Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  The next one showed him at his most athletic. Stripped to the waist, he is making a jokey bodybuilder pose by straining his arms across his body to force the muscles of his chest and stomach to stand out in relief.

  Tekayeva kept sniffing as she spoke. At first, I thought she was trying not to cry, but she explained that in fact she had been kicked in the face while milking the neighbours’ cow. The cow, it transpired, hated men and it had seen a man passing and just lashed out. It had connected full in the face, but she had come to see me anyway. I looked at her with new respect after that.

  Although she was not crying, she now regrets not having kept a closer eye on her son, because a crucial two-year period was starting that would not just see his wrestling career but his entire life permanently ruined, as a result of events two continents away.

  Version one – his own version – is that he was trying to get to Iran. ‘I left Russia to go to Iran, I wanted to study at university there. I travelled through Afghanistan, but before I could leave I was arrested by the Taliban in Herat. They thought I was a Russian spy and they imprisoned me,’ he later told a lawyer from the British legal charity Reprieve.

  Version two comes from a Russian television station, which interviewed him in 2005, and presumably got the facts from him. According to the television channel, he was heading for an Islamic school in Pakistan, and was passing through Afghanistan to get there.

  A third version, which has been repeated in a number of newspapers and which appears to originate at another Russian television channel, has it that he spent time in Saudi Arabia, then came to Afghanistan, via Iran.

  Whichever version is true, no one disputes that Kudayev crossed the border into Afghanistan around the beginning of 2001. He was picked up by the Taliban militia, which was at that point ruling the country and giving asylum to Osama bin Laden. On 11 September of that year, suicide jihadis crashed four planes in the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people. Afghanistan was about to become a very uncomfortable place for anyone who had fought for the Taliban or its allies.

  A Russian prosecutor who spoke to Kudayev in 2002 said he had been part of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a violent group seeking to overthrow the dictatorial government in that country, although this appears to have been pure speculation on the part of the prosecutor, since he also said Kudayev personally denied having been involved.

  But that was academic. In 2001, no one was spending much time checking evidence on whether foreigners in Afghanistan actually had fought for the Taliban or not. Kudayev was rounded up along with hundreds of Taliban prisoners and dumped into the Qala-i-Jangi fortress in northern Afghanistan. The fortress was crammed with prisoners, many of whom had been able to keep their weapons. They rose up, killed their guards and an American interrogator, who was to be the first US casualty in Afghanistan, and took the fort.

  Between 25 November and 1 December 2001, the prisoners battled Afghan and foreign troops for control of the prison. It was brutal. The attackers at one point poured burning oil into the basement where the prisoners were sheltering, and dropped bombs onto their positions. Less than a third of the prisoners survived, and many of them – including Kudayev, who took a bullet in the hip – were permanently maimed.

  There could surely be no doubt of the young man’s guilt now. Only the toughest Taliban prisoners had been in the fortress, and only the toughest of the toughest could possibly have survived the battle. He was packed off on a journey that went through a couple of American bases, before ending up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

  It is a measure of the hatred Kudayev feels for the Afghans who handed him over to the Americans that he has called his dog after their leader: General Dostum. Tekayeva handed me a photo of the dog too, and insisted I write the name ‘Dostum’ on the back, so as not to miss the joke.

  This is not really the place to detail the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Americans, although he told his lawyer about regular beatings, denials of medical treatment, having to take strange pills, sleep deprivation and being forced into stress positions for long periods. It was a continuation of the nightmare, and has come to dominate his life. He has never been convicted of a crime, but that initial arrest by the Taliban has been enough to sentence him first to three years in American detention, and now to four years in a Russian prison.

  He appears to have become more serious about his religion during his time in Afghanistan. He identified himself to his American captors as Abdullah Kafkas – Abdullah meaning ‘servant of God’ in Arabic, and Kafkas meaning Caucasus – and it took some time before anyone realized who he really was. That came when in 2002 he was visited in Guantanamo by a Russian prosecutor, who was able to check records of residence in Nalchik. The prosecutor was in no doubt of the young man’s guilt, although it did not appear that Kudayev was puritan in his religious beliefs, judging by the fact that he smoked.

  ‘He immediately asked me for a cigarette, and started to ask how everything was in Nalchik,’ the prosecutor told a Russian newspaper on his return from Guantanamo.

  ‘But in relation to Russia, he was very negative. He said he did not want to return. He asked to be sent to Saudi Arabia, or to Afghanistan. He said he would also happily remain in America. As if anyone wants him there!’

  Either way, he did not get his wish. Despite his desire not to be sent back to Russia, the American authorities announced on 1 March 2004 that they had handed him over to their Russian counterparts. This was not a simple deportation, however, in which the ex-prisoners would be sent home and allowed to live their lives. A statement released by the US State Department said he and six other Russian nationals in the camp would ‘face criminal charges relating to their terrorist activities during an armed conflict. The transfer is the result of discussions between our two governments over the past year, including assurances that the individuals will be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law and will be treated humanely in accordance with Russian law and obligations’.

