9. The Last Pieces

[ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA’S LAST articles continued her protest against the brutality unleashed by Yeltsin and Putin when they agreed to reignite the Chechen War. In ‘A Pact Between Killers’ she passes on to a wider audience a report she believed important and illuminating.]

A PACT BETWEEN KILLERS

28 September 2006

A conference was held recently in Stockholm devoted, amongst other things, to the problems of the North Caucasus. Political analysts, journalists and human rights activists were invited. We publish below excerpts from one of the papers read at the conference.

Vakha Ibrakhimov, Researcher, Chechnya:

A significant number of local people regard the actions of Chechen squads as far worse than what was typical of the federals before them. ‘Those were Russians, but these are our own people. How can they treat us like this?’ Such is the half-rhetorical question I heard repeatedly. Even so, those critical of the Kadyrovites, people who hate them, would not want to go back three or four years to when the Republic was totally under the control of Russian soldiers and agents of the intelligence services.

Why? Simply because the members of pro-Moscow detachments, being themselves Chechen, do not treat other inhabitants of the Republic in a racist manner. Their enemies are not ‘all Chechens without exception’, and not even genuine separatists, but particular families and people with whom they have personal scores to settle. For a majority of Kadyrovites, Yamadayevites, Kakievites, and the followers of other warlords, the decision to fight on the side of the federal forces is not politically motivated but a convenient means of resolving their own problems with the backing of a state which ensures their security and, for a time, provides for them materially.

The members of these detachments are involved in exactly the same abductions, murders and torture, and long ago caught up with the death squads of regular officers of the Russian intelligence agencies in terms of brutality, but at least their actions are selective. Civilians who are not personally resisting either them or the federal authorities (who come a distant second) are usually left unmolested.

Who is in these detachments? The press, encouraged by the Government, represent them as former resistance fighters who, ‘having recognised the futility of continued resistance’, have joined the Russian side. This is far from the truth.

One of the mainstays of Russian policy in the region is the blood feud. This custom continues to be observed in Chechen society and, until recently, even had a stabilising function. To commit murder was not something a criminal would undertake lightly, because a murderer who failed to obtain forgiveness was doomed. His only option was to flee. In periods when the Chechen state has been weak, such individuals often joined armed groups and put the heat on their pursuers from a position of strength. Some of the most troublesome armed groups when Maskhadov was in power also consisted of people bearing blood guilt.

It was, however, the Russian political leaders who saw an opportunity of basing their policy on them. A considerable number of today’s so-called security agencies in Chechnya include, and are under the command of, people guilty of premeditated murders and kidnappings. Immediately after the occupation of the Republic, for example, Movladi Baisarov’s group went into service with the Russian Army. Its leader was a member of a gang led by the recidivist criminal, Ruslan Labazanov, who was defeated by the Chechen security forces in summer 1994. Between the two wars he and his lieutenants specialised in kidnapping and ransom.

One of the first to transfer allegiance to the federal authorities was Suleyman Yamadayev. According to data from the Prosecutor’s Office, his group also engaged in kidnapping but was subsequently legalised as a special company attached to the military commander of Gudermes District. The Vostok (East) Battalion has now been created on this basis as part of the 42nd Motorised Rifle Division of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation. Said-Mahomed Kakiev’s detachment has been incorporated in the same division, as the Zapad (West) Battalion. Kakiev too was a member of Ruslan Labazanov’s gang and was accused of committing a number of criminal and terrorist acts.

The civilian population’s most serious complaints are about the activity of the Kadyrovites. The detachments nominally identified in this way grew out of Akhmat Kadyrov’s Security Service and to this day are commanded by his former bodyguards. These individuals now also occupy all the key posts in Chechnya. Ruslan Alkhanov, for example, is the Interior Minister, and Adam Demilkhanov is the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the security agencies.

Originally, several dozen people were members of this service, and in the main they were close relatives or fellow villagers of the Republic’s former Mufti (Kadyrov Senior). As they grew in number, members of criminal gangs emerged from the underground and were added. These were initially ‘anti-terrorist centres’, and more recently mutated into the North and South Battalions, the Second Regiment of the Militia’s Patrol and Checkpoint Service, and the like. They have been co-opted and now rank among the security agencies of the Russian Federation. Both then and now, people who have committed murders and kidnappings are the backbone of the Kadyrovite groupings. These are the people appointed as commanders, and responsible for recruiting new members.

