Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  The Strasbourg court’s ruling has been followed by others like it, but most Chechens are unable to win such high-profile assessments of their plight. For most of the estimated 5,000 disappearances that have taken place in Chechnya since 1999, there is no evidence to produce in court except for the continuing absence of a human being as mute proof of the horrors of the war.

  Despite the overwhelming force used by the Russians, the Chechens continued to resist, and abuses of civilians have become commonplace on both sides. Brave human rights activists gather details, but they are largely ignored by the Russian authorities and by the world’s media, which has got bored of this dirty little war.

  Every month, people vanished and people died, winning Chechnya a position as one of only three places in the world with the maximum score of 5 on the United Nations assessment of danger. What became commonplace in Chechnya would have been enough to cause panic in many other countries.

  Taking one month at random – this is the first month I have got records for in my notes – here is a summary of the human rights abuses in Chechnya in September 2002, as compiled by the umbrella group the Union of Non-governmental Organizations.

  An eighteen-year-old vanished, after being detained by the Russians. Artillery was fired at the village of Avturi, killing cattle. A young man was detained by the Russians, and only released after a ransom was paid. An explosion hit the village of Achkhoi-Martan. A pro-Moscow Chechen’s house was robbed. A human arm was found in the forest. ‘Cleansings’ took place in mountainous areas. Artillery struck mountainous areas. A court bailiff was murdered. A pro-Moscow administrator’s cousin was murdered. A Chechen man was paraded on television as a terrorist, after being severely beaten. Security measures were tightened. Soldiers searched houses. The village of Prigorodnoye underwent a ‘cleansing’. An administration building was burned down. A family was killed by artillery. A pro-Moscow Chechen was shot dead. Chechen refugees were forced home. More ‘cleansings’ were conducted in Prigorodnoye. A mass grave of Chechens who had previously been taken by the Russians was found, six of them identified with names and dates of birth. A policeman was killed. Soldiers detained farmers, and killed a calf for their lunch. Four men were detained in Grozny. A local official was arrested for links with the rebels. Russian troops stole things when conducting a ‘cleansing’. Eleven men were detained in a ‘cleansing’. Two men and a child were detained in a ‘cleansing’. A body was found. There was another ‘cleansing’. Eleven people were killed and twenty-two injured when a bus was blown up in Grozny. Drunken soldiers murdered three security guards at Grozny market (their heads were delivered to the hospital, their bodies dumped). Artillery and aerial bombing was deployed against mountainous regions. A policeman was killed. Soldiers searched a home, wounded the owner, and left. A holy site was bombed. There were air raids. Four men were killed when a Russian armoured vehicle drove over the top of a car.

  And so it went on, month after month. Chechnya was terrifyingly dangerous.

  That danger was one of the reasons that the media did not report on the daily horrors that Chechens were living through. It was extremely difficult to ensure safety in the region, plus strict Russian restrictions on reporting made it hard to remain inside the law. Foreign journalists were only supposed to visit the region on specially organized trips, in which we would be taken to see pro-Kremlin youth groups, or a restored school, and kept safely isolated from anyone who might tell us what was really going on.

  Often the only chance we had to get a real picture of what was happening was by talking to the Russian soldiers whose barracks we slept in. They were always happy to drink vodka at our expense, and their drunken boasts of battles and firefights were in marked contrast to the official line that all was calm.

  This official image of Chechnya as a tranquil little backwater was supported by the army’s daily press releases, which detailed how many rebels had been killed, and how little support the rebels had from the local population. I remember one weekend when the rebels raided Grozny, and the distortion in the Kremlin’s press tactics became amusingly clear. The rebels had established checkpoints in the middle of the city in the evening, and stopped all cars driving past. Anyone with papers from the pro-Moscow administration was summarily executed. Dozens were killed. It was a dramatic demonstration of their continuing presence.

  ‘Grozny was quiet this weekend. City transport was working, and people went to cafés and little shops,’ said the press release on the Monday morning.

  The Russian media meanwhile seemed more than happy to follow the Kremlin’s line, although there were some notable exceptions – among whom, inevitably, was Andrei Babitsky, the daring reporter who was later to interview Basayev.

  Babitsky was in Grozny for most of that terrible autumn and winter in 1999 – 2000. He filmed the bombardment of Grozny, and his images – some of which featured dead Russian soldiers, and thus contradicted official denials of casualties – enraged the Kremlin. Obviously, it could be difficult for him to phone his wife or his office in the circumstances, but he tried to keep in contact as often as he could. His broadcasts on the US-funded Radio Free Europe (called Radio Liberty in Russia) were the only independent view of what was happening inside the besieged city.

  ‘In November 1999, I had gone in with a group of journalists. But in January 2000, I was on my own, and I did not know the city, it was so changed. Eventually I decided to leave. I am Russian with accreditation, and I thought there could be no objections to me,’ Babitsky remembered.

  ‘But they detained me immediately as a suspicious person.’

