Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  I arrived late the next evening on a flight from Moscow, via the main regional airport. As we reached the outskirts of Buddyonovsk, trigger-happy Cossack volunteers with shotguns had only minutes before shot to death a female Russian journalist who apparently failed to slow down quickly enough at their checkpoint. The center of the city was a chaotic mix of burned-out cars, hysterical locals with relatives inside the hospital, and Russian troops and police, who were helpless to do anything lest Basayev make good on his pledge to blow the hospital to kingdom come should they storm it.

  Basayev’s demands were bold and basic: a cease-fire, the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, and direct peace talks with Boris Yeltsin’s government. But Yeltsin was in Canada at a G-8 summit, and his lieutenants dragged out negotiations, telling Basayev at one point that they had gathered over two thousand ethnic Chechens from the area around Buddyonovsk and would slaughter them if he didn’t release the hostages. To show he meant business, Basayev responded by ordering half a dozen Russian servicemen hostages shot in the courtyard of the hospital.

  As dawn broke on the fourth day of the test of nerves, Russian Special Forces tried to storm the complex. The Chechen terrorists held up some hostages as human shields in the hospital windows. The fighting raged on and off all day, punctured by periodic telephone exchanges between Basayev and Russian negotiators, now led by Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. (President Boris Yeltsin had dropped out of sight with a supposed ailment.) Faced with a mounting toll of over a hundred civilian deaths and the fact that the Chechen suicide squad still held hundreds more hostage and with live world television coverage, Chernomyrdin caved in, which probably saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, for the time being at least.

  As a precaution against Russian duplicity, Basayev demanded and was given some one hundred of his hospital hostages—including some who went voluntarily, among them several Russian reporters—to take with him along his homeward journey, to be released once he and his men were safely back in the mountains of Chechnya. The convoy consisted of a couple of buses and a refrigerated truck with about a dozen bodies belonging to his fighters inside. Cameraman Zhorra Vardzelashvili and I followed behind in a jeep.

  The column moved slowly, rarely faster than forty miles an hour, passing through the golden wheat fields of the Stavropol Territory. The sun began to set. Mosquitoes pranced in the dimming light. Russian military helicopters constantly trailed the convoy overhead. Every once in a while, we would stop, allowing the would-be suicide squad and their hostages (many probably suffering from Stockholm syndrome) to stretch their legs, and me to set up my satellite phone and call in the latest details of the progress of the odyssey after talking with the fighters. They all said the same thing: They had fully expected to die during their mission, and had never expected to return to Chechnya.

  Shamyl Basayev snoozed most of the way back, slumped in one of the bus seats, catching up on some one hundred sleep-deprived hours of staring certain death in the eye.

  Basayev had plans to drive through central Grozny in a show of bravado once the convoy arrived back in Chechnya, but the idea was vetoed by Chernomyrdin on the logic that Grozny was full of humiliated and liquored-up Russian troops, and a shot from one could spark another round of uncontrolled bloodletting. The Chechen commander apparently agreed with this wisdom, and instead of heading straight for Grozny, the column took a circuitous route though the deserts of northern Dagestan. As darkness fell, warplanes replaced the tracking helicopters, pouring out a constant stream of flares, illuminating the desert night sky like fireworks.

  We finally parted ways with the convoy in the middle of the night during a rest stop in the desert.

  CONTRARY TO PREDICTIONS that the Russians would ignore the agreement, peace talks did begin, with international diplomats arriving to mediate in Grozny. The Russians also symbolically pulled some troops out of Chechnya. But they left others intact, which meant the fighting slowed but did not stop. Haggling over a proposed peace deal lingered for months before breaking down.

  To complicate matters, Dzhokhar Dudayev, the separatist leader, was assassinated on April 21, 1996, while speaking on a satellite phone from the foothills of the southern Chechen mountains. The Russians had homed in on his satellite phone signal and launched a missile. It exploded a few yards from where he had been speaking, killing him almost immediately.

