Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [79]
But to return to Eshiev. On November 10 last year, on Militia Day, Kadyrov put Eshiev forward for a medal, which he was duly awarded in a solemn ceremony by generals of the Interior Ministry. Many Chechen militiamen refused to enter the hall on that occasion. In the winter, however, a section of Eshiev’s detachment rejected Kadyrov and again took to the hills. There was fraternisation between Eshiev’s people and resistance fighters, and Ramzan accused Eshiev of treachery. It was claimed he had surrendered on instructions from Basayev solely in order to inveigle his way into Kadyrov’s confidence and kill him.
The upshot was that all the members of Eshiev’s family to be found in the Vedeno and Gudermes Districts were first abducted and then disappeared off the face of the earth. There were 24 of them, including women and a three-year-old child. Only one very ancient member of the family was left alive, on the grounds that he was too old to have children.
The fate of the Eshiev family became widely known in Chechnya and, naturally, among the resistance fighters. Nobody is going to be in a hurry to surrender to Ramzan now.
“Was Eshiev really going to betray Ramzan?” I asked people in the know.
“Yes,” they replied.
As the commanders of the pro-Moscow Chechen security forces point out, “loyalty” meant accepting total subservience to Kadyrov, not an attractive proposition, but those days are rapidly coming to an end. The situation now is that demonstrative loyalty to Ramzan, which helped many here to flourish, is being replaced by firm confrontation of him by the security forces. That was not the case before this summer.
On July 25 German Gref and Alexey Kudrin, respectively Russia’s Ministers of Economic Development and Finance, flew into Grozny. There was a Party pow-wow on how to finance the rebuilding of Chechnya. Kadyrov, in his usual loutish manner, baldly demanded almost two billion roubles for projects which had already been completed, to which Gref and Kudrin responded in an unprecedented manner by demanding that he should provide them with full documentation, including invoices, on the projects.
The documentation is in a state of complete chaos. Building takes place, but there is no paperwork in respect of some four billion roubles. Gref was succinct in his reply: “Nice try …” The intonation, those present claim, was suggestive of “Up yours, Sunshine!” Kudrin said outright he had no intention of ending up in prison because of Ramzan: the money would be released only when full, receipted documentation for the projects was received. Kadyrov was indignant: “We’ll send you documentation by the suitcase tomorrow!” Kudrin was having none of it: thanks, but he would send his own valuation commission from Moscow to estimate how much the projects should have cost. Kadyrov went ballistic, but swallowed it.
There were a great many people present at that meeting, and none failed to register the change in the tone the federal ministers adopted with Ramzan. They also reminded him about the funds allocated for “flood damage,” which needed to be accounted for. Ramzan had no comeback. Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, the Speaker of the Chechen Parliament, was about to start singing his favorite song of recent months – to the effect that Moscow hadn’t given Chechnya a copeck in aid – but was cut off in mid-sentence.
There had been nothing quite like this before. In the past, those same federal ministers addressed the “Kadyrov team” only in the tone of indulgent fathers. Witnesses also noticed that the ministers declined to be transported from the airfield to the meeting in Kadyrov’s black Land Cruisers with their Moscow number plates, preferring Alkhanov’s presidential fleet.
Behind the scenes at that same meeting, the federal ministers were advised that if Kadyrov became President, half the Chechen Republic would leave Chechnya. They were also told that nobody was likely to sign up to amnesties underwritten by Ramzan.
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