Let Our Fame Be Great (60 page)

So how can we understand this? Was he just defending himself by a long and improbable lie? Was he so soul-less that he was prepared to not only kill children for a political cause, but also then lie about it?

Perhaps he was not lying at all, and it certainly looked that way from the testimony of Alik Tsagonov, one of the few hostages to have a clear recollection of Kulayev in the school. Tsagonov was forced into the cafeteria after the explosions that triggered the Russian assault to free the school. A group of hostages were made to sit on the floor while the rebels fired out of the windows over their heads. He admitted that he did not remember everything clearly, but he was certain that Kulayev was sitting among the hostages, not battling the army like the rest of the rebels.

‘I did not see that he had weapons at that moment. When he sat among us, he had nothing in his hands. When he spoke, we understood that he was one of them. Sveta Bigaeva sat near us, she said to me: “He is reacting to what we are saying.” And we were talking in Ossetian. I asked him: “Do you understand Ossetian?” He said to me: “I understand a little.” These were the words that he said first: “I killed no one. I want to live”,' the witness said.

Kulayev later had the chance to cross-examine the witness himself, and asked him if he remembered a fifteen-minute conversation they had about a man in Chechnya who might have been a mutual friend.

‘Tell me, when I sat with you, do you remember how I told you how we were brought there, taken from our home? I explained to you. I of course could not speak well in Russian. Do you remember this?' Kulayev asked. He was talking to a man who had no cause to like him, or to defend him, but the witness backed him up.

‘He said this as well. He said he was forced, that he did not want to go. But, how it was, it could not all be saved in my head. All his words,' Tsagonov said.

‘Well, I said to you, when they started to fire from the tanks. Do you remember, I said, they will now shoot the ground and first floors. And then they will start shooting here. Therefore, whoever of us, let them jump out now. And then you said to me: “You jump out, and tell them there are children here.” And then, when they fired from the tanks, when you said, there were explosions on the first floor, and
the cage [from the window] fell. A rebel shot one lad, a child. And you said to me: “Jump out.” And I jumped out,' said Kulayev, desperate to have his story at least a little confirmed.

The witness could not in fact support everything that Kulayev said, saying he could not remember, but he did say that Kulayev had been the second person to jump out of the window.

Other witnesses had vague memories of Kulayev running around with a gun, and terrorizing them, but Tsagonov's account is far more detailed, and at least raises doubts whether the defendant was the dedicated jihadi depicted in the charge sheet.

Be that as it may, the judge rejected Tsagonov's testimony in favour of the more numerous, but less specific, evidence of people who said they saw Kulayev in camouflage clothes shooting uncontrollably with an automatic rifle. (Kulayev himself insisted he was wearing the white clothes and trainers that he left his house in, and did not shoot at anyone.)

In his final summing up, the judge rejected also Kulayev's own testimony, and the elaborate story about his brother. The judge compared Kulayev's words to statements the defendant made in detention prior to the court hearing. In those statements, which bore the defendant's signature, Kulayev admitted many of the charges against him, including that of being part of an armed group.

But, taking into account Kulayev's own cross-examination, those documents themselves seem doubtful.

‘Did you read them before you signed,' asked one of the lawyers.

‘I did not read.'

‘Why did you not read?'

‘I do not know the Russian language,' replied Kulayev.

‘From the moment of your detention, you were offered a lawyer. Were you always interrogated in the presence of a lawyer?'

‘No, he was only there three times in five months, I think,' said Kulayev.

‘But now you are being questioned in the presence of your lawyer. You and your lawyer sign the documents, after they have been read by you personally, and you write that you personally read it at the end of the document. What can you say now?'

‘In these months, I only saw my lawyer twice. Where they told me to sign, I signed.'

The judge ignored this testimony, instead using the circular argument that Kulayev must have voluntarily signed the documents – documents the defendant said he had not read, or agreed to, and only signed because he was beaten – since he had also signed a statement declaring he had voluntarily signed the documents.

So, that was the judge's argument. The testimony of the two Chechen witnesses was rewritten to support the prosecution case. Kulayev's own testimony was rejected in favour of earlier testimony that the defendant said had been beaten out of him. And testimony by hostages that could have been used to support Kulayev was ignored.

It was hardly a model trial, but that was no surprise. Trials in Russia rarely are. But the most important thing is: was Kulayev really guilty? Just because the trial was a farce, does that mean he was not guilty?

And here, obviously, it is harder to judge without spending months traipsing from house to house in Chechnya and Beslan compiling information about a convicted terrorist who has already failed his appeal. This is not a job for the faint-hearted, since it would attract police interest within minutes, and I confess it is one I am not brave enough to undertake.

And yet to my mind, his story that he shot no one in the school makes sense, if only because of the vagueness of the testimony against him and the consistency of his denial of having done any of it. His story somehow seems too unlikely not to be true. True jihadis boasted about what they had done, or tried to justify it. They did not flatly deny it.

And what about the beginning? Is it really possible that he had been picked up by rebels and forced to go with them just because his brother was suspected of having changed sides and gone over to the Russians? And here, there are problems, since, frankly, the story does not make much sense.

Why would the rebels who took his brother take him too? What did it matter to them that he came with them? This is the only bit of the story that does not seem logically coherent.

And this is where the chaotic, disorganized and biased nature of the trial is most frustrating, because on three occasions he gave out hints – or even firm comments – that there was more to it than he had at first said. If only more-insistent lawyers had been present, they would have followed up on what he said in passing.

Questioned as he was by non-skilful interrogators who did not in any case care very much, crucial hints were missed that could have explained why he was taken to the school in the first place. And once you see the hints, his whole story makes sense.

