Free Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches by Anna Politkovskaya, Arch Tait

ask, standing in one of the houses which is “completely finished.”
    “That’s it,” he says, and points at what appears to be bare earth, or concrete. It’s difficult to tell under the layer of mud.
    “But that’s just earth.”
    “Well, what do you think they’ve got in their tents?”
    The telephone is ringing and I know who it is. Vera, a Russian refugee from Grozny who is married to a Chechen. Her family, having lost their toehold in Grozny, have been languishing for over four years in a tent on the outskirts of the Ingush hill village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya.
    “They drove us out of one camp,” Vera shouts through the “anti-terrorist” electronic jamming. “Now we are in another called Satsit, but they cut the water off here too yesterday. How are we supposed to live? Do they call this voluntary repatriation? Where are we supposed to go? To a new camp? Please, do something about it.”
    “But Pamfilova came to see you,” I shout back in reply.
    Our conversation is cut off, but I know that the travels through the North Caucasus of the Chairwoman of Putin’s Commission on Human Rights succeeded in bringing back to Moscow just one thing: legitimisationof the travesty being perpetrated, and an opportunity for the state’s leading lights to tell their VIP Western colleagues they have the situation under control, while continuing to trample all over the Constitution. Madame Pamfilova is a good-hearted woman, but she is now part of a state system insisting, against all logic, on sending refugees back to Chechnya. The bureaucrats are not prepared to listen to common sense. They want everyone out by March 1, so that before March 14, the date of the Russian presidential election, they will have had time to remove the tents, and their problem will have been solved. Why does it have to be like that?
    One of the most persistent stereotypes of the Second Chechen War is that the refugees are enemies of Russia. They are not seen as living in tents because their own warm houses were bombed. They are not seen as having been deprived of their rights. They are not seen as innocent people unjustly accused.
    They are enemies who must be crushed. They are part of Maskhadov’s power base, accomplices of the “international terrorism” which Putin has been fighting, is fighting now, and will continue to fight. To listen to the Army and the officials, you would think the refugees’ reluctance to return to Chechnya was solely because they want to be able to continue their propaganda against Putin’s policies to foreign journalists and human rights activists, who find it easier to get into Ingushetia than the closed zone of Chechnya.
    This is the thinking behind the solution of the refugee problem whose apotheosis we are now witnessing. Victory at all costs. No negotiations or understanding. Cut off their gas and water and send them back to the security sweeps and the war. If they don’t do as they’re told, that’s their lookout. You don’t pussyfoot with the enemy.
    A program of repression is being rolled out across Russia, sweeping aside everything in its path. It engenders resistance. Everything seems to be done in order to spite someone; everything is directed against someone. But against whom? Is it only against the refugees? No, it is directed also against you and me. History tells us that children from the reservations never forgive children from warm houses for their humiliating childhood.
    YELTSIN AND DUDAYEV SHARE FIRST PRIZE. THE SILVER GOES TO PUTIN, BASAYEV AND LEONTIEV
    July 5, 2004
    First, the profiles of the candidates for the War Prize, awarded for unleashing and fomenting the Chechen tragedy of 1994–2004. It has been founded by Chechenskoye obshchestvo , unquestionably the best newspaper today published in Chechnya and Ingushetia, and the one most dynamically increasing its circulation. Its editor is Timur Aliev. Announcing the War Prize, Chechenskoye obshchestvo showed that it is also more in touch