Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [72]
And heaven forbid that anyone should try to conceal anything. The Kadyrovites have an enviably efficient protection racket control service, far more efficient than whatever outfit Putin kids himself is pursuing Basayev. If you don’t pay your tribute, or if you try to conceal something, you get a smack on the head and the sum due from you is increased as an ongoing fine. If you fail to pay a second time you had better flee before you are abducted, with fatal consequences.
In other words there is a market, and it is ruled by bosses who do their rounds and get their cut. The bosses are a gang in private practice, and in Chechnya they enjoy the patronage of Russia’s most senior state authorities. Accordingly, absolutely anything goes in terms of robbery with violence or depravity, economics or politics, or the appointment of candidates to stand as Deputies. Not even membership of Putin’s United Russia party confers immunity. You need to pay and promise to keep paying.
One last example: a man who was close to the Kadyrovs, Taus, the most loyal of the loyal, their guard dog of Chechenisation. Taus lived with the Kadyrov family for a long time. He respected Akhmat-hadji. He served him and was inherited by Ramzan, whom he had known since he was little. Taus aspired to be a major politician. He was the architect of the agreement on how powers were to be divided between the Russian and Chechen regimes, and he was someone Surkov talked to in the Kremlin. He longed to be leader of the Parliament, and for a while enjoyed the rank of Chairman of the State Council of the Chechen Republic, a quasi-parliamentary institution which rubber-stamped political decisions on behalf of Akhmat-hadji and Ramzan.
But then there was an argument. In the end even the most loyal of the loyal could no longer tolerate the super-insolence of Kadyrov’s gang and the super-exactions they levied. Trading on his position as an old comrade, he had the audacity to make a remark to the totally berserk Ramzan, who beat him like a dog, in public, as he was accustomed to beat anyone he didn’t like. He punched him in the face and kicked him out.
Taus left and, even before the election, Ramzan appointed a different head of the Parliament, Dukvakha from the Ministry of Agriculture, to be Deputy Prime Minister. Incidentally, the Ministry of Agriculture pays even more than the other Ministries to Tsentoroy; Dukvakha had decided that might help his career along.
What am I getting at? On the eve of this latest round of “European-style” elections, Chechnya has finally been turned into a big Bey’s bazaar where the Bey is the sole oligarch, complete with his Hummers and his golden WC pedestals, a completely brutal, repressive apparatus that stops at nothing, and other tell-tale signs of the Turkmenbashi syndrome. Do you know what Parliament does in Turkmenistan? It rubber-stamps the decisions of the Turkmenbashi. Well, in Chechnya a “European” façade is being built by a regime of total Turkmenbashism, a mechanism for rubber-stamping whatever Ramzan’s visceral urges dictate.
Of course, you have to feel sorry for the people racing to hand over money for the right to become nonentities, as Alu Alkhanov has in the past year by being “democratically elected” President of the Chechen Republic. But everybody makes his choice, and for those who wish to run and deliver the money there are others out there who were also urged to be election candidates but categorically refused.
One thing, however, is unbearable. What was it that thousands and thousands of people, from the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, laid down their lives for? For this? And why are those who are still alive suffering so much, eking out an existence without any twenty-first-century amenities in the ruins and wrecked homes of Chechnya?
It is hard to admit, but we must: all the sacrifices that were made have been rendered senseless by the regime which has been installed. As election