‘Their father is a hero’

A Dagestani columnist was sentenced to 17 years on fabricated charges. His wife talks about the terrorism trial and how their four children are coping.

Last month, columnist Abdulmumin Gadzhiev, who wrote about Islamic issues for the independent Dagestani outlet Chernovik, was sentenced to 17 years in a high-security penal colony. While the prosecution alleged that Gadhizev had engaged in terrorist propaganda and financed extremist organizations, including ISIS, the only “evidence” it had against Gadzhiev was a receipt for an innocuous airline ticket he bought back in 2015. The Russian human rights organization Memorial has designated Gadzhiev as a political prisoner, and his former colleagues are convinced that the prosecution was motivated by his popular column about Islam, covering topics from family relationships to Islamic law in economics and personal finance. By the time his trial ended, Gadzhiev had spent four years in prison. His wife Dana Sakieva talked to the independent outlet Bereg about her husband’s trial and its toll on their four children. Meduza is publishing a condensed translation of her story with Bereg’s permission.

A common scenario

When talking to people who are not from Dagestan, Dana Sakieva tells them that her husband’s case is about “a journalist who was arrested because he wrote about Islam in a newspaper.” She explains that the evidence against her husband, Abdulmumin Gadzhiev, is non-existent, and the prosecution’s argument is muddled and unclear.

Gadzhiev, the former Religion editor of the weekly Dagestani newspaper Chernovik, joined the publication in 2008. He had a knack for explaining complicated topics in Islam to ordinary people, writing on topics like Islamic economics and finance, says the publication’s editor-in-chief, Mairbek Agaev.

Four years since her husband’s arrest, Dana Sakieva explains that trials like her husband’s are not that unusual for Dagestan:

People living in Dagestan are used to seeing similar situations. The scenario is always the same: early in the morning, law-enforcement agents burst into a home. There, they plant something and then start making accusations. It’s always done very loudly, with lots of noise — and most of the time, there isn’t any “terrorist grouping” to speak of. Then, they arrest the husband, or sometimes the wife, and interrogations begin.

The allegations against Gadzhiev centered on promoting and financing terrorism. According to the prosecution, he allegedly financed three terrorist organizations: ISIS, the Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan, and the Supreme Military Majlis ul Shura Council of the United Mujahideen of the Caucasus.

As supposed evidence of the columnist’s terrorism-related activities, prosecutors presented a record of a 16,000-ruble “donation” made in 2015 using Gadzhiev’s bank card. That money, the prosecution argued, was meant to pay for uniforms, ammunition, and medications for ISIS combatants. While these claims remain unsupported, Gadhizev himself has supplied a receipt for the payment — which was, in reality, an airfare booking fee. Both the plane ticket and the testimony of the travel agency that sold it to Gadzhiev figure as exhibits in the case.

The 26 columns Gadzhiev had written for Chernovik also form part of the case evidence. According to prosecutor Murad Aliev, Gadzhiev’s writing about Islam amounts to ISIS propaganda — even though none of the expert witnesses summoned to examine the articles agree with this opinion.

“In Dagestan,” says Dana Sakieva, “we sometimes see pretty high-profile terrorism cases, and they often have this fictitious quality”:

The first thing you imagine when you hear about a terrorist is probably a person who must have hijacked a plane or taken someone hostage. But here, the argument is that my husband wrote things that supposedly promoted terrorism and extremism. And there isn’t any proof of this. The prosecution’s evidence crumbled before it came together.

Several times in the course of the hearing, she recalls, her husband said to the investigator: “Let’s look at this column together. Did you read it yourself?” Every time, the answer was that the detective hadn’t read it — and wasn’t going to. Perhaps this is because, as Sakieva says, her husband’s publications had been so moderate in the views he described:

Whatever their topic — the value of time, family relationships, education, life priorities, or something more specialized like economics — they were never radical relative to Islamic norms. The bottom line is that he wrote about how to live according to Islam today, in our time, in real conditions.

A chronic condition

Her husband’s arrest split the family’s life into what came “before” and what came “after,” Dana muses. After the first shock of the early-morning apartment raid, some friends started asking her if she’d noticed any signs of trouble or felt like she was being watched before. But she couldn’t remember anything suspicious.

Within a short while, she was consumed by “court hearings, jail visits, children’s problems, practical questions that I had to deal with alone,” she recalls. Abdulmumin was at the Makhachkala jail. Time went by:

My daily routine was full of paperwork, meetings with lawyers, bringing things to jail, work, children, school, daycare. Nearly all of our friends, as well as the lawyers, thought it would all be over soon and my husband would be released. They predicted it would take a week, a month, or maybe half a year. I trusted those forecasts and waited — for the month to be over, for the six months to be over. But by the end of the year, I realized that no one was likely to know all that much in a situation like this.

