Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  He could fill in a new form to appeal, and a decision would be due in six weeks, she added before turning back to her screen.

  She was not exactly unkind when she said it, but it was clear she had told so many people these same words that all the edges were rubbed off them. She was a study in bureaucratic indifference.

  Musa was stunned. ‘If you’d left me in Belgium, I wouldn’t need a pobyt or anything,’ he snapped.

  She kept looking at her computer screen, and did not respond.

  I have never seen a man change so quickly. The cocksure, jocular man who had tried to incite me into impersonating him was gone. Suddenly he looked old. His hopes of getting asylum were done. He did not even have the despised pobyt. That would have to wait for the appeal. He had nothing. He was suddenly an illegal alien in Poland, and could be deported at any time.

  It was terrible.

  ‘I thought I’d get a status as a refugee, I really did,’ he said, as we sat once more in the car. ‘They give refugees 1,000 zlotys a month, and now I will get nothing. Even if I get this pobyt, they won’t give me anything. I think they did this because I went to Belgium. I’ve lost my mood now, I’m sorry.’

  He was rambling. Earlier I had told him the British superstition about how seeing a single magpie was bad luck, and I felt guilty as he brought this up in his disappointment.

  ‘If only we’d seen a second magpie, I’d have got it,’ he said.

  When we had driven up to the office building, the stereo had been playing Boney M at full volume – ‘Rasputin’ – but now there was just Musa’s voice, bitter and broken.

  ‘I only came here to this centre to show you what it was like. I did not expect an answer. I won’t appeal it, what’s the point? It’s not just in Chechnya or Russia that there’s no justice. There’s none here either,’ he said.

  He sat quietly in the car for a while as we waited at the traffic lights and then, when they turned green, he pulled over to the side of the road.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve lost my mood,’ he said. ‘Can you go now? This is the will of the Almighty. Positive, negative, pobyt, it’s not down to me to decide. But I’ve lost my mood. I’m going to drive away. Can you go now?’

  I climbed out of the car. He did not even glance at me while I did so. He sat there motionless, and I watched him wait for a gap to pull out into Warsaw’s traffic. His grin had vanished, his eyes were bleak and his face was grey. The gap came at last, and he pulled out steadily, without the tyre spins he had delighted in just ten minutes earlier. He pulled into the outside lane. From his silhouette I could see that his shoulders were still slumped.

  He was on his way to the clearing in the forest where he would park his car and sleep that night. And after that? He had said he might go to Turkey. Or perhaps he will try his luck in western Europe again. Whatever he chooses – and I never even found out his surname, so I will never know – it would be even further from what he dreamed of as a boy.

  Had he not been a Chechen, I would have called him a broken man.

  32.

  There is No Need for This Any More

  While I was writing the previous chapter, a headline popped up on the news that Russia had finally ended its war in Chechnya. The anti-terrorist rules imposed there since 1999 had been cancelled, Chechens would be ruled under the same constitution as the rest of the country, and the rebels – if they emerged again – would be dealt with through normal procedures.

  The war, in short, was won.

  Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya on behalf of Russia, exulted in the news.

  ‘The nest of terrorism has been crushed, illegal armed groups have been neutralized, and militant leaders on whose conscience lay the grief and suffering of thousands of people have been destroyed, detained and brought to court,’ he said, according to one Russian news agency.

  Leaving aside the question of whether Kadyrov, who was barely literate when I first met him in 2003, could actually construct such a complicated sentence, the fact was impressive. He took over from his father, the mufti Akhmad Kadyrov, who disliked the Wahhabi fighters so strongly as to side with Russia, when his father died in a bombing in 2004.

  Since then, he has established a brutally personal form of government that has little in common with the liberal values that still underpin Russia’s constitution. Rivals to his rule have been brushed aside. The Yamadayev clan, for example, which allied with his father in helping the Russians in 1999 but became a rival for power, has been sidelined. Two of the brothers were assassinated in unsolved killings within six months of each other in 2008 and 2009. Their surviving brother blamed Kadyrov, but he denied involvement.

  A week after the announcement that the war was over, as if the rebels wished to put their hands up and point out that they still existed, they killed three Russian soldiers. So much for the war being over.

  In truth, though, the legal changes would have made almost no difference on the ground anyway. The violence in Chechnya has spread to Ingushetia and Dagestan. Policemen, civilians and soldiers will continue to die sporadically for the foreseeable future. The war may have lost its intensity, but it has spread out and it will take years to vanish altogether.

  Still, be that as it may, the Russians are right. There is no doubt that militarily speaking they have won. Kadyrov, a man professing loyalty to Moscow, is in charge. The rebels are marginalized and hunted. The most energetic opponents of Russian rule are almost all dead, and more of those who are not are in exile in Europe or elsewhere.

  I have to admit though that the Russian announcement made me smile. Just a few weeks before it was made, I had been sitting and chatting with an exiled former rebel leader – he does not like to be identified, to protect himself from retaliation – who made completely the opposite point.

  ‘Chechens have effectively won independence,’ he said.