  Babitsky was picked up by the Russian army, and was about to learn that the Kremlin viewed investigative journalists as enemy combatants. The film he had shot in November had made some Kremlin officials link him to Basayev, and they were not going to allow him to escape and damage their cause with more footage. They confiscated his tapes and took him to their military base outside Grozny. He received no explanation as to why he had been detained, but on 18 January he was moved on to the prison of Chernokozovo, the most notorious of the Kremlin’s ‘filtration camps’.

  ‘They treated us like livestock. Some official told a journalist that I had been detained as a vagrant even though this was not true because I had documents. They told me nothing, I was just in a cell in Chernokozovo. They also told journalists I had been helping the illegal armed forces,’ he said.

  At first, he was confined in a cell with fifteen other people with just a dirty mattress to lie on, and a hole in the floor to use as a toilet. There was only one other Russian – a tramp the army had picked up – and the rest were Chechens.

  He spent three days in that cell, and all around were the sounds of the inmates being beaten. There was screaming twenty-four hours a day. At one point, a woman screamed for two hours straight. He personally was lucky, and was only hit with a truncheon a few times. It hurt for two days though, he said.

  ‘There was one fighter there, all the other lads were just village boys. This one man they thought was a fighter they beat in the most appalling ways, they would take him away. For those first three days, the sound of beating used to go on all the time,’ Babitsky said.

  His wife Lyudmila had no idea where he had got to, and her fears increased on 21 January when agents from the FSB – one of the security forces in charge of running the ‘filtration camps’ – came to demand negatives Babitsky had left with her last time he was in Moscow. Eventually, on 25 January, Radio Free Europe broadcast an announcement that its journalist was missing. Worried, the station’s editor met one of Putin’s advisers, was told Babitsky was in Russian custody and won a promise that his journalist would be released. But there was a twist.

  Babitsky, it transpired, was not being flown back to Moscow to his wife and colleagues at all, but was being exchanged with the rebels for two captured Russians, as if he was a prisoner of war. It was a telling sign of how the Kremlin regarded the press.

  Putin was asked how he coul
d justify handing over a Russian citizen to people he himself had dubbed bandits. ‘For me it was more important to return these two Russian soldiers who were fighting on our side,’ Putin, who would shortly be elected president, was quoted as saying by the Russian press.

  The Kremlin’s story was not even true. The handover was a sham set up for the cameras. Babitsky was not being handed to the rebels at all, but to some Russian allies who could look convincingly Chechen for the cameras.

  The FSB had been on hand to film the encounter, and the grainy footage showed an unshaven Babitsky, wearing a patterned sweater, being led forward and handed over to two men in masks. He was clearly reluctant to go with them, but he looked weary and stunned.

  The man to whom Babitsky was handed was not a member of the resistance at all, but a bandit with connections to the Russian police who kept him locked in a room in the village of Avturi, to the east of Grozny. ‘It was particularly scary in Avturi,’ Babitsky remembered. ‘I thought they could kill me at any time. I thought they were just waiting for the signal to liquidate me. I was just kept in a house. I sat from morning to evening with two guards. I was convinced they would kill me, it was a very unpleasant time.’

  Eventually, on 23 February, the Chechen man decided to get rid of his annoyingly well-known captive. American officials, including the Secretary of State, had begun to ask questions about his fate, and he was more trouble than he was worth. So the captor took him to Dagestan, where he tried to make Babitsky cross the border to Azerbaijan, and even provided him with a false passport. But Babitsky refused to play along, and doubled back to the nearest Russian city. On 24 February, he rang a colleague and said where he was. Although he would subsequently be charged with possession of the false passport he had been given, effectively his ordeal was over.

  If it was designed to scare him off reporting on Chechnya, it did not work. Babitsky being Babitsky, he still reports on the North Caucasus although he lives in Prague, but it was a useful message from the Kremlin to all other Russian journalists. If they dared to film from the unofficial side of the conflict, they would be treated as the enemy, whether they were a citizen or not.

  It was a lesson they have learned well. Very few journalists have taken the risks Babitsky took to uncover the true face of the war, which has in turn helped the government sell the brutal conflict to the Russian people as a necessary and limited anti-terrorist operation.

  Some Russian journalists have been brave enough to look behind the Kremlin’s propaganda, but they have been rare exceptions in a craven profession. And the silence from the majority has made it easy to convince the rest of the world that Chechnya is nothing to worry about.

  30.

  The Hard Shackles of Evil

  As Russian tanks rumbled across the planes of northern Chechnya in October 1999, the Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, made a desperate appeal to NATO for help. It sounds absurd. NATO intervene in Russia? But it was not as peculiar an appeal as it now sounds. Just six months earlier, Western warplanes had bombed Serbian targets in support of the Kosovo Albanians, starting the process that would eventually lead to Kosovo’s independence.

  The position of the Chechens looked very similar. Like the Albanians, they were being targeted with indiscriminate attacks by a larger neighbour, and like the Kosovo Albanians, they were fleeing their homeland in huge columns of refugees.

  But Maskhadov’s hopes were stillborn. NATO would not support the Chechens. On 26 October, the secretary-general told reporters Chechnya ‘is not the business of NATO at the present moment’. That can hardly have been a surprise for Maskhadov, since just two weeks earlier that same secretary-general gave an interview saying that rebuilding ties with Russia – which had objected strongly to the bombing of its Serb allies – must be his top priority. The Chechens were victims of global politics.

