Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [68]
Hiding behind his black glasses, Ibrahim hobbles off. Everything that happened to him this August is typical of life in Chechnya in the run-up to the election. One could substitute names of other people who have been tortured in the same place and for the same purpose. The real pre-election campaigning by Kadyrov’s emissaries is mass intimidation under the slogan, “With Kadyrov, or Death!”
What we see looming is truly an election of despair. The Kremlin has created a monster worse than those which preceded him, and now he is not so easy to get rid of. If Kadyrov wins, it is inevitable that he will settle scores with his opponents, that they will retaliate, that there will be more bloodshed and atrocities, mistrust and radicalisation. That will be a war, whether you call it civil war or the Third Chechen War.
WHY KADYROV TOOK AGAINST OLD BALU: PRESIDENTIAL POWER IN THE ZONE OF THE SO-CALLED “ANTI-TERRORIST OPERATION”
November 20, 2003
Does Kadyrov want to be a real president? Does he want to live up to the election results declared on October 5 and, in accordance with the Constitution, protect the people of Chechnya from war, abductions, starvation and humiliation? What is he doing? What sort of a bargain are the populace getting?
For the past five months Marat Isakov has been searching high and low for his 77-year-old father, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov, Village Elder of Dyshne-Vedeno, a well-known man respected in this region as authoritative, upright and devout. In fact, as the people of Vedeno say of him, as pure as gold. He has made ten pilgrimages to Mecca, has stood up against the Wahhabis, and you will not find a house here where Old Balu, as he is affectionately known, has not buried the departed, reconciled enemies or counselled the young.
For some time, however, the elder Isakov had been an obstacle, in Kadyrov’s opinion. Old Balu failed to support him, spoke out against his methods, and on June 21 this year, during the period between the referendum on March 23 and the election on October 5 when Kadyrov was sweeping away all opposition, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov was abducted by “unidentified military personnel,” from the street next to his own in Dyshne-Vedeno, as he was going to a wake. His family have no doubt that the Kadyrovites were behind it.
Zeinap, Said Mahomed’s 75-year-old wife, who has borne him ten children and shared 60 years of her life with him, wrote letters to everyone she could think of, from the Prosecutor of Vedeno District to President Putin and Patriarch Alexiy. She enclosed a copy of his labor record book as a worker at the Vedeno forestry mill and as a blacksmith, his awards, expressions of appreciation for his numerous successes in socialist competition. It was all futile. “Information regarding the circumstances of the detention and present whereabouts of S. Isakov is not in the possession of any of the Ministries of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Chechen Republic.” In today’s Chechnya, this is a fearsome dismissal which leaves no grounds for hope. It came to Zeinap signed by the Military Prosecutor of Army Unit 20116, Judicial Colonel I. Kholmsky.
Balu appears to have been swallowed up by the earth, a man “who enjoyed unchallengeable authority among all strata of the population,” as a collective appeal from the Citizens’ Assembly of Vedeno District to President Putin put it when they demanded that the old man be returned.
“It was odd the way even people who agreed to help, people who go into the military bases, to Khankala, suddenly changed their tune one or two days later,” says Marat, one of Said Mahomed’s seven sons. “One day they would be saying, ‘Yes, I’ve seen him. He will certainly be released,’ but the next it was, ‘No. I don’t know anything.’ ”
“Why do you think that is?”
“It was if they had discovered something, and suddenly wanted out.”
Zeinap continues:
“He is ill, taking medicine. He has high blood pressure and stomach trouble. I sense he is no longer with us. He would not have lasted this long in prison. They might at least return his bones. We