Nothing but the Truth

The Kremlin continues its Michurinist labour of planting and nurturing civil war in Chechnya as assiduously as the late father of Soviet hybridisation. Its most recent contribution was made on 8 June when the President signed an order appointing 49-year-old Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov ‘Chief of Chechnya’ (Director of the Provisional Administration). Kadyrov is associated by most of the population solely with conflict and division. They call him the ‘middleman Mufti’, the link between Chechen bandits and those highly placed citizens in Moscow whose main priority is to prolong the policy of intimidation in the North Caucasus.

The three weeks since 8 June have served only to confirm the worst predictions regarding Mr Kadyrov’s appointment. The conflict between Chechen and Chechen has flared up with new vigour. The news images are following the same script as when civil war flared up in Tajikistan.

Within these three weeks, only three heads of district administrations out of 18 have agreed to work under the middleman Mufti. Twelve of them sent an abrupt demand to President Putin, the ‘Letter of the Twelve’, either to change his edict or expect sabotage. When Moscow chose to ignore this, a meeting of administrative heads in Gudermes on 16 June considered a proposal to try to persuade the Centre to at least delay Kadyrov’s accession to the throne by a couple of months, until the end of the harvest season. The reason is that people need to be able to harvest the 85,000 hectares they have sowed with such difficulty without the fear that Kadyrov’s coming to power heralds either a renewal in the near future of combat operations or that the Kadyrov gang, whose existence he no longer bothers to deny, will simply set about brazenly filching the harvest, every hectare of which has been watered with blood and tears.

What is more, Chechnya is being abandoned by members of the Provisional Administration led by the already ex-Acting Head, Yakub Deniev. They too first sent a petition to the Kremlin (the ‘Letter of the Forty-Four’) in which they categorically stated that they would find it morally unacceptable to work under a man who had declared jihad on Moscow only for Moscow to hand him the throne of Chechnya, and who was now also demanding that he should have control of the budget.

Blood has been shed. A well-known Urus Martan imam, Umar Idrisov, has been assassinated, and PR games immediately began in connection with his tragic death. As if in response to orders from above, most of the media declared the Imam to have been a supporter of Kadyrov, which he never was. Indeed, Idrisov was a determined opponent of Kadyrov and refused to recognise him as Mufti or condone his pretensions to being the chosen spiritual leader of Chechnya. People have immediately connected the assassination of the Imam and the lies in the media, and have concluded that Moscow is artificially inflating Kadyrov’s standing, not holding back even from murdering the Imam so that they could pretend he had been martyred because he supported Kadyrov.

What, specifically, are the grudges most Chechens hold against the middleman Mufti?

In the first place, money. In 1992 Kadyrov was the treasurer of a mass pilgrimage of Muslims from Chechnya to Mecca. Kadyrov collected between $300 and $500 from each of them, only for the King of Saudi Arabia to pay for all the Chechen pilgrims. Kadyrov did not return the $220,000 he had collected. Outrage ensued, a criminal case was brought, and for six months Kadyrov was held in a pre-trial detention facility, after which the case was dropped by the Prosecutor’s Office and, on the orders of then President Dudayev, Kadyrov was released.

The next detail of his portrait is more recent. It concerns one of Kadyrov’s first acts after his appointment, and also tells us something about his morals. Budruddin Djamalkhanov, by now already the ex-director of the provisional administration’s liaison department with the security agencies, relates, ‘My father-in-law, Nasukha-hadji Akhmadov, built a mosque in 1989 in Kurchaloy, which was later turned into a madrasah. My father-in-law supported it to the best of his ability, but in the spring he asked the provisional administration for support. Koshman [the Russian Government’s representative in Chechnya] agreed, seeing that the children were at least being taught something there. At this point came Kadyrov’s appointment. Naturally, all the papers with the detailed budgets, staff lists and time-sheets were passed to him. The first thing he did was to write in his own name: “Kadyrov – 3,000 roubles”. He went on to demand that the staff list should be augmented with his relatives as sham teachers. My father-in-law gave up in disgust.’

In the second place, Kadyrov is not a mufti, since there already is a living mufti, Mahomed-Bashir-hadji Arsanukayev, elected in 1992 in accordance with Chechen custom at a council of ulema (delegates from all districts). Arsanukayev, one of the Republic’s most eminent theologians, fell into disfavour with President Dudayev for cursing his actions in dividing the Chechen people. The history of the rise of Kadyrov as a counterweight to Arsanukayev is that in August 1995 a famous assembly of the major field commanders took place in Vedeno. Here Dudayev proclaimed the founding of a new state, the Islamic Republic of Ichkeria. He next proclaimed Kadyrov Mufti, who until then had been a little-known and unpopular mullah. Kadyrov was, however, agreeable to declaring jihad on Russia. The appointment was contrary to Chechen tradition, and accordingly the population came to regard Kadyrov as no more than a kind of chaplain or mufti for the field commanders. From February 1996 Kadyrov orchestrated the persecution in Chechnya of all members of the Arsanukayev Muftiate. Mullahs have been mercilessly abducted and killed and the elected Muftiate destroyed. Presidents Dudayev, Yandarbiev, and subsequently Maskhadov several times reconfirmed Kadyrov’s status without consulting the ulema.

Maskhadov rewarded him with several oil tankers and oil wells in the Nozhai-Yurt and Grozny Rural Districts, enabling Kadyrov to become extremely rich and maintain a large detachment of well-armed mercenaries. In the spring of 1999 one of the periodical redistributions of influence began between the members of Chechnya’s ruling elite, and Kadyrov fell out with Shamil Basayev who was encroaching on his oil interests. This was the real reason behind Kadyrov’s condemnation of Basayev’s incursion into Dagestan [which the Russian Government used to justify beginning the Second Chechen War]. The split between them deepened, and in August 1999 Maskhadov relieved Kadyrov of the post of Mufti. Kadyrov refused to acknowledge this and to this day considers himself the Mufti of Chechnya, having now switched sides to support the federals, the very people on whom he had declared jihad.

Yakub Deniev, who until he retired on 20 June was the Acting Head of the Provisional Administration, having worked as such for eight months of the war, says, ‘Kadyrov is the worst possible option for Chechnya. His appointment is an insult and a humiliation for most Chechens and a slap in the face for the clergy. There is no getting away from the fact that he is a brigand. Indeed, the appointment of Kadyrov is a signal that the military phase of the operation will be continued and escalated. There is absolutely no desire for peace in Moscow at present and Kadyrov feels at home in conflict. His policies aim to deepen the divisions within Chechnya. One does of course come across confrontational individuals, but Kadyrov breaks every record in that respect.’

What does the Kremlin need all this for? What does it hope to achieve by these provocations? We appear to be facing a transition to a new phase of what it calls the ‘counter-terrorist operation’. Since the guerrilla warfare shows no signs of slackening and the sore tooth which is Chechnya can’t be extracted by military means, the intention seems to be to destroy Chechnya by the tried and trusted method of sowing internecine strife.

The West will turn a blind eye, taking the view that ‘they are just fighting among themselves’, and nobody in Russia will be particularly bothered by the slaughter, even though it has been instigated from above.

The ‘Chief of Chechnya’, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, controls his own illegal armed group which engages in abductions, and which also has a private prison in the village of Tsentoroy.

How come? First of all, the unvarnished testimony of an eyewitness who survived. The necessary explanations can come later.

‘Opposite the house in which Kadyrov lives in Tsentoroy, some 20–30 metres away, near the road and the water tap, is a small single-storey building. The Kadyrovites call it their HQ. The Head of the Republic’s bodyguards are usually in there. The house has five rooms, one of which is permanently used as a cell for prisoners.

‘Behind the HQ a lean-to has been built which has a further three cells, invariably occupied by detainees.

‘Who are they? Firstly, people caught planting explosives. Secondly, people associated with the [Islamist] Wahhabi jamaat. Thirdly, miscellaneous other people. Their cases are judged by Ramzan, Kadyrov’s younger son. It’s like a real court, only with Ramzan presiding.

‘People he finds not guilty of anything very serious are left in the cells for various periods; sentences are decided by Ramzan and Ruslan, the head of Kadyrov’s “Security Service”. Those found guilty of something serious are sent off to Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, about 15 or 20 kilometres west of Grozny. What happens to the detainees after that nobody knows.

‘Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 has a reputation as a haven for kidnappers. Under Maskhadov’s rule, too, there were many kidnappers and their victims in this village. The Zavgayevs’ sister was held there for a year and eight months, for example. Today the same outlaws are in the same place, only legitimised by Kadyrov’s protection.’

Before explaining in detail exactly what this is all about, I should mention that I have chosen this tale as typical of many others. Much the same thing is described by other people who have had the misfortune to come into contact with Kadyrov’s ‘Security Service’, but who have succeeded in getting out and even agreed to testify on condition of anonymity.

What is going on in Chechnya today? It is my profound conviction that what is going on is an unambiguous civil war, deliberately provoked by the three-year-long so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’, which sees brother rise up against brother, one family against another.

The whole area is crammed with armed detachments of every sort. These are mainly Russian Army troops, special operations units, rapid reaction squads, militia special purpose units, alpha groups and so on. These troops are opposed by the so-called resistance forces, illegal armed groups, a thoroughly diverse collection of fighters who, for the most part, answer only to their own consciences.

During the last six months, however, a new punitive force has appeared, a kind of Chechen sandwich filling in the sense that they are not on either side, although they have an ideological affinity with the federals.

These punitive detachments are known as the Kadyrovites, named after their organiser, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, who two and a half years ago was appointed Chief of the Republic by President Putin of Russia.

The Kadyrovites are also an illegal armed group. They are commonly referred to as Kadyrov’s ‘Security Service’, which would appear to provide them with a vestige of legitimacy, but this is not the case. The Chechen Ministry of Justice has confirmed that Kadyrov’s ‘Security Service’ is not registered anywhere, and accordingly has no legal right to exist, any more than Basayev’s brigade, or what remains of the detachments of Khattab or Barayev.

Exist it nevertheless does, and it feels right at home in a civil war. The ‘Security Service’ has no desire at all to see Putin’s promised ‘dictatorship of the law’ arrive. Quite the reverse.

At first things looked less ugly. Kadyrov’s personal security detachment was assembled mainly from the ranks of his relatives, but with the passage of time it has degenerated into a monstrous hybrid in the traditions of the Tsarist secret police and the Soviet NKVD–KGB.

The secret prisons and the torturing are, of course, highly secret; the more so since the Kadyrovites are no fools and try to leave no witnesses. Modern Chechen life has, however, conspired against them.

One of the most terrible tragedies for Chechnya is the mass disappearance of citizens. Today there are almost 3,000 ‘disappeared’, although nobody can give a precise figure. Their relatives go out seeking them, on the earth and under the earth, among those on the Russian side and among those on the other side. When the war ends we can be confident that the best investigators in Russia will be the relatives of the disappeared.

It is these ‘investigators’, recruited by misfortune, who uncovered the Kadyrovites. For some time, the tracks of abductions had been stubbornly leading to the village of Tsentoroy, famously the place where Kadyrov lives. The evidence pointed to buildings adjacent to Kadyrov’s house, and more precisely to Kadyrov’s very agreeable country estate and the buildings occupied by his bodyguards. Another path led stubbornly to Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, a village on the road to Grozny.

A recurrent pattern emerged: while some did return to freedom from the Tsentoroy torture chambers, all that came from Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 was the coldness of the grave. Sometimes, by chance, the bones of those who had been traced to Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 were found, scattered or half buried by dogs.

With time, one further piece of information emerged: Kadyrov is busily buying up plots of land in Tsentoroy, displacing to other villages families he doesn’t want and replacing them with his bodyguards’ families. Dracula is building a castle hidden from prying eyes, whose inhabitants are tied to him by the powerful bonds of shared guilt.

Many conversations with relatives of the disappeared, who found that all roads led to Tsentoroy and Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, show that people at first simply didn’t believe the Kadyrovites would dare to return to their old ways, to the kidnapping notorious in the time of Maskhadov, before Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov was reborn as a law-abiding and Kremlin-fearing gentleman.