  Meanwhile, I continued to make rotational reporting trips into Chechnya as the months dragged on, living in private homes that had somehow escaped destruction and paying the owners for room and board. My host was Rosa, a huge Chechen woman with a screeching laugh who professed to be a member of a “women’s fighting brigade” and thus an implacable foe of the Russians. Who knows whether she ever really saw any battle, but she was making quite a windfall on the war correspondents staying at her cramped one-story house that lacked indoor plumbing. (Her rebel credentials came into question when I accidentally discovered a stack of papers under my bed—Rosa’s forms, requesting financial compensation for war damage to her undamaged house, from the Russian-installed authorities in Grozny. At the time, taking money from the Russians was considered treasonous among the fighters.)

  Rosa did seem to have a good ear for information, and a nonstop mouth to broadcast it with. “I’m telling you, Basayev is going to retake Grozny within a month with every fighter we’ve got, or his name isn’t Shamyl Basayev!” she shouted at me.

  I wonder who else heard, because the prediction seemed odd. The Russians and Chechens were negotiating again, and this time it was President Boris Yeltsin himself who had given the go-ahead for peace talks. The war was terribly unpopular in Russia and threatening to ruin Yeltsin’s reelection chances, bringing the possibility of a return to power by the Communists. It did not make tremendous sense to me that Basayev would be planning some suicidal assault on Grozny, which was still jammed to the teeth with Russian troops and checkpoints.

  But Rosa’s words made me curious. I set out to find Basayev. He was, predictably for a very wanted man, not easy to locate, especially after Dudayev’s death-by-sat-phone. He moved from one mountain hideout to the next. Along for the ride across boiling rivers and broken roads in our old Niva driven by our Chechen driver, Musa, was Carlotta Gall, now with the New York Times, collecting ever more information that would establish her as the Martha Gellhorn of the early twenty-first century.

  We spent one night at a safe house in the mountains, friends of Musa’s. Our hosts seemed nervous, and I soon figured out why: Musa whispered that they were embarrassed at not having any meat to serve their guests; so embarrassed that they could not bear telling us themselves. Still, they tried to put as festive a face as possible on the situation, serving us long green boiled wild garlic shoots collected in the forest, a diet that had kept fighters hiding in the mountains from going hungry.

  The next morning we set out again in the jeep, heading for Basayev’s ancestral village of Vedeno on a rutted road with a steep incline. The town (really just a collection of farm-type houses) went back and forth between Russian and Chechen control during the war. Now it was in Chechen hands again. Musa meandered through his network of contacts, and eventually we were taken to Basayev’s family home. Its windows were all blown out, the dwelling rendered inhabitable by bombing. Russia’s “Enemy Number One” was, wisely, not hanging around at home. But arrangements for a rendezvous were made.

  We drove up to the house. Shamyl Basayev, some comrades-in-arms, and Basayev’s father, a small, taciturn man turned bitter by the war, were waiting.

  Basayev, looking clean and dressed in blue camouflage, ordered some chairs pulled up to an old wooden table in the yard outside his bombed-out family home. We began talking over tea warmed in a kettle over an open fire.

  Years later, Basayev became perhaps the first terrorist to actually embrace his label as a “terrorist,” saying he was no different from the Russian army—whom he also called terrorists for killing Chechen civilians. Basayev always h
ad a wry sense of humor, but as the war years wore on, it seemed to become more forced, sardonic, tired, and bitter.

  He railed against the peace talks with Moscow, saying they would bring nothing.

  “It’s just another fiction,” he snarled. “They don’t want peace. They’re just using this period as a chance to bring in fresh troops and break our momentum. Now we Chechens are basically helping Yeltsin get elected,” he told us.

  Nonetheless, Basayev said he would “accept orders” from the Chechen separatist leadership.

  “But I’ll insist on taking harsh measures,” he added, hinting of “something to come,” leaving me wondering if it was just a bluff or if he was pondering some new Buddyonovsk-style attack. About that event, Basayev was adamant.

  “Buddyonovsk wasn’t terrorism,” he rebuked me sharply. “It was a ‘coercion to peace.’ Is it not terrorism when the Russians deliberately target Chechen women and children?”

