He would sing freedom songs for his people with his guitar in his hand; was killed: Who is Alimsultanov?

Imam Alimsultanov is a Chechen musician born in 1957, while his family was in exile in Kazakhstan. He is a pioneer artist who, like Victor Jara, decided to sing freedom songs for his people with his guitar in his hand, despite having studied agriculture. Therefore, he is the child of the same fate, the same folk song, and the same conscience as Jara, who was arrested after the coup organized by the United States in Chile and whose fingers were broken to prevent him from playing the guitar before he was killed.

That's why Imam Alimsultanov means the same honorable words to the Caucasus as Jara means to South America. We are also talking about a musician who traveled from front to front with his guitar in the occupied lands in the 1990s, singing songs to his brothers who put up resistance not to lose hope and to leave the history of struggle they inherited from their ancestors to the future generations in an honorable manner.

Imampasha Vakharbiyevich Alimsultanov (June 22, 1957 – November 10, 1996) was a popular Chechen bard and folk singer. Alimsultanov was born to Chechen parents in the Kyrgyz SSR in 1957. His family, which belonged to the Zogoy teip, had been had been relocated as a result of the forced deportations of most Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia on February 23, 1944. His father, Vakharbi, was born in 1926 in the village of Bonay-Aul, located in the Aukhovsky District of central Dagestan, bordering Chechnya. 

Imam Alimsultanov was murdered on November 11, 1996, by similar power groups, with bullets emptied into him, just like his friend Victor Jara. Maybe if this massacre had been carried out while he was traveling from front to front with his guitar in his hand, the amount of pain that conscientious people carry in their hearts would have been different. Unfortunately, he was assassinated by those who occupied his lands, far away from the fronts where hot conflicts took place, in a city where civilians practiced their normal pursuits of life. While he was resting with his three Chechen friends in a hotel in the city of Odessa, he suddenly started knocking passionately on the door and shouting, “Sir! Your friend had an accident in front of the hotel. Please open the door!” This massacre, which took place with the call out, is actually an indication of how afraid the oppressors are of those who sing resistance songs with saz in their hands. Unfortunately, the person Imam Alimsultanov sees in front of him, who opens the door and tries to go out to help his friend, is none other than his executioner.

The secret service member of the imperialist country occupying its lands unhesitatingly holds the gun in his hand and discharges the bullets into Imam Alimsultanov's merciful chest, where he carries the pain of his people like a flag. Imam Alim Sultan, of medium height, with black hair, a light forehead, and broad shoulders carrying the warmth of his two children, falls to the ground in pieces. Strangely enough, between his fingers, which have only held a guitar until now and are too delicate to kill a person, there is a piece of paper with the first lines of the last poem he had just started writing in the room: “I am in love with you, O Lord! In this physical prison / I am a prisoner, save me with your call to martyrdom.”

Oppressors do not like those who sing folk songs. Because the consciousness of liberation produced by folk songs is more effective than any other form of struggle. Shakespeare's words, "Those who make a nation's folk songs are stronger than those who make its laws", in this respect, seem like a special reminder spoken to record the resistance struggles of oppressed peoples from South America to the Caucasus Mountains in modern times.