Gradually, however, the facts began to speak for themselves; acts of terrorism ensued, and those of Kadyrov’s men considered guilty of the murders were themselves dispatched to the next world in accordance with the tradition of the blood feud. There were numerous reports of Kadyrov’s motorcades coming under fire or being blown up. He never suffered personally, but nephews, cousins and second cousins who were members of his security detail were killed.

You may approve of this approach to matters of life and death or categorically reject it, but what you or I think is not going to change anything. Given that most of the law enforcement agencies currently operating in Chechnya are fully aware of the evil-doing of Kadyrov’s ‘security service’ but are not raising a finger against it, what can be done to stop this? More broadly, how could the intelligence agencies, with which Chechnya is teeming, have allowed things to come to such a pass?

There are two answers, one logical and the other irrational. To begin with the second: the overall policy of the agencies keeping the area of the anti-terrorist operation under surveillance is simply: ‘Let them fight it out among themselves. The more bloodshed, the better.’ Starting from this premise, Kadyrov’s reign is just what you want.

The logical answer is that Kadyrov and the intelligence services both want to destroy Maskhadov and his supporters by whatever means they can. For the present, they are allies united by this aim, their interests overlapping so much that each closes his eyes to the criminality of the other. There are two facts to note here. The first is that some of those in Kadyrov’s torture chambers did indeed wage war against Russia in the era of the Islamic Republic of Ichkeria, or were prominent members of that government, or at least sympathised with it. Kadyrov has shown on more than one occasion that he cannot tolerate any sort of competition or rivalry. He makes an exception for resistance fighters who have recanted and sworn allegiance to himself, turncoats like Suleyman Yamadayev, the Gudermes kidnapper appointed to the position of goat in charge of the kitchen garden as Chechen Deputy Commissar of War. Yamadayev enjoys lording it over his former comrades-in-arms, many of whom he has put in the Tsentoroy cells.

The other thing to note is that, since the beginning of this year, a recurring theme in the accounts of those who witnessed abductions subsequently traced to Tsentoroy and Youth Soviet Farm No. 15 is that unidentified men in combat fatigues, flak jackets, masks, and helmets with built-in microphones came very quietly into the victim’s house, communicating between themselves in a whisper. They have become known as ‘The Silent Ones’ because they work so soundlessly, co-ordinating their actions by radio and moving around in shoes with thick, springy rubber soles. There have been instances when relatives sleeping in neighbouring rooms didn’t even wake up until the door closed behind the Silent Ones, and it was only when a mother went into the room where her sons had been sleeping that she realised they had been taken.

This stealth technique is Kadyrov’s modus operandi. These abductors are not Kadyrovites at all, but most probably agents from the federal Central Intelligence Directorate, the GRU. This leads to the very unpleasant conclusion that GRU agents are either acting under direct orders of the Kadyrovites, abducting citizens on their instructions, or that, if they find they have abducted the wrong person, are handing him over to the tender mercies of Kadyrov’s ‘security service’.

I have talked to officials in the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office about the Kadyrov gang often enough to know that they are fully aware of what is going on and have tried to oppose this lawless mayhem. But they have also admitted that Kadyrov’s ‘security service’ acts as it does because Kadyrov is now effectively beyond the reach of the law, thanks to his intimate relationship with the Russian authorities.

This state of affairs is not going to last for ever. Interests will diverge, and when they do Kadyrov and the Kadyrovites will be in an unenviable position. It is difficult to imagine anywhere on the planet where they will be able to find refuge.

ABUSE OF ADMINISTRATIVE AND MILITARY RESOURCES, UNBRIDLED AMBITION WITH GANGSTER TENDENCIES, ONLY THIS TIME THE ELECTIONS ARE NOT IN RUSSIA, BUT IN CHECHNYA

We continue sketching in our portrait of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, the ‘Chief’ of the Chechen Republic appointed by President Putin more than two years ago.

Why is Kadyrov allowed to act without constraint? Why is it all ignored by the intelligence agencies? As usual, when things are complicated there are simple explanations. The answers in this case are crude and cynical. The victims who are traced to Tsentoroy are tortured and disappear purely because of Kadyrov’s electoral weakness.

The former Mufti is possessed by a desire to be ‘democratically elected’. Whatever the cost, he wants to feel the equal of Maskhadov, enjoying the same measure of legitimacy. Kadyrov may today be Chief of the Chechen Republic, but only because he was appointed, which is not the real thing. In actual fact his power is derisory, but he wants genuine power, and he craves it so insanely that common sense is banished.

Accordingly, the illegal armed group commonly known as Kadyrov’s ‘security service’ is hunting down his enemies, by which he means those who would be obvious rivals if the militarised political process in Chechnya ever finally came to the point of an election.

His primary enemies are the so-called Ichkerians, those who served in and supported the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and President Maskhadov, the Islamist Wahhabis, members of their jamaat groups, terrorists who sympathise with any of the above, and anybody associated with the separatist ideals of Djohar Dudayev, who supported the idea of Chechnya seceding from Russia.

These are the targets against whom the Kadyrovites direct their main efforts and, naturally, they enjoy the support of the Joint Military Command and FSB who are responsible for conducting the ‘anti-terrorist operation in the North Caucasus’. Since all debate about what methods of combating terrorism are acceptable and all criticism of excessive violence has long ago ceased, Kadyrov’s manifest enthusiasm for death squads raises no eyebrows.

The absence of constraint fosters depravity and enables Kadyrov to settle scores with anyone who has offended him in times past. This goes beyond political or ideological enmity. The bodyguards’ second target seems at first to be entirely random individuals, but in fact many of these are people who in their youth in some way offended Kadyrov, or were less than supportive of his religious career.

The third, special category of people likely to be murdered by Kadyrov’s ‘security service’ are the unofficial leaders of Chechen villages, people who – by dint of the military situation, of villagers’ despair at what is happening, and because there is no protection – have become very active in their districts and villages and demonstrated leadership qualities. The Chief of the Republic has discerned a threat to his electoral prospects in their growing grassroots popularity. Not in the sense that they might themselves be elected: Turko Dikayev, for example, had no such ambitions. They have simply shown that they are capable of mobilising their villages, and would be unlikely to mobilise them for Kadyrov.

Turko Dikayev was one of Kadyrov’s personal friends. They went back a long way, but this did not save him. In recent months Turko had found himself in this category of popular unofficial leaders. It was not something he sought, and resulted only from the suffocating bureaucracy which left him performing essential tasks everybody else was too scared to do.

The result was that this August, in mysterious circumstances which point to the complicity of Kadyrov’s ‘security service’, Turko Dikayev was murdered. By this time, as a responsible and popular individual, he had become the Administrative Head of Tsotsan-Yurt in Kurchaloy District. Tsotsan-Yurt’s recent history has been appalling. The New Year of 2002 saw it subjected to one of the most brutal security sweeps Chechnya has known. On 1 January soldiers entered the villagers’ houses and wished them, ‘Miserable New Year!’ The then head of the village simply fled. The soldiers were willing to negotiate the return of bodies only with the village head and it was at that point that Turko, as one of the Council of Elders of Tsotsan-Yurt, assumed responsibility.

We met in early March. In Tsotsan-Yurt’s central square there was a permanent wake for the victims of the security sweeps. Turko had been unable to sleep for days and was in a terrible state because of high blood pressure. In the spring the Army’s incessant raids on the tormented village were replaced by a new horror: almost every day mutilated corpses were being systematically dumped on the outskirts. The villagers were living in a state of constant shock and panic. They appealed to Turko, but he found it impossible to persuade any officials from Grozny to come to the village. He did everything he could to ease the situation of his fellow villagers, attempting to negotiate with the federals, going to Grozny himself, and trying to obtain an audience with his old friend Kadyrov.

Kadyrov refused to see him, not even allowing him into the waiting room. All the while the head of Kadyrov’s ‘security service’ was strutting up and down the corridors of the government building telling everybody this brutality was the only way to treat Tsotsan-Yurt because it was a bastion and symbol of lawlessness.

Let us be quite clear: Kadyrov left the village to survive as best it could with no support from him. He abdicated his responsibilities in Tsotsan-Yurt, and all that Turko did was refuse to betray his fellow villagers. He accepted that authority and did all he could for them at the moment of their greatest distress. He earned immense respect for that and, incidentally, made no secret that he had lost faith in the moral qualities of Kadyrov. And so he was killed.

Turko had a presentiment that something of the kind would happen, and told me that he saw Kadyrov as the gravest danger to himself. Like a runaway locomotive, Kadyrov was steaming towards elections of his own devising, and hurling aside anybody who might get in the way or speak out against him.

This answers our main question as to why the Kadyrov regime is as it is. His gang are smoothing the way for their chief to be elected President. His bodyguards abduct and torture people, his obnoxious son, in tandem with the head of the ‘security service’, judges them, and then they simply disappear. All because Kadyrov has this electoral itch, this lust for legitimation. He has been in power for two years now, but sitting on a stool, not a throne. He can talk about nothing other than his imminent ultimate victory over Maskhadov. Whatever you ask him, he always returns to that.

Kadyrov understands that only an election will set the seal on his victory over his former comrade, his one-time spiritual pupil, and his present-day Enemy No. 1. Kadyrov has even concocted a new constitution for Chechnya to further his ends, because elections need to be constitutional. The only one Chechnya has dates from the period of Presidents Dudayev and Maskhadov, and under that Constitution Chechnya already has a President.

Kadyrov has agreed with the Kremlin that November would be the best time for a referendum on the new Constitution. They need to hurry, while Chechnya is still full of Russian troops who can vote the right way once his path to the throne has been cleared.

He has overlooked just one detail. In this squalid tale of murderous passion, the Kremlin – with its stubborn support of Kadyrov, support which frees him of all moral constraint – insists on ignoring the fact that Kadyrov Senior can only win an election in which the security forces, numbering many thousands, distort the ‘democratic’ vote.

The two years during which he has ruled by fiat have been spent not in earning the respect of his electorate but in losing any he ever possessed. If Putin went into his election as an unknown quantity, which allowed for all sorts of manipulation, Kadyrov has no such option. He is poisonous, and the whole of Chechnya knows it. How can you entrust government of the country to the likes of Kadyrov, who has no prospect of ever enjoying any sort of approval rating from the electorate? The result is that he has to resort to extreme measures. Is Putin not guilty of a crime against people who are infinitely weary of waiting to be freed from the imposition of war, disasters, funerals, dead bodies and torture?

If, Mr President, you do not know the names of decent people in Chechnya, ask those who do. It is so elementary, and lives will be saved.

PS An argument broke out in the Novaya gazeta office over whether we should write Security Service or ‘Security Service’? Anti-terrorist operation or ‘anti-terrorist operation’? Opinion was divided. From a grammatical point of view clearly there should be no inverted commas, but the present-day reality in Chechnya is so phoney as to make it impossible to observe grammatical rules. In Chechnya everything is in inverted commas, because an illegal war is taking place in a zone whose existence is itself illegal. An illegitimate government spawns lawless soldiers. The knot has already been pulled so tight that it is difficult to imagine how it can be undone, even if at some magic moment enlightenment should come to those with power in their hands, and perhaps even a flicker of responsibility in their minds.

A BLOOD FEUD HAS BEEN DECLARED AGAINST THE FAMILY OF THE ‘ACTING PRESIDENT OF CHECHNYA’

In the remote Chechen village of Bachi-Yurt ‘unidentified masked individuals wearing camouflage fatigues’, speaking only in Chechen, executed four members of one family, the Ablayev-Dautkhadzhievs. Three men, aged between 45 and 55, were shot along with a 27-year-old woman, who leaves a two-month-old baby and two sons aged four and five. The executioners came for them in the night and said they were exacting blood retribution for the events of 14 May, when female suicide bombers made an attempt on the life of ‘Acting President of the Chechen Republic’ Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov near the village of Ilaskhan-Yurt. In the attack five of his bodyguards died; these the murderers described as their comrades, and said they had accordingly come to ‘take blood’ for them.

Up till now, no monuments have been placed on the graves of those executed and the men of the family of the four who died do not visit the cemetery. This means they have declared a blood feud for the killing, this time on Ramzan Kadyrov, younger son of the ‘Acting President’, who, with his father’s full support and occupying the post of Commander of a mythical ‘Interior Ministry Special Unit’ at his court, engages with his brigade in robbery, murder, and general score-settling with those he regards as his enemies.

