August 11, 2009
The Price Of Progress -- Life In Kadyrov's Grozny Permeated By Fear
by Gregory Feifer
GROZNY -- The last time I visited the Chechen capital, in 2007, it seemed most of the city had been already rebuilt.
It
was just before national parliamentary elections, in which Chechnya --
only recently bombed to ruins during two bitter wars for independence
from Moscow -- would deliver 99 percent of its votes to the main
pro-Kremlin party, United Russia.
The party's only platform was support for the man who'd launched the second of those wars, then-President Vladimir Putin.
But
I was wrong to think the city's reconstruction was nearly finished. A
year and a half on, Grozny has been still further transformed. It now
boasts Europe's largest mosque, surrounded by acres of neatly tended
gardens.
Expensive cars speed down the main thoroughfare, Putin
Prospekt, which is lined with cafes bearing French and Italian names, a
sushi restaurant, and a branch of a Moscow luxury shopping mall.
Ongoing construction is turning Grozny into a hodgepodge of renovated
neoclassical buildings, cheap, vinyl-sided apartment blocks, and squat,
traditional Chechen red-brick houses.
Young couples and mothers with their children stroll down the main streets in the evening.
Answer Always The Same
Eating
ice cream and laughing with her friends at an outdoor cafe next to a
brand-new fountain in one of the city's central squares, Asya
Tashtamirova says venturing outside after dusk used to be mortally
dangerous. Now, she says, life is better than it's ever been.
"After
work, we can come to places like this to sit and talk with friends,"
she says. "Before, we just couldn't do that because the situation here
was so different."
Ask anyone who's responsible for
Grozny's transfiguration from moonscape to Russia's newest city, and
you'll get the same answer. Boris Muzakayev, a clean-shaven,
middle-aged man sitting one table down from Tashtamirova, echoes the
unanimous opinion.
"Ramzan Kadyrov is one of the most
honorable people in Russia," Muzakayev says. "He's responsible for
bringing order here. He's able to control the situation here 100
percent."
Large, Big Brother-like pictures of the stocky
32-year-old leader -- with his trademark close-cropped beard, bristling
crewcut, and loosened tie -- hang everywhere in Chechnya, along with
signs of praise and thanks. But the veneer of devoted optimism often
wears thin. Soon after praising Kadyrov, Tashtamirova admits that fear
still permeates Chechnya.
"The only people who aren't afraid are
the ones who either don't know anything or never go out," she says.
"We're frightened for our loved ones, for you, for ourselves. The fear
is always there."
'Just Like Stalin's Time'Shootings
and bombings by the handful of separatist rebels remaining in Chechnya
have been on the rise since Moscow declared its decade-long
counterterrorism operation over earlier this year. But it's the Chechen
authorities, not the militants, who are believed to be behind most of
the ongoing abductions and killings, and, most recently, the burning of
houses belonging to relatives of suspected separatists.
Next to
the manicured lawns of the city's new mosque, one young man repeats the
universal praise of Kadyrov, then changes tone as soon as my microphone
is turned off.
"No one here is going to talk to you about politics," he says. "It's just like Stalin's time."
An
official in Kadyrov's administration who also didn't want to be
identified says that's no surprise for a population still traumatized
by war.
"Everyone here has known only war since 1994," he says.
Wounded by shrapnel in the 1990s, the official spent months paralyzed and unable to talk.
"Everyone
here has lost family members and friends," he says. "The only thing we
wish for is to be able to leave our houses in the morning and return in
the evening still living and breathing."
Lions ProwlI'd traveled to Grozny to
interview Kadyrov
along with two correspondents for RFE/RL's Russian Service. Summoned at
9 p.m. to Kadyrov's massive compound in his hometown Tsenteroi, near
Chechnya's second city, Gudermes, we sped the 45 minutes there in a
minivan sent by his press service.
Outside Grozny,
Chechnya remains very poor. Still, we pass many newly rebuilt village
houses before arriving at Kadyrov's main gate, the first of several
along a private drive festooned with strings of colored lights. The
entrance is heavily guarded by soldiers of his private army, known as
the Kadyrovtsy.
Inside the complex, past a horseracing track
and an artificial pond, two gold-colored lion statues guard the
entrance to the residential compound. Inside, real lions prowl in
cages, part of Kadyrov's extensive zoo of rare animals and birds. I
can't help fixating on the rumor that the compound also houses a prison
in which Kadyrov has tortured and killed with his own hands.
Kadyrov
isn't ready when we arrive. So we wait in a small stone building
housing his press service until we're called to his mansion next door.
Passing a sleek black Mercedes by the front door -- one of Kadyrov's
vast fleet of luxury cars -- we step into a massive, marble-floored
palace, lined with ornate columns and luxurious silk wallpaper.
