Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [61]
The absence of constraint fosters depravity and enables Kadyrov to settle scores with anyone who has offended him in times past. This goes beyond political or ideological enmity. The bodyguards’ second target seems at first to be entirely random individuals, but in fact many of these are people who in their youth in some way offended Kadyrov, or were less than supportive of his religious career.
The third, special category of people likely to be murdered by Kadyrov’s “security service” are the unofficial leaders of Chechen villages, people who – by dint of the military situation, of villagers’ despair at what is happening, and because there is no protection – have become very active in their districts and villages and demonstrated leadership qualities. The Chief of the Republic has discerned a threat to his electoral prospects in their growing grassroots popularity. Not in the sense that they might themselves be elected: Turko Dikayev, for example, had no such ambitions. They have simply shown that they are capable of mobilising their villages, and would be unlikely to mobilise them for Kadyrov.
Turko Dikayev was one of Kadyrov’s personal friends. They went back a long way, but this did not save him. In recent months Turko had found himself in this category of popular unofficial leaders. It was not something he sought, and resulted only from the suffocating bureaucracy which left him performing essential tasks everybody else was too scared to do.
The result was that this August, in mysterious circumstances which point to the complicity of Kadyrov’s “security service,” Turko Dikayev was murdered. By this time, as a responsible and popular individual, he had become the Administrative Head of Tsotsan-Yurt in Kurchaloy District. Tsotsan-Yurt’s recent history has been appalling. The New Year of 2002 saw it subjected to one of the most brutal security sweeps Chechnya has known. On January 1, soldiers entered the villagers’ houses and wished them, “Miserable New Year!” The then head of the village simply fled. The soldiers were willing to negotiate the return of bodies only with the village head and it was at that point that Turko, as one of the Council of Elders of Tsotsan-Yurt, assumed responsibility.
We met in early March. In Tsotsan-Yurt’s central square there was a permanent wake for the victims of the security sweeps. Turko had been unable to sleep for days and was in a terrible state because of high blood pressure. In the spring the Army’s incessant raids on the tormented village were replaced by a new horror: almost every day mutilated corpses were being systematically dumped on the outskirts. The villagers were living in a state of constant shock and panic. They appealed to Turko, but he found it impossible to persuade any officials from Grozny to come to the village. He did everything he could to ease the situation of his fellow villagers, attempting to negotiate with the federals, going to Grozny himself, and trying to obtain an audience with his old friend Kadyrov.
Kadyrov refused to see him, not even allowing him into the waiting room. All the while the head of Kadyrov’s “security service” was strutting up and down the corridors of the government building telling everybody this brutality was the only way to treat Tsotsan-Yurt because it was a bastion and symbol of lawlessness.
Let us be quite clear: Kadyrov left the village to survive as best it could with no support from him. He abdicated his responsibilities in Tsotsan-Yurt, and all that Turko did was refuse to betray his fellow villagers. He accepted that authority and did all he could for them at the moment of their greatest distress. He earned immense respect for that and, incidentally, made no secret that he had lost faith in the moral qualities of Kadyrov. And so he was killed.
Turko had a presentiment that something of the kind would happen, and told me that he saw Kadyrov