Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [62]
This answers our main question as to why the Kadyrov regime is as it is. His gang are smoothing the way for their chief to be elected President. His bodyguards abduct and torture people, his obnoxious son, in tandem with the head of the “security service,” judges them, and then they simply disappear. All because Kadyrov has this electoral itch, this lust for legitimation. He has been in power for two years now, but sitting on a stool, not a throne. He can talk about nothing other than his imminent ultimate victory over Maskhadov. Whatever you ask him, he always returns to that.
Kadyrov understands that only an election will set the seal on his victory over his former comrade, his one-time spiritual pupil, and his present-day Enemy No. 1. Kadyrov has even concocted a new constitution for Chechnya to further his ends, because elections need to be constitutional. The only one Chechnya has dates from the period of Presidents Dudayev and Maskhadov, and under that Constitution Chechnya already has a President.
Kadyrov has agreed with the Kremlin that November would be the best time for a referendum on the new Constitution. They need to hurry, while Chechnya is still full of Russian troops who can vote the right way once his path to the throne has been cleared.
He has overlooked just one detail. In this squalid tale of murderous passion, the Kremlin – with its stubborn support of Kadyrov, support which frees him of all moral constraint – insists on ignoring the fact that Kadyrov Senior can only win an election in which the security forces, numbering many thousands, distort the “democratic” vote.
The two years during which he has ruled by fiat have been spent not in earning the respect of his electorate but in losing any he ever possessed. If Putin went into his election as an unknown quantity, which allowed for all sorts of manipulation, Kadyrov has no such option. He is poisonous, and the whole of Chechnya knows it. How can you entrust government of the country to the likes of Kadyrov, who has no prospect of ever enjoying any sort of approval rating from the electorate? The result is that he has to resort to extreme measures. Is Putin not guilty of a crime against people who are infinitely weary of waiting to be freed from the imposition of war, disasters, funerals, dead bodies and torture?
If, Mr President, you do not know the names of decent people in Chechnya, ask those who do. It is so elementary, and lives will be saved.
PS An argument broke out in the Novaya gazeta office over whether we should write Security Service or “Security Service”? Anti-terrorist operation or “anti-terrorist operation”? Opinion was divided. From a grammatical point of view clearly there should be no inverted commas, but the present-day reality in Chechnya is so phoney as to make it impossible to observe grammatical rules. In Chechnya everything is in inverted commas, because an illegal war is taking place in a zone whose existence is itself illegal. An illegitimate government spawns lawless soldiers. The knot has already been pulled so tight that it is difficult to imagine how it can be undone, even if at some magic moment enlightenment should come to those with power in their hands, and perhaps even a flicker of responsibility in their minds.
A BLOOD FEUD HAS BEEN DECLARED AGAINST THE FAMILY OF THE “ACTING PRESIDENT OF CHECHNYA”
June 16, 2003
In the remote Chechen village of Bachi-Yurt “unidentified masked individuals wearing camouflage fatigues,” speaking only in Chechen, executed four members of one family, the Ablayev-Dautkhadzhievs. Three men, aged between 45 and 55, were shot along with a 27-year-old woman, who leaves a two-month-old baby and two sons aged four and five. The executioners came for them in the night and said they were exacting blood retribution for the events of May 14, when female suicide bombers made an attempt on the