Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  And that is where the story takes us next.

  PART FOUR

  Beslan, 2004

  27.

  We Offer You Peace, and the Choice is Up to You

  Hundreds of people stood outside the tall metal gates. White-faced and red-eyed from four days of worry, fear and no sleep, they were now waiting to find out if their lives would be ruined for ever. Occasionally, the gates would open a crack, and a couple of people – normally a man and a woman together, sometimes two women – would emerge, blank-faced and stunned. Then, another trickle of bystanders would be admitted through the gates.

  The day was grey, and tiredness had rendered me stupid. Every now and then, a stray wisp of wind would push a putrid, sickly, overripe smell into the street. It was unpleasant, and seemed to cling in my nose. I was smelling it for the first time, or I would have known it at once. It was the smell that human bodies make when they rot.

  Beyond the gates were the victims of the Beslan hostage tragedy – the worst hostage raid in Russian history. The chaos of the storming of the school, where 1,300 hostages had been kept without food or water for three days, had ended. But no one had any idea of the death toll, and I was hoping to get into the morgue in Vladikavkaz to count them. Russian officials had been lying to the press and the hostages’ relatives all week. They had told us there were only 354 hostages. They had said the attackers had made no demands. They had lied again and again.

  The dead bodies would not lie to me, and eventually I too gained admission to the morgue, where I would be able to find out the cost of the disaster for myself. Ahead of me was a straight stretch of road, twenty metres or so, then a left turn around the back of the morgue building. The smell was stronger here. It almost had a solid presence, and it felt like cheese or sickness in my throat.

  I walked steadily, automatically almost, to the corner and, turning it, saw a vision of hell. To my right was a row of stretchers, with transparent plastic sheets covering bodies. The row receded for a few metres to a broader courtyard where dense rows of stretchers held still more people: children, men, women, all mixed up together. At least a hundred bodies in all. And among them were the living, sleepwalking from body to body. They were searching for their children, their sisters, their mothers or their uncles among the army of the dead.

  Two women, one of them with dyed red hair and clutching her face, stooped over a child’s body, uncovered it, then pulled the plastic sheet back over its face and walked on along the row.

  Many of the bodies were terribly burned and disfigured. In the furthest corner, a twist of gut emerged from a corpse’s stomach like a spring bracken seedling turned rotten and vile. One or two bodies were just piles of pieces in bags, while others seemed unharmed. One boy’s face is still with me. It was pale like a dairy product, with the same glistening surface as a cheap brand of cream cheese on sale all over Moscow. Freckles stood out on his face, unusually sharp against the pallid cheeks. His eyes were closed, and his long eyelashes fringed them rather beautifully. I had never examined a dead body this closely before. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, except that he was totally and unmistakably dead.

  I spent perhaps twenty minutes in the morgue before I walked out, my clothes saturated with the smell of the dead. As I pushed my way through the gates, I saw Viktor, a photographer friend of mine, coming the other way.

  ‘Wait for me, will you, I’ll just take some pictures, then we can go and get some breakfast,’ he said.

  I was not sure I could eat breakfast, but I wanted company so I stood by the gate, lit a cigarette and waited for him to finish his work.

  He was out again in thirty seconds, pale and stunned. He grabbed my arm for a second, then bent double and vomited into the roadway. This was a man who had documented the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan and the worst disasters Russia had thrown at him in a long career. This was the worst thing he had ever seen.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he said, as he stood up. We bought a bottle of vodka and two plastic cups, and finished it that morning, drinking toast after toast to the dead.

  In total, 334 bodies would pass through that and other morgues before the victims of this terrible crime were all laid to rest in a new, giant graveyard that would come to dominate the approach to the little town of Beslan, which had once been known only for its vodka factories and its shabby airport. Now it has a hideous global fame that will stay with it for ever.

