The final dispatch of a reporter murdered for telling
the truth
This is Anna Politkovskaya's final unfinished article
for her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. It was written
shortly before she was murdered last Saturday. After
two wars of independence, Russian-backed forces are
torturing a whole generation of young Chechens, she
writes, to try to restore order in the troubled north
Caucasus region
By Anna Politkovskaya
Published: 13 October 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1868072.ece

Dozens of files cross my desk every day. They are
copies of criminal cases against people jailed for
"terrorism" or refer to people who are still being
investigated. Why have I put the word "terrorism" in
quotation marks here?

Because the overwhelming majority of these people have
been "fitted up" as terrorists by the authorities. In
2006 the practice of "fitting up" people as terrorists
has supplanted any genuine anti-terrorist struggle.
And it has allowed people who are revenge-minded to
have their revenge - on so-called potential
terrorists.

Prosecutors and judges are not acting on behalf of the
law and they are not interested in punishing the
guilty. Instead, they work to political order to make
the Kremlin's nice anti-terrorist score sheet look
good and cases are cooked up like blinys.

This official conveyor belt that turns out "heartfelt
confessions" is great at providing the right
statistics about the "battle against terrorism" in the
north Caucasus (where Chechnya is).

This is what a group of mothers of convicted young
Chechens wrote to me: "In essence, these correctional
facilities (where terrorist suspects are held) have
been turned into concentration camps for Chechen
convicts. They are subjected to discrimination on an
ethnic basis. The majority, or almost all of them,
have been convicted on trumped-up evidence.

"Held in harsh conditions, and humiliated as human
beings, they develop a hatred towards everything. An
entire army (of ex-convicts) will return to us with
their lives in ruins and their understanding of the
world around them in ruins too..."

In all honesty, I am afraid of this hatred. I am
afraid because, sooner or later, it will burst into
the open. And for the young men who hate the world so
much, everyone will seem like an outsider.

The practice of "fitting up" terrorists raises
questions about two different ideological approaches.
Are we using the law to fight lawlessness? Or are we
trying to match "their" lawlessness with our own?

Recently, at Russia's request, Ukraine handed over a
certain Beslan Gadaev to Moscow. He is a Chechen and
was arrested at the start of August in Crimea during a
document check.

He was living there as a forced resettler. Here are
some excerpts from the letter he sent me on 29 August:
"After being extradited from Ukraine to Grozny (the
Chechen capital) I was taken to a police station and
asked whether I had killed members of Anzor Salikhov's
family as well as family members of Anzor's friend. I
swore I had killed nobody and not spilt any blood,
neither Russian nor Chechen. The policemen said with
certainty: "No you are a killer." I again denied it.

"They began to beat me. At first, they punched me
twice in the area of my right eye. While I was coming
to, they tied me up and handcuffed me to a metal bar
lodged behind my knees so I couldn't move my hands,
though I was in handcuffs anyway. Then they took me,
or rather they took the metal bar jammed behind my
legs, and suspended me between two stools at a height
of about one metre. As soon as they had me suspended,
they attached wires to my little fingers. They began
to administer electric shocks while they beat me with
rubber truncheons wherever they could.

"I don't remember how long it lasted but I started to
lose consciousness due to the pain. Seeing this, they
asked me whether I was ready to talk. I replied that I
would talk but I didn't know what about. I spoke to
spare myself from torture, even for a little while.
They took me down, removed the metal bar, and flung me
to the floor. They said 'talk'.

"I said I had nothing to say. They responded by
hitting me with the metal bar in the area of my right
eye where they had already struck me. Then they hung
me up again, the same as before, and repeated the same
process. I don't remember how long this lasted ...
they repeatedly poured water on me.

"Around lunchtime, a policeman in civilian clothing
came up to me and told me some journalists had come to
see me and that I had to confess to three murders and
a robbery.

"He said that if I didn't agree they would repeat
everything (the torture) and would break me by
sexually assaulting me in some way. I agreed to comply
and gave an interview to the journalists and they (the
police) forced me to testify that the injuries I had
received from them had been sustained in the course of
an escape attempt..."

Zaur Zakriev, a lawyer defending Beslan Gadaev,
informed Memorial (a human rights organisation) that
his client had suffered physical and psychological
violence on the premises of the Grozny police force.

In the medical ward of prison number one in Grozny
where Gadaev is laid up, charged with "banditry", a
document details his many wounds. His lawyer, Zakriev,
has forwarded these complaints to the prosecutor of
the Chechen Republic.

