One of the most appalling atrocities in the course of the Second Chechen War was the taking hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia, on September 1, 2004 of up to 1,200 people, including 770 children, on the first day of the school year. Russian government troops stormed the school on September 3: 331 hostages died, including 186 children. Here too it seemed that the regime’s primary concern was to manipulate the situation for its own political advantage. A Russian Diary contains more of Anna Politkovskaya’s writing on this tragedy.
September 6, 2004
By Dmitriy Muratov and Sergey Sokolov (Novaya gazeta’s special correspondents in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow)
As the Beslan tragedy has unfolded, hundreds of our journalist colleagues, state officials and readers have been asking what has happened to Novaya gazeta’s columnist, Anna Politkovskaya. They believe that her presence in Beslan might have been of value, but Politkovskaya never reached Beslan.
On the evening of September 1, Politkovskaya was sent in Novaya gazeta’s car to Vnukovo Airport. Before that she had contacted a number of Russian politicians and Maskhadov’s representative in London, Akhmed Zakayev. The basis of her proposals was that everybody who could get in touch with the terrorists should do so promptly, without considering the consequences, in order to save the children. “Let Maskhadov go and reach agreement with them,” she urged. Zakayev reported that Maskhadov was prepared to do that without conditions or guarantees.
At Vnukovo, flights to Vladikavkaz had been cancelled. Those to nearby towns had also been cancelled. Three times Politkovskaya checked in and three times she was unable to fly. The newspaper ordered her to go to Rostov, and from there to travel onwards by car. The Karat airline allowed her to board.
Politkovskaya had had no time to eat all day. In the plane – and she is an experienced person – she refused food, having taken an oat biscuit with her. She felt fine and asked only for tea from the stewardess. Ten minutes after drinking it, she lost consciousness, having just had time to summon the stewardess back.
Thereafter she remembers only fragments. Valiant efforts were made by the doctors at the Rostov Airport Medical Center to get her out of a coma. They succeeded. The work of the doctors from the Fifth Infectious Diseases Department of Rostov City Hospital No. 1 was irreproachable. In underfunded conditions they revived her by all the means at their disposal, even surrounding her with plastic bottles full of hot water, administering a drip feed, giving injections. By morning she had recovered consciousness.
Grigoriy Yavlinsky, our colleagues from Izvestiya, and friends in the Army made every effort to help the medics in what, in the doctors’ opinion, was an almost hopeless task. Many thanks to them.
On the evening of September 3, with the assistance of other friends (thank you, bankers!), Anna was transferred by private plane to one of the Moscow clinics. The Rostov laboratory analysis has not yet been completed. For some incomprehensible reason the first analyses, taken at the airport, were destroyed. The Moscow doctors said openly that they could not yet identify the toxin, but that a poison had entered her body.
Until these circumstances have been clarified, we do not want to engage in conspiracy theories. However, both the situation with Andrey Babitsky, a journalist with Radio Liberty, removed from a flight to the North Caucasus at Vnukovo Airport on suspicion of having explosives in his baggage (!) – needless to say, they found nothing – and the incident with Politkovskaya oblige us to think that attempts were being made to keep a number of authoritative journalists respected in Chechnya from reporting on the tragedy in Beslan.
Politkovskaya is now at home under medical supervision. Her kidneys, liver and endocrinal system have been seriously affected by an unidentified toxin. It is not known how long she will need to convalesce.
Why on earth don’t those officials so exercised by Politkovskaya’s activity just get on with doing their jobs? Averting terrorist acts, for example.
September 13, 2004
The first three days of September 2004 have demonstrated once again that the moral and intellectual level of the Kremlin’s current occupants gives no grounds to hope there will never be another Beslan. The days since the tragedy have demonstrated, moreover, that they have no intention of learning any lessons from the school massacre. They persist with their lies and evasions, and insist that black is white. This leaves our children and grandchildren in danger.
Our state authorities operate out of sight and, during times of national tragedy, they hide. We need people who at the very least will not hide themselves away. The crucial question in the light of recent events is, how have the state authorities responded to the Beslan tragedy? What have they done to improve their citizens’ security?
There has been only one visible response: an administrative “anti-terrorist” reorganization in the South of Russia. In each region a senior “anti-terrorist” officer has been appointed from the ranks of the Interior Ministry’s troops. They rank as second in command to those with overall responsibility for the region. In the current bureaucratic structure, which existed before Beslan, each region has an Anti-Terrorist Commission headed by Presidents Zyazikov, Alkhanov, Dzasokhov, Kokoyev, et al., and they bear full responsibility for terrorist acts on their territories. In addition, the new senior anti-terrorist officers will each command a further 70 special operations troops. The post-Beslan reinforcement of security in the South Russian regions, accordingly, amounts to 71 extra anti-terrorist agents apiece. Is that it? Yes. It is a typical bureaucratic manoeuvre to avert bad publicity.
What do we actually know about the heads of the Anti-Terrorist Commissions in the South of Russia? Let us cast an eye over the files of some of these gentlemen whose duty was to prevent Beslan from happening and who, after it erupted, were personally responsible for conducting the operation to free the hostages.
Every age has its own characteristics. The Brezhnev era was typified by cynical dementia. Under Yeltsin it was think big, take big. Under Putin, we live in an era of cowardice. Take a look at those who surround him.
