Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [69]
Old Balu was as uncompromising as he was legendary. He famously never bowed down before anyone. He ignored Kadyrov’s demand to all mullahs and religious leaders and did not urge his fellow villagers to vote in favor of the new Constitution in the March 23 referendum. Nearly everyone else grumbled but did as they were told. More than that, Said Mahomed categorically rejected Kadyrov’s methods for ruling Chechnya, for example when it was announced that the Islamic fast was not to be observed as required by the Islamic calendar but to be moved by one week. This was his way of finding out which mullahs would defy him. The majority were scared and complied, if without enthusiasm. They wanted to live. Said Mahomed did not comply. He said publicly, “We should fear the Almighty, not Kadyrov.” This, of course, was passed on to Kadyrov, and retribution was not long in coming.
“Kadyrov was just establishing which of the mullahs were on side,” says a fellow villager. “We were very afraid for Said Mahomed, we begged him to go to his son in Moscow. Kadyrov was removing from his path anybody who enjoyed authority and was not on his side, but Said Mahomed refused. He said, ‘I am too old to run away.’ ”
Shortly before he was disappeared, old Balu went to Ilaskhan-Yurt where a religious festival which is important for Chechens takes place once a year. People pray together. As he was approaching the village, the old man saw that the United Russia party was electioneering in the middle of the religious festival, and of course Kadyrov was there in person. Isakov did not disguise his outrage and left immediately. Again, Kadyrov was informed.
Strong people usually have no difficulty respecting the authority of other strong people. It is the weak people who seek revenge. Very little time passed before they came for the old man, a whole column of armoured vehicles. Some 200 soldiers, all to seize one ill old man.
Said Mahomed went outside the gates. Zeinap tried to dissuade him but he replied that they would not harm an old man like him. He had been checked hundreds of times. He walked through the gates and that was the last anybody saw of him. Zeinap heard the engines of the armoured column roaring as it turned and drove off. She and his sons wrote letters to every conceivable institution. The villagers held a meeting to demand that Kadyrov and the Army immediately return their greatly respected elder. The Prosecutor’s Office even opened Criminal Case No. 24049, but the official responses, when they came, were mere stonewalling. “No special measures (security sweeps) were conducted in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno by members of the federal forces between June 20 and 23.”
“There was just the pretence of an investigation and of inquiries,” Marat Isakov is convinced. “He was taken away by Kadyrovites. Kadyrov forces the mullahs to be corrupt, but my father was completely different. Kadyrov removes all genuinely religious people who separate religion and money. That has always been the way in our family. We kept out of politics and avoided friendship with government officials.”
Almost all the mullahs in Chechnya who found Kadyrov unacceptable, and openly said as much to the people, have by now been eliminated. The same is true of almost all the heads of rural administrations in Chechnya. (The Chechen administrative system is based on enormous “villages” of up to 15–20,000 inhabitants.) But what, meanwhile, of the “President of the Chechen Republic”?
Having been proclaimed President, Akhmat-hadji