Let Our Fame Be Great (68 page)

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.

Chechens dying abroad is not a new thing. Two Chechens were killed in London as early as 1993, while the poet Yandarbiyev was killed by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004.

But the latest wave of killings seems far more extensive, and far more politically driven.

The world has ignored the horrors and killings in Chechnya these last years, but with an ever-growing Chechen population outside Russia, and no sign that Moscow is prepared to compromise on its heavy-handed approach to Chechens' dreams of independence, perhaps we will find more Chechens being killed on European streets. And that would surely be impossible to ignore.

In the depths of winter, in early 2003, my editor sent me out of Moscow to a little town where the central heating had broken down. Russian towns often still possess these Soviet-era heating systems, when a whole block or suburb gets its hot water from a single factory.

In this case, the factory had halted its work briefly. That meant the water in the pipes had stopped moving, had frozen and had exploded out in extraordinary frozen waterfalls of rusty ice. It was the kind of slow-news-day story that journalists have to do sometimes. It would barely be noticed in the slew of interesting articles from other places.

The excitement for me was that Adlan Khasanov, Reuters' Chechen photographer, was coming with me. I had been trying to learn enough to report properly on Chechnya for months and this, it seemed, would be the perfect time to learn a few details about the fighting, the people and the culture. I would have a real-life Chechen to myself for the whole four-hour drive there, and the four hours back, and reckoned I would learn as much from him as I had from all the books I had read.

It did not turn out that way.

Adlan had no interest in talking about war. He wanted to talk about my home in Wales, about music, about concerts, about vodka and about girls. We gossiped all the way there, and laughed our way around the story. The unfortunate people we were meeting, whose houses were so cold there was ice on the light bulbs, were welcoming and jolly in the face of his charm. One family was from Grozny. As Russian emigrants, I expected they would loathe their Chechen visitor, but Adlan made friends with them too. They gave us tea and biscuits and thawed us out in their warm house, where they mocked their neighbours who had not had the brains to install a private heating system.

So, my plan was a failure, and I found out nothing about the war. But I gained a new friend, and Adlan proved a ray of light into the often dark job of covering the Chechen war.

I can picture him now, striding down the open-plan Reuters office: long, dark hair; handsome, wide face with a grin of welcome; big, laughing voice.

‘Oliver, you have become so fat' was a common opening to our conversations. If I had not seen him come in, he would sneak up behind me and grab the side of my stomach to prove the point that, as I got closer to thirty years old, I was indeed getting fatter.

He spent much of his time in Grozny, whence he would send photos of refugees, soldiers and poverty. But his pictures often missed the standard war clichés – tanks, guns, soldiers – in favour of children, or weddings, or sports practice, or prayers. In short, he documented how Chechens kept living while the bombs exploded around them, while the politicians failed to save them.

When he came to Moscow, he became playful. He took daft photos at the zoo, including a whole series depicting monkeys with bottles in their mouths; and touching shots of a polar bear cub with its mother. A favourite game was to swipe the most impressive-looking cameras from the cupboard and shoot close-up pictures of the models at the fashion shows held downstairs in our office building. Adlan loved girls, and these girls loved him: tall, dark, good-looking and a photographer.

Adlan and I went out for beers, and he taught me a bit about his homeland, when he wasn't talking about the subjects that really interested him. I had an insatiable appetite for war gossip, since this was a time when Reuters did not let its staff travel to Chechnya without an official escort. But most of his chat was about his friends, or his parties. He talked about them with such life that eventually I learned that war isn't about politicians anyway, it's about the people caught up in it.

Even when we covered events together in Chechnya, he didn't much want to talk about what we were doing. I can remember standing with him outside the polling station in the village of Tsentoroi on 5 October 2003, waiting for Akhmad Kadyrov, the former Chechen mufti who changed sides to become Moscow's man in Chechnya, to
come out and talk to us. I was so excited to be there I could hardly stand still. Adlan wanted to talk about a film he'd seen.

After that, whenever I wrote something about Kadyrov and the convoluted loyalties of Chechnya, I would imagine Adlan, his eyes glistening with merriment, ducking through the crowds at the polling station, sidestepping men with guns to get the shot he needed so he could finish for the day, and get stuck into the real business.

At the time, I had been mystified. How could he not have been fascinated by these changes in his homeland? I learned later how completely I had misjudged him. He had spent the night before huddled with a friend in the corner of his courtyard as the bullets flew overhead.