  Eleven members of his extended family had reportedly been killed, he said, several of them just before his raid on the Russian town of Buddyonovsk. He had yet to take on the cloak of hard-line Islamism that he adopted in later years, or even come close to embracing the label of being “Russia’s Enemy Number One,” which he would wear like a badge of honor until his death, blown to bits while riding a truck piled with explosives in 2006, on its way to another attack. He was a hardened man, but one still capable of delivering an impish message with a wink as we finished our tea.

  “You’ll probably want to stick around Grozny this summer,” he said slyly.

  Something big was up.

  A MONTH LATER, Shamyl Basayev and his Chechen forces surrounded Grozny and the twelve thousand Russian troops bivouacked there. One version had it that part of the advance posse had entered the city disguised as part of a wedding procession. Then groups of fighters pinned down the Russians at their command posts. Reinforcements were rebuffed and entire columns destroyed in elaborately well-planned ambushes that resulted in huge Russian losses due to “friendly fire,” that is, tricking Russians to fire at Russians. Meanwhile, panicked Russian TV reporters trapped in the city called in over live TV, telling the country that official claims that the situation was under control were a “dirty lie.”

  I was almost as unprepared for events as the Russian General Staff. In Tbilisi at the time, I caught a flight and headed to the area as soon as I heard the news, along with cameraman Sergiy Karazy. Even approaching the outskirts of the again-besieged city was preposterously risky. The Chechens had blocked road traffic from all sides as they closed the noose on the surrounded Russians.

  Sergiy and I decided to try to get into Grozny by foot, all the roads closed to traffic by either the Russians or the Chechens, who had them pinned down. In stifling heat, we walked through a surreal and ugly landscape of modern urban warfare. Discarded Russian uniforms and body parts still lay around the city bus terminal as we passed, having already covered three miles or so. The stench of rotting flesh was everywhere, but more was in store.

  From the smoggy, smoke-filled burning oil installations, we could hear Russian helicopter gunships overhead, signaling danger and Russian control of the air. But every time we heard one pass, it was followed by a whooshing sound from the ground—Chechen fighters firing makeshift ground-to-air “Stinger” missiles fashioned from air-to-ground rockets salvaged from previously downed attack helicopters. Known for uncanny resourcefulness, the Chechen fighters affixed wooden handles to the base of the rockets, attaching to them improvised ignition devices powered by nine-volt transistor batteries, the kind a cheap radio requires. To guard against the flames emitted when these “Poor Man’s Stingers” soared skyward, the fighters had fashioned vulcanized masks from old car tires.

  I was invited by a fighter to try one but passed up the opportunity to experience how effective the rockets and masks were. I don’t regret this fleeting moment of lucidity.

  Fighters we met said a command center had been set up near the heavily damaged central market area, and so we went there to cadge a quote or two. Word had it that the area was littered with Russian corpses and that local kids were using the heads of decapitated soldiers like soccer balls, kicking them up and down the streets.

  I never saw or filmed that. Instead, as we approached the market, a familiar face emerged from the twisted metal of the market stalls.

  There he was again.

  “What brings you here?” asked Shamyl Basayev sarcastically. No answer was needed or expected.

  I asked him if the Russians could retake Grozny.

  His expression instantly changed, becoming stern. “Of course they can retake it. But it will cost them ten thousand dead and three months.”

  While Basayev jumped in a jeep with some of his armed comrades, Sergiy and I continued on foot. The Chechens had established their ambush positions; the Russian units were waiting for reinforcements that would never arrive. It was time to go.

  We had walked for several miles when we passed a half-destroyed fire station. Chechen fighters swarmed about. They were skittish, dirty, and aggressive after almost a week or so of urban warfare and demanded that we follow.

  We were led into the remains of a courtyard, where a wiry, thinly bearded man demanded our documents.

