Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

In early 2005, a few months before Basayev gave that interview, I visited a building in Grozny used as a home by hundreds of Chechens whose houses had been destroyed. The families there had lived in refugee camps outside Chechnya, but the Russian government, embarrassed by the camps and their silent reproof, had forced the inhabitants to go home.

  In one room, Viskhan Siriyev lay on a bed, and writhed away from me as I walked in. He was sixteen, but was as small as someone half his age, and his thin arms barely covered his huge eyes as he tried to hide himself from the upsetting visit of a stranger. Five members of his family shared this one room, and they took it in turns to care for their brother, who had not spoken since a bomb destroyed his family’s home ten years before.

  He might be still alive, but he was as much a casualty of the Chechen war as anyone who had actually died. And, in a cruel irony, he could not go abroad to receive the treatment he needed since he could not get a passport. The reason he could not get a passport spoke volumes about the cruelty and indifference of the Russian administration. He had to be photographed by an authorized photographer for his passport to be valid. His family dared not take him out of the room, since it upset him too much.

  The photographer was too arrogant to come to this room, even if it might have meant an easier life for a terrified and ruined child. As a result, he had no valid passport and no chance of treatment.

  Across the other side of the town was the Republican Children’s Hospital, where staff and patients were bundled into huge coats against the cold, and the only heating was naked gas flames in the corridors. Doctors and nurses were doing what they could but they lacked medicines, resources and equipment, and the health situation was disastrous.

  Sultan Alimkhadzhiyev, the head doctor at the hospital, welcomed me to his office but had none of the exuberant Chechen hospitality when he described the horrors he dealt with every day.

  ‘Almost all the children, probably 80 per cent, have psychological trauma. They have seen death, explosions. That’s about 300,000 children, ’ he told me.

  Infant mortality, he said, was probably 50 per 1,000 – double the level in the rest of Russia – and he guessed that every fourth or fifth child born had some kind of birth defect, reflecting the terrible state of their mothers.

  While aid had been pouring into Beslan to help the children rebuild their shattered lives, he was left with just the hard-working staff of his hospital to try to reconstruct a whole country’s future.

  I could see why Chechens would be angered by what Russia had done to them. And it was that anger, caused by Russia’s total destruction of Chechen society, that was driving Basayev’s attacks on his enemies wherever he might find them. But it was enough to remember the morgue in Vladikavkaz, where the children were laid out like lengths of timber in a saw mill, to know that his response was wrong.

  It did not help the children of Chechnya if the children of Beslan suffered, and no matter how horrible Basayev’s response, the Russian state could withstand anything he threw at it.

  No one mourned Basayev when he died in an explosion in July 2006, ending a chapter in Chechen history more terrible than anything before it.

  When I think of his victims, I always remember first that boy in the morgue with the butter-pale face. The serenity of his features in that place of death was touching. I was holding cotton wool dipped in some strong-smelling liquid to my nose – it was being given out by medical assistants – to hide the smell, but there was no hiding from the horrors before my eyes. There had been no horror in his face though. It was whole and undamaged.

  I do not know his name, but in my mind I imagine that he might have been Kazbek Bichegov-Begoshvili, a nine-year-old boy who died in the siege.

  I became, during my repeated visits to Beslan, friendly with Kazbek’s parents. By the time the first anniversary came round, they had a new baby. They called him Sarmat.

  ‘I decided to have this child for my wife. She was crying all the time. And maybe I did it for myself as well, to make it easier for me. For my soul,’ explained Roman, the baby’s father, as we drank vodka on one of my many visits to the family in their home just a hundred metres from School No. 1.

  Roman looked shattered, a decade at least older than his forty-two years. Most of the time he smoked, standing in the courtyard outside his single-storey home, and looked blankly into the distance. Sometimes we smoked together. Sometimes we talked, but most of the time we did not.

  Sometimes we could hear Sarmat crying inside the house, a new life untouched by the siege. Perhaps he will grow up to be a man in a Caucasus without war.

  ‘I want Sarmat’s life to be happy, not just his life, but all our children’s lives. We have to hope this new generation will be without grief,’ said his mother Zarema as she held him in her arms.

  But, with the heavy load of anger and deprivation weighing down a new generation growing up just a hundred kilometres away in Grozny, I fear the cycle of violence will not stop just because she wishes it.

  28.

  I Cannot Even Raise My Eyes towards Them

  The victims and bereaved relatives of Basayev’s actions rarely got the chance to see their attackers face punishment for what they did. Suicide bombers did not survive to face justice, and the hostage-takers also tended to know they were on a one-way mission.

  That was why the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, a Chechen man born in 1980, was so extraordinary when it opened in May 2005 in the city of Vladikavkaz.

  While gunfire had cracked overhead, and the rebels within the Beslan school building battled with special forces troops outside, he had been picked up by police trying to escape from the building.

  He was not local, and he barely spoke Russian, so it did not take the police long to work out that he had been part of the group of hostage-takers. He was the only one that survived and so became a target for all the hatred and anger directed at the group of armed men who had brought death to School No. 1.

