The Kungaevs’ lawyers, naturally, lodged an appeal, but were not very optimistic. Abdullah Hamzaev pinned most of his hopes on the European Court of Human Rights, not on the Russian judicial system, and the appeal to the Supreme Court was made primarily because that step was procedurally necessary before an appeal could be lodged in Strasbourg.
But then, a sensation: early in March 2003 the Military College of the Supreme Court unexpectedly annulled the verdict, acknowledged irregularities, and decreed that a retrial should take place. The case was to go back to the start of the investigation and convene in Rostov-on-Don in the same district military court, but with a different judge presiding.
On the Russian political map, the Supreme Court has long been regarded as no more than a department of the president’s office rather than as the highest level of an independent national judicial authority. Thus this turn of events could mean only one thing: the winds in the Kremlin had changed direction and the president had turned his back on the notion that a Russian officer in Chechnya was always in the right. Again, as in spring 2000, Putin was trying to position himself publicly as the champion of the dictatorship of law, and the 2004 preelection presidential campaign was about to begin. Putin’s United Russia Party also faced parliamentary elections in December 2003. The front-running slogan for both campaigns was “The law rules supreme.”
On April 9, 2003, the court in Rostov-on-Don reconvened. The colonel was a changed man. There was little sign of the brazen lout who almost spat at the judge and insulted the parents of the murdered girl. He complained he had been betrayed. He was plainly nervous. He demanded a trial by jury but was refused. He then ceased to reply to questions, stuck cotton in his ears, and sat in the dock reading. Colonel Vladimir Bukreev, deputy chairman of the district military court, now presided over the bench. For the first time, witnesses were called for cross-examination. This was a revolution.
First to be questioned was General Gerasimov. He reported that Budanov, as the commanding officer of a tank regiment and hence a representative of the Ministry of Defense rather than of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had had no right to search the village of Tangi-Chu looking for a female sniper. Arresting suspected members of IAFs was a matter for the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, and the police. Moreover, General Gerasimov testified that the regiment had received no orders to conduct search operations in February and March 2000. Budanov himself had “no right to be checking passports and accommodations in populated areas, and no right to be gathering intelligence there.”
Then Yakhyaev, the head of the municipal administration of Duba-Yurt, was called to give evidence. According to Budanov, Yakhyaev was the one who had given him the photograph of men and women carrying snipers’ rifles, which had been the main reason why Budanov had gone looking for a sniper in Tangi-Chu. Yakhyaev now told the court he had given no such photograph to Budanov. His statement was corroborated by a certain Pankov, who had been in Chechnya as a senior FSB agent in late December 1999 and early January 2000. Pankov testified that Budanov had indeed met Yakhyaev several times in his presence but that Yakhyaev had not given Budanov any photograph or said anything to him about a female sniper. Neither had Budanov himself made any mention to Pankov of a photograph or a sniper.
As a result, all Budanov’s testimony in his own defense was discredited. On July 25, 2003, sentence was passed: ten years’ detention in strict-regime labor camps. Budanov is due for release on March 27, 2010.
Budanov undoubtedly got what he deserved, and even if his comeuppance was as the result of preelection maneuvering and opportunistic political intrigue, one can only welcome the court’s just verdict, of which there are so few in Russia. The trial certainly cut against the grain. The majority of the army top brass, and virtually all of the officers’ corps, especially in the Caucasus, categorically rejected the verdict. Greatly incensed, they were convinced that Budanov had suffered only because he had honorably defended the motherland. They took the ten-year sentence and the stripping of Budanov’s awards and rank as a personal insult. Since the military courts are, to all intents and purposes, part of the military, not the judiciary, Judge Bukreev’s position was a brave act, because he was simultaneously passing sentence on himself.
No matter how dramatic the controversies surrounding the Budanov case, the story of his conviction is an exception to the rule. Political circumstances placed his crime in the limelight and brought the case to the public’s attention, with important political consequences. The authorities were forced to give permission to the court to find Budanov guilty. In other war-crimes trials in which the accused were members of the Russian federal forces, the charges were frozen, and the security services exerted themselves only to enable the criminals to escape punishment, even when monstrous acts had been committed.
For example, on January 12, 2002, six military groups landed in the vicinity of the Chechen highland village of Dai. They were searching for fighters, among them Field Commander Hattab, who, according to operational intelligence, had recently been wounded and was in the region.
What happened then came to be called Budanov Case II. Ten men from a special operations unit tied to the Central Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of General Headquarters, landed from helicopters. Seeing a minibus on the road, they stopped it and ordered everybody to get out. They first tortured the passengers, trying to get them to reveal the whereabouts of fighters, then killed all six, and finished by burning the bodies.
The official agencies promptly dubbed this brutal, lawless execution “a military clash with IAFs.” There were witnesses, however, who quickly made that story untenable. All six passengers proved to be ordinary civilians returning on a scheduled trip from the district of Shatoy to their homes. Among them was forty-year-old Zainap Djavathanova, the mother of seven children, ages two to seventeen years, and expecting her eighth. All that remained of her was one foot in a shoe, from which her husband and older children identified her. That day she had been to Grozny to be examined by a gynecologist.
Then there was the headmaster of the Nokhchi-Keloy village school, Said Mahomed Alskhanov, sixty-nine years old, and Abdul-Wahab Satabaev, the history teacher at the school. They were returning from a teachers’ meeting in Shatoy. The fourth body belonged to Shahban Bahaev, a forester. The fifth was that of a nephew of the pregnant Zainap, Djamalaili Musaev, accompanying her on the journey as was customary in that region. The sixth body was the bus driver, Hamzat Tuburov, a father of five. The entire district knew him well, because every day he drove whoever required transport from Shatoy to the various highland villages and back.
On the evening of January 12, all the killers were arrested. The Shatoy District prosecutor’s office, acting on the evidence of a chance witness, Major Vitaly Nevmerzhitsky of military intelligence, managed to obtain permission to make the arrests, which were virtually unprecedented in Chechnya. The special operations troops were handed over shortly afterward to the investigators of the military prosecutor’s office, and Criminal Case No. 76002 was brought against them.