The text breaks off here with the article unfinished.
Politkovskaya's newspaper, 'Novaya Gazeta', has
promised to investigate the issues raised in the piece

Translation by Andrew Osborn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Murder and torture are the price of 'peace' in
Chechnya
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Published: 13 October 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1868073.ece

The grisly and unsettling details of Russian
journalist Anna Politkovskaya's final investigation
into Russian-controlled Chechnya that she was working
on right up until her murder on Saturday have been
laid bare.

Fittingly for a journalist who made her name through
her critical and hard-hitting coverage of the
rebellious southern region and Russia's attempts to
quell separatist sentiment there, her journalistic
swan song is a damning indictment of the way Chechnya
is governed.

Her last working hours appear to have been dedicated
to cataloguing the Russian-backed Chechen government's
alleged human rights abuses and its apparent torture
and murder of terror suspects.

The Russians have fought two wars since 1994 to keep
Chechnya within their borders and now claim the area
is reasonably peaceful and that the process of
rebuilding has started in earnest.

Moscow's hard-line approach to the largely Muslim
republic bears the personal imprimatur of President
Vladimir Putin.

It was Mr Putin, then Russia's Prime Minister, who in
1999 prosecuted the beginning of the Second Chechen
war.

And it was Mr Putin, the former Head of Russia's
Security Service, who constantly talked tough on
Chechnya.

"We'll follow terrorists everywhere," he said
memorably in 1999. "Should we catch them in the
shithouse, we'll whack them in the shithouse."

Under his leadership, Grozny, the Chechen capital, was
carpet bombed into a lunar landscape on more than one
occasion and one of the first TV images of him as
Russian president was of him handing out hunting
knives to troops serving in Chechnya.

On one level his uncompromising stance appears to have
paid off. The Kremlin has long argued that the war in
Chechnya is over and that it is effectively engaged in
"mopping up" operations and for the first time in a
long time those words have a ring of truth about them.

Though Russian soldiers are still killed in rebel
ambushes, the attacks are sporadic and the casualties
small.

Nor have the rebels launched a major terror attack
since the Beslan school siege in 2004 whose horror
alienated many of their supporters in the West.

Shamil Basayev, the rebels most feared field commander
and the so-called "Butcher of Beslan", died in
mysterious circumstances earlier this year.

And according to the Russians, the number of rebel
fighters holed up in the republic's fog-shrouded hills
is as little as 600.

They are hopelessly outnumbered - Russia has around
50,000 federal troops garrisoned in Chechnya and
25,000 loyalist Chechen fighters at its disposal.

Moscow has therefore felt comfortable enough to
withdraw many of its troops from the republic and
delegate much of its day-to day-running to a
Kremlin-backed government made up of Chechens.

Though still officially classed as "a zone of
counter-terrorist activity", Chechnya, it is argued,
is rapidly becoming a "normal" part of the Russian
Federation.

But Ms Politkovskaya's final investigation painted a
very different picture and suggested that the
Kremlin's much-trumpeted "peace" is bought at an
unacceptable price.

The contents of her final article would have made
uncomfortable reading for people in high places and
many Russians suspect that she may have been killed
because of what she had uncovered.

Controversially, she publicly called for Ramzan
Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Prime Minister of
Chechnya, to stand trial for his alleged involvement
in the torture and murder of terror suspects. Mr
Kadyrov has since admitted that he did not like her
articles about him but has denied any involvement in
her death saying he has never "settled a score" with a
woman.

Fragments of the article she was writing at the time
of her death were published in Russia yesterday by the
liberal newspaper she worked for, Novaya Gazeta.

Nobody has been arrested for her murder though CCTV
images suggest that she was shadowed by four people
and then shot "execution-style" in the lift of her own
Moscow apartment building by a man wearing a baseball
cap.

Mr Kadyrov has already been named a prime suspect by
her newspaper though her colleagues also agree she may
have been killed to blacken his name.

This month, Mr Kadyrov turned 30, making him eligible
for the Chechen presidency. He is a controversial
figure, who now controls a 25,000-strong army, and
there are plenty of people who would like to see Mr
Putin withdraw his support for the Prime Minister.

But as things stand, Mr Kadyrov appears unassailable
and is tipped to be crowned Chechen president by the
end of the year.

Perhaps it was a coincidence but the bearded Premier
celebrated his birthday on 5 October, two days before
Ms Politkovskaya was murdered.