  Among those obligations were those Russia had signed up to on joining the toothless Council of Europe, including allowing due legal process and refraining from torture.

  For Muslims in Kudayev’s home town of Nalchik, those assurances would have seemed like a joke. Since the outbreak of the war in Chechnya, rebels had consistently tried to stir up the Muslims in neighbouring regions. In response, Russian police closely monitored religious congregations, particularly those that sought to distance themselves from the official state-backed Muslim communities. It became a vicious circle, with Muslims angered by police surveillance, and police following them more closely because of their anger. Basayev’s rebels kept a close eye on everything, keen to exploit other people’s despair for their own ends.

  In the circumstances, the law became almost entirely irrelevant. At one point, ten Chechen women doctors were put on the Russian wanted list as would-be suicide bombers. Their photos and names were posted around Russian towns, and police were told to look out for them. Their crime? An internal document featuring their names and pictures printed by their employer – the US aid group International Medical Corps – had been found by police. There appeared to be no other proof. The document was even written in the Latin script, making it abundantly clear that it had originated in a foreign company, but the police’s first reaction on discovering the pictures of the women had been to think they could only be suicide bombers.

  The doctors were lucky they did not get picked up before the mistake was uncovered. Russian courts did not require much evidence before convicting Chechens of terrorism. Zara Murtazaliyeva, for example, a student in Moscow, was convicted on the basis of transcripts of slightly anti-Russian telephone conversations. The judge ruled she had a ‘negative attitude towards the state’ and found her guilty. If she did not have a negative attitude before her trial, she is almost certain to have had one after she was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.

  So this is the situation – one of tension, illega
lity and violence – that Kudayev was brought back to. He was kept in prison while the authorities looked for a crime to try him for. They failed to find one and he was eventually released from custody in June 2004. For Fatima Tekayeva, his mother, it was a terrible shock.

  ‘He had changed completely,’ she explained. ‘He was changed, he was a real nutcase. He ate badly, he slept badly, he did not talk to anyone. Even if people came to see him, he would sit in his own room. He was not himself. He had been such a joyful lad but he came back from there completely different.

  ‘He had had so many friends in childhood. I could not sit down at home even. They were mainly Balkars, but even a Russian who adopted Islam came too,’ she said. ‘As time passed, he became a bit better, but he did not talk to anyone but me and his brother, and even if he spoke to us his head hurt. He would go into his room and say: “Do not talk to me, I have to relax.”’

  He needed medical treatment as well. He had terrible trouble with his liver, and the bullet was still in his hip. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow during his captivity, and he was weak. The wrestler had returned as a cripple. But he could not go to a doctor, since he lacked the internal passport that is the key to all the Russian state’s services. Without documentation, you are effectively not a human being.

  In the absence of medical care, the only thing that might have improved his condition was rest, but he did not even get that, because the police came and interrogated him any time they felt like it.

  ‘Rasul was at home between June 2004 and October 2005, and during this time they took him from our home in masks four times. They did not even say why they were doing this. One time they had him from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and we had to call an ambulance afterwards because he did not get his medicine. The ambulance took him to hospital and they treated him all evening, but I refused to leave him in hospital because I was scared, so I took him and treated him at home,’ remembered Tekayeva.

  Kudayev was taken to the police station and questioned on 23 May 2005. He was summoned again on 28 May and told a new case would be opened against him for alleged falsification of documents. On 19 June, he was visited by prosecutors, but was too ill to speak. In July, he was questioned by the FSB, then on 16 August he was abducted from home, and questioned for five hours about Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

  It was a horrific time, but the next photograph Tekayeva showed me was rather lovely. It showed her son having finally gained his passport. He is grinning, showing a mouth of white, firm teeth, and his hair is brushed down over his forehead. He is wearing a grey jacket, and a dark T-shirt, both of which enhance his good looks. Through an open door behind him, you can see Tekayeva doing the washing up in the kitchen.

  By this stage, Tekayeva had lost touch with all her other relatives, and was having to cope with just her sons for company.

  ‘If these relatives came to me and asked how Rasul was, then they would be visited and searched too. Since that time I have hardly talked to my relations so my problems would not affect them too,’ she said.

  But then, on 13 October 2005, the problems became worse. A group of possibly a hundred men, most of them local Muslims radicalized by the violence they faced from the police, attacked buildings belonging to security forces in the city. It is hard to know what they were trying to achieve. They did not publish any coherent demands; nor did they take a significant number of hostages. They just opened fire on state targets, apparently more or less at random.

  Basayev, the Chechen warlord, inevitably got involved, issuing statements on his website about the insurgents’ links to the Chechen resistance. But those links were tenuous, since the men in Nalchik lacked the skill of the Chechens, and were rapidly and comprehensively defeated. The uprising had been a murderous expression of rage by a marginalized generation.

  Tekayeva left home that morning unaware of what was happening, and reached her workplace – a clinic where she worked as a cleaner – at around 11 a.m. The fighting had been going on for two hours by now, but she, Kudayev and her other son, Arsen, were completely unaware of it.