  ‘Now the Russians have almost no influence in Chechnya. I remember a period when I could not speak in Chechen in the bus. We were slapped for this, and now day after day you don’t hear a Russian speaking in Chechnya ... I remember the speeches of the Russians. “This is Russian land, this is our land. If they want to build a state, let them build it somewhere else, this is our city, it was us who built it.” This is what the Russians said. And now, let them try. In Kadyrov’s Chechnya, let some Russian say it is Russian land.’

  I was surprised by his apparent endorsement of Kadyrov, whom he considered a traitor, and surprised still further when he told me he would no longer encourage young Chechens to ‘go into the mountains’ and join the groups resisting Moscow’s rule.

  He was still a firm believer in his people’s cause, he told me, and did not regret having spent much of his adult life fighting the Russians. On the contrary, he exulted in it. But now was the time to sit tight and repair their damaged society. The Russians who once dominated Grozny have left, so the Chechens have the space to rebuild their country in their own way.

  ‘We have won, the people won. There is no need for this any more,’ he said.

  So, who is right? Who has won? The Chechens, as the rebel leader with his fierce eyes and dark beard told me, or the Russians, as the Kremlin had insisted?

  Perhaps they are both right. If both sides of a war have won, then both sides have lost, and that seems far more important than crowing about victory. Just as the Russians have won militarily, there can be no doubt that they have lost in every other way. The former rebel commander was right. The last time I was in Grozny I did not see a single Russian out of uniform. Young people on the street barely spoke the state’s language, and my cosmopolitan Chechen friends, educated in the Soviet Union, despaired of the uneducated generation growing up.

  The city, which had been so shattered on my earlier visits, had been tidied up and rebuilt. New façades made old buildings look new, and new shops and parks gave Grozny a pleasant air. A new and handsome mosque with minarets and extensive gardens laid out in the middle of town added a suitably Middle Eastern look, only a
dded to by the portraits of Kadyrov on every lamp post and major building. These could have been posters celebrating an Arab dictator.

  Kadyrov, though he pays lip service to the Kremlin, has a style of government far removed from the nominal democracy in Russia proper. He has imposed elements of sharia law just like the rebel government before him. I was in Grozny in Ramadan, and alcohol was – for people without connections – impossible to find. Gambling had been banned, and women working for the government had to wear headscarves.

  The Russians who lived in Grozny before 1994, the Russians who sheltered with Yashurkayev and his dog Barsik when the bombs rained down, are gone. They live to the north now, in the heartland of the Russian state. The peripheries have been reclaimed by the nations – the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis – that the Russians tried so hard to displace.

  And without ethnic Russians on the ground, the influence of the central government has slipped. In a farcical series of events in February 2009, Moscow tried to impose a new head of the government’s tax department in Dagestan. His candidature was unacceptable to the locals because, quite simply, he was a Russian.

  Mass protests followed his appointment, and when he arrived in Dagestan in spite of the popular opposition, he was kidnapped and threatened with murder. Not surprisingly, he decided not to take up the post. This is hardly the iron hand that the Kremlin is supposed to wield.

  Just a few weeks later Kadyrov, in an interview with the Russian government’s own newspaper, made it clear the reason why so many Chechens have now changed sides to support the Kremlin. They want its money.

  Asked if he would like to lead an independent Chechnya, he said: ‘I will tell you why I don’t need sovereignty. We have a small country, not much room to sow and plough, and the birth rate is high. The oil will finish, and then what will I do as a separate state? Who do I turn to?’

  With such cupboard loyalty, the Russian government has no reason to congratulate itself on bringing up a new generation of Chechens dedicated to Moscow. Who knows where they will turn when the Russian money runs out?

  And yet, if the Russians have not won, then the Chechens certainly have not either. For the 190,000 Chechens or so who have sought asylum in the West, there is the pain of homesickness, and the bureaucratic complications of life in a foreign country. For the Chechens who have chosen to remain at home there is a lack of education, a homeland strewn with mines, a destroyed economy and, still, the risk of arbitrary arrest and death. And though Kadyrov might have brought stability, he has not brought law.

  Umar Israilov found this out in the most direct way in 2003, when he was just twenty-one. According to his own account, which he told me over a long afternoon in a Vienna flat, he had helped out the rebels in a small way ever since Russian troops returned to Chechnya in 1999. He had been considered too young to take a direct role in the fighting, he said, but he had done what he could.

  ‘I stored their weapons, I helped them. I lived with a couple of comrades on the edge of Belgatoi,’ he said, referring to a village south-east of Grozny. ‘And we were ambushed one night when we went into the village for food. They took us first to Argun, they kept us for a couple of days in a basement. Then they took us to Kadyrov’s sports club in Gudermes to show us to Ramzan.’

  I knew that sports club. A shiny building on a side street, it has a boxing ring and training facilities. Kadyrov has an office upstairs, and likes to welcome foreign journalists there. After being shown to Kadyrov, Israilov and his comrades were moved to Kadyrov’s home village of Tsentoroi, where Kadyrov and his father then lived in a large brick compound guarded by grim-faced, bearded men who watched you when you approached.

  It was another place that Kadyrov liked to show off to the press, but, according to Israilov, all this time it had a secondary function.