‘Well, Shakhidat and Aimani could not have been guilty,’ Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva says, shaking her head and no longer wiping her swollen eyes. She is a grandmother and in May six of her family were killed. ‘Why did my daughter die? They dragged her here, to the cellar where we have a kitchen. I was shouting, “Take me, she has a baby!” They replied, “You are not a blood relative. We don’t need you.” Her children were crying. People in masks woke everyone from their beds and asked, “Who are you?” Or “Whose are you?” They took those they wanted down to the cellar and just shot them. My Liza first of all. What for? Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty of causing the explosion. Everybody knows that.’

The women around us are crying like kittens, moaning quietly. Liza’s old father breaks down. It is unbearable, because everybody can see what the continuation will be.

First, however, a chronology of this latest misfortune to befall Bachi-Yurt, and why these events happened.

On 14 May a terrorist attack took place in Ilaskhan-Yurt, a village in Gudermes District, during an election rally for the ruling United Russia party which coincided with the day of the Prophet’s birth. There were many casualties. Chechen television had assiduously invited people to come to the field near Ilaskhan-Yurt, promising a meeting with Kadyrov and gifts in his honour from United Russia. It was only after the bombing that Kadyrov claimed on television that the Ilaskhan-Yurt meeting was a religious celebration; the propaganda put out through the Chechen media before 14 May made it clear that this was pre-electoral campaigning on behalf of United Russia candidates, supported by the administrative resources of the state. The heads of rural administrations were instructed to organise buses to systematically bring their people to Ilaskhan-Yurt in order to swell the numbers.

People arrived in vehicles and on foot. For several days beforehand local television reported that Kadyrov would be speaking and, as a sign of clemency, would talk to mothers whose children had been disappeared during security sweeps. Thousands responded to that inducement. A crucial factor in the turnout of many thousands was this hint that Kadyrov would make an announcement about the fate of some of the disappeared. There have been thousands of them in Chechnya, and most of their relatives comb the Republic daily in the hope of finding traces of their dear ones.

Among the crowd were Shakhidat Baimuradova, her sister Aimani Visayeva, the mother of 11 children and long since an old-age pensioner, and Zulai Abdurzakova. They were there for good reason. A typical part of the modern Chechen scenery, these are mothers fruitlessly seeking their sons, hoping by chance somewhere to come across an honest law enforcement officer. They always carry bundles of documents with them.

On 13 May, the day before the gathering, Shakhidat and Aimani went to the home of Kadyrov’s father in the village of Tsentoroy to ask him to help them get a meeting with the ‘Acting President’ at which they could hand over their letters and documents. The father told them to go to Ilaskhan-Yurt, saying that it would be more convenient to meet him there. They took his advice. On 14 May what happened happened, and by that evening the Prosecutor’s Office had issued the names of these three elderly women as the suicide bombers. On 16 May, after inspection by forensic medical specialists in the Dagestan mortuary of Khasavyurt, the bodies of Shakhidat and Aimani were returned to their relatives, and on 17 May they were buried in Bachi-Yurt, their ancestral home.

The bandits who burst in in the night shouted, ‘Why did you bury them here?’

‘Well,’ I ask, ‘why did you, when in fact they lived in other villages?’

‘So that they would be next to their mother’s grave. They no longer had anybody where they lived,’ the relatives answer. They are convinced that Shakhidat and Aimani were not the bombers.

‘They both had too many things to take care of, and they just weren’t like that.’

Towards evening on the day of the funerals two men, Roman Edilov and Arbi Salmaniev, came to the family’s house. Although Dautkhadzhiev is the surname of Shakhidat and Aimani’s brother, their maiden name is Ablayev because their father had more than one wife and some children took their mother’s name. The Ablayevs and Dautkhadzhievs have adjacent houses in Bachi-Yurt. The wake was taking place after the funerals of Shakhidat and Aimani.

Edilov and Salmaniev are well known in Bachi-Yurt. Edilov is the recently appointed Head of the Kurchaloy District Interior Affairs Office. Before that he was a soldier in Kadyrov’s ‘Security Service’ or, as people here put it, ‘one of Ramzan’s gang’. Edilov is regarded as someone charged with defending the ruling family’s interests in Kurchaloy. Salmaniev, his deputy and another Kadyrov soldier, lives in Bachi-Yurt.

Salmaniev and Edilov declared the families guilty of the terrorist act committed by Shakhidat and Aimani. ‘Now,’ they said, ‘you must pay in blood for the attempt on Kadyrov’s life and for the deaths of Ramzan’s soldiers’.

‘Did you know this was coming?’ I ask Akhmat Temirsultanov, the Qadi (Islamic judge) of Kurchaloy District and Imam of Bachi-Yurt.

The old man – respected, ill, stooped – pretends to be deaf in order not to have to answer the question. I press the point, but to no avail. Even the Qadi and Imam is desperately afraid of falling into disfavour with the Kadyrovs. That fear can today be felt throughout Chechnya, fear of a kind unknown even a year ago. People have learned from the blood-letting, and only the bravest will whisper, ‘We are afraid of Kadyrov.’

‘Does anybody else, do the families of other people who died at Ilaskhan-Yurt, bear a similar grudge against you? Have you been warned by them?’ I asked Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva. The ritual of declaring a blood feud is strict. It is not something undertaken lightly, and a qadi or imam should be involved in the procedure.

‘No, nobody else has a grudge against us because they know Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty. The Prosecutor’s Office admitted it made a mistake.’

And so it did. A thorough examination of the bodies of Shakhidat and Aimani, conducted at the insistence of the investigative team at the Prosecutor’s Office leading the inquiry into the bombing, showed there was no need even for a forensic medical examination. The nature of their injuries proved it had not been them. A death sentence caused by a slip of the tongue.

Ivan Nikitin is a tall young man who wears trainers and has a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. He is the leader of the team investigating the ‘act of sabotage and terrorism’ within the framework of Criminal Case No. 32046. Nikitin’s team was set up by the Republican Prosecutor’s Office and is based in Gudermes, close to Ilaskhan-Yurt, in order to be able to question witnesses conveniently.

‘These women, Baimuradova, Visayeva and Abdurzakova, were not wearing the explosive devices,’ Nikitin confirms. ‘They were simply standing two metres away from the epicentre. I told Qadi Temirsultanov that when he came to ask whether they were guilty or not. I could see he needed to know that in order to avoid a blood feud.’

‘Tell me, then, why was the Prosecutor’s Office in such a hurry to declare that they were the bombers? Here we are with four completely guiltless people killed, one of whom had a two-month-old baby she was breast-feeding.’

Nikitin understands perfectly. He sighs and parries with ‘It is all the fault of the media.’ In fact, it was none other Sergey Fridinsky, the Deputy Prosecutor-General of Russia for the Southern Federal Region and Nikitin’s immediate boss, who announced the names of the alleged bombers before anything was known for certain. Nikitin declines to comment on this and refers me ‘upstairs’. Needless to say, ‘upstairs’ the officials in the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office are in no hurry to comment on their own murderously irresponsible utterances.

Back in Bachi-Yurt. Zina Dautkhadzhieva, the mother of the executed Liza, also has very little to add. She is terribly afraid of saying something she might regret, something which might prove fatal for some of her other children.

‘You have to understand, the Kadyrovites are everywhere, and to declare a blood feud on Kadyrov today is …’ The Bachi-Yurt villagers try to explain the situation but can’t.

‘It is to take on too much. It is a death sentence. That’s the way life is here.’

It seems there is nobody capable of protecting them, neither the Prosecutor’s Office, nor President Putin, nor the United Nations.

Edilov and Salmaniev went away, and because their accusations seemed so preposterous, so completely at odds with all the rules and customs, the men remained at home. Nobody went off to hide, as is traditional when somebody declares a blood feud or is preparing to do so. In those circumstances the men at risk do not sleep at home. They all stayed, and on the night of 17 May were executed: two of Aimani’s sons, Khanpash and Movsar Visayev; Aimani’s brother, Said Mahomed Ablayev; and Shakhidat, their niece.

Why? Because this has now almost become a custom. The Kadyrovites can do anything they please, even things forbidden by tradition. They live as if there will be no tomorrow, despising the laws, written and unwritten. If Ramzan wants land in Gudermes for his petrol station, he takes it without even bothering to inform the Ministry of Education to whom the teacher training institute standing on that land belongs.

So now instead of the Gudermes teacher training institute there is Ramzan’s petrol station. That is how it is with business, where money is involved; but the same thing applies to blood, to the torrents of it shed at the hands of the Kadyrovites. For they are in charge of this blood-letting; everybody in Chechnya knows that if you need to take revenge on someone for spilling blood, you go to work in Ramzan’s division. You will be welcomed and given weapons and their blessing to exact retribution. The Kadyrovs are in the business of setting everybody against everybody else. What for? In order to consolidate their own power. Where there is no order, there remains only blood and fear to secure the base of your throne.

Power struggles are never noble or fine, but the power struggle in Chechnya, taking place against the backdrop of a war now in its fifth year, is as nauseating as a reusable traitor.

Ibrahim looks like a pirate. Scars are healing under his hair and his eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. He was hurt very badly. He limps clumsily, his weight falling heavily first on one leg then on the other, a common sign here of someone beaten on the kidneys. Ibrahim Garsiev, the 36-year-old father of a family, is from Tangi Chu. He is a bodyguard of Rustam Saidullayev, the brother of opposition politician Malik Saidulayev.

On 7 August he was driving from home through the Urus Martan District when he was stopped by ‘unidentified masked individuals wearing combat fatigues’, the usual Chechen story. They disarmed him, took him to the district militia station, and started interrogating him.

‘They wanted me to confess to blowing up a military water tanker in Tangi Chu and killing Batalov, the Head of the District Office for Combating Organised Crime,’ Ibrahim relates. ‘But that was just for show. The Head of the Criminal Investigation Department is a decent man. He said, “Look, at least admit to having a hand grenade. That will be better for you, you will only go to prison for a year. Otherwise the Kadyrovites will kill you. It is they who are calling for your head.”’

Ibrahim, however, dug his heels in, and shortly afterwards was hooded, pushed into a car, and driven off.

In Chechnya the ‘Kadyrovites’ are units subordinate to Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of the ‘Chief of Chechnya’. Ramzan is the head of Daddy’s ‘Security Service’, and behaves in a manner reminiscent of President Yeltsin’s bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov, who interpreted his role so broadly as to behave like the second-in-command in the state hierarchy.

An example of this in action: how funds are collected for Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s election campaign. As a majority of ministers in the Chechen Government admit, Ramzan names a sum of money which their Ministry is to contribute. We are not talking thousands of roubles here, but thousands of dollars. The Minister draws up a list apportioning the levy between officials in accordance with the post they occupy. Deputy ministers have to contribute up to $5,000, while heads of departments or boards are assessed at $1,000–2,000 per head. The officials are warned that if the Ministry fails to deliver the sum demanded by Ramzan, they will be sacked. Civil servants are desperately afraid of losing their jobs because wages funded by the state budget are the only more or less stable form of income in Chechnya. As a result, half of Chechnya is today in debt to the other half. Everybody has borrowed and re-borrowed from each other in order not to come to the attention of the Kadyrov family.

After the officials, there are Chechnya’s markets. This is the Republic’s second most important cash cow. Unfortunate Chechen women – teachers, doctors, housewives, nurses, and journalists – stand in the markets, which is how most families have managed to feed themselves throughout the war. The Chechen men are at home trying to avoid security sweeps and checkpoints, and the Chechen women are trading. Every such market trader also has a tribute levied on behalf of Akhmat-hadji. The approach is the same: Ramzan names a figure to the market’s Director, who then allots everybody a contribution.

The officials, naturally enough, did not protest, but the women went on strike. They had each been assessed for $500 (political services in Chechnya are, you will note, quite pricey), and said they would not return to the market until the demand was made more reasonable. The strike collapsed, however, when the Kadyrovites threatened to murder the families of one or two of the ringleaders, and the money was handed over. You can judge for yourself how remarkably fair and democratic the coming elections are going to be.

