Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (4 page)

Their superiors arrive, the Acting Head of the District Militia, Alexander Naidyonov, and his deputy Yevgeny Popkov. “We have nothing to say,” is their curt joint communiqué.

“Can you at least tell me whether you are instigating a criminal investigation? It is already November 5.”

Colonel Naidyonov almost runs away from me, his eyes darting all over the place.

What’s the problem? Isn’t it straightforward: if there has been an attack on someone it should be investigated? Or might the militia’s skittishness relate to the fact that in his statement Komarov named as his own prime suspect the Ryazan oligarch, Sergey Kuznetsov, one of the ten wealthiest locals, the owner of a large shopping center and much else besides, about whose business methods Komarov frequently wrote?

This explanation seems to be confirmed when Investigator Mikhail Zotov, accompanied by Colonel Naidyonov, arrives to question the victim for the first time in the provincial neurological clinic. He is persistently curious to know why Komarov wrote so much about Kuznetsov. Was it, perhaps, Zotov suggests insistently, because he had been taking bribes to write “good” articles about him and then, when Kuznetsov stopped paying, he started writing critically about him? This is what Kuznetsov is saying. No doubt everybody judges by their own standards. “Give us what we want and we’re on your side. Don’t, and we’re against you.” That is the sickening creed of the militia.

It is almost noon but the enforcers of law and order are in no hurry to get on with their work, and are plainly not on Komarov’s side. We rush around Ryazan, putting together a criminal case: from the October District Prosecutor’s Office to the Ryazan Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, from there to the October District Militia on Yesenin Street and finally, forcing our way into the office of the indignant Colonel Naidyonov, encounter a very amiable Georgian who will subsequently tell us, “I am a Georgian, and accordingly the man has not yet been born who can bribe me.”

This is the Head of the Provincial Criminal Investigation Department, Militia Colonel Dzhansug Mzhavanadze, and he informs us with some ceremony that a criminal investigation was opened on November 5 at 11:30 a.m.

“What work is being done on the main line of inquiry, involving Kuznetsov? Are Komarov’s articles being attached to the file, and his statement to the FSB two weeks ago that he was being threatened?”

“I am not at liberty to tell you about the means and methods we are employing to solve the crime.”

We fully understand, and carry on crisscrossing Ryazan to try to ensure that these do not turn into means and methods of covering up a crime. Oligarch Kuznetsov is everybody’s daddy.

The oligarch is unflustered, and very democratic in his ways, as you would expect of a major financial supporter of the Governor of Ryazan.

“What sort of an oligarch am I?” Sergey Kuznetsov asks coyly. In an earlier life he was the Secretary of the District Committee of the Young Communist League. He radiates civilised behaviour, bonhomie and modesty. “I borrowed $5,000 from my mother-in-law yesterday. I have invested my last copeck in my business. I don’t have a home of my own. I should have emigrated to Israel long ago. My mother, Galina Abramovna, is there and here I am struggling for a better life. I am a builder. By nature I am a creator. On the old rat-infested city rubbish tip I built a retail center with 600 shops. I opened the best beauty parlour in Ryazan, which has an excellent surgeon. He gave my wife’s breasts a lift, and removed my moles. Everybody without exception is pleased. Only Misha Komarov is dissatisfied. He writes endlessly that
the plastic surgery operations are performed without a licence. He’s just trying to settle personal scores with me. I am getting tired of his articles. I decided to teach him a lesson.”

“To teach him a lesson? Do you know that on November 3 someone tried to kill him? Just after he had left another court hearing against you?”

“You won’t believe me but I’ve only just heard about it, immediately before our meeting.” The oligarch calls in the head of his security service, a large fellow in a black leather jacket. “Have you been to the hospital?” he asks him.

The bodyguard relays in detail what the doctor told him about Komarov’s state of health.

“Isn’t it strange that the doctor has passed all this information – confidential medical details – to your Viking?”

Kuznetsov is pleased with the effect he is having and smiles masterfully.

“What confidential details are you talking about? I was treated in that very same neurosurgery department after somebody lobbed a grenade at me. But Misha never seems to learn.”

