Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya, Arch Tait
Authors: Anna Politkovskaya, Arch Tait
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opening they had made to ask if anybody was alive in the cellar, and shortly afterwards took Vakhid and then Viskhan out of the old house.”
At the moment the entrance to the cellar was blown up, according to the case materials, Maskhadov was closest to it and took the full force of the blast. That is why he died instantly. His bodyguards survived only because Maskhadov died.
Do you remember the television images of the dead Maskhadov, stripped to the waist, lying on concrete in a courtyard? That was the Yusupovs’ courtyard, despite all the official fairy tales suggesting it was Kadyrov’s.
The Yusupovs’ courtyard no longer exists. The adobe house collapsed during the operation on March 8, and some four days later federals arrived, laced the Yusupovs’ new house with ribbon explosives and destroyed all the evidence, thereby ruling out any tests or the possibility of an independent inquiry. One important question is: how sure were the soldiers that it was Maskhadov in the cellar?
Some three days before the operation they knew only that an important figure of some description was in this part of Tolstoy-Yurt. Maybe Basayev, maybe Umarov [Doku Umarov, a later President of Ichkeria], or maybe Maskhadov. That was all. By late in the evening of the seventh, however, from tracing the text messages it was evident that, with a high degree of probability, it was Maskhadov living on Suvorov Street. The information was sent to Moscow, and overnight a special Russian unit, answerable directly to the Director of the FSB,flew out. The reason why the culmination of the operation was not entrusted to soldiers of the Special Operations Center of the FSB, which is permanently deployed in Chechnya, was simple: mistrust even within a single Ministry, and particularly of officers who are permanently stationed in Chechnya. The problem of the selling of information is acute.
The special flight of Moscow troops, and the fact that they were waited for in Chechnya for several hours without anybody else moving to the concluding phase of the operation, is further evidence that they knew it was Maskhadov they were dealing with. The Moscow agents who flew to Tolstoy-Yurt were a group of Russia’s best commandos whose only task is to kill. And kill they did, because this time the order had come.
What resources did Maskhadov have for defending himself, if, indeed, he was intending to defend himself at all? What was found in the cellar?
It has to be said that there was precious little. He had a typical Chechen array of four assault rifles (between five men). Three of 5.45 mm calibre, and one of 7.62 mm. There were three home-made grenades, and one F1 grenade for blowing himself up. There should also have been the renowned Maskhadov Stechkin, his personal Army officer’s pistol. The Stechkin, however, disappeared. We find the papers of the criminal case peppered with the investigators’ questions about where the Stechkin had gone. Nobody kept an eye on it at the time.
Death, of course, is no laughing matter, but the morals among the Army in Chechnya, where looting has become ingrained over many years, make it difficult to suppress a wry smile. Even the operation to liquidate Maskhadov was not free of a spot of looting. To put it politely, the Stechkin was filched by the killers. Maskhadov had it when he was in the cellar but after the operation it was nowhere to be found. It’s not difficult to imagine the details: the Stechkin is now hanging on a wall, or perhaps it is in a safe, belonging to a member of the FSB’s special operations unit, and when he has had a drink or two its new owner shows off his trophy to his comrades-in-arms, or girlfriends, or,heaven knows, perhaps even to his children. The Stechkin will turn up at auction 50 years or so from now. It is the sort of thing that has happened often enough in the past.
So where does that leave us, in September 2005, as a trial begins at which the circumstances of the last months of
At the moment the entrance to the cellar was blown up, according to the case materials, Maskhadov was closest to it and took the full force of the blast. That is why he died instantly. His bodyguards survived only because Maskhadov died.
Do you remember the television images of the dead Maskhadov, stripped to the waist, lying on concrete in a courtyard? That was the Yusupovs’ courtyard, despite all the official fairy tales suggesting it was Kadyrov’s.
The Yusupovs’ courtyard no longer exists. The adobe house collapsed during the operation on March 8, and some four days later federals arrived, laced the Yusupovs’ new house with ribbon explosives and destroyed all the evidence, thereby ruling out any tests or the possibility of an independent inquiry. One important question is: how sure were the soldiers that it was Maskhadov in the cellar?
Some three days before the operation they knew only that an important figure of some description was in this part of Tolstoy-Yurt. Maybe Basayev, maybe Umarov [Doku Umarov, a later President of Ichkeria], or maybe Maskhadov. That was all. By late in the evening of the seventh, however, from tracing the text messages it was evident that, with a high degree of probability, it was Maskhadov living on Suvorov Street. The information was sent to Moscow, and overnight a special Russian unit, answerable directly to the Director of the FSB,flew out. The reason why the culmination of the operation was not entrusted to soldiers of the Special Operations Center of the FSB, which is permanently deployed in Chechnya, was simple: mistrust even within a single Ministry, and particularly of officers who are permanently stationed in Chechnya. The problem of the selling of information is acute.
The special flight of Moscow troops, and the fact that they were waited for in Chechnya for several hours without anybody else moving to the concluding phase of the operation, is further evidence that they knew it was Maskhadov they were dealing with. The Moscow agents who flew to Tolstoy-Yurt were a group of Russia’s best commandos whose only task is to kill. And kill they did, because this time the order had come.
What resources did Maskhadov have for defending himself, if, indeed, he was intending to defend himself at all? What was found in the cellar?
It has to be said that there was precious little. He had a typical Chechen array of four assault rifles (between five men). Three of 5.45 mm calibre, and one of 7.62 mm. There were three home-made grenades, and one F1 grenade for blowing himself up. There should also have been the renowned Maskhadov Stechkin, his personal Army officer’s pistol. The Stechkin, however, disappeared. We find the papers of the criminal case peppered with the investigators’ questions about where the Stechkin had gone. Nobody kept an eye on it at the time.
Death, of course, is no laughing matter, but the morals among the Army in Chechnya, where looting has become ingrained over many years, make it difficult to suppress a wry smile. Even the operation to liquidate Maskhadov was not free of a spot of looting. To put it politely, the Stechkin was filched by the killers. Maskhadov had it when he was in the cellar but after the operation it was nowhere to be found. It’s not difficult to imagine the details: the Stechkin is now hanging on a wall, or perhaps it is in a safe, belonging to a member of the FSB’s special operations unit, and when he has had a drink or two its new owner shows off his trophy to his comrades-in-arms, or girlfriends, or,heaven knows, perhaps even to his children. The Stechkin will turn up at auction 50 years or so from now. It is the sort of thing that has happened often enough in the past.
So where does that leave us, in September 2005, as a trial begins at which the circumstances of the last months of
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