The word ‘Kadyrovite’ in Chechnya is applied to a large number of decentralised and anarchic detachments, each armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry, including Israeli rapid-fire rifles and murderous Berettas banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Officially there are 61 people in Akhmat-hadji’s security detail but if we include units under Ramzan’s command, some of the militia firearms teams, and all manner of special operations units with which Chechnya is teeming and into which Kadyrov has succeeded in infiltrating his own people, the official figure rises to 1,200.

In reality, however, throughout Chechnya the Kadyrovites number several thousands. They themselves put the figure sometimes at 3,000, sometimes at 5,000. Where do they all come from? The divisions Ramzan Kadyrov controls today accept anybody who wants to go on fighting, for example ex-resistance fighters who have been amnestied. In effect, the amnesty declared by the Russian Duma obliges those amnestied to be absorbed into the Kadyrov detachments. Amnestied former resistance units now form the backbone of the Kadyrovites. This summer they recruited in every district centre and most villages. Fighters and members of the resistance who refused amnesty on these terms testify that those who did surrender were regarded by and large as brutes and criminals in their communities.

Although the Kadyrovites claim to be sweeping Chechnya clear of Islamic extremist Wahhabis, they are in practice clearing the Republic of anybody they want to get rid of. At present that means Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s political enemies.

Another recent example: Movladi Baisarov’s detachment is based in the village of Youth Soviet Farm No. 15, near Grozny. The detachment was previously commanded by Maskhadov’s deputy, Vakha Arsanov, and has moved directly from the ranks of the separatists into the Kadyrovite organisation.

Baisarov’s men recently abducted three FSB officers and attempted to ransom them in exchange for one of their criminal comrades who had been arrested for his involvement in another kidnapping. The Baisarovites got away with it because now they count as Kadyrovites.

In the Urus Martan District Militia Station it was precisely one such turncoat that Ibrahim Garsiev found himself facing, namely a participant in several sensational kidnappings back in Maskhadov’s time, a man with a federal warrant out for his arrest but who is now the Deputy Head of the District Militia Station in Urus Martan.

It was this criminal who organised Garsiev’s kidnapping, knowing that he worked in Saidulayev’s security detail, and called upon the services of ‘unidentified masked Chechens wearing combat fatigues’. Ibrahim was driven off and soon found himself before Ramzan Kadyrov in the courtyard of his fortress home in Tsentoroy.

Yes. He asked me what kind of vehicle Saidulayev used and how many bodyguards he had. I didn’t reply. I was beaten all over my body with a spade handle; Ramzan beat me himself. They strung me up by the arms from a tree and beat me. Ramzan was not the only person directing this, there was a second person who later told me he had been Basayev’s Chief of Staff but was now Ramzan’s Head of Reconnaissance. Ramzan said he would give his gold watch to whoever thought up the cruellest death for me.

It was Basayev’s ex-Chief of Staff. He said I should be hung up by the arms and have a thousand cuts made on my skin. They went away and conferred. I thought they were deciding how to kill me but when they came back they started beating me again, intermittently. They would beat me and then ask, ‘Are you going to do it then?’ The third time I said I couldn’t take any more and would do what they wanted.

They wanted me to take a landmine into Rustam’s house and blow up Malik Saidulayev when he arrived. I agreed. Ramzan shouted, ‘Do you think I’m going to let you have the presidency? Even if Malik gets elected I will shoot every last one of you.’

Ramzan was commissioning it and you were to carry it out? They were to give you a landmine?

They stopped beating me and dragged other people from the cells. There are cells for prisoners which open directly into Ramzan’s courtyard. I saw three prisoners myself. I don’t know what they had done. They shot two of them in the legs in front of me. The third, who had already been shot in the legs, was put in a car and taken away. Then they gave me tea, as if now I was one of them. They gave me something to eat. They brought some girls who sang and danced. They let me go the next day. I am supposed to tell them when Malik is coming to see his brother, and then they will immediately give me the landmine. I have gone into hiding. I have taken my family away. Ramzan warned that if I did not do what I promised he would massacre me and my family. I sent a statement to the Prosecutor-General. If Kadyrov Senior becomes President, my only option will be to join a group to fight him. What can I do? We just have to survive. I won’t let them take me alive a second time.

Hiding behind his black glasses, Ibrahim hobbles off. Everything that happened to him this August is typical of life in Chechnya in the run-up to the election. One could substitute names of other people who have been tortured in the same place and for the same purpose. The real pre-election campaigning by Kadyrov’s emissaries is mass intimidation under the slogan, ‘With Kadyrov, or Death!’

What we see looming is truly an election of despair. The Kremlin has created a monster worse than those which preceded him, and now he is not so easy to get rid of. If Kadyrov wins, it is inevitable that he will settle scores with his opponents, that they will retaliate, that there will be more bloodshed and atrocities, mistrust and radicalisation. That will be a war, whether you call it civil war or the Third Chechen War.

WHY KADYROV TOOK AGAINST OLD BALU: PRESIDENTIAL POWER IN THE ZONE OF THE SO-CALLED ‘ANTI-TERRORIST OPERATION’

Does Kadyrov want to be a real president? Does he want to live up to the election results declared on 5 October and, in accordance with the Constitution, protect the people of Chechnya from war, abductions, starvation and humiliation? What is he doing? What sort of a bargain are the populace getting?

For the past five months Marat Isakov has been searching high and low for his 77-year-old father, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov, Village Elder of Dyshne-Vedeno, a well-known man respected in this region as authoritative, upright and devout. In fact, as the people of Vedeno say of him, as pure as gold. He has made ten pilgrimages to Mecca, has stood up against the Wahhabis, and you will not find a house here where Old Balu, as he is affectionately known, has not buried the departed, reconciled enemies or counselled the young.

For some time, however, the elder Isakov had been an obstacle, in Kadyrov’s opinion. Old Balu failed to support him, spoke out against his methods, and on 21 June this year, during the period between the referendum on 23 March and the election on 5 October when Kadyrov was sweeping away all opposition, Said Mahomed-hadji Isakov was abducted by ‘unidentified military personnel’, from the street next to his own in Dyshne-Vedeno, as he was going to a wake. His family have no doubt that the Kadyrovites were behind it.

Zeinap, Said Mahomed’s 75-year-old wife, who has borne him ten children and shared 60 years of her life with him, wrote letters to everyone she could think of, from the Prosecutor of Vedeno District to President Putin and Patriarch Alexiy. She enclosed a copy of his labour record book as a worker at the Vedeno forestry mill and as a blacksmith, his awards, expressions of appreciation for his numerous successes in socialist competition. It was all futile. ‘Information regarding the circumstances of the detention and present whereabouts of S. Isakov is not in the possession of any of the Ministries of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Chechen Republic.’ In today’s Chechnya, this is a fearsome dismissal which leaves no grounds for hope. It came to Zeinap signed by the Military Prosecutor of Army Unit 20116, Judicial Colonel I. Kholmsky.

Balu appears to have been swallowed up by the earth, a man ‘who enjoyed unchallengeable authority among all strata of the population’, as a collective appeal from the Citizens’ Assembly of Vedeno District to President Putin put it when they demanded that the old man be returned.

‘It was odd the way even people who agreed to help, people who go into the military bases, to Khankala, suddenly changed their tune one or two days later,’ says Marat, one of Said Mahomed’s seven sons. ‘One day they would be saying, “Yes, I’ve seen him. He will certainly be released”, but the next it was, “No. I don’t know anything”.’

‘He is ill, taking medicine. He has high blood pressure and stomach trouble. I sense he is no longer with us. He would not have lasted this long in prison. They might at least return his bones. We went to Kadyrov’s father to petition. I tried to go to Kadyrov himself but his bodyguard shouted at me and drove me away. If a resistance fighter gets killed in the fighting, the soldiers return his body to the relatives for 15,000 roubles. But here is someone who was not guilty of anything. None of his sons were involved in anything either, and we can’t even have the body. I went to the Army Commandant in Vedeno and said, “If someone is guilty, he gets put on trial; but if he is not guilty does he simply disappear?” The Commandant had nothing to say.’

Old Balu was as uncompromising as he was legendary. He famously never bowed down before anyone. He ignored Kadyrov’s demand to all mullahs and religious leaders and did not urge his fellow villagers to vote in favour of the new Constitution in the 23 March referendum. Nearly everyone else grumbled but did as they were told. More than that, Said Mahomed categorically rejected Kadyrov’s methods for ruling Chechnya, for example when it was announced that the Islamic fast was not to be observed as required by the Islamic calendar but to be moved by one week. This was his way of finding out which mullahs would defy him. The majority were scared and complied, if without enthusiasm. They wanted to live. Said Mahomed did not comply. He said publicly, ‘We should fear the Almighty, not Kadyrov.’ This, of course, was passed on to Kadyrov, and retribution was not long in coming.

‘Kadyrov was just establishing which of the mullahs were on side,’ says a fellow villager. ‘We were very afraid for Said Mahomed, we begged him to go to his son in Moscow. Kadyrov was removing from his path anybody who enjoyed authority and was not on his side, but Said Mahomed refused. He said, “I am too old to run away”.’

Shortly before he was disappeared, old Balu went to Ilaskhan-Yurt where a religious festival which is important for Chechens takes place once a year. People pray together. As he was approaching the village, the old man saw that the United Russia party was electioneering in the middle of the religious festival, and of course Kadyrov was there in person. Isakov did not disguise his outrage and left immediately. Again, Kadyrov was informed.

Strong people usually have no difficulty respecting the authority of other strong people. It is the weak people who seek revenge. Very little time passed before they came for the old man, a whole column of armoured vehicles. Some 200 soldiers, all to seize one ill old man.

Said Mahomed went outside the gates. Zeinap tried to dissuade him but he replied that they would not harm an old man like him. He had been checked hundreds of times. He walked through the gates and that was the last anybody saw of him. Zeinap heard the engines of the armoured column roaring as it turned and drove off. She and his sons wrote letters to every conceivable institution. The villagers held a meeting to demand that Kadyrov and the Army immediately return their greatly respected elder. The Prosecutor’s Office even opened Criminal Case No. 24049, but the official responses, when they came, were mere stonewalling. ‘No special measures (security sweeps) were conducted in the village of Dyshne-Vedeno by members of the federal forces between 20 and 23 June.’

‘There was just the pretence of an investigation and of inquiries,’ Marat Isakov is convinced. ‘He was taken away by Kadyrovites. Kadyrov forces the mullahs to be corrupt, but my father was completely different. Kadyrov removes all genuinely religious people who separate religion and money. That has always been the way in our family. We kept out of politics and avoided friendship with government officials.’

Almost all the mullahs in Chechnya who found Kadyrov unacceptable, and openly said as much to the people, have by now been eliminated. The same is true of almost all the heads of rural administrations in Chechnya. (The Chechen administrative system is based on enormous ‘villages’ of up to 15–20,000 inhabitants.) But what, meanwhile, of the ‘President of the Chechen Republic’?

Having been proclaimed President, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov is today rarely to be found at his desk, and the way he spends his time can hardly be described as ‘leading the Republic’. Kadyrov’s life is divided between his fortress-home in Tsentoroy and Moscow, with a great deal more time being spent in the latter. This should be no surprise. Kadyrov cannot free himself from the past and continues to see keeping the Kremlin sweet as the first priority of his presidency, well ahead of working for the people. Truly he would need to move mountains in order to earn their respect. His ‘work’ in Moscow of late has centred on the long, drawn-out retirement of Alexander Voloshin, the Head of Putin’s Presidential Administration. Kadyrov was never away from the Kremlin while this was playing out, because his installation in power had been Voloshin’s swan-song project, and without Voloshin he was powerless. He started to become nervous when oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, and frequently travelled to Moscow to try to find a new and equally powerful patron.

Kadyrov in Chechnya is also a pretty gruesome spectacle. When he travels from Tsentoroy to Grozny, ‘to work’, so to speak, the arrangements are becoming even more spectacular than those in place for Putin’s journeys around Moscow. All roads and footpaths are closed, and cars and Kadyrov’s pedestrian subjects alike find themselves in a state of siege. He is scared that one of his subjects may decide to blow up the champion of their wonderful new life.