  That morning, I had been awakened early. Perhaps, it was five o’clock, I did not know. The previous three days had blurred into each other in a single progression of gunfire and explosions and other people’s grief. With the siege over, I was getting my first night’s sleep all week, and was untroubled by nightmares or shakes. Then my phone rang.

  President Vladimir Putin, who had refused to negotiate with the hostage-takers and who must have ordered the storm operation in which hundreds of people had died, had come to visit the survivors. At five in the morning, he had presumably had to wake them up to do so, and my editors wanted me to see his reaction to the horrors all around.

  It was too late, Putin had gone. The Kremlin was too slick to allow the president to feel the popular wrath bubbling over against his government, so it had not announced his arrival until he had departed.

  I was left to wander through the streets of Beslan, which for the first time in three days were free of the throngs of journalists and grieving relatives who had been waiting for the siege to end.

  A police checkpoint tried to block my passage to the school building itself, but the police were sleepy and talking my way past them was easy. In the thin morning light, the school was a tired-looking rose-brick building, with two storeys.

  It faced a railway line. Perhaps, in happier times, the children had looked out from boring lessons and counted the carriages on trains rattling by. I walked along the side of the rails towards the school, and was surprised to see a man sleeping against the corner of the wall, in the school gardens. He looked shabby, like the homeless men who slept rough in Moscow.

  It was only when I saw that a couple of metres from him were four or five other men, all clumsily dropped into the pile they had formed when they had been shot and thrown out of the window, that I realized he was dead. These men had been murdered on the first day of the siege as it turned out, when the hostage-takers had feared they might form the kernel of resistance.

  A little further was a gate passing from the railway into the school yard. Here children would have played in the grass and the beaten earth, but now there were rows and rows of body bags. Black plastic bags, numbering perhaps a hundred, stretched away from me almost to the end of the yard.

  I felt blank as I looked at them. There was nothing inside me but despair. Overshadowing the whole scene, behind me, were three tanks. These were the tanks that the Russian forces had used to blast the hostage-takers out of their upstairs windows, despite the children that were still packed into the building. They had left huge star-burst blast marks on the bricks.

  The sports hall where the hostages had been kept for their three-day nightmare was barely visible, but from what I could see the destruction was terrible. Blackened roof timbers lay mixed in with body parts on the floor where children had played basketball. The windows were blown out, and giant scars marked the walls, where the explosives and bullets of both sides had ripped up window ledges, plaster, bricks and concrete.

  The scene in front of me encapsulated the horrors of the new Chechen war: the ruthlessness, the barbarity, the violence and the countless civilian casualties. The view behind me told another story: the three tanks summed up the brutal Russian response. Russia only had blunt tools for its job of crushing the Chechen people, and it did not care who got crushed along with them.

  Of the 334 victims, 186 would be children, many of whom were going to Beslan’s School No. 1 for the first time. September the 1st is a day of celebration in Russia – ‘the Day of Learning’, it marks the start of the school year – and they were
wearing their best clothes. The hostage-takers had chosen the date for its resonance; they had declared war on children, and the demands they made were straightforward.

  They had passed a shabby piece of paper to an intermediary, with a series of promises and suggestions, bizarrely detailed in the light of the horrific circumstances under which they were being proposed. Chechnya, they said, was prepared to keep the Russian currency, to enter the post-Soviet treaty organization, to remain neutral and to seek to prevent any violence against Moscow, if only Russia recognized its independence.

  ‘The Chechen people is waging a national-liberation struggle for its own freedom and independence, for its survival, and not so as to destroy or demean Russia. Being free, we will be interested in having a strong neighbour. We offer you peace, and the choice is up to you,’ it said.

  The Chechens’ ‘national-liberation struggle’ had come to this. The warriors who defended Grozny so bravely and gloriously in 1994, who had somehow miraculously defeated Russia two years later, were now forcing children to drink their own urine in a packed sports hall so they could win their independence. A disaster for both the Russian and Chechen peoples, it was a descent into darkness and evil driven above all by one man: the man whose name stood at the top of the demands handed over in Beslan.