The history of Lema Salmanov is typical. Born in the village of Mairtup, in November 2002 he shot two fellow villagers in his own courtyard who had come by prior arrangement to collect money for a truck he had bought from them. The relatives of the murdered men declared a blood feud on Lema, but the authorities intervened on the criminal’s behalf. He was appointed commander of a detachment of Kadyrovites in the village, and thereafter of an anti-terrorist centre which was being formed in Kurchaloy District. His powers now virtually unlimited, he set about persecuting his sworn enemies, their immediate relatives, and anybody who might even hypothetically exact vengeance on him at some time in the future. Some of these went off to join the resistance fighters, others hid with friends. The friends were also subjected to repression for giving them refuge: they were beaten, tortured and killed. Several families were drawn into the conflict, certain episodes of which were represented in the press as being part of the struggle against terrorists. On Russian Militia Day, 2005, Lema Salmanov, who six months earlier had shot his elderly great-uncle for trying to talk sense to him, was awarded a government medal.

To the present day this individual remains one of the most powerful Kadyrovite commanders, although one might wonder what use he has been to the Russian authorities, since his activity has resulted in the killing of his personal rather than the state’s enemies, and dozens of people have taken to the hills to join the fighters.

It would appear that this is precisely the aim of Chechenisation, and that it was from the outset devised as a means of pitching Chechen against Chechen, not allowing the conflict to die down, and fanning it to the level of civil war. Clearly, if such a policy is to be implemented, it is best to seek the support of those who, having committed one crime, will not hesitate to repeat it in the future. There are no plans to combat the tradition of the blood feud in Chechnya and, given that retribution may be visited on a culprit even after many years, it binds such people to the Russian authorities more firmly than any ideological views.

This policy also serves the purely propaganda task of showing the world local inhabitants fighting on the side of the federals, and hence undermines the idea that the conflict has separatist roots.

There have always been Chechens who favoured keeping the Republic within Russia. They organised movements and armed detachments and, for example, hundreds of people opposed the separatists back in the early 1990s under the command of Bislan Gantamirov. At the beginning of the Second Chechen War, even before Akhmat Kadyrov’s Security Service was created, vigilante detachments appeared in a number of districts and enabled Russian troops to take control of the mountainous part of the Republic without serious losses.

The members of these detachments and their commanders refused, however, to participate in security sweeps, hostage-taking and summary executions. Emphasising their loyalty to the Russian authorities, they nevertheless showed a determination to protect the civilian population, if necessary from the Russian Army.

From early summer 2000, the Russians began to rid themselves of these ‘unreliable’ allies. The vigilante group of Vedeno District, for instance, was first dissolved and most of its members subsequently either abducted or killed. The Rifle Company of the Shatoy District Commandant’s Office was disbanded. It consisted mainly of men who had rallied to the Russian banner on intellectual grounds and had later refused to merge with the West Battalion, which consisted largely of criminals.

In other words, Chechenisation is not simply the transfer of power to institutions consisting of local inhabitants, but an encouragement and legitimisation of the activities of those who are prepared to participate in punitive operations against their own population. Chechenisation is a policy for expanding the scope of the war, and the result of the policy has been a replacement of the genocide practised directly by Russian agencies in the early stages of the conflict by today’s reign of terror by criminal and semi-criminal gangs supported and directed from Moscow.

A POSTSCRIPT: FRAGMENTS OF TWO ARTICLES ANNA WAS WORKING ON AT THE TIME OF HER DEATH

Editorial Note

People ask whether we believe Anna Politkovskaya’s murder was related to an article about torture which she was preparing, and which she had announced on Radio Liberty on Thursday, 5 October, two days before her death. We are here publishing fragments from two items which our columnist did not complete.

The first contains eyewitness accounts of the use of torture, which is confirmed by medical reports. The second consists of a video which would have formed the basis of an article that was never written. The disk in Politkovskaya’s possession (and we would ask whoever passed her the recording to contact us), shows unidentified citizens being tortured. The torturers themselves took the video and appear to belong to one of the Chechen security agencies.

WE ARE DESIGNATING YOU A TERRORIST

Novaya gazeta, No. 78 (12 October) 2006

Dozens of files come my way every day which contain copies of materials from criminal cases against people imprisoned or under investigation in Russia for ‘terrorism’.

Why put ‘terrorism’ in inverted commas? Because the overwhelming majority of these suspects have been designated terrorists. Now, in 2006, this habit of designating people as terrorists has not only displaced any genuine attempt to combat terrorism, but is of itself producing potential terrorists thirsting for revenge. When the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the courts fail to uphold the law and punish the guilty, and instead merely act on political instructions and connive in producing anti-terrorist statistics to please the Kremlin, criminal cases get cooked up like pancakes.

A conveyor belt for mass-producing ‘voluntary confessions’ works faultlessly to ensure targets are met in the so-called struggle against terrorism in the North Caucasus.

Here is what a group of mothers of a number of young Chechens, found guilty by the courts, have written to me:

‘For convicted Chechens the corrective labour colonies have effectively become concentration camps. They are subjected to racial discrimination and kept permanently in solitary confinement or punishment cells. Almost all of them have been sentenced on the basis of fabricated court cases without credible evidence. Confined under cruel conditions, their human dignity is violated and they learn to hate everything. Here is a whole army which will be returned to us with their lives wrecked and with a warped outlook.’

