Let Our Fame Be Great (61 page)

The Wahhabis, as the puritans were known, were often young people, flush with Saudi money, inspired by their military experiences,
and keen for their influential wartime positions to persist in peacetime. At their head was, of course, Basayev, who had returned from his hostage-taking raid on the hospital in Budyonnovsk as a hero. He had allied himself with a Saudi jihadi called Khattab, who had access to Arab money. Between them they attracted a substantial private army, and threatened to destabilize a people already traumatized by war.

Kadyrov put himself at the head of those Chechens opposing the Wahhabis, and sought to block the spread of the energetic, aggressive Islam these young men preferred. He wanted to keep Chechen society in its former shape, to keep the influence of the older generation and the Qadiri sect that he belonged to. He saw the Wahhabis as a divisive influence bent on destroying the traditions and customs of the Chechen people.

There were probably only a few dozen foreign Muslim volunteers in the country, but their influence was disproportionately large. Kadyrov regularly campaigned against them, saying they should be expelled now that the war was won. He almost paid for it with his life in October 1998 when a bomb gutted his car and injured his driver. The dispute had become personal. Chechnya was already plagued by kidnappings and bombings – legacies of mass unemployment and the high number of weapons-trained men left with nothing much to do. Now the clashes became more organized, and Maskhadov – a decent man, even his enemies concede, but no politician – was fearful of cracking down, not wishing to take sides against the former comrades who made up both sides of the bitter dispute.

Kadyrov urged the president to organize an armed force of Sufis – a return to the days of Imam Shamil and the nineteenth century – to oppose the military wing of the puritans, as he sought to mobilize Chechen society behind his vision of the future. Maskhadov dithered.

Then, in August 1999, the divide became a gulf. Basayev and Khattab sent their fighters into Dagestan, which still remained a Russian region, to help their religious allies in the mountains break free from Russian rule. Whatever way you look at it, it was a stupid thing to do. It was an aggressive violation of the peace deal signed between Chechnya and Russia, and most Chechens thought it was unjustified and unnecessary.

There have since been dark rumours about how Russia – keen for an excuse to enter Chechnya once more – encouraged the raid by pulling back its border guards, but there can be no excuse for the actions of Basayev and his allies. They made a terrible strategic error. Russian special forces battled in the mountains, bombing villages controlled by the religious puritans, and using helicopters to strafe rebel positions. War had returned to the Caucasus after just three years.

Then came a series of devastating apartment bombings – in the Dagestani town of Buynaksk, in Moscow, and in the Russian town of Volgodonsk in September – which killed almost 300 sleeping civilians. The bombings were unforgivable, and Basayev was quick to deny any responsibility. But the prime minister, an ex-KGB man called Vladimir Putin who was almost unknown to the Russian public, was not listening to such denials. He declared that Chechens were behind the attacks and that his government had to move back into the republic to restore order.

As troops poured into Chechnya – 100,000 of them or more, a far more serious invasion than that of 1994 – Maskhadov's and Basayev's forces united to defend Grozny. Their differences could be resolved another time. Like 1994, this was a war for national survival and surely all Chechens would take up arms once more against the common enemy. That did not happen. For the first time, Chechens did not rally together when attacked. Kadyrov had other plans.

He and his allies – including the Yamadayev clan, which would also become influential in the years ahead – gave up the town of Gudermes without a fight. The rebel fighters were asked to leave, and Russian troops were invited to occupy the town peacefully.

Kadyrov then travelled to Moscow to meet Putin, who probably could not believe his luck. That such a senior and respected Chechen leader was prepared to break ranks with his comrades, betray the national cause, and change sides with hardly any pressure being applied was a coup worth delaying a cabinet meeting for.

And on 18 November that is exactly what Putin did. He apologized to his ministers for keeping them waiting. ‘We had an unexpected event in connection to the arrival of Akhmad Kadyrov, mufti of the Chechen republic, who at the request of the residents of
Gudermes came to Moscow, to the government, and unexpectedly asked for a meeting,' Putin said.