“When an acute condition goes chronic, things get a bit easier,” she reflects. The family and even her imprisoned husband were all forced to get used to him being in jail.

Dana credits their community for all the support that she and her children get. The four boys still go to the same daycare, school, and extracurricular activities as before. Everyone there tells them that their father has done nothing wrong and that he is a hero. “Out on the street, on the bus, in a taxi, at the kids’ club — there’s empathy from people we don’t even know personally. This means a great deal to me,” Sakieva admits.

A natural teacher

When she came to see him in jail, Dana recalls, Abdulmumin told her that he’d always wanted to read a great many works of literature but never had the time for it. In detention, however, he could read all he wanted, he said, trying to assure her that things weren’t all that bad.

A mathematician by education, Gadzhiev started out professionally by teaching economics at the Dagestan State University, where the faculty made very little money — unless they took bribes, Dana explains, but that wasn’t her husband’s style. After their first child was born, Gadzhiev started writing for Chernovik. From 2008 to the day of his arrest, he wrote for the newspaper, where his column became very popular with the readers. It seemed “unusual” at first, Sakieva remembers, but then became a completely habitual facet of their life.

She says that she gets letters, both from Abdulmumin’s readers and from the people who used to be his students. “Some say, ‘Have you ever seen an all-around D student with an A in advanced math?’ Abdulmumin taught so well that everyone understood his subject,” she says. The families of Gadzhiev’s cellmates’ also tell her that their imprisoned family members, who never had a formal education, are now taking math and geography lessons from Abdulmumin while in jail.

Dana’s visits to her husband took place on the fourth floor of the jail building. She found the experience eerie:

I’d go up to the fourth floor, and all the doors locked again behind me. I go through the building all alone, thinking that if I got lost, no one there would wonder where I’d gone. We were given 10 minutes to talk. At first, I could only cry the whole time, gazing at my husband, and he’d say, “Calm down, everything’s fine.” Next to us was the person overseeing these 10 minutes. I had to remember what I had meant to say, but I’d forget… With time, this too became just another routine.

She realized that court hearings were also a kind of routine. After a while, she stopped trying to understand the legal jargon and the long presentations of the defense, the prosecution, and the judges. She began to feel that it was all a mechanical process, where her husband was simply assumed to be guilty.

‘I wonder what my son will think’

When Dana first heard about her husband’s verdict and the 17-year sentence issued by the court, she couldn’t help thinking about how old their sons would be when Abdulmumin would be released:

These numbers are still stuck in my head: 28, 27, 22, and 19. Grandchildren come to mind next, since some of the children will have finished college, some might be married. They were little when my husband was arrested — the eldest was 11, and the youngest was just one-and-a-half.

By the end of Gadzhiev’s trial, the couple’s eldest son had turned 15. He decided to be present at the final hearing. Although the law requires that people in attendance must be at least 16, Dana says the judge let him into the courtroom — perhaps because he already knew the verdict. The teenager himself described what happened during the hearing:

We all stood up. The judge began to speak, but he was really mumbling in a monotone. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, so I just listened for a number. The first figure I heard was five years and six months. So, I was really happy and began to smile. Then, the judge started talking about some kind of property. I couldn’t understand anything. I looked around — and no one was smiling except me.

After the hearing, he learned his father had just been sentenced to 17 years on cumulative charges.

“When he was 11,” Dana says, “he understood what expert witnesses were for, and he knows very well how the whole case has been stitched together. And there, in that hearing, serious people in frocks issued a sentence that has no justification. I think this is going to stay with him. I don’t know what he’s going to think of the words ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in the future.”

On September 20, Sakieva got some good news: one of the three judges of the court’s collegium issued a dissenting opinion, criticizing the “evidence” against Gadzhiev and writing that the case documents, in fact, proved conclusively that he was innocent.

As Gadzhiev’s team prepares for appeal, Sakieva expects this opinion to be of significant help. “Of course,” she adds, “I have these gnawing doubts — we’ve already seen how, despite the witnesses who said they didn’t testify the way the prosecution said they did, despite the experts who said that my husband’s writings didn’t contain even whiff of extremism, he still got this sentence. This situation is simply outrageous, totally fabricated, and falsified.”

“But the appeal itself can take a long time,” she admits. “Sometimes it seems possible that a man could spend 17 years in jail, only to hear in the end that he was innocent.”

Original story by Bereg. Adapted for Meduza in English by Anna Razumnaya.

Published by permission from Bereg.