Albert

Torture victims accuse Chechnya's new president

When the man in the fancy four-wheel drive asked Din-Magomed to teach
his son how to swim, it seemed like an innocuous enough request and the
boy readily agreed.

But the 13-year-old would spend the next two days being tortured by
members of one of Chechnya's most infamous Russian-backed law
enforcement units.

Such treatment is commonly meted out to those accused of collaborating
with Chechnya's rebels. But Din-Magomed's alleged crime was much more
mundane: he had been accused of stealing a mobile phone and a pair of
earrings from the man's car.

Din-Magomed says he was guilty of nothing more than sneaking out of his
house for an illicit swim at a nearby lake on a hot day last August.

But Din-Magomed's accuser, identified as Salman Abubakarov, was a
powerful man with connections at the dreaded Operative and Investigative
Bureau No 2 (ORB-2), an outfit controlled by the Russian interior ministry.

The next morning, the boy was dragged from his home and taken to ORB-2's
main interrogation centre in the town of Urus-Martan.

"They handcuffed me to a radiator," he recalled quietly, speaking in his
mother's flat in the settlement of Chervlyonaya. "A Russian man took
notes as the others started kicking me and beating me with their fists.
They threatened me with electric shocks but I did not confess because I
did not do the crime."

When he was released, Din-Magomed had suffered a fractured skull,
concussion, chest trauma and bruising. Nearly eight years into the
second Chechen war, Russia's most rebellious province remains a deeply
troubled place. Bearded militiamen, dressed in Islamic skullcaps and US
military fatigues, roam through the partially rebuilt ruins of
Chechnya's cities carrying out the thuggish whims of an indigenous
administration imposed by the Kremlin.

Their victims are dragged off the streets, or simply vanish from their
homes.

Officially the number of reported incidents has been falling in the past
two years.

But according to human rights bodies, this is only because many victims'
relatives are too frightened to report disappearances.

Some things in Chechnya are changing, however - though not for the
better, activists say. At what is expected to be a lavish ceremony
today, Chechnya's alpha warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov, will be sworn in as the
republic's president.

An amateur boxer who keeps a lion as a pet, the 30-year-old has been
accused of presiding over a culture of torture and secret prisons - it
is even alleged that he once used a blow torch on a rival. Perversely,
Mr Kadyrov's appointment could be good news for the family of
Din-Magomed and their quest for justice.

Although he is a Kremlin appointment, the president has accused ORB-2 of
serious abuses and has signalled in the past month that he wants to shut
it down.

Not that Mr Kadyrov has suddenly become an unlikely champion of human
rights. His own 8,000-strong private army, known as Kadyrovtsi, is
perhaps the worst offender among the loyalist militias. A more likely
reason, analysts say, is that the president regards ORB-2 as a rival he
cannot control.

The Kadyrvosti's job is to root out separatist fighters. But most of the
militia are ex-rebels themselves and activists claim they have sold
protection to prominent separatists. "Their victims aren't rebels, but
ordinary people," said a Russian activist who travels to Chechnya.

One such victim is Samai Abzuyeva. She says the Kadyrovstsi tortured her
son, Abdulbek, to death a year ago to wrest control of his second-hand
car dealership.

Enraged that Mrs Abzuyeva has tried to seek justice, the militiamen,
working with Abdulbek's widow who wants to force her from her flat, have
turned their anger on the 76-year-old grandmother.

"I'm begging you to help me punish these people," she told The Daily
Telegraph. But the Kadyrovtsi seem so confident in their own immunity
that it has become common for them to film torture sessions on mobile
phones and send the footage to friends.

Malika Soltayeva was accused by her Muslim husband of having an affair
with a Christian, which she denied. She was filmed as she was stripped
and flogged before her head was shaved and dyed green, the colour
associated with Islam. A year later, she is still looking for justice.

In the past fortnight, two videos obtained by The Daily Telegraph
suggest that the militia has been little deterred by the furore over Mrs
Soltayeva's humiliation. One shows a woman lying face down as she is
flogged. Activists have interviewed her but say she is so scared that
she has begged them to drop the matter.

Source: The Telegraph, 05/04/2007
Author: Adrian Blomfield

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