The first time he dropped one of his hints was right at the beginning, during his own lawyer's cross-examination of him. If he had had a competent lawyer – or perhaps a lawyer who wanted to defend him – it is surely impossible that what he said could have been missed.

When the rebels first picked him up, when he was on his way to the shop, and said they were looking for his brother, they took Kulayev ‘away somewhere', he had said. While there they asked him about his brother, but they also asked him if he worked for Ramzan Kadyrov, a rebel who changed sides to succeed his father as the Kremlin-backed president of the region.

‘Do you work for Ramzan Kadyrov? I have documents. They took them off me, questioned me. Then they said to me, let your brother, let him come, we will wait for him where the roads cross,' Kulayev said.

It is hard to figure out exactly what he meant in those comments, since his Russian grammar is so mangled it could be several different things, but it looks very likely that he had some kind of documents, which fingered him as being in the employ of Ramzan Kadyrov, the sworn enemy of Shamil Basayev and the separatist rebels. Kadyrov – and another group of Chechens from the Yamadayev family – was the prop of Russia's control of Chechnya, and was hated by the rebels. If Kulayev had been working for him, they would have taken him away immediately and punished him as a traitor.

Kulayev let slip the next clue when Ganiyev was on the witness stand. Although Ganiyev was technically the one giving evidence, the complexity of the trial structure meant that Kulayev regularly spoke as well. At one point, he yet again insisted that he had nothing
to do with the raid, and that he had been taken along against his will.

‘What, you were taken as a translator?' asked the judge with heavy sarcasm, in light of Kulayev's bad Russian.

‘No, I was taken, I said, because of my brother. I had been with Yamadayev, I had my documents with me. Later also the Kadyrov documents. Because of this they did not let me go. I was for three months a guard for Yamadayev, the general. When my brother was with Basayev, I was with him [Yamadayev] there. Because of this they brought me here,' he said.

This time, his story is far clearer. He had been initially picked up by rebels looking for his brother, but when they searched him they found the documents incriminating him as a foot-soldier for the other side and took him with them.

The final and most convincing clue came from the other Chechen witness: from the failed suicide bomber Muzhakhoyeva. She was cross-examined by the prosecutors, and the defence lawyer, and the judge, and the defendant, but it took someone with more presence than any of them to get to the bottom of the case.

Susanna Dudiyeva, who led the Beslan Mothers group, appears to have been the only participant to have picked up on Kulayev's remarks that he had worked for the pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya, and she asked Muzhakhoyeva about it.

‘Nurpashi said that he was part of the guard of Kadyrov. He could be killed for this. And for this, he was taken there, to the terrorist act. Does this mean that Ganiyev and the others knew that he had joined Kadyrov's forces?' asked Dudiyeva, who is remarkably articulate and intelligent.

‘You know,' replied Muzhakhoyeva, ‘I have not said this before. But his wife told me all about this. And I told her: “Take your husband and leave.” Because he had already been there [with Kadyrov], sooner or later they would either kill him or send him somewhere.'

‘So he was in Kadyrov's forces?' asked Dudiyeva, who should have been a lawyer herself.

‘Probably, yes. That is what his wife said.'

So perhaps this was Kulayev's great secret. The reason he was detained and taken to the school was that he had served in the forces fighting against the separatists. But then the question remains, surely he could have used this information to save himself? Could he not have called in one of the pro-Moscow Chechen leaders to testify in his defence?

Who can say why he did not do this? To find out, I would need to ask him myself, and he will not be available to speak to reporters any time soon. Perhaps, in fact, he was not able to bring witnesses to the trial. It is unlikely that his lawyer expended much energy in that direction.

Looking at my notebooks and the trial transcripts, I do not think he should have been found guilty of any of the crimes he was accused of on the evidence that was presented at his trial.

Perhaps he could be condemned for failing to stop the hostage-takers, or for not fighting them when he had the chance, but does that merit life imprisonment? Would either of those failures to take action even constitute a criminal act? Even if it did, no information was presented to justify such charges.

Guilty or not, though, his story is a sad one, and he was as much a victim of the violence as the people he was convicted of fighting against. For this new Chechen war that Moscow launched in 1999 turned Chechen against Chechen. Brother against brother. The savagery which both sides unleashed was enough to divide families, and to ruin a nation.

The Chechens' national unity forged in the 1994 – 6 war did not last long, although at first there was broad agreement, after the Russians pulled out, that the Chechen state should be a democracy with elements of Islamic law.

Akhmad Kadyrov had been elected as
mufti
– the leading figure among Chechnya's Muslims – in the midst of the war in 1995 and called for jihad against the invaders. There is an extraordinary video clip on the internet in which Basayev and Kadyrov sit side by side – the warrior of Islam and the spiritual leader, united on one path – while Basayev lectures a room full of journalists about the Russian cities he will conquer.

‘We will fight further. We will take, if it works out, we will take Vladivostok, we will take Khabarovsk and Moscow. We will fight till the end, and no one except Allah can stop us on this road,' shouts Basayev, pumping his fist, as the mufti sits stony-faced beside him.

Both men retained great influence in peacetime. They were going to build a state based on the principles of Islam. In February 1997, Kadyrov announced that women employed by the state would have to cover themselves up, showing only their face, hands and feet. Later that year, Aslan Maskhadov – elected president of the Chechens in January 1997 – introduced elements of Islamic law into the region.

But, beneath the surface, disputes were brewing. The puritan forms of Islam introduced to Chechnya by Arab volunteers and Saudi emissaries were loathed by the more easy-going Sufis like Kadyrov, who dominated traditional Islam in Chechnya and saw the new arrivals as a threat to their positions. The actual theological differences can seem slight, and often they consisted only of minor differences in praying posture, but they masked major disagreements in the path believers wanted to follow.