(A equipa de defesa prepara-se para alegacoes finais. AP)He turned to Khadzhikurbanov. 'Tell me, did you ever have occasion to use this kinds of services?'
'A hundred times,' Khadzhikurbanov said. 'Though I never slapped together anything as clumsy as this.'
And, when the defense finally played the video of a bulky Rustam covered in mud, the junior prosecutor held the phone up in the air in response and said, 'But there's another video in here, of a thin man.' She brought the phone to Dzhabrail in his cage. 'Tell me. Who's this?'
'Actually, that's me,' Dzhabrail said.
Musaev's final statement, which up took up nearly two hours, conveyed his fervent belief in the innocence of the accused. More than that, he was defending two young men, and he himself was young. He sensed that, at some level, everyone was proud of him. The Judge, though often irritated that Musaev never stopped arguing, was proud of him; the jurors, eight of whom were middle-aged women, old enough to be his mother, were proud of him; and the young journalists, who were proud of their contemporary, claimed that they sometimes even caught the prosecutors looking proud of him. Maybe it was tinctured by paternal benevolence toward an upstanding member of a 'problem' minority. In any case, Musaev concluded by playing on this feeling of pride. 'I'm speaking today before you, but I have two more jurors that everyone else,' he said, and went on:
'I have two more jurors, because when I first took on this case the first to
object were my parents. My own mother said to me, 'How can you be on the other
side of the barricades? This woman did so much for the people of our country.
She saved so many crippled lives.' And then I said to her, 'Mom, I'm not on the
other side of the barricades from Anna Politkovskaya or her children. I'm on the
other side of the barricades from the Investigative Committee of the Russian
Federation, which pretends to solve crimes and wants to call the innocent
guilty. And this is not something lawyers in our country need any getting used
to - we are always on that side of the barricades.' And this is precisely why
today I have two extra jurors, because today I invited my father and my mother,
so that could hear just how little this indictment is worth, so they could judge
between myself and the state accusers just as you are judging, honourable
members of the jury. That's all.'
Khadzhikurbanov's lawyer gave a short closing statement that included the argument that Khadzhikurbanov could not possibly have organised the killing on October 7th, because it was his mother's birthday. The most intricate closing statement was Moskalenko's. In sixty minutes, it expressed all the ambiguity and difficulty of the trial. She was a defender of human rights, but in this case, in defending the rights of the victims, she was supposed to be allied with the prosecution. This was not a role she enjoyed, especially in a trial where the prosecution was working with an untenable indictment.
(Karinna Moskalenko, principal advogada de acusacao, acompanhada pelos dois filhos de Anna Politkovskaya, Ilya e Vera. AP)
Now she went through the evidence against the Makhmudov brothers. She expressed doubt that they couldn't remember October 7th. But she certainly wasn't prepared to accuse them of murder. She pointed out that Anna Politkovskaya had spent most of her last years standing up for the rights of the poor Chechen families, families like the Makhmudovs. 'We do not accuse,' Moskalenko said. 'We categorically do not accuse. We are on the side of the victims.'
She moved on to Khadzhikurbanov and Ryaguzov with much greater zeal. The evidence against them was thin to nonexistent: Moskalenko knew that. And yet she also knew that they were guilty. They were guilty of collaborating with a terrible regime. Moskalenko now produced a compilation of Politkovskaya's writtings, published two years ago by Novaya Gazeta - 'For What' it was called - and began to read from her description of Russian war criminals in Chechnya. 'Who could have hated Anna for these articles?’ Moskalenko asked. 'Those who were responsible for what happened.' Were Khadhzikurbanov and Ryaguzov involved in her murder? 'At the very least, their view of the world in no way contradicted the view of Anna taken by the authorities.' Of Khadhzikurbanov and Ryaguzov alleged beating of the travel agent, she said, 'I cannot accuse a person without first accusing the system that conditioned him to think that it was acceptable to do these things.' And this was the essential problem with the case - what Sergei Sokolov called 'the total interdependence of the criminal world and the system of law enforcement.' If you believe the cell-phone records furnished by the authorities, why not believe their testimony? They had photographs of the people following Politkovskaya; those people were nowhere to be found. The defendants in the dock were like the ones the authorities could spare.
Most of the defendants spoke briefly in their final statements. Khadhzikurbanov, who had in the wake of Moskalenko's speech fallen into a state of deep petulance, thanked the jury for spending its time 'looking at a monster like me.' But in Ryaguzov, the F.S.B. agent, one sensed some of the underlying ideological realities surrounding the trial. He thanked everyone for coming. He thanked the jury: 'You have been plunged into the passions of real life, not a TV show. Whether you like it not, you will leave parts of your souls here.' He thanked the side of the victims for its courage. He thanked the Judge for being a model of impartiality. He thanked the defense, of course, and he even thanked the prosecution - 'who was just carrying out orders, like I used to do.' Ryaguzov had spent three months working on crossword puzzles. It turned out, at the end, that we were all just visitors at his place.
(O tribunal encerra para deliberacoes. AP)
He had earned the right of home court because he'd defended us all in the war on terror: 'Yes, it's true, we went to some restaurants, we drank coffee, sometimes we drank vodka. But no one remembers that for half a year we drank vodka out of aluminium cups and ate food out of cans.'
'People have spent a lot of time here talking about some networks of agents,' he went on. 'In all the world, and in all time, no one has invented a way of procuring intelligence, and counter-intelligence, other than through such a network. People know all about the terrible terrorist attacks that happened in our country. They don't know anything about the terrorist attacks that didn't happen - on the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day, for one. Not long ago, we were afraid to go into our entryways, or when we saw a backpack on the subway. It's not like that anymore. Do you think that happened by itself? It didn't. As for my wishes, I have just one. Next week is February 23rd, and everyone is going to go home, and raise a glass to the defenders of the fatherland. Spare a thought for us.'
The courtroom was momentarily silent. Ryaguzov told the truth: even amid the financial crisis, Russia is a safer, more prosperous place than it was ten, or even five, years ago. The war in Chechnya is over, even as its aftershocks, in the form of the mutant regime of Ramzan Kadyriv, continue. And in the new Russia if you mind your own business, drive to and from your work, hire a babysitter, and eat out - all as they do in the West, it is said - then you really can feel safe entering and exiting your entryway at four in the morning and four in the afternoon.
Para a semana: O desfecho do julgamento do assassínio de Anna Politkovskaya!
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