I am an outcast. This is the main result of my work as a journalist in Chechnya and the publication abroad of my books on life in Russia and the Chechen conflict. In Moscow they do not invite me to press conferences or to initiatives in which the participation of Kremlin officials is expected: the organizers do not want to be suspected of having sympathies for me.
Yet all top officials agree to meet me when I am writing an article or conducting an investigation. But they do it secretly, in places where they cannot be seen, in the open air, in the square or in secret places that we reach by following different roads, as if we were spies. They are happy to talk to me. They give me information, ask for my opinion and tell me what happens at the top. But always in secret.
It is a situation you don’t get used to, but you learn to live with: these were the conditions in which I worked during the second war in Chechnya, which broke out in 1999. I was hiding from Russian federal soldiers, but thanks to some trusted intermediaries I was still able to establish secret contacts with individuals. That way I protected my informants.
After the start of Putin’s “Chechenization” plan (hiring the “good” Chechens loyal to the Kremlin to kill the “bad” Chechens hostile to Moscow), I used the same technique to get in touch with the “good” Chechen officials “. I had known many of them for a long time since, before becoming “good”, they had hosted me at their home in the hardest months of the war.
Now we can only meet in secret because I am considered an impossible enemy to “re-educate”. I’m not kidding. Some time ago Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, explained that some enemies can be reasoned, while others are incorrigible: dialogue with them is impossible. Politics, according to Surkov, must be “cleaned” of these characters. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, not just with me.
The ambush
On August 5, 2006, I was in the midst of a crowd of women in the small central square of Kurchaloj, a gray and dusty Chechen village. I wore a rolled-up scarf over my head like many local women my age do. The scarf did not completely cover the head but did not leave it uncovered either. It was essential not to be identified, otherwise anything could have happened to me. On one side of the square, hanging from the pipeline that crosses Kurchaloj, was a man’s overalls soaked in blood. The head, on the other hand, was gone. They had taken her away.
In the night between 27 and 28 July two Chechen guerrillas were ambushed on the outskirts of Kurchaloj by some men loyal to the Kremlin ally, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen prime minister. Adam Badaev was captured while Hoj-Ahmed Dushaev, a native of Kurchaloj, was killed. Around dawn about twenty Zhiguli full of armed men reached the center of the village where the police station is located. They wore Dushaev’s head. Two men pinned her to the pipeline in the center of the village and hung her bloodstained trousers underneath. Then they spent the next two hours photographing the head with their cell phones.
The severed head remained exposed for twenty-four hours. Eventually the militia men took her away, leaving her pants hanging from the pipe. Meanwhile, agents from the Attorney General’s Office were examining the ambush scene. The villagers assure that they heard one of the agents ask a subordinate: “Have they finished sewing up the head?”. Dushaev’s body, with his head sewn back to his neck, was returned to the ambush site, and the Attorney General’s office initiated the investigation following normal investigative procedures. I wrote an article to tell the episode, without commenting but providing a reconstruction of the facts. I went back to Chechnya just when the newspaper with my article was on the newsstands.
In the square the women tried to hide me. They were sure that Kadyrov’s men would shoot me if they knew I was there. They all reminded me that the premier had publicly sworn to kill me. It happened during an executive meeting: Kadyrov said he had had enough and added that Anna Politkovskaya was a doomed woman. Some members of the government told me about it. Why so much hate? Maybe he didn’t like my articles? “Anyone who is not one of us is an enemy”. This was stated by Surkov, Kadyrov’s main supporter in Putin’s entourage.
“She’s so stupid she doesn’t even know the value of the money. I offered her some money but she didn’t accept it, ”Kadyrov told an old acquaintance of mine, a militia special forces officer. He’s “one of ours,” and if they’d caught us talking, he’d certainly be in trouble. When it was time to say goodbye, it was dark outside. The officer begged me not to go out, because he was afraid they would kill me. “Do not go. Ramzan is very angry with you ”. I went out anyway. That night in Grozny I was supposed to meet someone secretly.
He offered to take me in a militia car, but the idea seemed even more risky to me: I would become a target for the guerrillas. “But at least in the house where you are going are they armed?” He asked me with a worried air. Throughout the war I was between two fires. When someone threatens to kill you, his enemies protect you. But tomorrow the threat will come from someone else. Why am I dwelling on this story? Just to explain that people in Chechnya are worried about me, and this fact moves me deeply. They fear for my life more than I do.
Why does Kadyrov want to kill me? I once interviewed him and posted his answers without changing a comma, respecting all their incredible stupidity and ignorance. Kadyrov was convinced that I would completely rewrite the interview, to make him appear smarter. Basically today most of the journalists, those who are part of “ours”, behave like this.
Is this enough to attract a death threat? The answer is as simple as the worldview encouraged by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “We must be ruthless with the enemies of the reich.” “Whoever is not with us is against us”. “Opponents must be eliminated”.
“Why are you fixated on the story of the severed head?”, Vasily Panchenkov, who heads the press office of the troops of the interior ministry, asked me in Moscow, despite being a decent person. “Don’t you have anything else to think about?”. I turned to him for a comment on Kurchaloj for Novaya Gazeta. “Forget it, pretend nothing happened. I say this for your own good! ”.
But how can I forget? I hate the Kremlin line drawn up by Surkov, which divides people between those “on our side” and those “not” or even “on the other side”. If a journalist is “on our side” he will get rewards and respect, and perhaps even propose to him to become a deputy in the Duma, the Russian parliament. But if he “is not on our side”, he will be considered a supporter of European democracies and their values, automatically becoming an outcast. This is the fate of anyone who opposes our “sovereign democracy”, “traditional Russian democracy”.
Report the facts
I’m not a real political animal. I have not joined any party because I consider it a mistake for a journalist, at least in Russia. And I have never felt the need to defend the Duma, although there have been years when they have asked me to do so. What crime did I commit to be branded as “one against us”? I limited myself to reporting the facts I witnessed. I wrote and, more rarely, I spoke.
I publish few comments, because they remind me of the views imposed in my Soviet childhood. I think readers know how to interpret what they read for themselves. This is why I mainly write reportage, even if sometimes, I admit, I add some personal opinion. I am not an investigating magistrate, I am just a person who describes what happens to those who cannot see it. The reports broadcast on TV and the articles published in most newspapers are almost all ideological. Citizens know little or nothing about what is happening in other parts of the country and sometimes even in their own region.
The Kremlin reacted by trying to block my work: its ideologues believe it is the best way to undo the effect of what I write. But preventing a person who does his job with passion from telling the world around him is an impossible feat. My life is difficult, of course, but it is above all humiliating. At the age of 47 I am no longer old enough to face hostility and have the outcast mark printed on my forehead. I won’t talk about the other joys of my job – the poisoning, the arrests, the telephone and online death threats, the weekly summons to the attorney general’s office to sign statements on almost all of my articles. The first question they ask me is always the same: “How and where did you get this information?”.
Of course, the articles that present me as crazy from Moscow do not please me. Living like this is horrible. I would like a little more understanding. But the most important thing is to continue to do my job, to tell what I see, to receive people who do not know where else to go to the editorial office every day. For the Kremlin, their stories do not respect the official line. The only place where they can tell them is Novaya Gazeta.
(Translation by Giuseppina Cavallo)
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