“What right do you think you have to ‘educate’ Komarov as if you were his father?”

“In Ryazan I am everybody’s father, and it seems to me I am having some success. Komarov thinks more carefully about what he writes, he weighs his words now. Personally I think
Novaya gazeta
is great. And don’t be afraid for Misha; he has been hit on the head many times before because he doesn’t know when to give way.”

We part, having got nowhere.

During the afternoon Victor Ognyov, the Deputy Prosecutor of Ryazan, makes a surprising announcement: he says a criminal investigation was launched yesterday, November 4, at 19:10 hours, rather than at 11:30 on November 5 as Colonel Mzhavanadze was assuring us just a couple of hours ago.

“The militia are saying something quite different. Who should we believe?”

“They simply did not know.” Ognyov imperturbably shuffles the
papers in his file, where two separate directives about instigating one and the same case are visible to the naked eye. “We intervened operationally so that everything would move along more effectively. First we appointed Skrynnikov, a junior investigator, but now at my request a more experienced official will investigate the matter (Mikail Zotov, who was defending Kuznetsov against Komarov). We’re about to send a special report on all this to the Prosecutor-General’s Office in Moscow since, as you will agree, this is not a routine case. We are observing all the requirements of the Criminal Procedure Code.”

“But why is the charge merely ‘disturbing the peace’?”

“Because Komarov was neither killed nor robbed. There was no intention of killing him.”

“How can you be so sure? Do you know the person with the intentions?”

“We know if they had meant to they would have killed him, but they were merely giving him a fright. It will be a matter of minor physical injury affecting the victim’s health for a short time.”

“He hasn’t recovered yet!”

“You will forgive my remarking that there is no article in the Criminal Code relating to beating up a journalist.” Ognyov smiles sardonically.

Evening falls once more. Misha is lying in one of the narrow beds typical of an underfunded Russian hospital. His head is bandaged and he looks pale. His mother has brought in all the medicine, bandages and syringes he needs because as usual there are none in the neurosurgical department. No doctors or nurses in the evenings either, but luckily Valentina is a nurse herself. Komarov is holding forth to his neighbours about democracy, the duty of the mass media, and the need to be unflinching in the fight against corruption which spoils life for everyone. His neighbours listen sullenly, either because of their own ailments or because they have little faith in the victory of democracy or in the need to make the effort Misha is describing. Sitting on the edge of the next bed, Valentina lectures her son.

“Yes, I understand what you are saying, and I am not against your being a journalist, but you do need to be more careful.”

“We can’t give in, Mum,” Mikhail answers with the passion of one
who will brook no compromise in the fight for good. He is in a state of post-traumatic euphoria, ready for the worst, fearing nothing. “Let them be afraid every week of what we are going to write about them, not we of them!”

“What are you going to do now, Misha?” I ask in parting.

“Carry on writing articles,” Komarov replies unyieldingly.

So, is it worth sacrificing your life for journalism? How does each of us make our choice?

Every successive attack on a journalist in Russia – and by tradition nobody ever gets caught – relentlessly reduces the number of journalists working because they want to fight for justice. The risks are very great and not everyone is up to the unremitting tension which accompanies this kind of work. As the numbers of one kind of journalist fall, so there is an increase in the number of those who prefer undemanding journalism, reporting which doesn’t involve prying where you are not welcome.

Undemanding media cater for an undemanding public, ready to agree with everything it is told. The more there is of the former, the more monolithic the latter becomes, and the less opportunity society has of seeing what is wrong with the circumstances in which it lives.

In the last few months the situation has been deteriorating rapidly. It seems we are at a tipping point, and that soon the Government (the oligarchs, the FSB, the bureaucracy) will no longer be breathing down our necks, because they will have achieved what they want: there will be nobody left prepared to lay down their life in order to get at the truth about other people’s lives. If there is no demand, there will be no supply.

More than three years later, the criminals still have not been caught: neither those who attacked Mikhail Komarov, nor those who paid them to do so
.

