of terrorism ensued, and those of Kadyrov’s men considered guilty of the murders were themselves dispatched to the next world in accordance with the tradition of the blood feud. There were numerous reports of Kadyrov’s motorcades coming under fire or being blown up. He never suffered personally, but nephews, cousins and second cousins who were members of his security detail were killed.
You may approve of this approach to matters of life and death or categorically reject it, but what you or I think is not going to change anything. Given that most of the law enforcement agencies currently operating in Chechnya are fully aware of the evil-doing of Kadyrov’s “security service” but are not raising a finger against it, what can be done to stop this? More broadly, how could the intelligence agencies, with which Chechnya is teeming, have allowed things to come to such a pass?
There are two answers, one logical and the other irrational. To begin with the second: the overall policy of the agencies keeping the area of the anti-terrorist operation under surveillance is simply: “Let them fight it out among themselves. The more bloodshed, the better.” Starting from this premise, Kadyrov’s reign is just what you want.
The logical answer is that Kadyrov and the intelligence services both want to destroy Maskhadov and his supporters by whatever means they can. For the present, they are allies united by this aim, their interests overlapping so much that each closes his eyes to the criminality of the other. There are two facts to note here. The first is that some of those in Kadyrov’s torture chambers did indeed wage war against Russia in the era of the Islamic Republic of Ichkeria, or were prominent members of that government, or at least sympathised with it. Kadyrov has shown on more than one occasion that he cannot tolerate any sort of competition or rivalry. He makes an exception for resistance fighters who have recanted and sworn allegiance to himself, turncoats like Suleyman Yamadayev, the Gudermes kidnapper appointed to the position of goat in charge of the kitchen