Kadyrov’s presidential ideal is also gradually becoming clearer. He has lately started hinting that it is the Turkmenbashi, the father of all Turkmen, who has turned Turkmenistan into the most oppressive of oriental despotisms in the post-Soviet territories. The Turkmenbashi is scared stiff of his people and roots out any semblance of dissent; he allows his officials free rein to thieve, and personally controls the corruption. He has an army of brutal mercenaries and influential backers beyond the borders of his land.

Who would deny that all the world’s dictators share a family likeness? Kadyrov has Putin and the Kremlin as his backers; his murderous campaign against old Isakov and the mullahs; his regal progresses; and his levelling of society by the simple expedient of cutting off any heads showing above the parapet. As for corruption and officialdom, Kadyrov’s Chechnya is one big playground of graft and corruption.

One current example is what has happened to the promised compensation payments, the main plank of Kadyrov’s election campaign and something he and Putin were forever seen talking about on television. It is already November, and no compensation is being paid. The way Kadyrov organised it was to set up numerous special Payments Commissions (with a consequent sharp rise in the number of officials). These are headed by a phalanx of dodgy individuals, and a war is being waged between these officials and citizens who have lost their property and the roof over their heads. The purpose of this campaign is to loot the compensation fund. Just as he himself controls the oil pipeline, just as the Turkmenbashi controls the gas pipeline, so Kadyrov has made a gift to the officials of the compensation pipeline.

Senior compensation officials are hard at it, having mastered the well-known ‘tube of toothpaste’ technique of squeezing out a percentage, a kickback. First they made sure that nobody could simply produce the documents proving their entitlement to compensation and get the money. People had to be registered and re-registered, lists had to be weeded and co-ordinated. Those removed from the lists had to make immense efforts to get reinstated, efforts expressed in terms of a percentage deducted from the compensation payment.

By now the population is so conformable it does not complain. In Avtury, the only person in the village to have received any compensation got 175,000 roubles instead of the 350,000 she was due, the remainder being siphoned off. She is happy and grateful to Kadyrov. In Grozny I could not find any such fortunate person who could say, ‘Oh, yes. I got the compensation and am building my new house.’

Either Kadyrov does not know what is going on, or Putin’s promises were a lot of hot air. And believe me, where there is money around, Kadyrov knows all about it.

Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov is shown on Russian television side by side with Putin far more frequently than the Russian Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasianov. Kadyrov it is whom President Putin insistently presents to East and West as ‘the face of the new Chechnya’. The new Chechnya is now in the second month of its existence. Nobody knows the whereabouts of Old Balu, and there is nobody to gainsay Kadyrov. Putin’s Chechen stalemate, Kadyrov’s land of despair. Late 2003, the ‘peace’ after the ‘election’.

In the six or more years of the latest war Chechens have become so used to frequent, dishonest elections that the imminent return of parliamentary elections has generated no discernible excitement. Popular apathy is consolidated by the racketeering which pervades the Republic. Everything depends only on whether you have paid or not; the officials and local security agencies either pay tribute, or levy it. Abductions continue to be a daily occurrence, and in that sense nothing has changed, except that now there are only two reasons for nearly all abductions: either somebody has not paid up (in the case of officials); or someone has not bought himself out (in the case of renegade resistance fighters).

My old friend Mahomet from Gudermes is a notable person in the Republic. A gentle, educated man, in earlier years he wrote a good book about the Chechen artist Pavel Zakharov. The blown-up Kadyrov Senior first made Mahomet, who had many orphans living in his house and was seriously in need of funds at the time, Minister of Labour and Social Development. Later also First Deputy Prime Minister for Social Affairs. But did Mahomet thieve?

Recently, the Kadyrovites kidnapped him and dragged him off to Tsentoroy, where the main Chechen ‘re-education base’ is now located, numerous zindan punishment pits having been dug there for the purpose. They beat him up and presented him with a bill for $200,000 if he didn’t want to end up on the list of human rights activists disappeared without trace. The $200,000 was apparently part of a debt he hadn’t paid, plus interest.

Mahomet gave it to them, cash in hand, on the nail. They brushed down his suit, smoothed it, and returned the official, whose job is to support the socially deprived, to his workplace. In other words, one set of state officials extorted protection money from another civil servant.

A similar instance involved a promising young leader of the Shali District, Akhmed, who was also invited by Kadyrov Senior to work as Head of the Administration out of Togliatti. Akhmed too was recently abducted and taken to Tsentoroy, beaten up, and ordered to pay $100,000 for his release. He handed it over, but lost his job anyway because the Kadyrov extortion controllers concluded he was unreliable and they saw no prospect of coming to a satisfactory arrangement with him. He immediately fled abroad. Now the Head of the Administration of Shali District is absolutely one of their own, a certain Edward Zakayev, a friend of Kadyrov Junior rather than of Kadyrov Senior.

What are these debts we are talking about, on this kind of scale? And how in any case can such debts arise between state officials?

Even a year ago, in the months following the enthronement of Kadyrov Junior, ‘on side’ in Chechnya referred to people who were considered loyal. Admittedly, ‘loyal’ primarily meant ‘bound by ties of kinship’, but nevertheless loyal. Now ‘on side’ means anyone who thieves and is capable of paying tribute. All officials and all security officers in Chechnya pay it to those above them – the Kadyrov gang – and the more highly placed an official is, the more he has to pay. A security official or a social welfare official pays on a regular basis. There is a requirement, for example, for a single local militia station to subscribe $1,000 for every person working there: 150 militiamen equates to $150,000 monthly, remitted to Tsentoroy.

And heaven forbid that anyone should try to conceal anything. The Kadyrovites have an enviably efficient protection racket control service, far more efficient than whatever outfit Putin kids himself is pursuing Basayev. If you don’t pay your tribute, or if you try to conceal something, you get a smack on the head and the sum due from you is increased as an ongoing fine. If you fail to pay a second time you had better flee before you are abducted, with fatal consequences.

In other words there is a market, and it is ruled by bosses who do their rounds and get their cut. The bosses are a gang in private practice, and in Chechnya they enjoy the patronage of Russia’s most senior state authorities. Accordingly, absolutely anything goes in terms of robbery with violence or depravity, economics or politics, or the appointment of candidates to stand as Deputies. Not even membership of Putin’s United Russia party confers immunity. You need to pay and promise to keep paying.

One last example: a man who was close to the Kadyrovs, Taus, the most loyal of the loyal, their guard dog of Chechenisation. Taus lived with the Kadyrov family for a long time. He respected Akhmat-hadji. He served him and was inherited by Ramzan, whom he had known since he was little. Taus aspired to be a major politician. He was the architect of the agreement on how powers were to be divided between the Russian and Chechen regimes, and he was someone Surkov talked to in the Kremlin. He longed to be leader of the Parliament, and for a while enjoyed the rank of Chairman of the State Council of the Chechen Republic, a quasi-parliamentary institution which rubber-stamped political decisions on behalf of Akhmat-hadji and Ramzan.

But then there was an argument. In the end even the most loyal of the loyal could no longer tolerate the super-insolence of Kadyrov’s gang and the super-exactions they levied. Trading on his position as an old comrade, he had the audacity to make a remark to the totally berserk Ramzan, who beat him like a dog, in public, as he was accustomed to beat anyone he didn’t like. He punched him in the face and kicked him out.

Taus left and, even before the election, Ramzan appointed a different head of the Parliament, Dukvakha from the Ministry of Agriculture, to be Deputy Prime Minister. Incidentally, the Ministry of Agriculture pays even more than the other Ministries to Tsentoroy; Dukvakha had decided that might help his career along.

What am I getting at? On the eve of this latest round of ‘European-style’ elections, Chechnya has finally been turned into a big Bey’s bazaar where the Bey is the sole oligarch, complete with his Hummers and his golden WC pedestals, a completely brutal, repressive apparatus that stops at nothing, and other tell-tale signs of the Turkmenbashi syndrome. Do you know what Parliament does in Turkmenistan? It rubber-stamps the decisions of the Turkmenbashi. Well, in Chechnya a ‘European’ façade is being built by a regime of total Turkmenbashism, a mechanism for rubber-stamping whatever Ramzan’s visceral urges dictate.

Of course, you have to feel sorry for the people racing to hand over money for the right to become nonentities, as Alu Alkhanov has in the past year by being ‘democratically elected’ President of the Chechen Republic. But everybody makes his choice, and for those who wish to run and deliver the money there are others out there who were also urged to be election candidates but categorically refused.

One thing, however, is unbearable. What was it that thousands and thousands of people, from the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, laid down their lives for? For this? And why are those who are still alive suffering so much, eking out an existence without any twenty-first-century amenities in the ruins and wrecked homes of Chechnya?

It is hard to admit, but we must: all the sacrifices that were made have been rendered senseless by the regime which has been installed. As election day 2005 approaches we are effectively back in 1997, the year when Maskhadov was an ineffectual head of state and Basayev’s gun law, raised to the status of national policy, was lording it over everybody.

The year 1997 led to the new war in 1999. Today’s arrangements cannot last long either. Another war in this land, which has already wept until it has no more tears to shed, is highly probable. Make a note in your diary: the elections take place in ten days’ time.

Last week that section of the Russian public which takes an interest in such matters was intrigued when a couple of photographs appeared on the Internet featuring Someone Resembling Ramzan Kadyrov (hereafter, in the interests of brevity, referred to as ‘SRRK‘). The photographs were stills from a video made using a mobile phone. This was said to be in the possession of a Canadian Chechen website. In the image SRRK is embracing an attractive young brunette in a crimson bra, and making no secret of how humanly happy he is.

A scandal erupted. The guardians of morality railed, the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office managed a turn of speed not seen for a long time by announcing that very evening that it was opening a criminal case against the perpetrators of this impertinence. Not, needless to say, in order to establish the identity of SRRK.

Those two photos, however, were mere child’s play. The ‘Bathhouse Video’, as it was titled, is nothing compared with other videos featuring that same SRRK and his henchmen, also made with the aid of mobile telephones, which have come into the possession of Novaya gazeta.

Right, then: Scene 1. Chronologically the first video, this was also the first to arrive at our office. A typical Grozny street, evidently in late autumn 2005, probably November. A trivial local incident: a road accident involving a federal armoured personnel carrier (there are no non-federal APCs in Chechnya) and a car belonging to somebody from the so-called Chechen security forces. Numerous people in the uniform of the Kadyrov ‘Security Service’ run in from off-camera. Among the crowd there are also members of the Highway Patrol Militia. The crowd is rushing over to where Russian soldiers are lying on the ground, evidently from the APC involved in the accident.

One federal who is still on his feet is pushed by men in Kadyrovite uniforms to where the others are lying. The mob crowds round. Flailing arms, fists, rifle butts. The one-eyed mobile phone follows what is happening.

A member of the Highway Patrol shouts in Chechen, ‘Stop beating them! Disperse! Aslanbek!’ Those filming with the mobile phone say in Chechen, ‘They haven’t had enough yet’ and in Russian add, ‘The bastards’. And again in Chechen, ‘We’ll show them not to disrespect Ramzan!’

Eventually the crowd parts. The bodies of the soldiers, sprawled on the wet, muddy shoulder of a Chechen road, are left lying motionless, face down in the mud. One of them gets his head stamped on. He does not react. Either they are dead or completely unconscious. One thing is clear, they have been thoroughly beaten up.

Scene 2. Possibly January this year, or maybe December last year. A dense crowd of men wearing a variety of combat fatigues in a market, either in Grozny or Gudermes. From the loudspeakers of a market booth pour the lyrics of a Russian pop song: ‘There is harmony in the world …’ In the middle of the crowd SRRK is visible.

The filming is being done from a car window. The two people involved in the filming are speaking quietly in Chechen. ‘What’s he doing, shoving him in the boot?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They’re shoving another one in.’ ‘Yes, two of them.’ ‘Do you see? It’s a Lada 10.’ ‘Is Ramzan getting into the 10?’ ‘I can’t hear what they’re saying because of you!’

The crowd of men in combat fatigues is churning about in Brownian motion. SRRK is directing the process from the middle of the mêlée. The paramilitaries are manhandling someone, who is not resisting, into the boot of a white Lada 10. Then they start shoving in a second man who is less willing. One paramilitary sets about him. Finally they slam down the boot lid and the vehicles prepare to leave.