First, Mr Murat Zyazikov, the President of Ingushetia. Zyazikov has been in power for a little over two years, before which his career was spent entirely in the KGB and FSB. He is one of Putin’s professional cronies. Nobody is in any doubt that Zyazikov was strong-armed into the office of President of Ingushetia by Putin and his team. His presidency has seen the secret services run riot in Ingushetia, flouting the Constitution. Citizens have been abducted by the FSB and death squads, and as a direct consequence young people have been heading to the mountains to join the fighters and there has been a wave of terrorist acts. What did Zyazikov do, this abysmal Head of Ingushetia’s Anti-Terrorist Commission? He has just sat there in his presidential seat, a typical FSB goon.
An FSB goon is, after all, somebody who sees the world from behind other people’s backs. That’s their profession. They are invisible fighters against an invisible threat. The problems begin when the threat becomes visible and real, and the President needs to come out and organise effective resistance to outlaws like those who took over Ingushetia on June 21, 2004.*
That night dozens of people died while Zyazikov sat it out in his cellar, waiting to see what would happen and keeping his own highly important skin safe. No doubt the President’s life is very precious and important, so perhaps he really ought to be hiding in his cellar. But it is no more precious than the lives of everyone else.
The result of that night was the loss of many lives in Ingushetia, attributable to a total lack of organised resistance to the invaders. Another important result was that the fighters were encouraged to think about undertaking something similar in the future.
Let us look, then, at August 21, 2004 and the seizure of Grozny by resistance fighters in an exact replay of the Ingushetian scenario. Where were Putin’s favorites that night, Alu Alkhanov and Ramzan Kadyrov, who so often tell us on television that they have all but caught the last of the outlaws? They too were down in their cellars, rather than leading resistance to the fighters. They too were saving their precious skins for future battles against international terrorism. The result that time was the loss of more than 50 lives, and a further boost for the resistance fighters’ self-confidence.
Finally we come to Beslan, where brutes planted explosives around small children and demanded an end to the accursed war in Chechnya. What should Zyazikov, Alkhanov, and the redoubtable Ramzan Kadyrov – responsible for dealing with terrorism in their territories, who had given Putin every assurance that the enemy would never pass – have done on that first morning of September 1? They, along with Maskhadov, whose name was being bandied about by the brutes, should have been standing there in the school and, with all the means at their disposal, without attempting to haggle over guarantees of their personal safety, should have tried to talk these brutes, whom they themselves had created, into releasing the children. Only after that should they have wrangled over who was right and who was wrong.
What happened? Neither Zyazikov, nor Alkhanov, nor Ramzan Kadyrov, nor Maskhadov went anywhere near the school. They bottled out, valuing their own lives above those of hundreds of children. To my mind, in the light of what resulted from the actions of both sets of citizens, the cowards are no better than the criminals.
Clever people say now that it would have been foolish for them to have rushed to negotiate in Beslan, foolish because it would have meant certain death. Quite possibly. What of it? Those who are guilty have to take responsibility. What actually happened was that innocent children bore the consequences of the cowardice and stupidity of those who, you may remember, chorused at election time, “We take full responsibility on ourselves.”
You will remember too that, before this, the only person in our recent history who decided to save his own skin rather than the lives of women and children was Kadyrov Senior (who was in any case assassinated on May 9 this year). In October 2002, when the terrorists who had occupied the Nord-Ost musical announced they were prepared to release 50 women if Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov came to them, he refused. Shortly afterwards, Putin signalled that Akhmat-hadji was his favorite in Chechnya.
Zyazikov, Kadyrov Junior and Alkhanov are all three of them Putin’s current favorites, and they have done exactly the same. The one person who did dare to go in, ex-President of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev, got the brush-off from the Kremlin. Now the new anti-terrorist initiative consists of allotting each of these cowards a senior officer and 70 special operations troops. That is who will be averting future acts of terrorism.
Except that cowards are incapable of averting acts of terrorism: cowardice is powerless in the face of terrorism. Obviously. Those senior Interior Ministry officers can only serve to preserve the lives of the Big Three the next time the balloon goes up. They will do nothing for the rest of us.
The conclusion is simple: neither Zyazikov nor Alkhanov, nor Ramzan Kadyrov can be allowed to remain in their jobs. It is a death sentence, not for them, but for us. And that is only in the first place. In the second place, what can we oppose to terrorism? How are we to stem the tide of terrorist acts and gradually put an end to them? What we need most is courageous authorities with a transparent plan to counteract terrorism. Then what? What needs to be changed in the North Caucasus to minimise the probability of future terrorist acts?
Here is my proposal. It is the plan of a journalist very critical of much that has been going on in our country during the first term of Putin’s presidency, and that is still going on now. These are ideas about how it may be possible gradually to regulate the Chechen crisis; and that this crisis is at the root of all that happened in Beslan and immediately before Beslan nobody apart from Putin seems to be in any doubt.
Here is what we should do now about suicide attacks in the North Caucasus; about Maskhadov; about the fact that the ranks of the resistance have been swelling this year more than in any of the previous years of the Second Chechen War; about the detachments of mercenaries active there and in adjacent territories; about the growing numbers of those seeking vengeance for the murder or disappearance of their nearest and dearest; about the unprecedented depravity of the troops; about the federal death squads operating outside the Constitution, persecuting civilians and carrying out extra-judicial executions; about federals who “wage war” only for the statistics, for combat premiums, for rank, decorations, and not in order to seek out and take out outlaws; about the absolute corruption of the Kadyrov regime, supported by the Kremlin and hated by the population; and as a result, about the level of distrust of the federal authorities among all sections of Chechen society, which today is completely off the scale.