  ‘From the Slave of Allah Shamil Basayev,’ the heading said.

  Basayev had learned his fighting as a volunteer in Abkhazia, a region within Soviet Georgia that broke free of central control in the early 1990s. During that war, he got very good at sending men and woman to detain, abuse and kill civilians. Taking his skills to Chechnya and beyond, he would be uniquely responsible both for prolonging the Chechens’ ability to resist the invading Russian forces, and for blackening his nation’s name in the eyes of the world. He himself admitted that he was a terrorist. Thanks to him, his whole nation was to be known as terrorists.

  He was one of the most dynamic commanders in the Chechen forces in the 1994 – 6 war. But it was not warfare that made his name; it was a daring, ruthless and radical raid outside Chechnya in June 1995, when he and almost 150 men darted out of their homeland, pretending to be a convoy of military trucks full of coffins and loot. They battled police in the town of Budyonnovsk, and then, seeking a base to resist the heavy assault coming their way, they seized the town hospital and at least 1,000 hostages.

  The siege that followed lasted from 14 to 19 June, and the Chechens beat off four attempts by Russian forces to storm the building. Russian heavy-handedness was broadcast around the world. Hostages waved white sheets out of windows in an attempt to stop the bombardment of the building, while Russian forces used snipers to try to take out the hostages so they could shoot the Chechens behind them.

  In a crushing humiliation for the whole country, Russia was forced to negotiate. Television pictures of the prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, talking to this bearded bandit from the south (‘Shamil Basayev, speak louder! You are not audible’ is the line that everyone remembers) seemed to confirm Russia’s post-Soviet collapse. The ceasefire Basayev won allowed the Chechens to regroup, to breathe again, and eventually to win the war. Basayev and his men returned to their homes as heroes, and the hostage-taking raid was confirmed as a successful military tactic.

  A deputy of Basayev’s who was on the raid later justified the attack, saying what they had done was nothing compared to what Russia had unleashed on his home village of Shali.

  ‘We analysed the tactics of the Russian troops on Chechen territory and concluded that only diamond cuts diamond. Therefore, we concluded that the only way to stop the war was to retaliate in the same way,’ said Aslambek Abdulkhadzhiev.

  ‘We did not make these plans except as a last resort. Why was the world silent when Shali was bombed, when some 400 people were killed and wounded? In fact, the evil we did in Budyonnovsk was not even 30 per cent of what they did in Shali.’

  It was a dangerous and seductive philosophy. If the Russians were targeting civilians, why should the Chechens not target them too? Why should the Chechens not commit evil if a greater good should come from it? Basayev himself had lost eleven relatives in a Russian bombing attack just days before the raid on the hospital, so why should he not take revenge himself?

  The trouble was that once he and his men abandoned the rules of natural justice, they found no stops. They had gained a great victory in Budyonnovsk, and they would try to do so again and again. But the philosophy is corrupting. A victory based on such violence is no real victory, as the Chechens learned to their cost.

  After the Russians signed the ceasefire and pulled out in 1996, Chechnya sank into complete chaos. The man who succeeded Dudayev as leader, an army colonel called Aslan Maskhadov, lacked the strength of character to keep the feuding warlords under control. Arab jihadis who had come to help the Chechens waved their money around, drove around in shiny new vehicles, and attracted private armies of men keen to earn easy cash.

  Less violent foreign sympathizers gradually were driven away from Chechnya by a wave of kidnapping that spread across the region. Most foreign charity workers pulled out after December 1996, when – in the worst deliberate attack in the history of the Red Cross – six foreign aid workers were murdered in their sleep, before Maskhadov was even elected.

  The lack of alternative sources of income drove more and more men into the arms of Basayev’s extremists. Maskhadov imposed aspects of sharia law, but Muslim puritans imposed their own executions on people they deemed to be criminals. The dreams of independence had collapsed into a lawless morass of murders, kidnappings and viciousness.