The day of the killing -- 7 October -- was Mr Putin's
54th birthday. Mr Kadyrov's birthday itself bore his
trademark "everything is all right in Chechnya and I
am the only person who can keep the peace" style and
the sky literally rained with money.

The self-styled hard man of the Caucasus never likes
to do things by halves and so it was that he performed
a traditional Chechen dance for the cameras surrounded
by 1,000- and 5,000-rouble notes (£20 and £100) that
had been sprinkled on the ground around him like
confetti.

The message was clear: Chechnya is no longer a
war-torn trouble spot but is on the up.

To underline that point the Chechen Premier
inaugurated Grozny's airport that has been
painstakingly resurrected from the ashes of two
separatist wars.

Commercial flights between the Chechen capital and
Moscow are to start soon, something that would have
been unimaginable even five years ago, and Mr Kadyrov
hailed the airport as a symbol of his republic's
renaissance.

Mr Kadyrov's father, Akhmat, a Kremlin-backed
president of Chechnya, was killed in 2004 when an
explosion ripped through the sports stadium where he
was reviewing a military parade.

Father and son had fought against the Russians in the
mid-1990s then dramatically changed sides. Since then,
Kadyrov Junior has coaxed many of his former
comrades-in-arms over to the Russian side and has
styled himself as Mr Putin's most reliable ally in the
region.

Huge apartment block-length posters of Mr Kadyrov and
Mr Putin adorn bombed-out Grozny, and the Chechen
Premier has even been made a "Hero of Russia",
something that angers the many federal Russian troops
who fought against him in the 1990s.

In the most questionable traditions of the CIA, Mr
Putin appears to have chosen Mr Kadyrov as "our
sonofabitch" as part of his policy of "Chechenisation"
to do what two wars could not: bring stability.

Getting an accurate picture of what is really going on
in Chechnya is difficult though. The Kremlin has made
reporting from there extraordinarily difficult for
Western reporters, and most Russian reporters are too
afraid of incurring the Kremlin's wrath to venture
there.

Anna Politkovskaya was different. Judging by the
material she had written for Novaya Gazeta, she was
too different for somebody's liking.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Murdered Russian reporter's critical last work
published

· Report accuses Chechen security forces of torture
· Paper says new evidence emerges on writer's killing

Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1921368,00.html

A Russian newspaper yesterday published the report
that journalist Anna Politkovskaya was working on the
day before she was assassinated - a report that
accuses the pro-Moscow Chechen security forces of
torture.
Novaya Gazeta devoted a page to the graphic account of
a suspected rebel fighter who claimed he was subjected
to electric shocks and beaten with rubber batons. The
events in the article, headlined We're Appointing You
a Terrorist, were described in a letter to
Politkovskaya by Beslan Gadayev, a suspected militant
who is now in custody in Chechnya.

The publication came as Novaya Gazeta said it had
uncovered evidence related to Politkovskaya's death.
"We have gathered some material, but all this requires
total silence," said the editor in chief, Dmitry
Muratov. "I can't disclose what we have in our hands,
or what track we are moving along." He said the
newspaper was working closely with prosecutors.
Still images from a blurred video sequence of a
separate incident being investigated by Politkovskaya
were also published, showing two men coated in blood,
apparently after having been tortured.

The journalist wrote that she received tens of letters
from Chechens each day describing fabricated
prosecutions against them and their relatives.

"The conveyor belt of 'organising heartfelt
confessions' is providing excellent results in the
'struggle with terrorism' in the north Caucasus," she
commented caustically. "Criminal cases are being
cooked up like pancakes."

Politkovskaya was shot dead last Saturday in the lift
of her apartment block in central Moscow. Police are
hunting a thin young man in a baseball cap who was
seen on CCTV footage leaving the building shortly
after she was murdered.

Her colleagues have said she was probably murdered by
a contract killer in revenge for her work. The
48-year-old mother of two was a dogged critic of the
Kremlin who concentrated on exposing atrocities
against civilians carried out by Russian federal
forces and pro-Moscow militia in Chechnya.

Mr Gadayev said in the article that he was arrested at
Russia's request earlier this year in Ukraine where he
was living as a refugee from the conflict in Chechnya.
He was taken to the Chechen capital Grozny and
tortured to confess to crimes in which he denied
involvement, he said.

"They electrocuted me and beat me at the same time
with rubber batons," he said. He was also punched and
hit in the face with a metal pipe, and then had a
plastic bag pulled over his head when he pleaded for
mercy, he claimed.