Their hatred frightens me. It frightens me because sooner or later it will burst its banks and everyone will become an extremist, not only the investigators who tortured them. These cases of designated terrorists constitute a battlefield on which two ideological attitudes towards what is being perpetrated in the ‘zone of the counter-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus’ confront each other. Do we combat lawlessness with the law? Or do we try to bash their lawlessness with our own?

These two forms of lawlessness clash and fire dangerous sparks into both the present and the future. The end result of this process of designation is a growing number of people who are not prepared to put up with it.

Ukraine recently extradited to Russia Beslan Gadayev, a Chechen arrested in early August when documents were being checked in the Crimea, where he lived as a displaced person. These lines are from a letter he wrote on 29 August 2006:

‘When I was extradited from Ukraine to Grozny, I was immediately taken to an office and asked whether I had killed a member of the Salikhov family, Anzor and his friend, a Russian truck driver. I swore I had shed no one’s blood, neither Russian nor Chechen. They stated as a fact, “No, you killed them”. I started denying it again, and when I repeated that I had never killed anyone they immediately began beating me. First they punched me twice in the right eye. While I was recovering my senses, they pushed me down and handcuffed me. They pushed a pipe behind my legs so I could not move my hands, even though I was already handcuffed. Then they grabbed me, or more precisely this pipe they had attached me to, and suspended me from two nearby cabinets which were about a metre high.

‘As soon as they had done that, they attached wires to the little fingers of both my hands. A couple of seconds later they turned on the current and started beating me with rubber truncheons wherever they could. I couldn’t stand the pain and started yelling, calling out the name of the Almighty and begging them to stop. In response, so as not to have to listen to my shouting, they put a black hood over my head. How long this went on I can’t accurately remember, but I began to lose consciousness from the pain. When they saw that, they took the hood off and asked if I would talk. I said I would, although I did not know what to say to them. I said whatever they wanted so as to avoid the torture at least for a while.

‘They unhooked me, removed the pipe, and threw me on the floor. They said, “Talk”. In reply I said I had nothing to tell them. In response they hit me with the pipe I had been hanging from, again on my right eye. I fell sideways and, almost unconscious, felt them again beating me wherever they could. They hung me up once more and repeated what they had done before. How long it went on I do not remember. They kept drenching me with water.

‘The following day they bathed me and rubbed something on my face and body. At about dinner time an officer in civilian clothes entered and told me some journalists had come and that I was to admit responsibility for three murders and robbery with violence. He threatened that if I did not agree they would do it all again, and also would shame me by degrading me in a sexual manner. I agreed. After I had given the journalists the interview, they threatened me with the same degrading treatment if I didn’t testify that all the beating I had had, which they had inflicted on me, had occurred while I was supposedly attempting to escape.’

Zaur Zakriev, the lawyer defending Beslan Gadayev, informed the members of the Memorial Human Rights Centre that this physical and psychological duress had been inflicted on his client in the Grozny Rural District Office of the Interior Ministry. According to the lawyer, the defendant did indeed admit to committing robbery with violence in 2004 against members of the law enforcement agencies. However, the agents decided to obtain further confessions relating to a number of crimes he had not committed in the village of Starye Atagi in their district.

The lawyer states that the brutal violence inflicted on the defendant left visible signs of physical injury on his body. The Medical Section of Pre-Trial Detention Facility No. 1 in Grozny, where Gadayev is currently held under Article 209 of the Russian Criminal Code on a charge of robbery with violence, has issued an official medical certificate listing evidence of systematic beating, physical injury in the form of welts, scratches, bruises, broken ribs, and damage to internal organs.

The defence lawyer has lodged a formal complaint about these gross violations of human rights with the Prosecutor’s Office of the Chechen Republic. […]

Politkovskaya’s text breaks off here, incomplete. The editors are seeking to establish what further episodes were to be included.

* * *

A video shows what appear to be members of one of the Chechen security agencies who have apprehended and are torturing two young men. One of those detained is sitting in a car, bleeding. A knife can be seen stuck in the region of the victim’s ear. The other seems to have been thrown out of the car on to the tarmac. The torturers are not themselves visible, and only Chechen speech (Melkhi dialect) can be heard, interspersed with swearing:

Verbatim text:

‘Putin said it. “View it from every angle,” he said.’

‘He should know!’ (Addresses the victim insultingly) ‘This bitch just won’t die, […] fucking goat, bastard …, fucked up queer. Doesn’t he look handsome? I couldn’t live without you.’

‘Croak, pal, croak, you shit! For God’s sake, know what I’m saying? Do it …’

‘Is he done? Is he done now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘OK, we’re leaving. Over here!’

‘Hey, move your asses, take up positions, take up positions. Close observation of the surrounding terrain.’