  ‘At work they all ran up to me and asked me why had I come to work. They said war had started in the town. They told me to go home and sit down with my sons and not to let them go anywhere. Arsen had driven me to work, but he had already left, so one ambulance agreed to take me home, because it was going nearby,’ she said.

  ‘I walked the 300 metres home and Arsen had not even got back yet. He was just getting back when I walked up. I asked him where Rasul was, and whether he was awake yet, and Arsen said that he was still asleep.’

  The three of them sat, appalled, and watched the news – all burning buildings and dead bodies – for a while, before deciding that they needed to establish alibis, so the neighbours could testify that they had not taken any part in the attacks. So, they went and stood in the courtyard several times where everyone could see them.

  Kudayev even spoke to Russian television after the attacks, telling them that he had no connection to the attacks, and had no idea who had carried them out. ‘Some people say it was Chechens, some people say it was Muslims, and some people even say it was an Orange Revolution, ’ he said, referring to the colour adopted by the peaceful revolutionaries in Ukraine the year before. That last comment was surely a joke, but it was not one the police appreciated.

  For the police had a very clear idea of who was to blame. They blamed a Wahhabi underground organization bent on destabilizing Nalchik and establishing an Islamic state in the Caucasus. In the circumstances, it was inevitable that the police would think a former Guantanamo inmate had to have something to do with this illegal movement. Tekayeva at this point understood the logic of the authorities as well as anyone, and tried desperately to protect her son.

  ‘We never left Rasul alone at home. Arsen would either go to work or I would, but we basically guarded him at all times. On the 23rd [of October] Arsen went to work, and I sat and chopped tomatoes. Rasul slept. And suddenly ... well, I have no idea where the cars came from, jeeps, cars, they surrounded the house. I asked what was going on. They told me to be still but I shouted to the neighbours to watch that they did not plant weapons or bullets on me. They took Rasul from his bed, they put him in handcuffs. I told them they should put me in handcuffs, but they shouted at me, swore at me. I called my other son, and he came home, but they would not let him in, they searched him, they took his phone,’ she said.

  ‘They had already taken Rasul out into the yard, they turned everything upside down in the house, I have no idea what they were looking for. Arsen told them to take him too, but they said they wanted the Guantanamo man . . . They took Rasul to the UBOP [the Department for the Fight against Organized Crime], and I waited there until about six. They had come to our house about nine or ten, and left about 13.30. I waited at the gates of the UBOP and saw how they were bringing young lads, how they beat them, what condition they were in, how they pushed their faces into the mud.’

  Kudayev and the fifty-seven others detained that day have not been freed since, and those who got in to see them in the UBOP building were appalled by what they saw. A lawyer, Irina Komissarova, managed to gain access to him on 24 October, the day after his detention.

  ‘Upon arrival at the Sixth Department I saw Kudaev R. V., who was sitting on a stool, in a contorted position, holding his stomach. There were a large bruise and many scratches on the right side of his face near the eye,’ she wrote in a complaint to prosecutors and other officials, as obtained by the activist group Human Rights Watch.

  ‘Kudayev R. V. told me that he had been tortured and beaten after he was brought to the Sixth Department. The testimony in the interrogation record was not his, it had been made up, and it was not correct . . . When Kudayev R. V. informed the investigator that he would not sign the interrogation record . . . all hell broke loose!!! From all sides people in the office gathered around (by the way, none introduced themselves) and everyone started issuing threats at Kudayev R. V
. In the end, he could no longer stand it and said that he would sign the interrogation record because he was afraid that after I left they would beat him again. Someone in the room told me, “You are free to go, we don’t need your services any more.” ’

  Medical records show that an ambulance was called to treat Kulayev that night. He was diagnosed as having ‘psycho-motor excitement, hypertension in the arteries, and numerous bruises’.

  Komissarova saw him again on 26 October, when his physical condition was even worse.

  ‘They almost carried him in because he could not walk without outside help. In my conversation with him, he told me that he had been subjected to physical violence. That is, he was beaten when he was delivered to the building of the UBOP,’ she wrote.

  ‘He was beaten in the area of the lower back and on the heels. One could see that he could not straighten out because of the pain, the leg that he could not stand on twitched, there were bruises on his face.’

  More proof of his mistreatment emerged when the Russian security forces leaked a whole series of pictures of the fifty-eight men they had detained in their sweep through Nalchik that October. Some of the prisoners are holding up prison blackboards identifying them, but Kudayev is not. As a result, he is virtually unrecognizable, with only his eyes looking the same.

  Tekayeva handed me this next photograph with a grimace. Her son’s lower face and jaw area were swollen to almost twice their normal size, and the eye sockets were bruised and discoloured. The smiling man who had posed with his passport just a few weeks earlier was long gone.

  So, this was the result of Russia’s promises to the Americans that the Guantanamo detainees would be ‘treated humanely’. The evidence of what was happening to him was available to the Americans, but they did not complain.

  In the photo taken after his beating, Kudayev’s eyes are hard and direct. They look straight at the lens with rage and resignation. Unlike some of the other men detained, whose photos show them to be scared, he knew about being beaten and being detained, and he was ready for it.