What gives me the right to pronounce on this and to propose a plan? Only my experience of working in Chechnya over many years. This is, of course, a journalist’s experience, which consists mainly of constant meetings with people at every level of Chechen society: with those who are pro-federal, and those who are anti-federal; with those active in the resistance, and their opponents; with children and young people, old people, and women; with Kadyrovites, and militiamen; with special operations troops, and Kadyrov’s bureaucrats; with mullahs and muftis, and with everybody else.
My job has been to go from one village to another, from one town to another, and to ask, and ask, and ask; to try to understand what moral code people live by, what they will settle for, and what they hold unacceptable.
In other words, this journalist’s work has been conducting social surveys, month after month, since the summer of 1999, in all the towns and villages of Chechnya about the crucial topic of what needs to be done to bring peace there. What part in the process do individuals see themselves playing? What is the future for Chechnya – with Russia or without? If with, then how are we to be reconciled? How are we to be reconciled when Maskhadov has been effectively removed from the equation as a potential negotiator, and it is in any case practically impossible to conduct negotiations with those who squeezed him out?
1. Set up a Federal Council for Settling the Chechen Crisis (a collegiate, advisory institution). The main prerequisite is that it should contain no representatives of the security ministries or the bureaucracy, because nobody trusts them. There should be only representatives of civil society, chosen from those who have worked in Chechnya as human rights observers throughout the years of the war. It is they who have earned the trust of the population, not those hiding behind the high fences of the government compound in Grozny. It should include public figures in Russia who have consistently opposed the war, whichever way the wind was blowing, have spoken out for a peaceful settlement and a genuine political process (and not the ridiculous elections twice conducted in Chechnya and almost totally ignored by the population).
2. From the moment this Council is established, no political or financial decision relating to Chechnya must be taken without being approved by the Council.
3. The Council should draw up a plan for clear and specific actions – “1, 2, 3, 4,” – and announce it publicly. The aim is for all the points of the plan to be completely transparent to everybody in Chechnya: what will be done and when, with deadlines, in order to settle the conflict.
4. Political negotiations with Maskhadov are essential, even though a majority of the population no longer respects him. It is, nevertheless, necessary to proceed through such negotiations, the aim of which would be to give Maskhadov an opportunity to apologize to his people and either to depart or answer in accordance with the law for what has happened. This is important not only for him, but also for those who at one time elected him. This is regarded by a majority as the starting point for a credible political process of settlement.
5. A public apology, without fail, by the Federal Center for the civilian victims of the war.
6. A demilitarisation, without fail, of the territory of Chechnya as the first condition of a political settlement. This is impossible without a troop withdrawal. Troops can remain only in their places of permanent deployment for a strictly defined transitional period, with a publicly announced deadline for withdrawal. How the troops are to be withdrawn also needs to be made public, with sanctions for infringement of the conditions.
7. The only way of effecting demilitarisation, given the total distrust between the federal troops and intelligence services, the civilian population and the Kadyrovites is for it to be implemented in the presence of international observers of sufficient status for the population to have confidence in them (the United Nations, OSCE, PACE, etc.). International observers are seen as the only possible guarantors of an even-handed demilitarisation. It would be possible to conduct an enforced disarmament of all who hold firearms illegally, but the population will accept this only if it takes place in the presence of international observers, and without the involvement of federal military personnel.
8. The presence of international observers is essential throughout the transitional period while passions are cooling. A request from the Federal Center to the international community for observers should be seen not as a sign of weakness but of strength.
9. Political leadership during the transitional period should be in the hands of a Russian Governor (the terminology favored by the majority) with the rank of Plenipotentiary Representative of the Russian President for Settling the Chechen Conflict. This could be a Deputy Prime Minister with special powers. The continued presidency of Alu Alkhanov is likely for a time, but retaining Ramzan Kadyrov in any capacity is out of the question. He is reviled.
10. The main criterion for the Russian representative is that they should be a civilian. He or she should be well known and respected by Chechen society, and should have a record as a consistent opponent of the war in Chechnya who has not wavered in response to the “Party line.”
11. It is essential that there should be a Chechen Office of the Russian Representative in Grozny, with Russian and Chechen representatives of civil society well acquainted with the situation and with people’s needs throughout the years of the war. These should be individuals who have worked in the thick of the war as human rights observers, and accordingly have earned popular respect. No bureaucrats.
12. The economic institutions for governing the Republic should be subordinate to the Office of the Russian Representative. Revenues should be under the control of civil society and members of the Federal Council who have an unblemished reputation.
13. A public discussion on the future of Chechnya should be organised gradually. Should it be a parliamentary or a presidential republic? This cannot be decided by Moscow. Decisions from Moscow will not be accepted, and national harmony will be undermined.
14. Organization of a public discussion on the type of constitution people should live by. It is essential to do away openly, through discussion, with the present constitutional “dual power,” where one section of the population does not accept the 1992 Constitution, while another section does not accept the 2003 Constitution. Such a discussion can bring about a normalisation, and genuinely fair and free elections in accordance with a single constitution in which everybody will feel able to participate.
15. Finally, after a few years of this process of peace and demilitarisation, free elections should be held in accordance with the pattern of a presidential or parliamentary republic adopted by a majority of the population.
Other people may have other plans and different arguments to mine. This is all to the good. We had a Constitutional Convention in Russia: let there be a Chechen convention to discuss and debate the options. There is no time left. We need high-powered brainstorming and soon, without personal ambition, without bragging about who was invited first and who second, and without the usual swinish misconduct from our political elite.
We need to think now in order to survive, for all our sakes. In memory of the children of Beslan.
