Dokka's hair is streaked with grey, but there is a sparkle in his eyes. He met me in a small room in a hotel near Moscow, where legal experts, monitors and lawyers from regional Memorial offices were attending a special seminar about changes in Russian immigration legislation. He greeted me like the owner of a small and shaky house, but a real one for all that: in the next room, women were setting the table for tea. Dokka introduced me to Chechen human rights activists, and told me how he ended up among them almost by accident, when he left his job at an agricultural enterprise.
"At dawn, there was a sharp, imperative knock at the door.
‘Dokka, are you at home? Open up!' a man's anxious voice cracked with tiredness in the silence of the morning.
I opened the door and saw a fellow villager.
‘My brother hasn't come home. He went off in his cart yesterday evening to get straw and he's disappeared. What shall I do?'
"It was 1995 (the first Chechen war lasted from 1994 to 1996); I was the head of administration of my native village of Goiskoe, which is in the Urus-Martan district of Chechnya (Russia). He had come to me for help, not advice. I had no choice but to get dressed quickly and take action. First I went to the man's house, but all I found was his sobbing wife, who said that she hadn't seen her husband since the evening before. I had to go to the military unit that was located near the village, and ask the soldiers to summon the commanding officer. The commanding officer - he was called Igor - arrived after about half an hour. He was a person who had still not been completely corrupted by the war. I explained the situation to him: this person was the father of three children, he had absolutely nothing to do with the militants, he had gone out to get straw and not come home. I asked for him to be released. Igor contacted his soldiers and replied that we had to wait. We stood there and talked - about half an hour later he was brought in an infantry combat vehicle, blindfolded and with a grey face. When he heard my voice, his jaw dropped, - he was so happy that I had found him. Igor told us to go home by way of the field - we were given the horse and cart, and he got home in the morning... His family was overjoyed..."
Dokka stops talking, without mentioning how many Chechen families during this time were deprived of their breadwinners, brothers, husbands, people who often very far removed from the war, trying to survive in difficult conditions. Finding a person in time practically meant pulling him out of the grave... Dokka worked as an "angel" for three whole years.
"The authorities are hierarchical by nature. In Chechnya, nothing depended on the head of any village: not state policy, whether his fellow villagers would be kidnapped that night, or whether the artillery would once again fire a few shells at the village "by accident". To the question: "Why did you shoot?" the officer in charge might reply impassively: "Oh, the gunner missed by a millimetre". Kidnappings were an ordinary affair - so I was representing authorities, who were criminal, unpredictable, and for whom nothing was sacred. Do they deserve to be obeyed? I didn't want to be one of them, so I left my job.
"In 1999 it all started again. Bombings, shootings, and then endless clean-up operations.
"In December 2000, Oleg Petrovich Orlov (the chairman of the "Memorial" human rights centre) and Tatyana Ivanovna Kasatkina (executive director) came to Urus-Martan to look for a person who could find an office for the "Memorial" centre in this town and then be its director. I was working at the time in my original profession: as an engineer at an agricultural enterprise. It was the office of the district newspaper that had recommended me to the human rights advocates - I had worked as a journalist for some time. They found me, told me about "Memorial", and what human rights activists do. I liked their offer to try myself out in a new job, as it was winter and there was no work at the agricultural enterprise. I went to Nazran for training, and I was given a text to edit. As a former journalist, I found this very easy, so the training did not last the proposed two weeks: ‘You'll do! Go home and work!' they said to me.
"And that's how our small office in Urus-Martan got started. In the beginning I was the only employee, but over time we were able to hire a lawyer, then a monitor, secretary and so on. We became quite an effective human rights team, although to start with things were difficult. The situation in the republic was so tense and abnormal that it seemed impossible to find any legal category to fit it in. At the same time, as a person "from the farm", I didn't even have any elementary knowledge about human rights. I had to study the code of criminal procedure by myself as well as the provisions of the Russian constitution to understand when and how human rights were being violated.
"In 2001, I enrolled at the extramural department of the law faculty of the Chechen State University, and in 2002-2003 I attended higher international courses on human rights in Warsaw. There were also seminars, but I learnt most from Chechnya itself. Every day I encountered various problems (people had their fair share of them in the post-war period), which had to be solved. I had very active practice: I worked on civil and criminal cases, and people came to us not just from Urus-Martan, but even from other regions of the republic, and other republics as well.
"For example, one of our cases involved North Ossetia: in 2004, Jamalaila Yanaev went missing in Beslan airport in 2004 after he had checked in for the flight to Moscow. It turned out that law-enforcement officers had taken him out of the airport building and driven away with him. This was all confirmed officially, including the fact that they had been helped by the airport head of security. This person had vanished without trace. His wife went to various authorities, but with no result, and eventually came to us. If the state refuses to investigate, then we have no choice: we submitted the case to the European court of human rights. Now we have already sent an appeal and it is awaiting its turn.
