Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [93]
Finally something had happened which is still exceptionally rare in Chechnya, where most soldiers, with the connivance of their superiors, have created total mayhem, and where the Prosecutor, timidly slinking past them, is a figure of fun.
With The Cadet now in a cell, it seemed to us that, largely thanks to the persistence of Novaya gazeta, the law would take its course. The case was being taken care of at the highest level.
We were wrong. On February 28 the author of these lines was summoned to Grozny, to the Office of the Prosecutor of the Chechen Republic, to “assist investigations related to Case No. 15004,” to be questioned as someone who had been wronged. Novaya gazeta naturally felt duty bound to comply, firmly believing that it had helped the Prosecutor’s Office to restore law and order and should continue to do so.
Things began to go wrong the moment I arrived in Chechnya. Vladimir Ignatenko, the Investigating Officer, behaved so inappropriately that from time to time one had the uneasy feeling that his main objective was not to keep all the witnesses in this case on board but rather to demoralise them, to coerce them into refusing to testify and thereby to torpedo the case. At one point Ignatenko ordered the security guards to take me outside the confines of the Prosecutor’s Office late at night, having deliberately dragged out the questioning until it was pitch dark and the curfew was in force. In Grozny that is tantamount to – well, obviously it is tantamount to what The Cadet had promised in September. On another occasion he forced me to stand under guard for several hours by “the kiosks,” a patch of ground not far from the Prosecutor’s Office, visible from it but not on its territory or under its control. Cold and hungry, I was refused permission to use the toilet, or the telephone to tell the newspaper what was going on. I was given water only infrequently, again under guard. Members of the Prosecutor’s Office staff joked sympathetically, “Consider yourself under administrative arrest.” Thank you very much.
I will omit details of the campaign of humiliation which went on for many days. It was so discourteous as to leave me without a shred of respect for those wearing combat fatigues and styled “Civil Prosecutors” in Chechnya. All attempts to get through to Chernov, the Prosecutor of Chechnya, to find out what was going on, failed. He was too busy. On one occasion he was in the bathhouse, another time having lunch, another time having dinner. Or so, at least, his security people said.
All this, however, is not what really matters. What matters is the witnesses, without whom the case will fall apart in court and The Cadet will walk off into history as if nothing had happened, and even, in the eyes of his ilk, wearing the halo of a martyr.
Ignatenko assured me that representatives of the Memorial Human Rights Center, who are well acquainted with the witnesses from Grozny, had supposedly refused to assist the investigation unless they were paid. This was a ludicrous assertion. I have known these people very well throughout the course of the Second Chechen War, risking their lives to get accurate information about what is going on, selflessly doing work which, incidentally, is the responsibility of the Prosecutor’s Office. I did not believe Ignatenko and, of course, set out to check his claims.
Here is what I learned. The witnesses really are terrified of giving evidence. They are moving round