The cowards can help only by quitting. They have already done quite enough.
December 1, 2005
It is finished. The conclusions of one of the parliamentary commissions into the Beslan slaughter have been published at a session of the North Ossetian Parliament. The inertia has been overcome, which can only be to the good.
Some of the report’s conclusions, however, create a strange impression. For example, Mr Kesayev, the Head of the Commission, assures us that the first telephone contact with the separatists occurred 28 hours after the start of the terrorist act, that is, towards noon on September 2. That is incorrect. Contact had been established two hours after the start of the terrorist attack, on the morning of September 1, as anybody who took an interest in the matter has known for a long time. Who initiated these contacts? Well actually, as it happens, I did, which is why I know. Indeed this fact of when contact was made with Maskhadov’s side was later recorded in the evidence of Alexander Torshin’s “Parliamentary Grand Commission.” Again, I gave that evidence in the Soviet of the Federation and Mr Torshin subsequently made use of it when discussing the Beslan tragedy in a television documentary on its first anniversary. The documentary was televised, and I can only suppose that somebody from Kesayev’s Commission must have seen it.
According to the Commission, the North Ossetian leaders (Dzasokhov and Mamsurov) attempted to contact Maskhadov but were unsuccessful. That too is incorrect. On September 3 Mr Dzasokhov spoke to Mr Zakayev, at that time Maskhadov’s Special Envoy in Europe, and Mr Zakayev asked only for a corridor for Maskhadov to travel through. Mr Dzasokhov promised to make the arrangements, but didn’t lift his mobile phone again, and the assault began.
One other conclusion of the report: it is asserted that these contacts were in any case pointless, because Maskhadov and Zakayev were complicit in organising the terrorism. This leads to a claim that the North Ossetian leaders were right to rule out negotiating with these guilty parties.
The Beslan inquiries fail to consider the most important point: that all these questions (whether tanks fired on the school and when, whether there were Bumblebee helicopters overhead) would never have been necessary if the leaders had only negotiated. Higher-ups in Moscow, however, gave the signal to attack, and the small fry in Vladikavkaz did as they were told. Taking that hard-line path, they turned the tragedy into a full-scale military operation, with catastrophic consequences.
It seems legitimate to ask what, actually, was the point of this inquiry? Was it for the victims, firstly, so that they should be clear who was responsible for the deaths of their dearest? Was it for society, to avoid anything of the sort being repeated?
To avoid a repetition does not mean making sure that during the next terrorist attack the next FSB general thinks twice before bringing in tanks, and instead decides to use a top secret weapon which is silent, colorless, has no smell and can never be detected.
That is not what is meant at all. To avoid a repetition it is essential that next time the state authorities should immediately, without losing a minute, enter into negotiations, should know how far they are prepared to negotiate, and have negotiators to hand. And that that plan should be carried out fully, so that it never again comes to gunfire and explosions.
January 23, 2006
The first meeting in the New Year of the Federal Parliamentary Commission on Beslan, chaired by Alexander Torshin, will be held on January 26, 2006. As already reported, there has been a split. On December 28, just before the New Year holiday, an account of the work the Commission has done in the past 16 months was delivered, rather than the long-promised report. The account was manifestly superficial and derived from the assertions of the official investigation. Most of the Commission’s members kept entirely silent, true to their signed undertaking not to talk about material matters or how the Commission’s work was proceeding. One member with a different view is Yury Ivanov, a Communist Deputy in the State Duma, who replied to our newspaper’s questions.
Yury Pavlovich Ivanov has been a Communist Party Deputy of the State Duma since 1994 and is currently Deputy Chairman of the Duma Committee on Development of the Constitution. He is no longer a signed-up member of the Communist Party, is aged 61, and is a well-known barrister. He defended Vladimir Kryuchkov, Director of the KGB, during the case against the 1991 putsch conspirators; Alexander Rutskoy after the shelling of Parliament in October 1993; and the Communist Party in the Constitutional Court.
Why were the members of the Commission pledged to secrecy? What fearsome secret is it that you all have to keep?
I have no idea. I firmly believe that all the officials who passed before the Commission should have been questioned openly and publicly, in the presence of the press. That is a fundamental principle. The Commission was working to procedures approved by Sergey Mironov (Head of the Soviet of the Federation) but the rules were not even discussed in the Duma. I was informed that all the members of the Commission had signed a secrecy agreement and accepted legal liability if they breached the undertaking. I should mention that the recently passed law on parliamentary inquiries contains no such requirement. Our procedure specified that all the Beslan meetings were to be held behind closed doors, despite the fact that the law on parliamentary inquiries requires quite the opposite: that all sessions should be held in public except in exceptional circumstances, where matters involving state secrets are being investigated.
What part of the evidence heard by the Commission bore any relation to state secrets?
There were no classified matters, no state secrets. After we had been working for a year and a half Alexander Torshin, Chairman of the Commission, declared that only 1 per cent of what we were discussing was secret. What I could see as necessarily secret was only some diagrams showing the position of snipers and revealing their names, and also those of members of the tank corps who fired on the building. That was all. Even if nobody had signed anything, we would never have dreamed of talking publicly about that.
Then why was it necessary to shroud the Commission’s work in this ambience of high secrecy?