Billiards In SlippersKadyrov,
dressed in an Armani tracksuit -- and, like everyone else in the
mansion, slippers -- is playing billiards with one of his men. (See
video below.) Kadyrov has been president for more than two years. But
the squat bear of a man with the jovial manner of a frat boy greets us
almost bashfully, as if embarrassed by the opulence of his fantasy
playground. Still, he looks visibly more aged and haggard than a
year-and-a-half ago. He changes into a plaid, open-necked shirt that
fits tightly over his powerful frame and swaggers upstairs to a plush
office. By the time we sit down, it's 2 a.m.
Kadyrov insists his only concern is for the welfare of ordinary Chechens.
"I'd lay down my life for my people," he says in brusque, heavily accented Russian.
He
began the first Chechen war with very different political sympathies:
then an anti-Kremlin rebel, he says he took up arms at the age of 17
because then-President Boris Yeltsin refused to negotiate with
Chechnya's first separatist leader Djokhar Dudayev, preferring instead
to "ruin Russia."
"The Chechen people were fully against Russia
then because they set tanks on us," Kadyrov says. "Russians blessed
those tanks and sent them against us as if we were German fascists. It
forced us to take a stand against Russia."
At the time, the
young Kadyrov was chief bodyguard for his father, Muslim imam Akhmad
Kadyrov, a separatist leader who switched sides during Chechnya's
second war. The Kremlin later installed the senior Kadyrov as Chechen
president. Today, Ramzan Kadyrov praises Putin for "wise policies" that
kept Chechnya a part of the Russian Federation.
"It's good
Russia didn't let Chechnya go. If we would have been given
independence, it would have been the end of our people. We would all
have died," he says.
Quiet TerrorKadyrov
says remaining part of Russia was the only way to save Chechnya from
destruction by foreign extremists who wanted to claim Chechnya as part
of their cause. When Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in a bomb blast in
2004, his feared security-chief son eventually succeeded him. Kadyrov
calls Putin, who appointed him, his "idol."
Rights groups say
Kadyrov has brought a large measure of stability to Chechnya by
enforcing a quiet terror. Last month, human rights activist
Natalya Estemirova
became one of the latest of his critics to have died in an unsolved
killing. On August 11, the head of a Chechen aid group and her husband
were
found dead in the trunk of their car.
Kadyrov
rivals have been gunned down in Vienna, Dubai, Moscow, and Chechnya.
But Kadyrov denies all accusations he had anything to do with the
murders. He also denies encouraging a cult of personality.
"Why
do I need my portraits everywhere? I have all the authority I need. Why
would I advertise myself?" he says. "People want to put up my portraits
themselves. Take them down and put them away if you want. I don't care!"
Some
believe Kadyrov's authority inside Chechnya is so great that he
effectively governs the region independently of Moscow. His critics
wryly note the young leader, who publically remains utterly loyal to
Moscow, has achieved the kind of de facto self-rule that had eluded
Chechnya's former separatist leaders.
But Kadyrov has been
unable to prevail in one of his biggest disagreements with Moscow, over
the right to refine oil and control its profits, even though much of
Kadyrov's wealth is believed to have come from kickbacks from the
region's semi-legal oil industry.
'I Believe Him'Kadyrov denies any split with the Kremlin.
"Why
would we need Rosneft or Gazprom?" he says of the state oil and gas
companies that pump out Chechnya's most valuable natural resources. "We
just need more money [from Moscow] to help rebuild our region's
economy."
Back in Grozny the day after our interview with
Kadyrov, a lawyer and former teacher who now works as a handyman -- and
who also spoke on condition of anonymity -- said Chechnya was so ruined
several years ago that only an authoritarian could have imposed order.
That's
a common view even among some of Kadyrov's loudest critics. Journalist
Kheda Saratova is planning a march in Grozny in memory of Natalya
Estemirova -- a risky endeavor in a city in which even Estemirova's
employer, the crusading human rights organization Memorial, has shut
its doors.
But Saratova praises Kadyrov, a leader she once
denounced, instead blaming the ongoing violence in Chechnya on security
service officers and others whose careers depend on continued
instability.
"These people are capable of killing, kidnapping,
anything to show off in front of Ramzan," Saratova says. "So when
Ramzan says he's trying to improve the lives of ordinary Chechens, I
believe him."
Some observers believe the universal praise of
Kadyrov is part of a coping mechanism among those who have lived
through two devastating wars. And indeed, backing the one man who
appears capable of ensuring stability may be the best way to survive.
Grozny may increasingly look like any other part of Russia, but no
number of shiny new buildings can mask the sense of something deeply
sinister in Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechnya.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2009 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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