Let Our Fame Be Great (63 page)

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.

The next one showed him at his most athletic. Stripped to the waist, he is making a jokey bodybuilder pose by straining his arms across his body to force the muscles of his chest and stomach to stand out in relief.

Tekayeva kept sniffing as she spoke. At first, I thought she was trying not to cry, but she explained that in fact she had been kicked in the face while milking the neighbours' cow. The cow, it transpired, hated men and it had seen a man passing and just lashed out. It had connected full in the face, but she had come to see me anyway. I looked at her with new respect after that.

Although she was not crying, she now regrets not having kept a closer eye on her son, because a crucial two-year period was starting that would not just see his wrestling career but his entire life permanently ruined, as a result of events two continents away.

Version one – his own version – is that he was trying to get to Iran. ‘I left Russia to go to Iran, I wanted to study at university there. I travelled through Afghanistan, but before I could leave I was arrested by the Taliban in Herat. They thought I was a Russian spy and they imprisoned me,' he later told a lawyer from the British legal charity Reprieve.

Version two comes from a Russian television station, which interviewed him in 2005, and presumably got the facts from him.
According to the television channel, he was heading for an Islamic school in Pakistan, and was passing through Afghanistan to get there.

A third version, which has been repeated in a number of newspapers and which appears to originate at another Russian television channel, has it that he spent time in Saudi Arabia, then came to Afghanistan, via Iran.

Whichever version is true, no one disputes that Kudayev crossed the border into Afghanistan around the beginning of 2001. He was picked up by the Taliban militia, which was at that point ruling the country and giving asylum to Osama bin Laden. On 11 September of that year, suicide jihadis crashed four planes in the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people. Afghanistan was about to become a very uncomfortable place for anyone who had fought for the Taliban or its allies.

A Russian prosecutor who spoke to Kudayev in 2002 said he had been part of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a violent group seeking to overthrow the dictatorial government in that country, although this appears to have been pure speculation on the part of the prosecutor, since he also said Kudayev personally denied having been involved.

But that was academic. In 2001, no one was spending much time checking evidence on whether foreigners in Afghanistan actually had fought for the Taliban or not. Kudayev was rounded up along with hundreds of Taliban prisoners and dumped into the Qala-i-Jangi fortress in northern Afghanistan. The fortress was crammed with prisoners, many of whom had been able to keep their weapons. They rose up, killed their guards and an American interrogator, who was to be the first US casualty in Afghanistan, and took the fort.

Between 25 November and 1 December 2001, the prisoners battled Afghan and foreign troops for control of the prison. It was brutal. The attackers at one point poured burning oil into the basement where the prisoners were sheltering, and dropped bombs onto their positions. Less than a third of the prisoners survived, and many of them – including Kudayev, who took a bullet in the hip – were permanently maimed.

There could surely be no doubt of the young man's guilt now. Only the toughest Taliban prisoners had been in the fortress, and
only the toughest of the toughest could possibly have survived the battle. He was packed off on a journey that went through a couple of American bases, before ending up in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It is a measure of the hatred Kudayev feels for the Afghans who handed him over to the Americans that he has called his dog after their leader: General Dostum. Tekayeva handed me a photo of the dog too, and insisted I write the name ‘Dostum' on the back, so as not to miss the joke.

This is not really the place to detail the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Americans, although he told his lawyer about regular beatings, denials of medical treatment, having to take strange pills, sleep deprivation and being forced into stress positions for long periods. It was a continuation of the nightmare, and has come to dominate his life. He has never been convicted of a crime, but that initial arrest by the Taliban has been enough to sentence him first to three years in American detention, and now to four years in a Russian prison.

He appears to have become more serious about his religion during his time in Afghanistan. He identified himself to his American captors as Abdullah Kafkas – Abdullah meaning ‘servant of God' in Arabic, and Kafkas meaning Caucasus – and it took some time before anyone realized who he really was. That came when in 2002 he was visited in Guantanamo by a Russian prosecutor, who was able to check records of residence in Nalchik. The prosecutor was in no doubt of the young man's guilt, although it did not appear that Kudayev was puritan in his religious beliefs, judging by the fact that he smoked.

‘He immediately asked me for a cigarette, and started to ask how everything was in Nalchik,' the prosecutor told a Russian newspaper on his return from Guantanamo.

‘But in relation to Russia, he was very negative. He said he did not want to return. He asked to be sent to Saudi Arabia, or to Afghanistan. He said he would also happily remain in America. As if anyone wants him there!'

Either way, he did not get his wish. Despite his desire not to be sent back to Russia, the American authorities announced on 1 March
2004 that they had handed him over to their Russian counterparts. This was not a simple deportation, however, in which the ex-prisoners would be sent home and allowed to live their lives. A statement released by the US State Department said he and six other Russian nationals in the camp would ‘face criminal charges relating to their terrorist activities during an armed conflict. The transfer is the result of discussions between our two governments over the past year, including assurances that the individuals will be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law and will be treated humanely in accordance with Russian law and obligations'.

Among those obligations were those Russia had signed up to on joining the toothless Council of Europe, including allowing due legal process and refraining from torture.

For Muslims in Kudayev's home town of Nalchik, those assurances would have seemed like a joke. Since the outbreak of the war in Chechnya, rebels had consistently tried to stir up the Muslims in neighbouring regions. In response, Russian police closely monitored religious congregations, particularly those that sought to distance themselves from the official state-backed Muslim communities. It became a vicious circle, with Muslims angered by police surveillance, and police following them more closely because of their anger. Basayev's rebels kept a close eye on everything, keen to exploit other people's despair for their own ends.

In the circumstances, the law became almost entirely irrelevant. At one point, ten Chechen women doctors were put on the Russian wanted list as would-be suicide bombers. Their photos and names were posted around Russian towns, and police were told to look out for them. Their crime? An internal document featuring their names and pictures printed by their employer – the US aid group International Medical Corps – had been found by police. There appeared to be no other proof. The document was even written in the Latin script, making it abundantly clear that it had originated in a foreign company, but the police's first reaction on discovering the pictures of the women had been to think they could only be suicide bombers.

The doctors were lucky they did not get picked up before the mistake was uncovered. Russian courts did not require much evidence
before convicting Chechens of terrorism. Zara Murtazaliyeva, for example, a student in Moscow, was convicted on the basis of transcripts of slightly anti-Russian telephone conversations. The judge ruled she had a ‘negative attitude towards the state' and found her guilty. If she did not have a negative attitude before her trial, she is almost certain to have had one after she was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment.

So this is the situation – one of tension, illegality and violence – that Kudayev was brought back to. He was kept in prison while the authorities looked for a crime to try him for. They failed to find one and he was eventually released from custody in June 2004. For Fatima Tekayeva, his mother, it was a terrible shock.