Boris Gryzlov, the Chairman of the Duma, came to one of our sessions. It was one of the sessions, incidentally, where every one of my proposals was turned down. I recommended that you and Andrey Babitsky from Radio Liberty should be questioned by the Commission to establish why you were unable to reach Beslan at that time, and what was behind the scuffle at Vnukovo Airport on September 2 for which Babitsky was detained just before he was to fly to Beslan, and so on [see above]. I also wanted us to seek information about the Alexander Pumane affair. You may remember, several dozen FSB and Interior Ministry generals met at a district militia station in the middle of Moscow, after which Pumane wasn’t just killed there but so badly beaten that neither his mother nor his wife were able to identify him. They had made mincemeat of him and DNA tests were required. It was claimed at the time that Pumane had been planning to blow up the President’s motorcade on Kutuzovsky Prospect, and that it was all closely related to terrorism.
Gryzlov, however, declared all that to be irrelevant, nothing to do with the Commission. They didn’t even vote on my proposal. The paradox is that the procedure made clear that Torshin was the Commission Chairman in charge of all sessions while Gryzlov, as Chairman of the Duma, could only attend as an observer, not take the chair or issue rulings about my proposals.
To Mironov’s credit, he was more tactful. He attended the sessions fairly frequently, sat, listened, asked permission to speak, and had to be granted it. Mironov, however, also made it very clear what the Commission’s job should be: “You need to channel, channel, and again channel.” Then everything became clear to me.
Channel what?
The public mood. Our job was to reassure the public.
But the only way you could do that would be by establishing the truth. I doubt whether even the truth would salve the suffering of the mothers of Beslan, but I emphasise that the Head of the Soviet of the Federation from the outset saw the Commission’s main task as being to channel public concern. He regarded the members of the Commission as public relations ditch-diggers. I believed instead that the Commission should be reporting the truth to society. I had been entrusted with establishing the causes and circumstances of the terrorist attack, and I should set them out clearly. The campaign of reassurance led to completely perverse interaction between the public and state authorities, for example when the investigators were obliged to appear before the victims in a Beslan community center and give a joint report at the very beginning of their inquiry. In my view, it was Putin and his administration who should have been explaining themselves to the victims at that time.
What are the main facts about Beslan which were excised when the account of December 28 was being written and which might have been fundamental to an assessment of the tragedy?
I divide all the inquiries into Beslan into criminal and parliamentary categories. The Commission did not, and still doesn’t, have the tools required to fully establish the actual circumstances. We have no right to caution people about giving false evidence; to oblige witnesses to confront those they are testifying about; or to carry out tests ourselves. That means that any conclusions we draw in this area will be based 75 per cent on information from the official investigation, which may have been economical with the truth or distorted. We were supposed to concentrate instead on the actions of federal officials. The national aspects were to be covered by a Commission of the North Ossetian Parliament under the chairmanship of Stanislav Kesayev which, in my opinion, did a good job. Their report is frank and honest, and that’s what really matters.
We should have started by evaluating the actions of the President and Patrushev, the Director of the FSB. Unfortunately, in all these 16 months the Commission did not consider the matter of the President’s responsibility for Beslan. We initially expected to question him; Putin was listed as a witness for a whole year, but suddenly disappeared.
The Commission passed no resolution to take Putin off the list?
No, and neither did it discuss why his name disappeared from the list of witnesses.
One other extremely important question, which I raised many times, was the matter of calling representatives of the Caucasian clergy. Nobody in the Commission seemed to object to hearing from the Wahhabis. I wanted to contact them all the time, to talk to them and understand them. Wahhabism is not banned. I began trying to find them. When we were hearing from the heads of the FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service, I asked them who the emissaries of Wahhabism were in the Caucasus. Either they do not know or they did not want to answer, but I remain convinced we should sit down together and talk. I remember I went to the Duma Committee on Religious Affairs and asked if they could give me the names of the leaders of Wahhabism, because I wanted to meet them. One of the vice-chairmen said, “Here is the telephone number of the main Wahhabi. He will tell you all you need to know.” I rang, and it turned out to be the number of Geidar Djemal, a well-known Moscow philosopher and political commentator. That’s our level of understanding of these problems.
If Putin had not been removed from the list of witnesses, what would you have asked him?
The Kesayev Commission confirmed that Zakayev had said Maskhadov was prepared to take part in negotiations. It is clear that Maskhadov’s going into the Beslan school might well have resulted in the children being released. I am certain the resistance fighters would have deferred to his authority. They had stated that they were under Basayev’s command, but that Maskhadov was their President and that negotiations should be conducted with him. Putin, however, did not want Maskhadov turning up in Beslan because any raising of Maskhadov’s profile would immediately have deflated the authority of the Kadyrov gang.
When Kesayev’s report was published, the pro-presidential press claimed it emphasised that Aushev and Dzasokhov had phoned Zakayev and asked for Maskhadov to come, but that he had not made contact. That was wilful misrepresentation of the situation.
In my view, everything should have been handled differently: all television broadcasts should have been interrupted, the President should have appeared on all channels and announced that he was providing Maskhadov with a corridor of safe conduct and guaranteeing his immunity. Urgently, no matter where he might be, Maskhadov should appear in Beslan and order the resistance fighters to cease their action. Then he would be free to depart.
Putin chose not to do that. He had already announced that Maskhadov was a criminal and the only way to treat Maskhadovs was to pulverise them in in the shithouse. The chickens had come home to roost: in that dreadful situation in Beslan the President was a hostage to his own big mouth. His vanity did not allow him to go back on his words, and the lives of thousands of people took second place to his vanity. That is why Putin delegated the problem from a federal to a regional level, and as President of North Ossetia Dzasokhov had no authority to organise a corridor or guarantee safe conduct.