"Then an operative in civilian clothes came and said I
needed to admit to three murders and a robbery,
otherwise they would repeat everything and rape me,"
he said. "I agreed."

According to his lawyer, Zaur Zakriev, Mr Gadayev has
lodged a complaint about his interrogation with the
Chechnya prosecutor's office.

Stills from the moving image, recorded possibly on a
mobile phone, showed two alleged members of the
pro-Kremlin Chechen security forces torturing two men,
one slumped in a car, the other sprawled on a road.
Both victims were bleeding heavily and one appeared to
have a knife stuck in his ear.

The recording was apparently made by the torturers,
whose words - in Chechen - Novaya Gazeta published.
One man said: "He's still conscious.(Talks to male
victim as if he's a woman) This one just won't die!"

"Look how beautiful he is. I miss you when I don't see
you."

Later the pair exchange words: "Is he dead?" "Yes,
dead." "Let's go."

The European court of human rights ruled yesterday
that Russia was responsible for the killing of five
Chechens during a "cleansing operation" in Grozny in
2000. The court ordered Moscow to pay the victims'
relatives more than €227,000 (£153,000) in damages.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Chechen silence

Anna Politkovskaya's death should awaken us to the
vicious injustices in the north Caucasus region

Thomas de Waal
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1920164,00.html

The murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya leaves
a terrible silence in Russia and an information void
about a dark realm that we need to know more about. No
one else reported as she did on the Russian north
Caucasus and the abuse of human rights there. Her
reports made for difficult reading - and Politkovskaya
only got where she did by being one of life's
difficult people.

Since 1999 she had made dozens of trips to Chechnya
and the surrounding regions, reporting on the
bombings, torture camps, abductions and corruption in
Moscow's second campaign in Chechnya. With the rest of
the Russian media toeing the official line and western
journalists as good as banned from the warzone, it
felt at times that our news from Chechnya came from a
remarkable one-woman reporting operation. It was scant
consolation to her that she received a shelf full of
western journalism prizes. Politkovskaya seemed mainly
interested in the award ceremonies as a forum for
reminding westerners to do something about Chechnya -
she was generally disappointed.

Recently the war has ebbed, and President Putin has
more or less succeeded in decimating the separatist
rebel movement. War-weariness has taken hold. Much of
Chechnya is peaceful, and work is finally being done
to reconstruct the city of Grozny.

But there is still plenty of reason to worry.
Politkovskaya was the first journalist to probe deeply
into Putin's weapon of enforcement in Chechnya: a
vicious government, led by the pro-Moscow prime
minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, that is accountable to no
one. People disappear in the night, and Kadyrov's
security forces are the suspects. Kadyrov - who has
expressed regret at Politkovskaya's murder - was her
special bete noire. "Kadyrov must be put on trial,"
she said firmly the last time I saw her, at a
conference in Sweden three weeks ago.

And as Politkovskaya's reports illustrated, if
Chechnya is quieter, the rest of the north Caucasus is
more disturbed. Unemployment is high, local elites are
corrupt, and political violence, often with an Islamic
tinge, is on the rise.

With her keen vision, Politkovskaya correctly
identified that the central issue here - the flaw at
the heart of Putin's Russia - was one of impunity and
of the thousands of people who have no recourse to
justice when their rights are abused. In Sweden I
heard her talk about the dozens of young men who had
been "designated as terrorists" in fabricated court
cases in the north Caucasus. No one defends them
properly in court and they are now serving long,
pitiless sentences in Russian prisons. If they ever
get out, they will be natural converts to revenge and
political violence.

There is a wider justice deficit in Russia. Officials
like to point out that Russia is now part of the
European justice system, with its courts all
answerable to Strasbourg. This is good news - but in
the past year lawyers and family members of Chechens
who have successfully challenged the Russian
government in the European court of human rights have
been intimidated and threatened.

Justice needs champions, and Politkovskaya had
reported on the mysterious deaths of some of those who
dissented publicly from Russia's authoritarian trends.
The list was already too long. Two liberal Russian
MPs, Galina Starovoitova and Sergei Yushenkov, have
been assassinated. In Chechnya the remarkable village
head Malika Umazheva, who tried to defend her
villagers against death squads, was murdered.
Politkovskaya reported on her case with passion and
precision. Now the messenger is dead, brutally
silenced by the very thing she warned so eloquently
about.

· Thomas de Waal is the Caucasus editor at the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and the author
of the introduction to Anna Politkovskaya's book A
Dirty War
tom@...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.islamawareness.net/Persecution/Chechnya/