Two Lies

Jeremy Putley, in a message to the Chechnya-SL list:

Two lies: that Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was a terrorist; and that he was not assassinated by the Russian security services.

As to the second lie, we now have the verdict of an honest Qatari judge, who found that the two GRU men sent by the Russians to murder Mr Yandarbiyev in February of this year were indeed guilty of the crime of murder, and sentenced them to life imprisonment. There remains only this to be said: the Russian state itself is now publicly declared to be guilty of terrorism (a fact already fully established by the conduct of Russian armed forces in Chechnya); and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in saying that the two murderers were innocent, condemns himself as a liar by his own words. "The Russian leadership issued an order to assassinate the former Chechen leader Yandarbiyev," the judge is reported as saying - a statement fully consistent with the report by the Qatari newspaper Al-Rayah, last April, that the assassination was carried out on the personal orders of the Russian defence minister, Sergei Ivanov.

We can now see more clearly why the Russian defence made their strange request for the court proceedings to be secret. Regrettably the court consented to this, contrary to normal practice. While secret trials are still frequent in the Russian system of justice, this is so because the state wishes the court proceedings to be secret, not to protect the innocent, but to hide from public view the inadequacy of the prosecution case, and so that false verdicts may be brought while the truth is hidden from the Russian people at large.

In the Qatar trial which has just concluded, heavy influence brought to bear on the matter apparently included the personal intervention of Russian president Vladimir Putin in a telephone call to the Emir of Qatar. Thus the evidence before the court as to the involvement of the Russian authorities at the highest levels of the state was not brought into the full light of day. The verdict of guilty stands as a condemnation of the criminality of whoever ordered the murder,as well as those who carried it out, but there has been a torrent of denials from the Russian propaganda machine. And the volume of the denials is such that the verdict of the honest judge is in danger of being drowned out.

It was the practice of the KGB to murder individuals who were thought to be troublesome. The most famous case was that of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist, who was murdered in London by a KGB operative in 1978 by means of a ricin pellet injected by a stab from an umbrella tip when the victim was crossing Waterloo bridge.

Mr Akhmad Zakayev, the respected deputy of Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, in a recent New York Times interview, said that the killing of Yandarbiyev showed that Russia under Putin has reverted to the darkest tactics of its Soviet past, when KGB agents tracked down enemies of the state overseas. He predicted that similar assassination attempts will be made again in other countries. We shall see.

Now that the court has brought in its honest verdict, the question of motive naturally arises. Why did the Russian state decide to assassinate Yandarbiyev, who was in exile in a friendly Muslim state from his own country by reason of its having been over-run by the armed forces of a former super-power? At Russia's request, the United Nations last year put Yandarbiyev on a list of people suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, and the United States put him on a list of suspected terrorists subject to financial sanctions. It is a reasonable assumption, perhaps, that the UN and the US would not have taken such steps without seeing reliable evidence for the Russian allegations. But considering American irrationality surrounding President Bush's "war on terror" such an assumption might well be unwarranted.

The contention of the Russian authorities was that Yandarbiyev was involved in collecting finance to aid the Chechen separatist cause. If this was so - and I have seen no evidence one way or another - this does not amount to "international terrorism." What it amounts to is collecting finance to aid a cause that many think and declare to be just: the cause of resisting the most cruel oppression of a nation in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

More specifically, it was alleged by the Russian authorities that Yandarbiyev was responsible for providing the funds that enabled a group of Chechens to mount the Nord-Ost theatre hostage-taking in October 2002. To this specific charge, for which there is of course no evidence, the answer would be that the provision of funding to a separatist movement cannot be assumed to imply any degree of control from a remote country over how the funds are used. The terrorist label was propaganda of the customary type. It is reasonably clear that the plot to assassinate Yandarbiyev was intended as a strike against the Chechen separatist cause. The Russian state, perhaps convinced by its own propaganda, had found Yandarbiyev to be a terrorist; the chekist mentality which now rules in the Kremlin produced the decision to liquidate him. Who, then, is the terrorist?

Assassinating the former president of Chechnya is fully consistent with the Russian leadership's Chechnya policy. What is that policy? To suppress, by targeted killing, all those Chechens they can find who oppose the occupation of Chechnya by the Russian military. To terrorise the entire population by the elimination of all dissent. This is the nature of the "friend" and ally that President George W Bush has bound to him with hoops of steel (considering which, it must be devoutly hoped that Bush will not be re-elected).

Incidentally, when Sergei Ivanov, the minister of defence, made his shocking statement that he had sympathy for the murderer Budanov, because he was a "victim of circumstances," he did not lie, for his comment was true to his government's policy to murder Chechens who get in the way, 18-year-old girls included. Budanov was sentenced to only ten years in prison for his terrible crime.

Jeremy Putley