That was followed by the assassination of Maskhadov. He could have been questioned about many things afterwards. Instead, somebody gave the order not to take him alive but to throw grenades at him. Putin talks a lot about international terrorism, but if they had taken Maskhadov prisoner, who would have been better placed to say who is financing the terrorists, whether the resistance fighters have their own network of agents and bribe-takers in the Kremlin, and where the weapons came from that were used in Beslan? Quite clearly, Putin did not want Maskhadov taken alive.
You have stated on several occasions that there was no sign of international terrorist involvement in Beslan. On what basis?
The Commission has no evidence of the involvement of international terrorism in Beslan. The munitions were Russian, and nothing is known about who financed the group. Lebedev, the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, speaking at the Commission, talked a lot about how they had “terminated” things both abroad and in Russia, but what does terminate mean? Did they kill people? Did they bring them to court? Let’s see the reports of the investigative agencies and the court verdicts. There is nothing. The Commission has only a vague report. If I am given specific information I will change my view, but for the time being it is all just talk.
What percentage of those testifying to the Commission caused you to have doubts of this kind, that the quality of their information was dubious?
I didn’t count. I have given you the example of Lebedev. I asked him to name the emissaries of Wahhabism in Russia, and he replied that was not a matter for him. As regards Arab mercenaries, we were told some had been present in Beslan, but I appealed repeatedly to the representative of the Prosecutor’s Office to speak to the Saudi Arabian Embassy and find out if there were Saudis involved. Without that confirmation we really cannot make that categorical assertion. But actually, how much difference would it make even if Saudi Arabia did confirm some were present? From my point of view, none. Individual terrorists might go for a shoot-out, either for money or motivated by their religious fanaticism. There are plenty of people like that around in some parts of the world, but that does not mean they are members of an international terrorist network called al-Qaeda.
As for that mysterious tape which Torshin played during his public account, it was not discovered by the official investigators but supposedly by children, who handed it to an American journalist. On this tape a supposed Arab, Abu Dzeit, rattles away in Russian so fluent you couldn’t better it! Where is the file on him? Again, all the information comes from abroad. The Commission has nothing.
I state publicly as a member of the Commission that I heard nothing specific from the appropriate intelligence agencies. I saw no evidence from which I could conclude who Abu Dzeit was. If I look at the report of the American Congress’s 9/11 Commission I find extremely detailed information about each of the terrorists: where he was born, where he studied, where he took his flying lessons, what resources he lived on. In our Commission there is just a list of names from the Prosecutor’s Office. Do they correspond to reality? Why did these individuals become resistance fighters? Why did they carry out such a dreadful act? The public will not be getting any answers.
What conclusions have you come to as to why the group which seized the Beslan school was formed?
For that you would need to study the composition of the group. The identity of eight of the terrorists has not even been established; on the others we possess only such general information as their names, their nationality, the fact that some had previous convictions, and that some were taking drugs. But how did those who were on drugs manage to resist so desperately for several hours? There is one extraordinary episode: Khuchbarov shot three of the terrorists, two women and a man, for refusing to obey his orders. When the children started drinking urine and were suffering terribly, these people started shouting at Khuchbarov that he couldn’t do this and must release the children. In other words, they took part in the hostage-taking but in the course of it repudiated their previous aims, and for that they were killed. Who were those three? Should not their bodies have been returned to their relatives? Are they resistance fighters or victims? There is a concept in law of voluntarily refusing to go through with a crime. That does not completely exonerate you, but it is taken into account when the sentence is being decided. Unfortunately, the Commission did not look into the terrorists’ personalities. I may propose that we should.
Beslan is part and parcel of the Chechen slaughter, one episode in an ongoing drama. If the Commission is supposed to be establishing the causes of the school seizure, then quite plainly they are not to be found in Ossetia. I am alarmed that nobody is intending – and here I fundamentally disagree with Torshin’s report – to investigate the causes. In the report being prepared there is no consideration of why the resistance fighters appeared in the first place. Why do they enjoy support in their society? What role in all this is played by the massive violation of human rights in Chechnya?
Did the Commission at least study the history of the attack on Ingushetia on June 21–22, 2004, immediately prior to Beslan?
No. What are my disagreements with the Commission? The first point is that Putin, by refusing to provide Maskhadov with safe passage, made it certain that the assault would take place. Secondly, Patrushev and Putin’s advisers [Anisimov and Pronichev, Deputy Directors of the Russian FSB] had major involvement but are bearing no responsibility at all. Thirdly, the violation of human rights in the Caucasus is a major cause of the Beslan tragedy, engendering more and more new resistance fighters. Fourthly, we failed to investigate the causes. The seizure of Ingushetia and other terrorist acts were not examined by the Commission at all, as if they were completely unrelated to Beslan.
There is a serious problem. Given all the confusion that arose, and after the assassination of Maskhadov, there is speculation about an appalling alternative explanation. You hear this whenever Duma Deputies are talking among themselves. Perhaps, in order to stop Maskhadov getting to Beslan, somebody organised the explosion inside the school which triggered the assault and all the rest of it. According to the report of the Kesayev Commission, Advisers Anisimov and Pronichev had their own separate office in the operational headquarters. What was going on in there? What decisions were being taken? Who is going to believe now that the explosions were accidental, especially when they didn’t occur on the ground floor, where there is not even a crater, but somewhere above the ceiling?
The President himself sowed the seeds for this explanation of events. It is an explanation which people are trying not to discuss and are pretending does not exist, but which would totally discredit the state. That is why I want answers from Putin.