  I immediately recognized him as Abu Musayev, the Chechens’ feared counterintelligence chief and the man who was reported to have authorized the execution of my friend Farkhad Kerimov, the Azerbaijani cameraman, in May 1995. According to witnesses, Farkhad was approached by some Chechen fighters in the rebel-held south, who offered him a ride. Rather than an escort to Grozny, they marched him to a field, pronounced him a spy, and pumped his chest with twenty-two bullets. The accusation was paranoid hogwash.

  Now Sergiy and I were standing in front of the man who likely ordered Farkhad killed on the basis of his war psychosis.

  “We’ve been far too liberal in letting you journalists wander around our republic,” Abu Musayev, oozing suspicion about our presence, remarked. He kept leafing through our passports and ID cards as if looking for some secret symbols.

  “We know that you relay our positions to the enemy,” he said.

  I blurted something along the lines of “Why would we want to do that?”

  It was pointless. Sergiy and I were at his unhinged whims. Unlike a fighter bomber raking our car with deadly rocket fire, or our happening to be in a building hit by a random bomb, this situation was specific and very personal. The “Hanging Judge” master of Chechen security was about to decide our fate.

  Musayev was known for something else—some investigative journalists alleged he was also involved in giving orders to kill Fred Cuny, a legendary humanitarian activist from Texas. Cuny disappeared at almost the same time as I had been near the site of the massacre in Samashki in 1995. Theories abounded among the Chechens that he could have been a CIA spy—or that they may even have been deliberately fed such disinformation by the Russians. Cuny disappeared in those early days of April 1995 and was never seen again—just a month before Farkhad’s disappearance and execution.

  After pondering on that subject for what seemed to me an eternity, Musayev sort of smirked, looked around the burned-out firehouse, and handed us our documents back, obviously disappointed that he had no place to hold us or hide us—we’d only be a liability.‡

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  The day, however, was not over.

  A Russian hard-line air force general, Konstantin Pulikovsky, had issued an ultimatum that he would bomb the city into oblivion if the Chechen fighters did not surrender. This set off a panic among the remaining, now-tiny number of Grozny residents. They scrambled to get out through the only exit—a rarely used road out over a ramshackle steel-plate bridge in the southeast of the city.

  The morning of the day of the ultimatum for the Chechens to surrender, the day the city was to be incinerated, I awoke and Sergiy and I set off for the center of Grozny again, crossing the treacherous bridge in a car whil
e wave after wave of refugees streamed out on foot.

  With us again was my driver Musa, the Chechen with one lame arm. Before we crossed the rusty bridge, he stopped, gravely withdrew a piece of paper he had stashed in his vest, and began to recite verses from the Koran. He was not particularly observant (he drank alcohol copiously and smoked like a diesel locomotive). It was the first time I had ever seen him appeal to the Almighty.

  Musa knew the back roads, which meandered around the city’s refineries, exceptionally well. The only problem was that most of them were deserted and dusty and thus perfect places for laying homemade mines. A decade before IEDs (improvised explosive devices) became a household word of terror among US military personnel serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chechen resistance to Russian occupation had started fashioning early forms of the deadly item in Grozny from glass jars of gasoline set with detonators. We both laughed nervously, and Musa uttered the standard mantra heard throughout the war.

  “Inshallah,” he breathed. “[We’ll only die] if God wills it,” he said.

  The Lord allowed that we drive the gauntlet in safety, and we returned to Basayev’s makeshift HQ in the market, where we had seen him the day before. With Russian shells raining down, there was almost no one around. We shot some footage of a couple of young fighters trying to get a captured Russian tank running and then drove down the street where my former landlady Rosa lived. I knocked on the door. She’d gone, like most others.§ Just as we started to pull away, one of her neighbors, a tiny, birdlike Cossack woman we called Aunt Nina, ran out into the street. Aunt Nina was well known for her feisty tirades against both Chechen fighters and the Russian troops who had destroyed her Soviet-style satisfactory life. Already in her seventies and with no place to go, she had vowed to stay and guard her tiny house in Grozny no matter what. Now, with the still-intact parts of the once 400,000-strong city under threat of being leveled, she begged us to take her out. We piled her and one suitcase into the back of our jeep and headed back out of the city.