  This was hardly a new position for them to be in.

  In January 1995, when Yashurkayev was just beginning his diary describing how he and his dog Barsik survived the bombs raining onto Grozny, the US State Department made clear its full support for Russia in dealing with this ‘difficult domestic matter’. It even compared the slaughter in Grozny to the American Civil War, as if the Chechens were a bunch of slave-owning secessionists who could not tolerate the human rights ideals of some Russian Abraham Lincoln.

  Just a year later, the Council of Europe – which is normally described as ‘Europe’s leading human rights organization’ – admitted Russia as a member despite the Chechen bloodbath.

  ‘This is a decision which gives post-1989 Europe its full dimension, ’ said the organization’s secretary-general. ‘It averts the danger of a redivided Europe and it contributes to European stability.’

  The Chechens had been sacrificed to the political desires of Western states desperate to keep the new Russia on their side.

  In the circumstances of 1999, however, when Russia was once more demolishing Grozny with bombs and shells, perhaps the Council of Europe might do something? NATO was not planning to take action, but that was a military alliance, not a human rights coalition. After all, just three years previously Russia had agreed to uphold basic values on its territory, and demolishing Grozny from the air surely went contrary to that.

  Initial signs were positive for the Chechens. The Council of Europe’s secretary-general announced that the war was a ‘violation of human rights in itself ’ in December that year. It was hardly a speedy response to a crisis that was already three months old, but it was something. What was more, the organization appointed a special envoy to investigate crimes committed against civilians in Chechnya. Perhaps the Chechens might receive some kind of international champion?

  Time went by.

  Eventually, in June 2000, six months of bitter fighting having passed since the envoy’s appointment was announced, foreign ministers of the Council of Europe’s member states convened to announce the action they would take against Russia. And their decision was: to do nothing.

  They could not, they said, expel or suspend Russia from their organization because then they would not have any positive influence over it. The implication was that they were having some kind of positive influence at the time, which made their statement almost comic.

  By this stage, the Chechens were likely to have known they were on their own. The Russian network of ‘filtration camps’, the ‘cleansings’, the bombings, the arrests, the disappearances had created a climate of horror in their homeland that no amount of hypocritical statement from Western powers could begin to outweigh.

  In the months since the war started, perhaps because of the way the violence had spread to Dagestan, police had become increasingly vigilant all across the North Caucasus. Foreign Muslim preachers were asked to leave, journalists found themselves being harassed, and many foreign Circassians lost their residence permits.

  Young Muslims, frustrated by official corruption, angry about probes into their religious leaders, chafed against the restrictions. One of these men was Rasul Kudayev, who turned twenty-two in January 2000. He was an athletic young man, having won the youth wrestling competition of his home region – Kabardino-Balkaria – when he was eighteen. Since then, he had failed to get ahead in life. He had done odd jobs in a factory, but had failed to buy his way into the police force. Anyone who has spent time in Russia will have realized that being a policeman is a lucrative job, and the entry bribe was too much for Kudayev.

  He did not come from a wealthy background. His mother had left his father when he was just ten, and now she raised him and his older half-brother on their own in the village of Khasanya, just outside the city of Nalchik.

  In the same month that the Council of Europe would decide not to censure Russia for its murderous conduct in Chechnya, Kudayev decided he wanted to seek a better life elsewhere. Perhaps he could succeed in sport somewhere else? He travelled to Uzbekistan, one of the former Soviet states in Central Asia, to work on his wrestling. It was a logical choice, since he is a Balkar – one of
the mountain Turk peoples – and the Uzbek language and his own are very similar. Balkars, the minority people in his home region, are discriminated against, and he felt he might get a fairer hearing in a foreign land.

  ‘He was not interested in religion then, he did not even pray,’ remembered his mother, Fatima Tekayeva, eight years later.

  ‘He was angry though that as a Balkar he could not move upwards. He had finished school, and then just worked in a textile factory. He decided to leave, he wanted success in sport. He left because of sport, but I did not know where he was going. He was offended by his trainer, I know this. The trainer was a Balkar initially, but I do not know after that.’

  Her parents were ill at the time, and she was working to support her family, and she had no time to keep her sporty son at his studies. She did not want him to wrestle at all; she wanted him to work hard and study more. Perhaps they argued about this, and that is why he left. It was a subject she did not want to talk about.

  Tekayeva is a small, compact woman, with a forceful face under her headscarf. We met in the park in central Nalchik, a city in the foothills some hundred kilometres west of Chechnya. It was a sign of the paranoia we both felt that, on meeting, we spontaneously took the batteries out of our phones. We had clearly both heard the rumours that the FSB can use a phone as a listening device even if it is turned off.

  She had brought along a pile of photos of her son, and she handed them to me as natural punctuation during the course of his story. She passed the first one to me at this point. It showed a young man, cocksure and handsome, laughing with a face full of glee. He had short dark hair, and the olive complexion of the Balkars.