The Commission has officially questioned Anisimov and Pronichev. What did they have to say?
They said they were sent to Beslan by Patrushev to offer advice and that was all. Beyond that, we are in the realm of speculation as to what they did or did not do there. In my view, the President and Patrushev confused the situation unbelievably. Under the law on the struggle against terrorism there should have been no advisers there, just an operational headquarters bearing full responsibility. In Beslan we had uncalled-for advisers functioning unlawfully in parallel with those in command. If Andreyev [Valeriy Andreyev, the Head of the North Ossetian FSB Directorate at the time the school was seized], who was in charge of the counter-terrorist operation, had two of his bosses advising him, how was he to take responsible decisions?
Can you give an assessment of the conduct of senior state officials? Patrushev, for example? Did he do everything he could?
He told us he was in Moscow and not at the scene, but we have a different complaint against him: why to this day have no effective informants been infiltrated into the terrorists’ ranks? Why was the FSB unprepared, not only in Beslan but also in Ingushetia, when resistance fighters rampaged unchecked for several hours and killed people who supported the federal authorities? That too was a disgrace.
The same goes for Minister Nurgaliev. The most serious complaint against the Interior Ministry is that it failed to organise an effective cordon round the school. They said that people in the Caucasus are hotheaded and just ignored it. Minister Nurgaliev sent his deputy, Pankov, there. There was a crowd right round the school which joined in the assault and the fire engines could not get through because of a huge number of private cars obstructing them. What was the militia doing in the meantime? I would not say that Nurgaliev should take personal responsibility for this, but Pankov certainly should. Instead, the explanation was: “It was splendid that the local townsfolk assisted. Without them far more people would have died, and they pulled many of the injured free.” Does that mean that next time the hostages’ relatives should just grab whatever comes to hand and mount an assault?
How do you rate Dzasokhov’s actions?
Do you mean, do I think he should have gone into the school? I have no answer to that. Should Dzasokhov have gone to his death? Your question is too difficult. It is absolutely clear that Aushev, who did go in, was much less at risk than Dzasokhov. Given their past records, Aushev was much less at risk than Zyazikov or Dzasokhov who, I am quite sure, would not have come out alive. For me it is obvious that in situations like that the Republican presidents need to be protected. They should not bear the burden for everything that happens in the course of a counter-terrorist operation. Did Dzasokhov do everything he could? Well, what could he do? He initiated the process of negotiating with Zakayev. He was at the scene, among the people, not hiding. I imagine he did what he could.
What about Zyazikov?
If he had gone in they would have killed him. For them he was a traitor.
Did Dr Roshal do enough?
Roshal was questioned by the Commission. He is a decent man. My impression was that he should not have been asked to go to talk to the fighters. The only conversation he had with them ended with them calling him a kike – a foul, churlish insult. On the other hand, it was he they called for initially, and he came.
How do you assess Aushev’s actions?
Aushev is a figure from the Caucasian elite of the Yeltsin era. At the beginning they were all presidents and ministers: Aushev, Maskhadov, Dudayev, Basayev were quite often seated at the same table. The Caucasus is a brotherhood. Then the Chechens went off the rails and started killing people. The war with Russia started and Aushev sided with Russia. In Beslan Aushev did everything right.
The so-called advisers, Anisimov and Pronichev?
The decision to send advisers was taken by Patrushev and Putin. Before the Commission Anisimov and Pronichev took the line that they had been given orders, went to Beslan, and gave advice.
What did you learn from your work in the Commission that was new?
The most unexpected discovery was the activity of the human rights organizations. My attitude towards them was that they were “little shits,” to use the expression of Pavel Grachev [the Russian Minister of Defence during the First Chechen War]. My view of the little shits dated from 1993–5 when I was meeting refugees from Chechnya and realized that what was happening there was a genocide of the Russians, and that the human rights activists were not speaking up for them but only for the Chechens. That infuriated me. Today, though, I have to admit that the human rights organizations have overcome that bias. They are fighting for the rights of people in the Caucasus irrespective of nationality, protecting the rights of ordinary people, not of the nouveaux riches. They take risks. They don’t spare themselves. At any moment they could be knifed or shot.
One final question: Gryzlov, as you describe it, on one occasion effectively took over the chair of the Commission, but the Commission was also visited by Lyubov Sliska, the Deputy Speaker of the Duma. What justification did she offer for interfering?
In November Sliska and Mironov came to the Commission and told us we should have our conclusion out before the New Year. She said the public were very stirred up and we needed to work as quickly as possible. They got support. Lyubov Sliska is an extremely glamorous woman who gets featured in the glossy magazines. How could you refuse her? Of course, Gryzlov had no business delegating Sliska to come and tell us what to do, but I would not call it interference. Let us just say it was less a meeting of the Commission than a meeting with a glamorous woman. She asked the Commission to bring its work to a conclusion. We agreed and passed a resolution, but then changed our minds. Instead of the final report, what Torshin presented on December 28 was an account of the work we have done. Incidentally, neither Gryzlov, Mironov nor Sliska turned up to hear it.
I asked Torshin to state publicly that I was opposed to the account both in form and in substance. He did not do so, and has effectively obliged me to go to the press. That is why I am giving this interview, addressing the Russian public myself.
July 13, 2006
A long-awaited event occurred this week: according to official sources, Terrorist No. 1, Shamil Basayev, has been killed, a man responsible for dozens of terrorist acts and the taking of hundreds of lives. If this was, as claimed, a successful operation by the intelligence services, they are to be congratulated, as are we all.