"In some cases, I act as a lawyer in court hearings not only in Chechnya, but in neighbouring republics. Recently, on 22 October, I was in Makhachkala (republic of Dagestan) at court hearings concerning the murder of Farid Babaev - he was the leader of the regional office of the Yabloko party in Dagestan. Babaev was killed on 21 November 2007, and two people were arrested. Although things in Dagestan were never as bad as they were in Chechnya, the reasons for this murder were clearly political. The circumstances bear this out: Farid was not only an active politician, he was also a human rights activist, who constantly publicised blatant crimes which representatives of power had allowed to happen. As human rights advocates, we cannot let the guilty escape punishment, but it is hard to find people able to stand up to a dispute between a person and the state, in the fight for justice. We questioned witnesses in court - and strangely enough, one of them, an officer of a patrol checkpoint service, i.e. a person with power and authority, rejected the testimony that he gave during the preliminary investigation, and changed it in favour of the accused. Then other witnesses began to change their testimonies - which means that that someone had ordered the murder, and tried to influence the course of the investigation."
This modest person, who insists that he be addressed by the familiar "ty" pronoun - "In Chechen, like in English, we just call everyone you. We consider each other equals" - is the head of the "Memorial" office in Urus-Martan, an international lawyer and regional legal expert at the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC) project... It's hard to believe.
"Here, in Chechnya, we do not just investigate kidnappings and murders. Quite recently we were able to resolve a number of civil cases. In the Urus-Martan region doctors and teachers were not paid their salaries during the years 1996-1999: the authorities said that at that time doctors and teachers were working for a ‘foreign nation', as they put it - Ichkeria (the unrecognized secessionist government of Chechnya), and not Russia. We worked actively on this case from February to May this year. The first case was decisive - it was important to create a precedent. If we lost it, we would lose all the rest, so we put all our efforts into it, used all our trump cards, and in the end we won. The court agreed that the present education department was the successor of the "Ichkerian" education department. The other cases all went smoothly. As fast as we drew them up and submitted them, the verdicts came in - all in our favour. An entire school and the central district hospital received salaries for three years. Then the district education department quickly handed out statements of indebtedness on salaries, and promised to pay everything.
"Besides the cases that I work on as part of my work at "Memorial", there are some cases I work on as an independent lawyer. The first verdict on a case that I worked on independently was delivered by the European Court on 25 September this year - I won the case. I submitted a petition before I began work at the "Memorial" EHRAC project, which protects the rights of Russians by using international law. The case concerned the disappearance of the son of the applicant. Armed men in military uniform broke into their house at night, arrested her son and took him away without any explanation. The next day some military vehicles were seen near their home and it was here that the kidnapped man was being held. The vehicles drove off in the direction of the centre of Urus-Martan. Several days later the mother, in the presence of two witnesses, appealed to the head of the FSB department, saying "My son doesn't even understand Russian very well! Help to release him..." The FSB head replied: "What do you mean, he doesn't understand Russian? He speaks it a lot better than you do". He had obviously already talked to the son, if he could make this conclusion. The mother wrote to various authorities and appealed to courts inside Chechnya and to prosecutors - including the general prosecutor. But the man was never found - he had disappeared without trace. When she came to me, I realised that the only solution for us was to appeal to the European Court.
"I don't know why anyone wanted this boy. The family may have been incriminated by the fact that the brother of the applicant, i.e. the uncle of the missing man, had been the head of the Urus-Martan city administration during the period of Maskhadov's rule and named as one of the leaders of the Wahhabi movement. Long before this, in 2001, he himself was arrested: as usual, unknown men turned up at night in military vehicles and took him away without explanations. A few days later his corpse was found, with marks of brutal torture.
"Unfortunately, sometimes people are kidnapped in Chechnya for no reason at all. A colonel by the name of Kayak was appointed commandant in the Urus-Martanovsky region. At a conference in the office of the regional administration where mothers, fathers and other relatives of missing people had gathered, he actually said "It's no secret that people are kidnapped to teach someone a lesson or for training purposes". In other words, people in Chechnya are like guinea pigs and are used to train officers of the special services. This flagrant violation of human rights has been the norm for several years.
"No one can guarantee that this horror will never be repeated. Whatever anyone says about the situation in the republic, until the authorities have the will to start investigating these crimes, it cannot be said that "democracy has triumphed" and law and order has been established.
"There has never been a case - or these cases are very rare - when the authorities have willingly changed something, or retreated from a position. We should remember that America took a long time to achieve equal rights between the black and white population, and many people, from Martin Luther King onwards, worked to change the situation.
"The situation in Chechnya can also not change of its own accord. However, if we win a case in the European Court, at least we achieve some kind of movement: firstly, the Committee of Ministers will demand an investigation of the incident from the head of state in order to implement the decision of the European Court. Secondly, relatives of the missing man will receive some sort of compensation. And finally, this means that some pressure will be exerted on the state. This is very important. There is, however, a problem with the first point: in some cases there are certain individuals known to have been responsible for acts of violence which caused deaths, but the investigation still proceeds very slowly. Not one court decision in this area has yet been implemented. But still, if there is at least some chance, some lever, it is better to make use of it than sit twiddling our thumbs: perhaps it does not seem as effective as we would like, but if we want changes, then we need to start with small things."
It's hard to say it without sounding sentimental, but Dokka is one of those people who does a great deal to change the situation. A person who carries out legal, research and educational work everyday. He is an employee at one of the 96 offices (judging by the list of "Memorial" offices on their official site www.memo.ru) in Russia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Germany and Ukraine... He is one of the good people of Planet Earth.