Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [87]
The Chechen Prosecutor, Vsevolod Chernov, does most of the talking, because it is primarily his responsibility to find the disappeared. Also present, of course, are representatives of the main Army base at Khankala, who attend with ineradicable scepticism written all over their faces. Those present from the National Military Prosecutor’s Office sit as silent as the grave. The meeting stretches out interminably, the various gentlemen discussing matters wearily and finding it difficult to conceal quite how boring, and indeed objectionable, they find all this.
Losing patience, Taisa Musayeva jumps up. Her voice quavers. “What are you talking about here? I have just one wish for the lot of you: that you should find yourselves in my place. Nobody is looking for my husband, or has any intention of doing so.” Taisa is 25, and does not know whether she is a wife or already a widow.
On July 2, during the now notorious brutal mass security sweeps in the hill villages of Assinovskaya and Sernovodsk, Taisa’s husband, Zelimkhan Umkhanov, was taken in front of his entire family from his home on Kutalov Street in Sernovodsk and driven away to an unknown destination. The whole world duly came to hear about these security sweeps, the President had his say, and for the first time in the long months of this war he waxed indignant about the senselessness of the “special measures” employed. The Prosecutor-General publicly assured us all that a meticulous inquiry was in hand.
“That was a lie. There is no inquiry,” Taisa hammers home her truth. For two months, the families of 28-year-old Zelimkhan and 22-year-old Apti Isigov, also abducted by the military from Sernovodsk, have been unable to persuade the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office even to take a statement from them about what they witnessed. The relatives have been scurrying round the Republic after Prosecutor Chernov, begging him to accept their evidence. To no avail.
What is it that the Prosecutors in Chechnya are keen not to know? Perhaps this might at least be of interest to their superiors in the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office? Well, they do not want to know, for example, the identification number of the armoured personnel carrier in which masked individuals abducted Umkhanov and Isigov without even glancing at their passports. It was “4025.” Neither do they want to know the radio call sign of the vehicle, “88;” or of the commanding officer in charge of the abduction, “12.” The number of the military Urals truck which accompanied the abduction was “O 1003 KSh.” On July 3 both Umkhanov and Isigov were sighted in the back of this truck. It was parked in Assinovskaya and the abducted men were lying covered by a tarpaulin. They were alive and asked for water when they heard voices nearby. There are witnesses to whom the unfortunate men managed to say that they had not been allowed out from under the canvas for more than 24 hours.
“The search for the disappeared could be completed, we believe, in a matter of hours,” write the mothers of the Sernovodsk men in a letter to President Putin. On August 28, having lost hope of finding any help in Chechnya, they wrote to Moscow: “All that is needed,” the mothers advise the President, “is to assemble those in charge of that special operation (who are all known), to question a number of soldiers and officers (who are also known), and, if necessary, to conduct an identification parade. There are witnesses living in Sernovodsk.”
The mothers are simple women, untrained in detective work, but simply stating the obvious. They do not know that hundreds of Chechen families have already been down this road. Nearly all of them wrote to the President with information in their possession which made it possible to find the disappeared in a matter of days. Given the will, of course. And that is the snag.
On January 2 this year Zelimkhan Murdalov, a 26-year-old man from Grozny, was walking down the street when he was suddenly assaulted by six men in combat fatigues, stripped, and bundled into a car in full view of the passengers on a bus which had stopped