  On the first day, as a prosecutor tried to read out the charges against Kulayev, the bereaved relatives packed into the tiny courtroom screamed and shouted at the defendant. Judge Tamerlan Aguzarov was forced to appeal to the crowd.

  ‘Let’s not make this process into a disgrace,’ he said, but his words had little effect. He postponed the session to another day, and he was forced to order that Kulayev’s head be shaved. The crowd was angry that the defendant’s long dark hair was obscuring his face.

  The start of the second session was much the same.

  ‘I ask you all to calm down,’ the judge said, but again with no response.

  ‘He should be forced onto his knees,’ a woman shouted from the crowd.

  And so it continued throughout that whole second day. Kulayev remained standing – voluntarily, as it happened; he could have sat down – as the judge read out the long charge list, including a list of all the victims of the attack which alone took ten minutes to detail. The slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale figure in the defendant’s cage was charged with terrorism, hostage-taking, murder and more – a whole litany of charges that seemed to span the entire Russian criminal code. The women and men in the courtroom stared at him with hatred. At the end of that long day, he was asked whether he accepted his guilt.

  ‘No,’ he said, mumbling through his thick Chechen accent. He was asked to repeat himself, and to speak more loudly.

  ‘You shouted well in the hall,’ one woman yelled at him from the crowd.

  ‘Not guilty,’ he said. ‘I was there because of my brother.’

  His chances of persuading the court that he was not guilty seemed slim. The awesome moral force of the bereaved mothers of Beslan was already being felt by the Russian government. They demanded a full inquiry into the disaster, and received visits by some of Putin’s top officials on a regular basis. It was impossible that a single judge would withstand their desire for vengeance and go easy on the defendant. Kulayev discovered this when he asked if he could have a translator.

  ‘I am no
t agree. I without translator, I cannot completely. I badly understand in Russian. Without a translator I cannot, I have said. I do not know in Russian,’ he said in broken and thickly accented Russian, but he won no sympathy from the judge.

  ‘What? You don’t understand Russian? You speak Russian beautifully, ’ the judge replied.

  Even I could tell he did not speak Russian beautifully. His accent was so thick as to be almost incomprehensible, but his request was denied – the prosecutors weighed in as well to try to persuade him that having a translator was not in his interests, since it would make it difficult to ask questions – and the trial got under way.

  The hearings were chaotic. Rows of women in black with headscarves packed the benches in the small hall on the first floor of the court building. Journalists sat downstairs, where a television link played a simultaneous recording of the events. Even from there it was obvious that the judge was failing to keep control.

  Under Russian law, there are not just two sides to a case – the defence and prosecution – but also a side representing the victims. The victims now had the chance to question the defendant, the judge and the lawyers on almost any question they wanted. Regularly, they launched into long conversations with one of the other participants, or with each other. And since there were more than 1,000 victims – the former hostages or the killed hostages’ bereaved relatives – the process threatened to last for ever.

  Often, the judge had to call a halt to proceedings to calm down the angry women, who had organized themselves into a group called the Beslan Mothers. They had their own interests, and wanted a full inquiry into the events. They believed Kulayev could tell them more than he was being allowed to say, and regularly expressed sympathy for him.

  But the majority of the victims and the witnesses had no such warm feelings. Hatred boiled out of people when they were asked to make any comments about him, regularly showing the amount of thought that had gone into fantasies of revenge.

  ‘I have heard that Kulayev beat children with the butt of his rifle. Maybe he killed them, or not, but he beat them. And kicked them. Which children, I do not know. But that he abused children, that is certain. He is guilty just because he was in the band. And he should be tried on all articles of the law. He should be shot. Take him out on the square and shoot him. He should be lynched. Three hundred children have been killed, 330 people,’ said one man at the start of a long, scarcely coherent rant against the defendant.

  ‘There should not be just punishment. Shoot him! The highest form of punishment . . . Mr Judge, I ask you, believe no one, he was in the band, that means he is already guilty on all counts. All. If I had been there, I also would have been shot. The highest form of punishment. Because I would already have been in a group. It was a common group. Common. This group came together to take the school. They all know well that he was going somewhere.’

  With witnesses dissolving into such anger, it is not surprising that the trial failed to establish much in the way of evidence. Kulayev’s attempts to defend himself – which we will come to – were ignored by almost everyone. Victims came and asked him the same questions over and over again. Why had he attacked their children? Why had he attacked them? Who had been his accomplices? And so it went on for sixty-one court sessions of grief and chaos.

  Some witnesses, like the man quoted above, said Kulayev had beaten children, or shot in the air, but the majority said they had not seen him, and their evidence did nothing but complicate an already tangled mess of evidence. Some said he had been kind to them, and nicer than the other hostage-takers. But there did not seem any logic to the process. There was no attempt to establish which testimony was correct, or even to pretend the court was fair.

  ‘Who taught you to fight, so as to kidnap small children? Why could you not have attacked a military base?’ asked the judge at one point, leaving no doubt that he had already made up his own mind about Kulayev’s guilt.

  And, in truth, who could believe this man’s protestations of innocence? Kulayev had been caught escaping from the school, he admitted having been inside. His claims not to have fired a gun and to have not killed a hostage seemed farcical. There was no doubt at all, from the very start, that he would be convicted. And he duly was.

