Chechnya: death of Moscow's gangster

Submitted by Anon on 22 May, 2004 - 10:16

By Dale Street

The only surprise about the assassination on 9 May of Ahmad Kadyrov, the Russian-imposed President of the Chechen Republic, was that it had not happened sooner. Kadyrov was one of the most reviled men in Chechnya, and deservedly so.
Kadyrov began the first Chechen war as a field commander for the Chechen forces. In 1995 he was appointed mufti of Chechnya, with the title of "field mufti". He was appointed to this position not by the spiritual leaders of Chechnya but by other field commanders. They wanted a mufti who would declare the conflict against Russia to be a holy war. Nobody but Kadyrov was willing to issue such a decree.

By July of 2000, however, Kadyrov had changed sides. He was appointed administrative head of the Chechen Republic by Putin, who also gave him the title of Colonel of the Russian Army. In 2002 Kadyrov railroaded through a new constitution for Chechnya (in a "referendum" organised on the basis of coercion and ballot-box stuffing) and in October 2003 he was "elected" in the same manner to be president of Chechnya.

Kadyrov was never the representative of the Chechen people, their champion in the face of the Russian occupation. He was Putin's representative in Chechnya. He ruled Chechnya with the assistance of his own private army, which at least equalled the Russian forces in the barbarity of its repression and plundering of the Chechen population.

Kadyrov harked back to the "golden days" of the Stalinist NKVD. In an interview with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, he told her:

"To find a bandit, I would quietly gather information and appear at his door at two or three in the night, shake his hand, and say hello. After such a visit, this bandit would disappear. With three or four other such operations, everyone would be clear on everything. That's just what happened when the NKVD was operating."

Kadyrov exploited his tenure of office to increase his income from the illegal oil business in Chechnya. As president of the republic, and backed up by the forces of his presidential security services, headed by his son Ramzan. Kadyrov was able to increase his share of the oil siphoned off from the oil pipelines which run through Chechnya.

Chechen and Russian officials have pointed the finger of blame for the assassination at Maskhadov (elected president of Chechnya after the first Chechen War) and Basayev (a particularly bloody Chechen field commander).

Trying to pin the blame for the assassination on Maskhadov is no more than another attempt by the Russian authorities to smear him as the Chechen Osama bin Laden. (Unlike Kadyrov, Maskhadov never sold out to the Russians.) Basayev may have been behind the assassination. But in the anarchy of Chechnya, the killing could just as easily have been the work of any one (or several) of a number of other factions.

Putin has promised "retribution" for the death of Kadyrov. This will mean a new wave of murder and robbery of ordinary Chechens, who will subsequently be declared by the authorities to have been 'terrorists'. Kadyrov's legacy to 'his' people is therefore a continuation of what he gave them whilst in power: terror, murder and repression.

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