  ‘They had a list of seventeen or eighteen people that they wanted me to sign. They wanted me to admit that I’d killed them. I asked how I could have killed them, so they beat me for two or three days. Then they probably got fed up so they appealed to Ramzan,’ Israilov told me.

  ‘I said to Ramzan: “Take your dogs off me or kill me.” After that they started to beat me a bit less. Different people came to beat me though, then Ramzan himself. They knew I had stored weapons and wanted to know where they were. I could not stand it. After two weeks I admitted where they were. There were probably ten machine guns, mortars too, I do not remember exactly.’

  After that, things got more terrifying. He was still kept in the basement of the big brick compound where I used to be treated to tea during interviews, but now he was just beaten for fun. At one point, an old man was brought in who had sheltered the rebel leader for a couple of days.

  ‘They beat him so badly, even a beast could not have beaten that old man like that. They asked why he had fed Maskhadov, and the old man replied that Maskhadov was a guest and so he had fed him. They called him a dog and beat him for two or three days.’

  Eventually, the guards got bored of Israilov, and put him through an amnesty system that allowed former rebel fighters to return to ordinary life. Thousands of separatist foot-soldiers took advantage of the scheme to join Kadyrov’s own private army, and Israilov was one of them, though he kept the little kernel of rebellion in his heart.

  ‘I spent three or four months in their base in Tsentoroi, and then Ramzan had me working as his personal bodyguard for a year, maybe for a year and a half, then he let me go and sent me to my village. At that time, my documents were all ready and I immediately went to Poland.’

  Although he had reached freedom from his tormentors, in some ways his nightmare was only now beginning. He was sitting in McDonald’s in Warsaw, eating a burger, he said, when his phone rang. It was Kadyrov, whose voice he recognized immediately. He had no idea how Kadyrov had got his number, and pretended to be someone else.

  ‘He asked for Umar. I said I did not know an Umar, and that I had just bought the phone. He then told me that I should tell Umar that he had arrested Umar’s father and Umar’s father’s wife, and that he would kill them if I did not come back.’

  Kadyrov rang back every day, and eventually Israilov admitted that it was him, and told Kadyrov to just kill his father because he was never coming home. Israilov stuck to his word, and Kadyrov illegally held and tortured his father for ten months, before releasing him too. His father is now a refugee in Europe as well. His story tallies with his son’s.

  Israilov finally applied for asylum in Austria, and received it in September 2005. He was still only just putting a life together when I spoke to him. We were sitting in the flat of a mutual friend, and Israilov was trying to find a place for himself to live. At the time, he, his wife and his three children were living about a hundred kilometres from Vienna, and he wanted to be nearer to the centre of things, but it was proving hard.

  ‘There are flats but when I phone up and say I have three children, well, I have an accent and when I phone up they ask who I am and I say I am from Russia so they ask if I have children, and I say I have three and they say they cannot help me. I think I have looked at every flat in the paper,’ he said.

  ‘Poles are more friendly. At least, they look at you with a smile, but these Austrians won’t even look at you.’

  He finished phoning up the numbers for flats in the paper, and moved on to a property website. He must have called ten different houses with the same result. Although his German was as good as any I had heard spoken by a Chechen, as soon as he opened his mouth and introduced himself, the landlord put the phone down.

  This went on all through the long afternoon, and after a few hours he laid the phone aside and came to sit with me on the sofa. He put his head in his hands. ‘This is the fourth month I have been looking for a flat,’ he said, ‘and nothing.’

  Israilov had kept himself busy throughout his time in Austria. He had learnt German, and had submitted papers to the European Court of Human Rights to try to win recompense for his suffering. He had given evidence
to activist groups, and he had even spoken to another journalist or two. But none of it helped the fact that he was living in a far-off country, and could not fit in no matter how hard he tried.

  I parted from him sadly. I had enjoyed talking to him, and I was hopeful about his future. He seemed to be an energetic, intelligent man, keen to become involved in European life, who could go far if only he could get a little help. But I did not really think about him again until the next year, when a headline appeared on an internet news service: ‘Austrian police probe political link in Chechen’s killing’. For some reason, I knew immediately it was about Israilov.

  I opened the story, and sure enough he had been killed. On 13 January 2009, he had left his Vienna flat – he must have found one at last, not that it did him much good – to buy yoghurt. Two men were waiting for him. He ran zig-zagging through the traffic to get away, but stumbled and fell after his pursuers fired four times. As he lay on the ground, they fired two shots into his head. He died instantly.

  The killing gained a surprising profile in the international media. Obviously, a Chechen being killed in Vienna was far more interesting than Chechens being killed in Chechnya, but still it was strange to see how much more interested the world was in this bright, abused young man now he was dead. A suspect picked up by Austrian police was quoted saying that Israilov had ‘deserved to die’, since he had changed sides, which allowed the newspapers to speculate on death squads roaming the streets of Europe’s capitals.

  And perhaps they were right, for Israilov’s death was part of a worrying trend. Three Chechens had been killed in Istanbul in the previous few months, and Sulim Yamadayev – the most prominent pro-Russian Chechen after Kadyrov – was assassinated in Dubai in March 2009, just six months after his brother was killed in Moscow.