There remain not a few questions in respect of the fatal explosion in the village of Ekazhevo. Distrust of the official version is entirely understandable: Basayev has been “killed” several times before, only for it to be found that the claims were premature. Even more often he has managed to slip out of what appeared to be totally inescapable situations, as during the raid on Dagestan in 1999 [suspected to have been orchestrated by the FSB, and used as a pretext to start the Second Chechen War] when his rabble marched out unscathed, in formation, under the puzzled gaze of special operations soldiers watching the procession through their telescopic sights.
Be that as it may, whether Basayev was liquidated or liquidated himself, the bastard is no longer a player in either politics or terrorism. We can breathe more easily, but can we really relax?
1991, October 5: Took part in occupation of the KGB building in Grozny. Still a secondary figure, under Labazanov and Gantamirov.
1991, November 9: Took part in hijacking a TU-154 passenger aircraft from Mineralnye Vody Airport. The hijackers were led by Said Ali Satuyev, a professional civil aviation pilot.
1991: Following a decision of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, supported by the Russian security agencies and, in particular, by the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Russian Armed Forces GHQ, armed detachments of volunteers took part in combat operations in support of Abkhazia against Georgia. The detachment commanded by Shamil Basayev gained a reputation for being particularly brutal towards the civilian population.
After Abkhazia, Basayev and his rabble turned up as mercenaries on the Azerbaijan–Armenian front.
1995, June: Seizure of more than 1,600 hostages in Budyonnovsk, including 150 children. One hundred and thirty people died at the hands of Basayev and his thugs.
Autumn 1999: Apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk blown up. Russian intelligence services claim the terrorists were trained through the joint efforts of Khattab and Basayev.
2002, October: Audience of the musical Nord-Ost and others taken hostage in Moscow.
2004, June 22: Raid on Ingushetia in which approximately 100 people died. Organised by Basayev and the current President of the unrecognised [sic] Republic of Ichkeria, Doku Umarov.
2004, August 25: Two passenger aircraft blown up with the loss of 90 lives.
And finally, the most dreadful terrorist atrocity of all, the hostage-taking at the school in Beslan on September 1, 2004.
On the night of June 9, 2006 Basayev, Russia’s bin Laden, was “blown to bits,” according to a press release from the FSB Directorate in Ingushetia, in a powerful explosion in Ekazhevo. He reappeared, piecemeal, on Tuesday, July 11 when his head was sent to Nazran for one type of identification, and his artificial leg to Vladikavkaz for another.
Such are the official announcements, and if we were not talking about the iconic death of a terrorist we have been trying unsuccessfully to catch for the past 10 years, they might raise a smile. By Wednesday, July 12, however, the intelligence services were putting out completely contradictory accounts of the death of Terrorist No. 1. Basayev was an idiot dynamiter travelling in convoy from abroad in a truck full of explosives and primed detonators; alternatively, Basayev had been betrayed by someone on his own side who had taken the bait of half a million US dollars.
In tripping over themselves, they laid the foundations for future myth-making, like that which for so many years now has surrounded the death of President Djohar Dudayev. Since only those with a “need to know” have any idea where Dudayev’s grave is, and because nobody else has seen him dead, many in Chechnya will tell you to this day that Djohar is alive and will return when the time is right; alternatively, that he is alive and has gone into exile with the connivance of the intelligence services; or, then again, that it was not in fact a missile that killed him but …
In other words, where reliable information is not provided, look out for myths. Many Chechens are saying today that this is not the end of Basayev. He too will become a legend, and tales will circulate that he has been sighted on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, or …
No matter what the circumstances of Basayev’s death, whether he was blown up or blew himself up, the important thing is that he is dead. This baneful factor has been removed from the equation. So, what is going to happen in Chechnya now? Which resistance fighters will follow which flag? The explosion in Ekazhevo was probably welcomed by some of them who were plainly opposed to Basayev, and saw him as a black sheep who disgraced everyone. Let us not forget that the detachment of Gelayev, who was subsequently killed in Dagestan, removed itself to Georgia precisely because it didn’t want to fight Basayev’s way. It was a moment of truth: should the strategy of outrages like Nord-Ost and Beslan be continued, or should it be rejected and a policy adopted that in no circumstances should atrocities be committed against entirely innocent victims? Mid-2002 was a watershed moment when our intelligence services should have shown some intelligence, but the opportunity was missed.
Now we are in 2006, almost four years after Nord-Ost, and soon it will be two years since Beslan. There is a new group in Chechen society, mainly young people, who are vacillating and uncertain. They refuse categorically to wait passively for Kadyrov’s brutes to come for them in the night, but were reluctant to join the fighters if that meant ending up with Basayev, when Basayev meant Beslan.
In the immediate future, the likelihood is that Basayev’s followers will fall in with Doku Umarov, who has the same ideas about the terrorist character of the war from now on. The remnants of other detachments are unlikely to follow, so a flood of new recruits, who were deterred by the bloodthirsty presence of Basayev, is more than likely. What the final configuration of the separatists will be is the big question.
Time will tell. One thing, however, is already clear: until relations between Moscow and Chechnya are finally sorted out in a manner acceptable not merely to Kadyrov but to a majority of the population, the situation is unlikely to settle down. Basayev’s having been blown to bits is not the decisive factor, merely part of the process.
* On the night of June 21, 2004, some 300 resistance fighters occupied the city of Nazran; 98 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The resistance fighters seized 1,056 weapons and burned down several administrative buildings, including the offices of the Nazran Interior Affairs District Office.