  Russia sent troops back in 1999, provoked by bombings that destroyed apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk and killed almost 300 people. The Chechens denied involvement (and lingering doubts persist that the FSB security service organized them for its own ends), but since they followed shortly after an invasion of Dagestan by Basayev, the Russian people was in no mood to hear their denials. The authorities blamed the chaos in Chechnya for fostering a nest of killers, and the Russian nation wanted revenge.

  In the terrible years of warfare that were to follow, Basayev remained single-minded in his pursuit of his goals: the goals that he was to express in Beslan. But he was to become ever more dreadful in the tactics he chose to pursue, taking the war to Moscow as he did so.

  My own first taste of those tactics came in October 2002. Recently arrived in Moscow, I had gone to the theatre to work on a feature article about foreign-style musicals in the Russian capital. The angle was going to be something like ‘American razzmatazz in the home of ballet’, but I never got to write it. As I stepped backstage to interview the producer, I was told that Chechens had seized another theatre on the other side of town. I was out the door, and taking a taxi as soon as I could.

  It was a wet, cold, rainy evening, and outside the theatre on Dubrovka street was chaos. Policemen unsure of what to do milled about, local residents and escaped theatre-goers mixed with them. A handful of journalists like me had made it there already and were looking for someone to tell them what was going on. In fact, there was no obvious sign that anything was wrong at all.

  Disappointed in my quest for information, I set off towards the front door of the theatre, thinking that the situation might be more obvious the closer I got. The building was a concrete monstrosity, with a huge light-blue poster stretching across its entire façade advertising the musical Nord-Ost which the hostage-takers had interrupted that evening by running onto the stage with their Kalashnikovs.

  In front of the theatre was a large car park, and I set off between the cars for the 200 metres that separated me from the front entrance. When I was about ten metres or so away, the glass doors opened and a man emerged into the night, lifted up his Kalashnikov and fired off a burst of shots over my head. I was stunned. I had never heard a gun fired in anger before, and it had paralysed me. I stood there looking at him for what felt like a minute, but was probably no more than a couple of seconds, before a policeman di
ved into me, knocking me to the ground.

  It was the beginning of a long two days of standing around, waiting for things to happen, and wondering if the Russians would once again cave in, as they had in Budyonnovsk and halt their military actions in Chechnya and agree to negotiations. This time, the Chechens had fewer hostages – about 850 people in total – but they were right in the middle of the Russian capital. The embarrassment for Russia was even greater than it had been seven years earlier.

  The Russians were in no mood to repeat their concessions, however. On the morning of 26 October, gunfire suddenly boomed around the theatre. The Chechens were firing in panic in all directions, as if they could see something the journalists could not. As it turned out, it was not what they could see that mattered, it was what they could smell.

  The Russians had pumped gas into the building, in an operation so secret they did not even tell the doctors on hand what drug they had used. Soldiers carried unconscious hostages out of the theatre like sacks of vegetables, dumping them on the forecourt where I had stood that first evening, before returning for more.

  The Chechens, unconscious in the theatre, had been executed where they sat. Television pictures showed black-clad women strapped with explosives slumped over in their chairs. Bearded men lay, shot dead, in corridors. A Russian soldier had placed a full bottle of cognac in one of the dead Chechens’ hands: heavy-handed wit for such a sombre occasion.

  For the operation had been, in human terms, a disaster. The Russian government had not been forced to stop its military operations in Chechnya, but 129 hostages had died. And all but one of them was killed by the gas pumped in to save them. Only one had died at the hands of the Chechens. Officials later justified their actions, saying they needed to gas the theatre to stop the Chechens blowing it up, but that was a nonsense. If the Chechens had wanted to explode their bombs and kill all their hostages, they had had plenty of time before they passed out. At the last moment, they had chosen not to wipe out all their hostages as they threatened, and they had died for their cause with little blood on their hands.