Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [63]
Up till now, no monuments have been placed on the graves of those executed and the men of the family of the four who died do not visit the cemetery. This means they have declared a blood feud for the killing, this time on Ramzan Kadyrov, younger son of the “Acting President,” who, with his father’s full support and occupying the post of Commander of a mythical “Interior Ministry Special Unit” at his court, engages with his brigade in robbery, murder, and general score-settling with those he regards as his enemies.
“Well, Shakhidat and Aimani could not have been guilty,” Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva says, shaking her head and no longer wiping her swollen eyes. She is a grandmother and in May six of her family were killed. “Why did my daughter die? They dragged her here, to the cellar where we have a kitchen. I was shouting, ‘Take me, she has a baby!’ They replied, ‘You are not a blood relative. We don’t need you.’ Her children were crying. People in masks woke everyone from their beds and asked, ‘Who are you?’ Or ‘Whose are you?’ They took those they wanted down to the cellar and just shot them. My Liza first of all. What for? Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty of causing the explosion. Everybody knows that.”
The women around us are crying like kittens, moaning quietly. Liza’s old father breaks down. It is unbearable, because everybody can see what the continuation will be.
First, however, a chronology of this latest misfortune to befall Bachi-Yurt, and why these events happened.
On May 14 a terrorist attack took place in Ilaskhan-Yurt, a village in Gudermes District, during an election rally for the ruling United Russia party which coincided with the day of the Prophet’s birth. There were many casualties. Chechen television had assiduously invited people to come to the field near Ilaskhan-Yurt, promising a meeting with Kadyrov and gifts in his honor from United Russia. It was only after the bombing that Kadyrov claimed on television that the Ilaskhan-Yurt meeting was a religious celebration; the propaganda put out through the Chechen media before May 14 made it clear that this was pre-electoral campaigning on behalf of United Russia candidates, supported by the administrative resources of the state. The heads of rural administrations were instructed to organise buses to systematically bring their people to Ilaskhan-Yurt in order to swell the numbers.
People arrived in vehicles and on foot. For several days beforehand local television reported that Kadyrov would be speaking and, as a sign of clemency, would talk to mothers whose children had been disappeared during security sweeps. Thousands responded to that inducement. A crucial factor in the turnout of many thousands was this hint that Kadyrov would make an announcement about the fate of some of the disappeared. There have been thousands of them in Chechnya, and most of their relatives comb the Republic daily in the hope of finding traces of their dear ones.
Among the crowd were Shakhidat Baimuradova, her sister Aimani Visayeva, the mother of 11 children and long since an old-age pensioner, and Zulai Abdurzakova. They were there for good reason. A typical part of the modern Chechen scenery, these are mothers fruitlessly seeking their sons, hoping by chance somewhere to come across an honest law enforcement officer. They always carry bundles of documents with them.
On May 13, the day before the gathering, Shakhidat and Aimani went to the home of Kadyrov’s father in the village of Tsentoroy to ask him to help them get a meeting with the “Acting President” at which they could hand over their letters and documents. The father told them to go to Ilaskhan-Yurt, saying that it would be more convenient to meet him there. They took his advice. On May 14, what happened happened, and by that evening the Prosecutor’s Office