SRRK has already climbed up on to the car’s running board. In the heat of directing the abduction he throws his arm forward, like Lenin on the armoured car at the Finland Station in 1917. ‘What is he doing on that 10?’ those taking the video exclaim. Quite so, bigwigs in Chechnya drive around fast in armour-plated jeeps.

Scene 3 is in effect the ‘Bathhouse Video’, two stills from which were made public last week. The significant thing about this clip is what was not shown. After SRRK embraces the lady in the crimson bra, there is some incomprehensible action. SRRK several times releases the lady in red then draws her back to himself, laughing. The lady tries to dance as he talks to her in bad Russian, but then he shouts in Chechen to somebody off-camera, ‘Go on, take your trousers off!’ Again, ‘Give him some shampoo [sic] so he takes his trousers off!’ All this with much chortling. SRRK is enjoying himself, relaxed, unself-conscious.

Finally the scene becomes more comprehensible. SRRK wants his young lady to feast her eyes on someone off-camera who is lowering his trousers on SRRK’s orders. After that we see a harassed young man in a black baseball cap pulling down his trousers. He has either been beaten up or is mentally disturbed, or in a state of narcotic intoxication. He moves slowly, but obeys the orders.

SRRK on the other hand is clearly on a high. With joyful yelps he tears himself from the young lady and skips over to the other man in the baseball cap, by now with his mobile phone in hand, and starts photographing the lower part of the unfortunate man’s body. The young lady no longer figures, as the ‘cameraman’ concentrates on SRRK squealing and enthusiastically continuing to video the personal attributes of the man in the baseball cap. SRRK is really enjoying himself. How? By photographing the extreme humiliation of someone who took his trousers down on his orders and is not even averting his face. Sex would have been preferable. This is sick.

The significant question, however, is who has decided to disseminate this material and why? Why right now? Who is the target audience?

Without the slightest doubt, those responsible were right by SRRK‘s side, trusted bodyguards and soldiers, ‘brothers’, because nobody else could have done it. Or rather, they could, but they would have been killed as soon as it became evident that the videos had strayed beyond their own circle.

The Kadyrovites all own cutting-edge mobile phones, especially those in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, closest to the Big Man. They have plenty of easy money and this is how they amuse themselves. They video everything and everyone, but mainly themselves and their amours. I have seen it myself, and they have boasted to me about how cool their mobiles are, and how much better than mine.

Videoing criminal acts like the armoured car and the boot episodes is not, however, an occupation for anyone with ambitions to remain alive and stay close to the Boss in the future. It is time to speculate: who has allowed themselves this liberty?

Not long ago in Vedeno District several dozen Kadyrovites transferred their allegiance to the resistance fighters. This went almost completely unreported, but the fact of their defection is not denied even by Khankala, the generals at Regional Operational HQ who direct all the continuing monstrousness in the North Caucasus.

We may suppose that it is these renegade Kadyrovites who have been distributing compromising material they had been storing up. Did it help them to be accepted back into the ranks of the resistance fighters, which is where most Kadyrovites originate? Unlikely. The recordings are an incidental detail, and for now it is an open question why they were not killed when they attempted to return to their former colleagues.

Who is the video’s target audience? This is really the important question. Who is the intended ‘consumer’ of the mobile phone recordings of SRRK? The Russian public? Nobody out there has had any illusions about Ramzan for a long time. Even in Kremlin circles, most realise that Putin made a bad mistake in choosing the Kadyrov family to be his team in Chechnya.

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 24 April 2006 the Chechen Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case into the incident of the attack on federal soldiers, which occurred on 7 October 2005 in Grozny. The other videos were to be examined in the context of an existing criminal case.]

According to a report by the Memorial Human Rights Centre, on 28 July in the district centre 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 29 July 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 Centre believes the desecration of Dushayev’s body by Gaibov was personal revenge. The villagers say that on 10 June 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 responsible to hurry up sewing the head back on. Finally, all these misdeeds took place in full view of the children and adults living in Kurchaloy.

The question we have to ask is whether this is a component part of our new ‘sovereign democracy’ or merely a side effect?

We look forward to hearing from the Military Prosecutor’s Office, the province of Sergey Fridinsky, whose duty it is to supervise the actions of members of the Russian Interior Ministry; from Yury Chaika, the Prosecutor-General, whose duty it is to supervise the behaviour of top-flight state servants, and also less exalted members of the Prosecutor’s Office.

The Chechen Prosecutor’s Office has confirmed the above report both in respect of the severing of the head and its being sewn back on, on 28–29 July in Kurchaloy. It has not yet indicated that it has opened a criminal case in this connection.

Vasiliy Panchenko, the Head of the Press Service of Russian Interior Ministry Troops, told Novaya gazeta, ‘As of 2 August no applications or requests have been received at the Headquarters of the Interior Troops from the Prosecutor’s Office, or by the Commanding Officer of the Joint Military Command in the North Caucasus Region. Accordingly it is not possible to make any comment, but we are prepared to respond to any inquiry from the Prosecutor’s Office in respect of Interior Troops.’

The Press Service of President Alu Alkhanov of the Chechen Republic declined to comment.

An amnesty is a good thing. Hope is always better than no hope, but how is the ‘2006 Amnesty’ for resistance fighters proceeding in the North Caucasus? Why have those who have surrendered (officially there are about 80 of them) behaved as they have? Who are they? What needs to be included in the law on amnesty which will begin its passage through the Duma in September to encourage others to follow their example? What conditions and whose guarantees are needed by those who wish to surrender?

In search of answers to these questions I have travelled through Ingushetia, Dagestan and, of course, Chechnya. I have found the situation very different from how it is presented in reports by the intelligence services.

Discovery No. 1, and the most important one: those who have laid down their arms as claimed in the official propaganda simply do not exist. Nobody who was hiding in the forests and mountains or cellars has gone to the Prosecutor’s Office or has given an undertaking to stay at their registered address. Why not? What is the real situation?

First, Dagestan and Ingushetia. The situation in Chechnya is radically different from that in these other republics. Dagestan is currently home to the greatest number of active ‘jamaats’ in the North Caucasus. In the anti-terrorist terminology of our intelligence services, jamaats are considered to be illegal armed groups. There are plenty of people in jamaats who could surrender if they chose to.

Surrendering Dagestan-style has, however, uniquely commercial characteristics. There is already a going rate. You have to pay the Prosecutor 60,000 roubles to get him to formalise your surrendering with an admission of guilt. If you haven’t got 60,000 roubles you face the consequences, which Putin has described as ‘active measures against those who fail to lay down their arms’. In Dagestan they say wryly that the statistics about those seeking to take advantage of the amnesty tell us only how well the mainly district and city prosecutors involved are prospering.

On 8 August it was reported that, in another act of terrorism, Bitar Bitarov, the Buinaksk District Prosecutor, was killed by a bomb. During all the years of the Second Chechen War, this district has been the bloodiest in Dagestan in terms of terrorist acts, secret operations and skirmishes. Bitarov has been killed, but it is unlikely that this act of sabotage bore any relation to the new amnesty and its money-making opportunities. The resistance fighters know full well, and they have told me as much, that this 60,000 rouble pay-off will have to be paid, given the totally corrupt state of Dagestan, irrespective of personalities, to whoever is appointed to replace the assassinated Prosecutor.

My next stop was in Ingushetia, where the boldest and most militant jamaats operate. Only three people are claimed to have surrendered there. Their statements were shown on Republican television, but all three had been abducted several months ago. The procedure was what is by now entirely customary in Ingushetia: they were kidnapped by members of ‘unidentified security agencies’ and later turned up in the pre-trial detention facility in Vladikavkaz, accused of participation in an illegal armed formation.

A detail common to all of them is that they are currently imprisoned. They are now in exactly the same situation as they were before they stated that they wished to be amnestied. None of them has been allowed to return home. The investigation against all of them is being conducted by a team at the Prosecutor-General’s Office led by Konstantin Krivorotov. His efforts to eradicate the causes which led to Beslan were supposed to decrease the enthusiasm for terrorist activity in the North Caucasus but have, unfortunately, had precisely the opposite effect. For almost two years his investigative activity has consisted of designating people as terrorists while the real bandits roam freely through the forests and mountains, and plant bombs when and where they will.

Of the three Ingushes who surrendered (and that they had done so was announced by their relatives and lawyers long before Patrushev made his amnesty proposals), we know that they were tortured during the investigation and signed ‘voluntary confessions’. Lawyers defending different accused under investigation by Krivorotov’s team say no offers to include them in the amnesty were made by the investigators. They comment that the statements made by the three are merely part of a deal struck by their relatives to get their sentences reduced.

In other words, the amnesty in Ingushetia too is closer to plea bargaining than conciliation. It in no wise indicates an increase in the number of resistance fighters who have seen the light and want to return to civilian life. Those who have been ‘amnestied’ have in any case been returned to ‘civilian life’ in strict-regime labour camps.

‘Do people who wish to avail themselves of the amnesty appeal to you or to the Parliament to mediate?’ I ask Mahomet Sali Aushev, a Deputy of the People’s Assembly of Ingushetia and member of the recently created Parliamentary Commission on Violation of Civil Rights.

‘In your view, is this amnesty going to bring about an improvement in the situation in Ingushetia, in terms of bombings, shelling and armed clashes?’

‘This is not a true amnesty, it is simply an appeal for people to lay down arms. A number of people have taken to the forests. Some of them will never turn back from that path. There are, of course, those whom we might call romantics. For any of those who are vacillating this proposal is of course very important, but for the majority, some 90 per cent, the amnesty is an irrelevance. Somebody close to them has been killed, and they are seeking retribution. There is nothing for them to repent of. It is they who are waiting for those who have wronged them to repent. Actually, it seems to me that this “amnesty” was not devised with us in mind. It is intended to have an impact mainly in Chechnya.’

And so to Chechnya, which has a defining role in the region. It is asserted that almost 70 individuals have asked to take advantage of the amnesty, only none of them are fighters. There are a great variety of people who, for a great variety of reasons, have said that they would like to take advantage of Patrushev’s proposal. One baked bread for Dudayev, another once said he sympathised with Maskhadov, a third took food to the forests. The nearest we come to a resistance fighter, whom they are showing on television, used to be in Doku Umarov’s detachment, but on closer inspection even he turns out to have been trading in the Urus Martan market for several years now, not hiding from anybody. He has been given a hint that it might be in his interests to help inflate the statistics, and that is what he has done.

What is needed for the amnesty to be real and genuine? That is a question I put to everybody. To resistance fighters who have not the slightest intention of ‘going legal’, as well as to those who are asking their relatives to help them make contact with the law enforcement agencies while the opportunity is there. Also to commanders of pro-Moscow Chechen security agencies, many of whom are themselves former resistance fighters amnestied under guarantees from Kadyrov Senior. These are precisely the men who for a long time were considered to be the bulwark of Kadyrov Junior’s power.

Their answers are extraordinarily consistent. ‘It is unlikely anybody will surrender to Kadyrov.’

There you have it, and this in a republic which is claimed to be infatuated with Ramzan, which is inundated with outward signs of deference. There are posters everywhere: Ramzan with Daddy, Ramzan with Putin, Ramzan on his own with a furrowed brow, and ‘You Are Our Hero’, and ‘We Are Proud Of You’. They are plastered along all the roads, at the entrance to even the smallest villages, in all schools and state institutions, on fences, doors and lamp posts, on the concrete blocks of disused checkpoints … Everyone in Chechnya just loves him so.

So why would people not be prepared to lay down their arms to him? This is where we can no longer name names. All my conversations on this subject took place on condition of complete anonymity.

‘Why do you believe Ramzan has to be removed before people will come out of the forests?’ I ask an influential commander of the pro-Moscow Chechen security forces whom I have known for a long time. He trusts me and I trust him. We have had good reason for that in worse times.

‘They will not come out to be slaves, and for us Ramzan is a continuation of the enslavement. They will come out when the rule of law is established, and not before. A second condition is that they should be guaranteed a job which doesn’t involve a rifle, not armed detachments they will be drafted into in place of the forest.’