That a private individual could arrange such a meeting spontaneously was extraordinary, but Kadyrov was no ordinary person. He was offering to effectively split the Chechen people, something which had been Moscow's long-term dream. To him, the threat of the puritans was so serious that it trumped the threat of the Russians.

‘Their only goal is to seize power under the cover of Islam,' he told Russian television, as he explained why he had appealed to the Russians for assistance against his former comrades. ‘The people are against this terrorism and force. It is just necessary to help this people a bit, to support them. As the prime minister said, to find some kind of option so as to stop the killings, to stop the war. To find some kind of option, so as to move onto a different track.'

I met Kadyrov many times, and always thought he was a decent and honest man, but it is hard not to conclude that he was fooled here. He seems to have genuinely thought Putin wanted to avoid war, or that perhaps only a little bit of fighting would be required to dislodge the Wahhabis. Perhaps he thought the rest of the armed resistance would come round to his way of thinking as soon as he spoke out. They did not, and the Russians were not in the mood to wait for them to change their minds.

The onslaught that Putin launched on Grozny that winter of 1999 – 2000 was as bad as anything Chechnya had seen five years earlier. The splits in the nation hardened and crystallized. Maskhadov declared Kadyrov to be a traitor, and the penalty for a traitor in wartime would surely be death. Kadyrov meanwhile said he would not rest until Basayev, Khattab and the other ‘kidnappers and murderers' were dead.

Before peace of a kind returned to Chechnya, Basayev and Khattab would indeed be killed. But Kadyrov and Maskhadov would be dead too. And more than 25,000 of their countrymen would die alongside them, while maybe 200,000 or more Chechens – 20 per cent of the total population – would flee into exile. It was a heavy price to pay for this handful of men's failure to reach agreement. And they are all to blame for that.

For Russia would not repeat its mistakes of the 1994 – 6 war this time. There were no tanks sent into built-up areas, until those areas were definitively pacified. There would be no handicapping of troops by any insistence on obeying human rights regulations. This was going to be a war of complete savagery.

It started with the taking of Grozny. In the 1994 – 6 war, Russia had lost thousands of men trying to fight its way into the city centre. Tanks without infantry support are extremely vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades, especially if they are fired from the tower blocks that lined the roads into the Chechen capital. As the Russian forces edged into Chechnya, the rebels in Grozny prepared to meet them once more.

Among the rebels was Apti Bisultanov, the poet who led the nation's cultural reawakening in the 1970s and 1980s. Now he was deputy prime minister in Maskhadov's government, and one of the commanders trying to coordinate resistance to the Russian troops.

It was a task that he found all but impossible. The Russians had no intention of battling among the ruins of Grozny. They parked their missile launchers and artillery pieces on the hills around the capital and started to demolish it block by block. The rebels could do little but hide underground.

‘Every unit had its headquarters in a basement, I knew every basement, who lived where, how many refugees were there, I knew every point,' Bisultanov told me one evening eight years later in a café in Berlin.

It was terrifying for the resistance fighters. The few television pictures taken from inside Grozny – mainly by the brave journalist Andrei Babitsky – showed trees with branches ripped off and scattered. Apartment blocks were chewed and gnawed, their corners rounded, their balconies shattered. The smaller private houses – single-storey dwellings that ringed the city centre – were shredded. Every basement held refugees or fighters.

The Russians were merciless. On 21 October, a rocket hit the central market, and Babitsky's images showed a mass of twisted metal. Perhaps as many as 140 civilians died, but the Russians brushed off criticism. The market, they said, had been used to trade weapons, as if that justified the horror they had unleashed.

It was a campaign to terrorize the population, and it worked. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens fled for neighbouring regions, where they were herded through filtration points, and all men between their teens and pensionable age were separated off for interrogation and detention.

