Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [66]
Ibrahim, however, dug his heels in, and shortly afterwards was hooded, pushed into a car, and driven off.
In Chechnya the “Kadyrovites” are units subordinate to Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of the “Chief of Chechnya.” Ramzan is the head of “Daddy’s ‘Security Service,’ ” and behaves in a manner reminiscent of President Yeltsin’s bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, who interpreted his role so broadly as to behave like the second-in-command in the state hierarchy.
An example of this in action: how funds are collected for Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s election campaign. As a majority of ministers in the Chechen Government admit, Ramzan names a sum of money which their Ministry is to contribute. We are not talking thousands of roubles here, but thousands of dollars. The Minister draws up a list apportioning the levy between officials in accordance with the post they occupy. Deputy ministers have to contribute up to $5,000, while heads of departments or boards are assessed at $1,000–2,000 per head. The officials are warned that if the Ministry fails to deliver the sum demanded by Ramzan, they will be sacked. Civil servants are desperately afraid of losing their jobs because wages funded by the state budget are the only more or less stable form of income in Chechnya. As a result, half of Chechnya is today in debt to the other half. Everybody has borrowed and re-borrowed from each other in order not to come to the attention of the Kadyrov family.
After the officials, there are Chechnya’s markets. This is the Republic’s second most important cash cow. Unfortunate Chechen women – teachers, doctors, housewives, nurses, and journalists – stand in the markets, which is how most families have managed to feed themselves throughout the war. The Chechen men are at home trying to avoid security sweeps and checkpoints, and the Chechen women are trading. Every such market trader also has a tribute levied on behalf of Akhmat-hadji. The approach is the same: Ramzan names a figure to the market’s Director, who then allots everybody a contribution.
The officials, naturally enough, did not protest, but the women went on strike. They had each been assessed for $500 (political services in Chechnya are, you will note, quite pricey), and said they would not return to the market until the demand was made more reasonable. The strike collapsed, however, when the Kadyrovites threatened to murder the families of one or two of the ringleaders, and the money was handed over. You can judge for yourself how remarkably fair and democratic the coming elections are going to be.
The word “Kadyrovite” in Chechnya is applied to a large number of decentralised and anarchic detachments, each armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry, including Israeli rapid-fire rifles and murderous Berettas banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Officially there are 61 people in Akhmat-hadji’s security detail but if we include units under Ramzan’s command, some of the militia firearms teams, and all manner of special operations units with which Chechnya is teeming and into which Kadyrov has succeeded in infiltrating his own people, the official figure rises to 1,200.
In reality, however, throughout Chechnya the Kadyrovites number several thousands. They themselves put the figure sometimes at 3,000, sometimes at 5,000. Where do they all come from? The divisions Ramzan Kadyrov controls today accept anybody who wants to go on fighting, for example ex-resistance fighters who have been amnestied. In effect, the amnesty declared by the Russian Duma obliges those amnestied to be absorbed into the Kadyrov detachments. Amnestied former resistance units now form the backbone of the Kadyrovites. This summer they recruited in every district center and most villages. Fighters and members of the resistance who refused amnesty