My disguise—a two-month beard trimmed to Muslim style that was gray enough to make me a respected elder, a greatcoat covering the thirty-pound flak jacket I was wearing and a lamb’s wool, Astrakhan-style papakh atop my head—seemed to be working. Coupled with my front-seat position, it had sufficed to keep our two other traveling companions’ curiosity in check, thanks to the local code of silence in front of elders, who must speak before being spoken to. I had kept strict radio silence. Now I was breaking it.
“Doktor Teymur,” he said in Russian from the back seat. “We have just crossed the Zalota Most over the Samur River! Is it good to be home?”
“Da,” I said, on cue.
Suddenly, a white Djiguli sedan darted out of the darkness and blocked our path.
“Wha—?” cried our driver, and mutterings of concern from the two other passengers ricocheted around the car.
“Don’t worry, friends, it’s for us,” hissed Isa, trying to reassure them. Then he turned to me. “Get out—now!”
“But my bags…”
“Go!!” barked Isa. “Your stuff will rejoin you on the other side! Go!!”
Things were going too fast: I was out of one car and into the other and a man sitting in the passenger seat turned to me to say “hello,” revealing double rows of gold-capped teeth in so doing.
It was soon clear how he paid his dentist.
“Denge!” he commanded, and Isa forked over a small wad of twenty-dollar bills.
“It is not enough!” screeched the man after making a quick count.
“What do you mean?” said Isa. “You said one hundred bucks.”[1]
“Each,” said the man in the passenger seat. “The price of transportation has risen.”
“This is a scandal!” growled Isa.
“That is the border,” said the driver. “The choice is yours.”
“Look, guys,” Isa implored the pair. “We are really low on dough—let’s make it an extra fifty and call it even.”
The driver and man in the passenger seat exchanged glances.
“For the Muslim cause, boys,” growled the driver, and took the extra cash. Then he turned on the ignition and hit the accelerator, screeching to a halt in front of the security gate.
“Doktor Teymur,” Isa asked in a loud voice as we emerged from the car. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“Da,” I replied, and gave him one.
“Remember what I told you,” growled Isa, bending close as if to get a light. “Just answer ‘yes’ to everything that sounds like a question.”These Russian dogs would sell their sisters, their mothers. Do you understand?“
“Da,” I said. The station was bathed in cheesy incandescent light, illuminating a knot of Russian soldiers standing near the barrier while others clambered like ants over a truck. Invisible dogs barked. A searchlight swung across an adjacent field. Then we started walking toward the barrier.
Isa and I had met the day before through the agency of an Azeri friend who specialized in dubious business ventures such as importing “class” cars for resale to the Baku nouveau rich. A late model Mercedes with only a few dents and bullet holes sold for around five thousand dollars. For an added premium charge of five hundred dollars, my contact once told me, he could have the cars taken off the INTERPOL hot car register. Although my contact never said as much, Isa seemed to be one of his primary sources for such “used” vehicles.
But that was before the war in Chechnya exploded in November 1994. After that, trade had dried up. Whether he really had been in the stolen car business or in some more legitimate trade, in February 1995 Isa was unemployed and needed cash. I had some cash and was in need of a man who knew how to move things along difficult roads and over borders—like me. As such, we were a perfect fit; we were both desperate.
The reason for my desperation was pretty straightforward. Having accepted—no, pursued—a contract with ABC’s Nightline to sally forth to Chechnya at war to create a one-man documentary on “the Chechen Spirit,” made on the basis of my unique ties, language ability, and cultural connectivity, I had traveled from Montana to Philadelphia to Washington to New York to Istanbul to London to Istanbul to Baku, only to run up against the proverbial brick wall. My pals in the pan-Turkic crowd in Istanbul had talked big, but failed to provide anything except lofty platitudes and empty promises. Ditto for my “high-level” contacts among the Chechen diaspora.
I wanted the program to air on February 23, the anniversary of the “Day of Chechen Genocide.” Alternatively, I wanted to be inside Chechnya in order to capture on film whatever happened on that most resonant day in the Chechen communal psyche. But the project had been dogged by problems from the start. Specifically, the Video News International agency that had subcontracted me to ABC’s Nightline seemed unable to come up with any of the requisite paraphernalia for the venture, ranging from airline tickets to combat zone insurance and even cash. After wasting a week of precious time on the East Coast of the United States, I finally accepted a package of vague terms on faith and boarded a plane to Istanbul, ready to start swimming in familiar waters—and it was already mid-February.
After some useless meetings with official Chechen emissaries, I checked into the offices of the Chechen Solidarity Committee in the smog-invested Lalali quarter of Istanbul. The office, located above a coffee house on a side street with a name that never would be registered on any postman’s beat, was the throbbing hub of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey—that is, the descendants of the small Muslim nations who had fled the North Caucasus to Ottoman Turkey after the Czarist armies had conquered the region one hundred and fifty years before. Although there were posters and other cultural paraphernalia relating to the other seven nations of the North Caucasus, the emphasis was heavily and unabashedly slanted on Chechnya. Portraits of the two implacable nineteenth-century resistance leaders, Imam Shamil and his predecessor, Sheikh Mansour, framed that of the current Chechen president, Djohar Dudayev. Nearby hung the green, white, red and black Chechen flag—the colors standing for religion, purity, blood and mourning, respectively—replete with the presidential symbol of an alert gray wolf on its haunches. On the wall behind the director’s chair, written in Noxchi (Chechen) with a convenient Turkish translation, were the words to the Chechen national anthem.
Establishing my bona fides with an intense young man named Fazil Özen who served as the director of the center, I was allowed to try and find a group of volunteers into which I might “embed” myself. As the primary contact point for Diaspora and traveling Chechens, the center attracted a weird mix of second- and third-generation “Chechen Turks” from Anatolian villages who had suddenly rediscovered their identity but spoke no Chechen or Russian, fourth- and fifth-generation “Chechen Arabs” from Jordan and Syria who were actually closer to Chechenness than their “Turkish” cousins, and finally, a truly motley crew of real Russian Chechens who needed or wanted help and assistance to return home via the underground railroad to fight the good fight. It was strange and wonderful and chilling, watching volunteer-ism at work. One young man, who said he knew me from Sukhumi (although he was on the other side of the lines in the Abkhaz war), wanted me to travel with him. He seemed like a perfect subject for my project of explaining, through film, what the Chechen spirit was all about.