Mukhamed Gazdiyev is convinced his son was kidnapped by Russian authorities as part of a brutal crackdown on rebels in Ingushetia, a troubled region just north of the Caucasus mountains. But life was difficult for the 65-year-old retired history teacher even before his son Ibragim disappeared on Aug. 8 last year.
Born without arms, Gazdiyev learned to write with his feet, got a higher education and eventually became a high school teacher in this tiny, largely Muslim region of Russia that neighbors war-torn Chechnya.
He believes Ibragim was seized by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the Soviet-era KGB, which is waging a campaign against shadowy rebels described alternately as Islamists and pro-Chechen separatists.
PHOTO: AFP
“One witness, whom I will not name because then he would be killed, phoned me and said he saw how my son was taken by force to the FSB building in [the regional capital] Magas,” Gazdiyev said.
Rebels have killed more than 50 police in Ingushetia so far this year, but human rights groups say authorities are only fuelling the insurgency with a ham-fisted crackdown that often snares the innocent.
Gazdiyev said his son was targeted because Ibragim “vaguely” knew a rebel from the local mosque. After the disappearance, Gazdiyev began pressing authorities to reveal the fate of his son, who would now be 30 years old.
He asked prosecutors to investigate Ibragim’s disappearance, “but I never got any concrete response,” Gazdiyev said.
Still hoping for justice, he appealed to Ingushetia’s Kremlin-backed leader, Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB officer who came to power in 2002 and has overseen the much-criticized crackdown.
Gazdiyev hoped this appeal might succeed, since Zyazikov had been a student in one of his classes nearly four decades earlier. The teacher managed to obtain a face-to-face meeting with his former student.
“Zyazikov confessed that ‘specials’ had taken my son; he assured me that it was a simple interrogation,” Gazdiyev said, using a Russian term for FSB agents. “He told me: ‘I guarantee that your son will be freed.’”
But that did not happen. After learning from “police sources” that Ibragim had been transferred to Vladikavkaz, capital of the North Ossetia region, and then to Chechnya, Gazdiyev wrote to the prosecutor general in Moscow, to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, to the Interior Ministry and the FSB.
But each letter yielded only a brief response, which Gazdiyev eagerly showed a reporter: In one paragraph, officials told him the investigation was ongoing and had been entrusted to police and prosecutors in Ingushetia.
“The investigator at the prosecutor’s office understood me,” Gazdiyev said. “He told me he would like to help, but he also said that if he really did his job and revealed what had happened with my son, he would lose everything.”
The old man admits that his son has probably been “eliminated.” But he is determined to keep pressing officials for the truth. It is the latest struggle for a man who overcame a disability and learned to write, and even solder metal, with his feet.
“They say hope dies last,” Gazdiyev said. “But it has already breathed for the last time. It is no longer a matter of finding my son, but a quest for justice, to make the police to do their work and respect the law.”
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