Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [75]
Chechnya’s voters? The influence of the Chechen electorate is no longer of interest to anybody. A Parliament has been elected which, when the times comes, will appoint Ramzan Kadyrov President. The Deputies there are no threat to anyone. They worship their Prime Minister with their knees knocking, and this video is of no concern to them.
I have no doubt at all that this mobile video has been released for the benefit of just one person in Russia: Putin. It is for showing in an auditorium where the only spectator obstinately refuses even to pretend he is concerned about the vileness of what he cobbled together from the material most readily available.
PS. We formally request that the Prosecutor-General’s Office should treat this as a witness statement. We are prepared unhesitatingly to forward the recordings in Novaya gazeta’s possession.
[The response was that on April 24, 2006 the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case into the incident of the attack on federal soldiers, which occurred on October 7, 2005 in Grozny. The other videos were to be examined in the context of an existing criminal case.]
A HEAD ON THE GAS PIPELINE. KADYROV’S MEDIAEVAL BARBARISM – IN JULY 2006
August 3, 2006
According to a report by the Memorial Human Rights Center, on July 28 in the district center of Kurchaloy armed Kadyrovites exhibited a severed human head on a gas pipeline in the middle of the village. This was the outcome of events there the previous night. At about midnight two resistance fighters had been ambushed on the western outskirts. There was a firefight, one of the fighters, a Kurchaloy man, Khozh-Akhmed Dushayev, was killed and a second, Adam Badayev, was captured.
At dawn some 20 cars with armed men congregated in the village by the Interior Ministry District Office and placed Dushayev’s severed head on the gas pipe. Beneath the head they hung bloodstained trousers. Dushayev was identified by residents living near the Interior Ministry building.
This was all directed by an aide of Prime Minister Kadyrov, Idris Gaibov, a former Head of the Administration of Kurchaloy District. Onlookers heard Gaibov phoning Prime Minister Kadyrov and reporting that they had killed “Devil No. 1 from Kurchaloy and hung up his head.” (“Devils” is how the Kadyrovites refer to Wahhabis.) After that, the Kadyrovites spent the next two hours photographing the head with their video cameras and mobile phones.
On the morning of July 29 militiamen from the Kurchaloy Interior Ministry District Office removed the head, but the bloodstained trousers were left hanging there. At the same time, officers from the Interior Ministry and members of the Prosecutor’s Office began work at the site of the conflict. Local people heard one of the Interior Ministry officers asking his subordinate, “Have they finished sewing that head back on yet?” Soon Dushayev’s body was brought to the scene of the ambush with his head sewn back on.
The Memorial Human Rights Center believes the desecration of Dushayev’s body by Gaibov was personal revenge. The villagers say that on June 10 Dushayev had killed Idris Gaibov’s nephew, Adam Gaibov, a soldier of the Yug (South) Battalion, and also beheaded him.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. One civilian government official, an aide to the Prime Minister of a government which is a constituent part of the Russian Federation, gave orders to soldiers who were not under his command to cut off a human head. The Prime Minister of that territory was aware of what was happening, or was at least informed about it while it was happening, and made no attempt to intervene. The Kadyrovites, who are now officially recognised as employees of the Russian Interior Ministry, carried out the order. Officials from the Prosecutor’s Office, the institution charged with supervising proper administration of the law, being fully aware of what had happened, merely told those