‘What do you mean? They want jobs waiting for them? That’s impossible. Unemployment here is the same problem for everyone.’

‘No, I mean something else. Nobody in Chechnya today, including those who never fought anywhere and have nothing to be amnestied for, can be sure they will have a job tomorrow if Ramzan for any reason takes a dislike to them. They can’t even be sure that they will be alive if Ramzan takes a dislike to them.’

After that we talk about Eshiev. My informant has not the slightest sympathy for him, but what happened has to be discussed. Maierbek Eshiev, a well-known field commander from the mountainous Vedeno District whose radio code name was Mullah, surrendered along with his detachment under Ramzan’s guarantees after Maskhadov was killed. Let us have no illusions, Eshiev is a religious fanatic.

Kadyrov promptly appointed him Commander of the Anti-Terrorist Centre for Vedeno District. Each anti-terrorist centre has divisions in the towns and villages of Chechnya and its officers are drawn from the old A. Kadyrov Regiment in which former fighters could enlist. They were all directly subordinate to Ramzan Kadyrov. For a long time the ATC was his power base, but in spring this year it was disbanded. This was seen as a first move by Moscow to cool Ramzan’s ardour. Most members of the Anti-Terrorist Centre were drafted into the North and South Battalions under the umbrella of the Interior Ministry Troops of the Russian Federation. On 1 June they swore the oath of allegiance to Russia.

Incidentally, this federal plan for taming Kadyrov Junior did enjoy some success. Many ex-resistance fighters who had become Kadyrovites took this opportunity to distance themselves from him. Kadyrov reacted by becoming hyperactive and tried to ensure the next batch of amnestied fighters came his way. The idea for the present amnesty, which Patrushev announced after Basayev’s death, came partly from Kadyrov’s determination to restore his power base.

But to return to Eshiev. On 10 November 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.

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 25 July 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 favourite 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.

Word spread like wildfire around Chechnya to the effect that Moscow was dumping Ramzan. After this meeting, which felt as if a starter’s pistol had been fired, there came the first stirrings of mutiny.

Unrest was first evident in the so-called ‘Oil Regiment’, the Interdepartmental Security Service. The oil security guards refused to pay their tribute to the so-called Kadyrov Fund, and warned Kadyrov not to try to get them to attack their own people. They told him they would not shoot, and would take no further part in settling his gangland scores. They would hand in their weapons and leave. Next, the officers of the Ministry for Emergency Situations revolted and also refused to pay tribute – 3–4,000 roubles deducted from their salaries – submitting official complaints to the Prosecutor’s Office about those gathering the levies. The detachment commanded by Movladi Baisarov joined the rebellion and, although there are not that many of them left, they continue to be influential. The West Battalion, now formally subordinate to the Central Intelligence Directorate, were drawn in immediately after them.

It finally came to open war. Muslim Iliasov, commander of one of the battalions transferred to the Russian Interior Ministry troops and himself a former resistance fighter who had surrendered to Kadyrov Senior, was a close friend of Ramzan. He nevertheless ambushed him. Other detachments were drawn in: the West, East, OMON, North, and South Battalions. These split internally, with some siding with Ramzan and others opposing him. The balance of forces was not in Ramzan’s favour, and Iliasov, who had instigated the rebellion, declared Ramzan his enemy. He explained why: for the humiliations, insults and derision, for the slavery. Ramzan raged but retreated because of lack of support.

‘This will not last long,’ said one of the commanders who took part in the events. ‘I would give it two months before it’s all over.’ Another of his colleagues who will also be unable to avoid taking part in the showdown said ‘three months’. Everyone with detachments subordinate to them in the pro-Moscow Chechen security agencies agrees that Ramzan’s removal from the scene is only a matter of time. ‘Although,’ they add, ‘anything might happen.’

‘Putin personally. Ramzan has been requesting an urgent meeting through Surkov.’

A meeting did indeed take place in the Kremlin on 9 August, but Ramzan got relatively little out of it: his face on television, but no money.

Let us return to what happened after the revolt. What happened was 3 August, the Day of the Oath, of swearing allegiance to Ramzan Kadyrov on the Quran. Poor Quran.

‘We were all summoned to Khosi-Yurt (another name for Tsentoroy) to a sacrifice,’ one of the participants relates. ‘It was some anniversary of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov (fifty-five years since his birth). They took us to the gym and said we were to swear allegiance to Ramzan on the Quran. All the battalion commanders were there. The Mullah read and everybody was supposed to repeat it. The cameras were on. For several days after that they were showing our lips moving on television. I personally swore loyalty to my father.’ Another commander laughs: ‘I swore to be faithful to my wife.’

For the participants this oath was by no means the first. My interviewees smile; ‘We saw people there who have sworn allegiance on the Quran to different leaders five times before, and broken the vow. They will break this one at the first opportunity.’

That is no more than the truth. The enforced oath only irritated more of those who are now opposed to Ramzan.

‘This oath-taking was a panicky affair,’ one of the commanders says with conviction. He, incidentally, did not go to Tsentoroy on 3 August. ‘Ramzan was trying to show Moscow that he has everything under control, that he is in charge, but what he showed Chechnya was that he is in a blue funk.’

‘How many people do you think Ramzan will have when it comes to the showdown?’

‘No, only those who see that deserting him will leave them facing prison. Not one of them will be accepted back in the forests now. His closest circle will be the first to betray him. That’s the kind of people he has lured to his side.’

So, what change has there been in the situation in Chechnya at the end of this summer? The declaration of the amnesty and the killing of Maskhadov’s successor as President of Ichkeria, Abdul Khalim Sadulayev, and of Basayev which preceded it suddenly dispelled the inertia. These events prompted people to think about where they were, about the wider picture in Chechnya, what it might lead to, and who was who. That is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

There is change also in the fact that, where previously almost everyone in Chechnya believed that in time Ramzan would be removed by those who had raised him up – ‘the Russians’ – those in the security forces, and I emphasise that these are the pro-Moscow Chechen forces, now say that they will have to free Chechnya from him themselves. They see Chechnya’s major problem today as being not the jamaats, but Ramzan, the Kadyrovites, and the widening conflict associated with them.

Why? ‘Because the Kadyrovites are the best machine yet invented for exterminating Chechens. This is something a majority of people now recognise.’

That is the explanation I was given about the present-day Russo-Chechen political situation by a certain wise person, a Grozny resident I know, who under Maskhadov lived in Moscow because he found the Wahhabis unacceptable, who returned when power was transferred to the Russian Government’s representative, Nikolai Koshman, and now finds it almost impossible to live under Ramzan.

‘The problem is that they can’t make up their minds in Moscow whether to force Chechnya to obey the law or not. Until Moscow decides, Ramzan will continue. Ramzan is a symbol of lawlessness. Those who want to come out of the forests are waiting for the law to be re-established. People want legality.’

‘But it is not simply a matter of Moscow failing to make its mind up,’ I reply. ‘The problem surely is that you Chechens periodically demonstrate that you don’t want to live under the law. How is Moscow to make its mind up if at every turn people here say “Khyo nokhchi vats?” (“Are you not a Chechen?”). What is the way out? How are Chechens to be compelled to live within the law? Even if they want to surrender to the law, and not to Ramzan’s lawlessness, will they be able subsequently to obey it? That is the snag. Incidentally, Maskhadov faced the same problems in the late 1990s. In 1998 he told me in an interview, in the presence of a group of journalists, that the only way to force Chechens to observe the law was to impose Islam.’

‘Maskhadov was wrong. What is needed is not Islam but the Adats, the ancient Chechen rules of life. They are full of wisdom. Paradoxical as it may seem, the Chechens can be compelled to live in accordance with Russian laws through the Adats.’

‘If we return to the amnesty, whose word can be accepted as a guarantee? Putin’s?’ I ask.

‘Remember Khambiev’s mission to Azerbaijan, when Maskhadov’s ex-Minister of Defence went to Baku on Ramzan’s orders to persuade former fighters to return and accept an amnesty? Nobody came back with him except for two of his relatives, and they were arrested at the border. I have no answer to your question. I think the guarantees need to come not from Ramzan, not from Putin, not from Alkhanov, but only from the law.’

Aslan is 31. He finished school as the USSR was collapsing and Chechnya was vacillating over which legal system to accept. He has been bearing arms for many years, like most men in Chechnya. He lives under a false name, like many in Chechnya. He would like to surrender, but cannot, also like many in Chechnya. Aslan is no longer the future – he is too weary and disillusioned for that – but the future of Chechnya may well depend on how he is treated. What follows is an interview, almost unedited. Draw your own conclusions: we were talking 24 hours before he surrendered to the Prosecutor’s Office.

‘I fought from 2000 to 2002, not from the very beginning of the war. I went to fight because my brother was unjustly imprisoned and my younger brother was seriously injured by a bomb. People were always coming into our house from a variety of agencies and terrorising us. I was no longer prepared to put up with it. It was impossible to stay at home and just wait to be humiliated. I fought in a detachment of 12 men who were loyal to Maskhadov.’

‘It was hard fighting in the long term, the conditions were hard. Some lads I knew talked to me, and we agreed to go together to take advantage of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov’s amnesty. I became a Kadyrovite. I was told, “You have nothing to worry about. There is nothing against you.”’

‘It was the same. Later they started disbanding the Anti-Terrorist Centre to create the North and South Battalions. I realised I was tired of it all. I didn’t want to run around with a rifle any more. I turned over my weapon and vehicle, but soon I discovered that the previous amnesty had not had legal force and prosecutions had begun under Article 205, Part 3 (Acts of Terrorism).’

‘Yes. Akhmat-hadji had a better head on his shoulders. He knew what needed doing.’

‘There was a lot of talk after the death of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov that if you, all the Kadyrovites and former fighters, were not handed over to Ramzan, who ought to replace his father, you would all go off again to the forests.’

‘That was not true. Nobody was planning to return to the forests. People weren’t even thinking about it as a final resort.’

‘How many are there like you, from the disbanded Kadyrovites, who would like to seek an amnesty?’

‘I know some 20 people. They want to, but there are no guarantees. Everybody who left Ramzan has discovered that the federal warrant against us has not been lifted.’

‘Are you prepared to go back into a different detachment under the amnesty?’

‘No. What difference is there whether you go into another detachment or to prison?’

‘What hopes do you and those 20 former Kadyrovites have, what are you hoping for?’

‘The rule of law. We are waiting for the law to be re-established. But those coming directly from the mountains have no chance at all now, and they know it.’

‘What distinguishes a resistance fighter from everybody else? The wish to fight?’

‘The inner desire for retribution is what you must have. Just wanting to fight is not enough.’

‘Nobody. Alkhanov a little, because he has not promised anything. I don’t believe in people who promise a lot.’

‘I don’t know them. I would need to talk to them face to face before I could trust them.’

‘Nevertheless, you are intending to go to the Prosecutor’s Office. What percentage risk do you think you face that they will put you in prison?’

RAMZAN KADYROV, THE PRIDE OF CHECHNYA: THE NEW PRIME MINISTER’S FIRST 100 DAYS IN OFFICE

In a few days Russia, and indeed the whole world, will be celebrating the First Hundred Days of the premiership of Ramzan Kadyrov, or so, at least, the Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic believes. He is making suitable preparations.

Hands up anyone who still doesn’t know that Ramzan Kadyrov is Ramzan the Builder? He is restoring battered Chechnya to its pre-war appearance, doing away with every trace of the battles which, with brief interruptions, have been taking place here since 1994.

Actually, everybody knows. They know that, without rest, for almost 100 days already, no matter where Kadyrov’s motorcade appears, orders will ring out to increase the speed at which everything he catches sight of is being built. Markets have sprung up, and petrol stations, and holes in the roads have been filled. The fences along them have been painted, temporary refugee camps have been demolished, soup is being made in the hospitals for the patients, and the ground is being marked out for branches of future gas pipelines. The children sing, ‘God save Ramzan!’ No, seriously. Almost every day anthems about today’s living mediator between the Almighty and the people of Chechnya are to be heard on the Republic’s television.