And the fighters could do nothing. Just like Imam Shamil's forces before their final surrender, these men were being denied the chance to confront the enemy with their grenades and Kalashnikovs, and morale slipped away amid this constant attrition. The destruction of Grozny may not have brought glory to the Russian forces, but it was effective.

‘It was complete anarchy. There was a plan for the defence of the city and I went to see these groups that were defending different parts. Some had stayed, and some had gone. The whole city, the civilian population, was underground. And the fighters were also down in the basements,' Babitsky remembered years later in his flat in Prague.

Fierce fighting continued around Grozny, but the Chechens were outnumbered and outgunned, and the capital was surrounded by December. The Chechens held out in their basements until February, resisting Russian advances via a complex network of defences, but they had realized they had to get out if they were not to die where they sat.

They prepared a corridor through the minefields to one of the villages outside the capital, but they knew casualties would be heavy.

Bisultanov was one of the desperate men trying to escape the disintegrating city.

‘It was like this, the corridor,' he said, holding his hands thirty centimetres apart, ‘and 5,000 men went along this corridor. One step aside would have been death. There were forty people in my group, which was called the special detachment because we were all educated. We had a political strategist, whom we had to leave behind because he was injured near Alkhankala. He could not stand, his back was ruined. There was a journalist who lost an eye.'

The Chechens had always prided themselves on recovering their wounded, but this death march in February 2000 defeated them. With artillery pounding around them, landmines on all sides, and in freezing temperatures, they left maybe 500 men dead and dying in
the fields. Many of the top commanders were killed, and Basayev himself lost a foot to a landmine.

‘Basayev blew up before my eyes,' remembered Bisultanov, shaking his head.

The rebel fighters were battered, tired and demoralized when they trudged into the village of Alkhankala. Medics treated their wounded, and the rest of the guerrillas reflected on their defeat.

‘It was all for nothing,' one Chechen commander told a French journalist who witnessed the retreat and met the rebels in Alkhankala.

‘I'm ashamed, ashamed to be here in this village, ashamed to put its residents in danger. But I'm especially ashamed to have lost so many young men in an unsuccessful campaign. Now I must go to their parents. What am I going to say to them?'

And even here, when all the men were united in their grief and shame, the split in the nation could be felt.

‘I've had enough of these politicians and of these Wahhabis I've been fighting the last few years. Now we're condemned to fight on to the last. I told Shamil [Basayev] not to go to Dagestan. He never listens to anybody . . . Behind us, we've left so many dead bodies, not only our own men but also civilians. There's nobody left to bury them.'

The French journalist Anne Nivat wrote in her book
Chienne de guerre
how she saw Basayev himself in the hospital as doctors operated on his mangled leg. The other fighters shouldered their weapons and moved on out. Grozny was lost. It was around now that Putin announced for the first time that the war was over.

As for Bisultanov, he was unharmed, but he was exhausted by what had happened. He and thousands more of the survivors waited – stunned – in Komsomolskoye, just outside Grozny. Then came the disaster that the rebels had avoided in Grozny. The Russians surrounded the village with tanks and shattered it. For more than two weeks, the Russians bombed and shelled the houses of the village. Hundreds of the rebels died. Organized resistance was crushed.

The Chechens would fight on, but as guerrillas. This would not be a war of frontlines any more.

And behind the Russian troops came the policemen and the interrogators. In the Grozny suburb of Aldy on 5 February, civilians paid
the price for the army's failure to destroy the group of fighters leaving the capital. Soldiers rampaged through Aldy, executing civilians at point-blank range, throwing grenades into cellars, and stealing valuables. It was a campaign of terror, deliberately designed to stop normal Chechens from supporting Maskhadov's forces.

Such operations as that in Aldy – called by the Russians ‘cleansings' – became common in Chechen villages. Troops would close off streets and go from house to house, checking passports, and taking away men who matched their profile of rebels. These men would vanish into the system of ‘filtration camps', and often never be seen again.