^*
The Cheka was a state security service established in 1917. It was the forerunner of the KGB, now the FSB.

^*
Apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk were blown up, apparently by the FSB, with the loss of many Russian lives. The Chechens were blamed as a pretext for re-starting the war in Chechnya. An attempt to do the same in Ryazan was foiled, and was subsequently represented as a “training exercise.”

2. The War in Chechnya

The Chechen War was re-started in 1999, supposedly in response to a Chechen attack on neighbouring Dagestan and the blowing up of apartment blocks in Russian cities in which over 300 citizens died. It is widely believed that both these pretexts were stage-managed by the Russian Government itself, which would mean it was responsible for the politically motivated mass murder of its own citizens. The former Director of the FSB Vladimir Putin came to power in the 2000 presidential election as a would-be saviour of the nation on a wave of anti-Chechen hysteria. Anna Politkovskaya reported uncompromisingly on the war and on its accompanying atrocities
.

Part I: Dispatches from the Frontline

LIBERTY OR DEATH? SOMETIMES THEY ARE THE SAME THING

March 27, 2000

These are appalling stories. Sometimes people say that to be on the safe side you should divide them by 10, or 100 or 200; but divide them as we may, they are still stories about atrocities.

On grey UN humanitarian aid blankets covering concrete barricades, a boy and girl are sitting, hunched and huddled. We try to talk about the future. I keep going on about prospects, the larger issues, the international dimension: “What plans do you have? What are you going to do with your lives?” Their replies relate only to the specific, the here and now: “Tomorrow we are going to the mountains to look for wild leeks. That is all there is to eat.”

I try again, about when things get better, what they hope for, about ordinary, human things: “Are there wild flowers already blooming in the mountains?” “There are unexploded bombs there, and a lot of soldiers,” comes the response, unhurried and unemotional, but behind the words hatred flutters like a banner.

These are Aslanbek and Rezeda, a brother and sister aged 18 and 20. In the First War they were in their early teens, in the Second they have hardened. If Rezeda still manages a fleeting smile, Aslanbek is as gloomy as the dirty concrete surrounding him. They both sat through all the bombing and shelling in cellars, until February 5 when their personal drama came to a head with the brutal killing by federal soldiers of their father, Salman Bishayev. He was 54 and was killed by federal troops in the courtyard of No. 3, Kislovodskaya Street in Grozny during a security sweep in Aldy, Chernorechiye District. They killed him and dragged the body away, and only after a 13-day search did Aslanbek and Rezeda’s elder sister, 30-year-old Larisa, find what
they were dutifully looking for. It was she who scraped Salman’s brains from the walls into a bag in order to bury them. Then they all fled to Ingushetia.

Now home is a quarry on the outskirts of Karabulak, where a building materials factory once flourished and where there are still many half-ruined stone storehouses. Along with 30 housemates, 23 of whom are children or young people aged between 15 and 22, Aslanbek and Rezeda have taken up residence in one of these boxes in this concrete wasteland. They jokingly call their shack “The Disco,” but there is no music or dancing here. The furniture consists of plank beds, and the 23 boys and girls sitting on them have no light in their eyes, and their arms hang listlessly by their sides. The Disco’s inhabitants have bonds of distant kinship and the shared experience of recent security sweeps in which their fathers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles were tortured and shot.

“What do you usually talk about?”

“For days at a time we talk about who has been killed and how it was done, and where someone’s grave has been found. It is dreadful,” 17-year-old Fatima Doldayeva tells me. She graduated from Grozny No. 2 High School in late 1999 with a gold medal. What Fatima says is true. By evening the talk is more than you can take. In the refugee camps of Chechnya and Ingushetia what people mostly talk about nowadays is death.

A Woman’s Head in a Red Scarf

Sultan Shuaipov hastened to Magas Airport in Ingushetia very early in the morning, even though everyone told him he was wasting his time. He had heard on the radio that a Council of Europe delegation would be stopping off briefly in Ingushetia, and was determined to meet these solicitous foreigners the moment they got off the plane and tell them
everything
.