Only one question is rather worrying: whose money is actually paying for this restoration? It seems reasonable to ask. The official answer, being drummed into the heads of the Chechen population, is that it is all being done with Ramzan’s money. OK, he is admittedly very good at extracting money from people, but he isn’t doing this for himself: he’s doing it for the People.

Is that good? Why, it’s absolutely marvellous! Chechnya is, however, awash with rumours about the mechanism of this pumping operation. By word of mouth one hears how much, exactly, each worker is shelling out to the ruling family. For example, the latest of a series of preparatory measures for the Hundred Days celebration concerns the personnel of the Interior Ministry’s Interdepartmental Security Service. (Alkhanov, the Interior Minister, is a relative of the Kadyrovs and former bodyguard of Kadyrov Senior.) The commanding officers announced at morning parade that the new rates for contributions to the Restoration of Chechnya Fund would be $1,000 each for officers, and 10,000 roubles each for the rank and file (which is quite a whack: these are some rank and file!). Anybody who can’t or doesn’t want to pay up is to be dismissed.

There have been no reports of dismissals: the Interdepartmental Security Service went to persuade those it protects, the overwhelming majority of whom were only too happy to comply: it was, after all, for the People. All for the sake of the People.

It has to be admitted that Kadyrov Junior is an outstandingly fast-learning pupil of his senior Moscow comrades, including the President of the Russian Federation. What matters is not to actually do things, but to say it was you who did them. This is the main lesson he has learned. Let us dip into the text of Chechen Government Instruction No. 184–r of 25 April 2006, signed by R. Kadyrov. It lists projects financed by capital investment in 2006.

What do we see? Of 27 planned projects, only six are due to be partially financed from ‘supplementary revenues’, where we may at least surmise the personal participation of Ramzan the Builder with a contribution from the so-called Kadyrov Regional Fund, the chest into which the voluntary contributions of citizens pour. Eighteen projects were fully financed from the Federal Budget by us, the taxpayers of Russia. That covers all repairs to school and boarding-school buildings, the promised gas pipelines to villages, construction of outpatient clinics, even the restoration of the ‘Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov State Museum’. Two other projects are financed jointly by the federal budget and the Federal Regional Development Fund. In other words, in 19 projects out of 27 Kadyrov Junior has played no part whatsoever. He has only had to keep an eye on things to stop the funds from being trousered. Or …?

An ‘or’ has to be conceded. Ramzan is allowed to do anything he likes. As the sole inheritor of the noble mission of Kadyrov Senior, he knows better than the Chechens how to spend money on the People. The basis of this claim is the belief that Kadyrov Senior was the middleman between the Almighty and the People, the Best of the Best, as he was called, and that he has bestowed this vicarious mission upon his son.

The legend of the Best of the Best, of course, requires constant cosmetic attention. Leaving it to develop spontaneously would be the utmost folly, and that is why Kadyrov Junior’s Hundred Days has fused naturally with the ‘Republic’s preparations to mark the 55th anniversary of the birth of the first President of the Chechen Republic, Hero of Russia, Akhmed Kadyrov’, as Government Order No. 241 of 24 May 2006, signed by R. Kadyrov, puts it. The odd idea of marking this anniversary is in fact a convenient way of bypassing such undesirable distractions as Victory Day, because it would clearly be inappropriate to have Chechens celebrating 9 May when that is also the day Kadyrov Senior was blown up. That consideration must clearly take priority over any rejoicing at the victory over fascism.

No creative initiatives are invited as to how to mark Akhmet-hadji Kadyrov’s 55th birthday. The Son of the Best of the Best has already made all the ‘preparations’. These the document lists as:

Quotations from A. Kadyrov to be used in television broadcasts:
‘My aim is not to stop the war, but to end war once and for all’; ‘My weapon is the Truth, in the face of which any army is powerless.’
A list of those to be interviewed about Kadyrov Senior. Who are they?
First and foremost, the son: ‘Interview with R. Kadyrov, “My Father Taught Me How To Live”’; followed by ‘Reminiscences by Khozh-Akhmed Kadyrov’ (an uncle), ‘He Grew even as I Watched’; and ‘Speech by the Chairman of the People’s Assembly of the Chechen Republic, D.B. Abdurakhmanov, “A.A. Kadyrov – Architect of Peaceful Construction in Chechnya”’
Titles of publications and their contents:
1. Publication in the newspaper Vesti, ‘A.A. Kadyrov – A Leader for his Times’. The historical inevitability of A. Kadyrov’s appearance on the political stage of Chechnya and Russia.
3. Publication in the newspaper Molodezhnaya smena, ‘A. Kadyrov, the Peacemaker’.
… 17. Broadcasts on Vainakh and Grozny TV: ‘V.V. Putin and A.A. Kadyrov, Architects of New Russo-Chechen Relations’; ‘A. Kadyrov, the Diplomat’.
18. Broadcasts on Radio Vainakh and Radio Grozny: ‘He United All the Muslims of Chechnya’.
… 34. Television series, ‘A. Kadyrov: the Highway of Life’ (weekly).
35. Humorous programme, ‘Smiling Kadyrov’ (The ‘Chechen Fingerprints’ team).
… 38. Congratulatory telegrams and messages. Appreciations of the merits of A. Kadyrov.
… 42. Billboards, street banners, wall hangings, ‘R. Kadyrov: “I Will Carry my Father’s Cause Forward to a Victorious Conclusion”’ …
This plan, egregious even by present-day standards, includes a list of publications which must without fail be published in June as Ramzan’s Hundred Days near the finishing line:
… 5. Publication in the magazine Nana, ‘A.A. Kadyrov Remembered by his Comrades-in-Arms, Family and Friends’.
6. Publication in the magazine Orga (a writers’ magazine), ‘A Portrait of A.A. Kadyrov, the Artist’.
7. Publication in the magazine Vainakh: poetry by various authors and dedicated to A.A. Kadyrov.
… 10. Broadcast on State TV and Radio. Chat-show ‘“I Am a Citizen.” A. Kadyrov, the Man who Restored the Good Name of Chechens’.
Events:
… 23. Scholarly symposium, ‘The Role and Significance of A. Kadyrov in Modern History’.
24. Competition to find the best reader. Poetry dedicated to A.A. Kadyrov.
25. Exhibition of children’s drawings, ‘Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, the Man who Brought Peace to our Home’.

To be arranged by R. Alkhanov, Interior Minister: oath of loyalty to the cause of A.A. Kadyrov and presentation to the best militia division of a standard bearing the portrait of A. Kadyrov.

Ramzan Kadyrov is still a very young man and hasn’t read much history, but what about those who grew up long ago, and remember when plans exactly like these were drawn up by central committees, municipal committees, district committees, and all the rest of them on the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Lenin, the 70th Anniversary of the Birth of Brezhnev, and so on ad nauseam?

To be fair, we should mention that the 55th anniversary celebrations are being financed by the A. Kadyrov Foundation with funds extorted by official racketeers from the Chechen people.

One striking example of the Foundation’s financial practices is provided by the recent inaugural Chechen beauty contest, organised within the framework of the Hundred Days. As we know, Kadyrov Junior undertook to make the people around him as happy as possible during this period.

Both Kadyrov Junior and his ‘team’, as it is now customary to call them, went out of their way to emphasise that the beauty contest was the brainchild of Ramzan. He is richer today than his father ever was, effectively an oligarch, wallowing in money and enjoying throwing it about, as the contest was to show.

After the jury had announced the name of the winner and many girls had been awarded cars, a celebratory dinner was held in a Gudermes restaurant. Kadyrov Junior and several dozen bodyguards arrived. The winners were commanded to dance for him and his entourage and, as the dancing continued, Kadyrov Junior ordered his bodyguards to throw banknotes at the young ladies, $100 and 1,000-rouble banknotes.

A reporter for Chechenskoye obshchestvo calculated that some US$30,000, including the rouble equivalents, ended up on the Olympus Restaurant’s marble floor. The young ladies duly picked up the money. When one of the competitors suddenly burst into tears, Ramzan arranged for her to be given a diamond-studded Chopard Swiss watch. The watch with all its diamonds materialised instantly in Gudermes, the tears were dried, and a watch bought with money extracted from the citizens of Chechnya was publicly thrown at the feet of another of their number.

The years will pass, all things will pass, and nobody will have any desire to recall any detail of these Hundred Days with their oaths of loyalty to the Kadyrov cause. But what of the girls who in May 2006 crawled around on that restaurant floor? What of the young journalists who put their signatures to a publication titled Kadyrov, the Peacemaker, at a time when hundreds had been tortured to death in Tsentoroy? How will they live with themselves? I cannot imagine.

PS. On the morning of 31 May, Kadyrovites (who no longer officially exist, as they have been reassigned to the Interior Ministry) caught resistance fighters in the hill village of Nesterovskaya in Ingushetia. As reported by the Russian Interior Ministry Troops Press Office, ‘Brigands, pursued by members of the militia, crossed the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia and hid in house No. 91, taking hostage the people living there.’

In the house surrounded by the Kadyrovites live the Khaikharoyevs, the family of Field Commander Ruslan Khaikharoyev, a kidnapper killed in 1999. With the family was Ruslan’s 19-year-old son, Rizvan, who, as their neighbours testify, was not a resistance fighter. When the fighters wounded a militiaman, the Kadyrovites retreated, taking with them Rizvan Khaikharoyev. He was pushed into the boot of one of the vehicles, which they positioned opposite the house. They used it for cover and began a two-hour gun battle. When everything fell quiet, Rizvan was hauled out of the boot and one of the Kadyrovites fired a pistol at the back of his head; another finished him off with his assault rifle. The murder was committed in full view of the people of Nesterovskaya, an extra-judicial execution committed by men who are now officially counted as members of the Interior Ministry Troops of the Russian Federation.

On 7 September a huge fight broke out at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Alkhasty on the Chechnya–Ingushetia border. Men in military fatigues approaching from the Chechen side and claiming to be the security detail of Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov became impatient at the ‘cheek’ of the checkpoint guards. These were Ingush Interior Ministry troops of the regiment guarding the administrative border, and they demanded to see the documents, military orders, and other forms required for taking firearms across the border. The Kadyrovites started waving their arms about and firing in the air.

Three militiamen were injured as a result, two of whom are in hospital. The Kadyrovites proceeded to cross the border without authorisation. Officers of the Ingush Interior Ministry issued warrants for their arrest, vowing to give them a good beating if they were found in Ingushetia. Ramzan Kadyrov’s entourage issued a statement claiming it was all lies, because their people do not take armoured personnel carriers across the border.

Whoever it was who turned up in APCs on 7 September – current Kadyrovites, former Kadyrovites now reclassified as officers belonging to battalions of the Russian Interior Ministry, or some other kind of thugs – what happened is a manifestation of the long-established Kadyrov syndrome whose principal distinguishing features are insolence, loutishness, and brutality masquerading as courage. In Chechnya the Kadyrovites beat men and women at will, in exactly the way the Wahhabis beat people in the days of Maskhadov’s Ichkeria. They behead their enemies just as the Wahhabis did, and the institutions of law and order turn a blind eye or even officially refer to this behaviour as the result of a heightened national awareness following the Chechen people’s irrevocable choice in favour of Russia.

In Chechnya itself there has been no attempt to halt the spread of this infection. Rather, it has been encouraged. ‘Come on, guys, we’re something else. We’ll show them who’s boss. We have every right!’ The Kadyrov syndrome is catching on among Chechen teenagers who are known as the New Wahhabis, or the R. Kadyrov Fan Club. They ‘graduate’ from the Fan Club and take their place in adult life and the world of work.

For a couple of years all this was festering only in Chechnya, with occasional outbreaks in Dagestan, mainly in the bordering Khasavyurt District. Now, however, the Kadyrov syndrome is spreading. Today many Chechens living outside Chechnya and even outside Russia are being infected with the virus.

Those around them have also moved on, though. By no means everybody is taken in by the televised fairy tales depicting Ramzan Kadyrov as a Hero of Russia. Many are getting very tired of the Kadyrov syndrome and it has produced a countervailing tendency in the form of a movement called ‘We Will Beat You’. Not everybody is willing, like many Chechens, to let the Kadyrovites walk all over them. This is what led to the anti-Chechen disturbances in Kondopoga, Karelia, and now also this incident in Alkhasty.