  The prosecutors asked for the death penalty – even though Russia has proclaimed a moratorium on its use – but the judge did not impose it. Sentencing Kulayev to death would have meant obliging Putin to pardon him, which would not have been a popular decision with the Kremlin, so Kulayev received life imprisonment. It appeared to be a fair end for an evil man.

  Even his lawyer, a 25-year-old who had held a lawyer’s licence for just a fortnight and who was only appointed to represent him ten days before the trial opened, clearly did not believe his client was innocent, and did not pretend to when appearing in court.

  ‘Of course, I did not want to defend him, but it is hard to argue with the decision of the court,’ he told one local journalist after the first session.

  ‘Such cases cannot be examined without a lawyer in court. I was the duty lawyer at that time and I could not refuse,’ he added, desperate to justify himself before his people, and to reassure them that he did not like or believe Kulayev.

  ‘I do not think this will mark the death of my career. I think there is an understanding that the defence of Kulayev is an obligation.’

  Although I am not saying the lawyer did not do his job as well as he could, it is hard to see how this attitude was in his client’s interests. He even began his summing up of his client’s defence with an apology.

  ‘My position as lawyer of the accused Kulayev is very difficult, and internally contradictory,’ he said.

  ‘You must understand me, I am a lawyer. I am tied to the position of my defendant. The defendant has the right to choose, his lawyer does not. Today I am not defending the crime, I am defending the rights of my defendant.’

  Without even the faith of his lawyer, it was hard to sympathize with Kulayev. But after the trial, the vision of the gaunt, hollow-eyed man in his cage stayed with me. I only attended three of the sixty-seven sessions – it took six sessions for the judge to read out the 120,000 words of the sentence and summing up – but twice while I was listening the defendant had said the same thing.

  ‘I was there because of my brother,’ he had said. I wondered for a while what he meant, then I forgot about it. A little while later, however, I discovered that a liberal activist keen on media freedom had paid for a secretary to type up a full record of all the court hearings, and had posted the transcripts on her website.

  Having a spare few hours, I decided to go back and scan through the transcripts to find out what he had meant about his brother. I was interested in what would turn a normal human being into the kind of homicidal maniac who would abuse children to make a political point.

  But I did not find any information to help me with that at all. The more of the transcripts I read, the more disturbed I became. Piecing together my own notes and the transcripts, I came to a worrying realization. Kulayev may not have been guilty at all. In fact, he may have been the unluckiest person to come out of School No. 1 alive.

  No human rights groups or journalists have advocated for him. His cause, not surprisingly, has not proved popular with activists. Convicted terrorists are not prone to attracting sympathy. So I have no second opinion to back up my conclusions. But I approached the evidence with an open mind, something his own lawyer and the rest of the court failed to do. The result was startling.

  In his summing up of the case, the judge rejected the defendant’s not guilty plea in a few sentences. He specifically quoted two Chechen witnesses – Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, the failed suicide bomber whose story is detailed in the previous chapter, and Rustam Ganiyev, a captured Chechen rebel also mentioned in the previous chapter – as confirming that Kulayev had been a member of Shamil Basayev’s group of militants and that his own claims not to have been a militant were a lie.

  This was my firs
t disturbing discovery, because, in saying that, the judge was wrong. Neither of the two Chechen witnesses said anything of the kind.

  Ganiyev, it transpired, had lived in the same house as Kulayev and Kulayev’s brother, a former comrade-in-arms, and he knew the defendant well.

  ‘Did Nurpashi have relations to the rebels?’ asked a prosecutor.

  ‘He did not,’ answered Ganiyev.

  As if that was not sufficiently categorical a rejection to satisfy the judge, a little later Kulayev himself asked the witness to confirm the point again.

  ‘Have you ever heard that I fought, or that I had weapons?’ asked the defendant.

  ‘You did not, I said, you did not. I know you, because I lived in your house and everything. I saw you there and everyone else from your family.’

  It is possible of course that the Chechen was lying to defend a friend or a comrade, but it is strange that the judge should so completely misrepresent not only what he said, but also what the second Chechen witness would go on to say. Muzhakhoyeva had also, it transpired, lived in the same house as Kulayev and knew him and his wife well.

  ‘Nurpashi Kulayev as far as I saw did not play any role. They never told him about any terrorist acts being prepared. He lived there with his wife Zhanna . . . He could go out, and they’d say: “Go, buy bread, or milk.” That’s all. His wife never wore a veil even. He did not pray particularly. I related to him, let’s say, like to a decent person, not like to the others.’

  According to her testimony, there were four rooms in the house, but Kulayev as the least significant person was left to sleep in the corridor. As the evidence continued, it departed further and further from the judge’s summary of it. She said she never saw Kulayev with weapons, and also that he did not follow the extreme Wahhabi strand of Islam favoured by the others.

  ‘I never saw him make his wife wear a veil, like I or the other women had to. He never prayed together with these rebels,’ she said.

  Again, we might assume she was just trying to defend a friend of hers, but then she specifically said that she was not.