But it made little difference what the language was or how many hours off prime time the program was shown. Rights and Wrongsl Chechnya was a broadcast of my material on Hussein and Samashki in calendar year 1996, and its producer, Danny Schechter, thought he might send it in as a candidate for the second year of the Rory Peck Awards, which I had never heard of, although Rory was my friend.
I am not sure who was more surprised when I was announced as being a finalist, myself on my way to London, or Michael Rosenblum, then on his way out the door from New York Times TV—possibly, I would like to think, because of me.
Thanks again, Danny.
Under the klieg lights, we four finalists for the Rory Peck Award waited for the CEO of Sony Europe to gain the podium and announce the jury decision. I felt more exposed than I did getting shot at in the streets of Samashki. I am sure my three rivals felt the same. I was filled with an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude toward everyone who had helped me along that long, eighteen-month journey from Samashki to London. There was smuggler Isa and his brothers Muhammad and Musa, as well as Commander Ali. There was the blacksmith, Alkhazur, Uncle Larry Sheets, Steve Coppen, Danny Schechter, and, of course, Hussein. I had all or most or some of their names written on a napkin tucked in my tux. Yes, I had ducked off to the bathroom before entering the auditorium to scribble down some quick notes of acceptance and thanks, because I had come to understand something I had never before felt.
I wanted us to win.
“And the winner of the Rory Peck Prize for 1996 is…”
A great wave rolled up from the darkened audience toward the stage as I stuck out my hand to congratulate Jane Kokan. She was stepping up to the podium to receive a state-of-the-art digital camera kit, a prize that symbolized independence for any freelancer. But it also symbolized something else—tacit encouragement for the first living winner of the Rory Peck Award to go out and do something even more insane than the project that had landed her as a finalist, and then winner, in the grand ceremony.
Yes, Jane Kokan was being encouraged to go back in. And suddenly I realized that, as a mere also-ran, I was exempted from such expectations.
I did not have to go back there any more. It was over.
I had pushed my story on Samashki to the world stage and fulfilled my part of the bargain with Hussein and his men. Although ours was not the winner, a segment of the Samashki piece would be shown as part of an hour-long program on the Rory Peck Awards in a worldwide, joint broadcast of the BBC and CNN.
I had done my duty. It was over, and I could go home.
“Could we have a word?”
It was Nik Gowing, standing in front of me at the cocktail party following the awards.
“That man you featured, Hussein?” asked Gowing.
“Yes?”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look,” said Gowing, drawing me aside from a knot of consolers.
“I don’t know how to say this exactly, so let me just say it out loud. There were many at the BBC who thought you should have won this year’s Rory Peck.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I am not here to give you a tough-luck consolation prize,” he interjected. “I am here to give you the assignment of your life, and this is it. We foreign correspondents wing our way into ghastly situations and report on them, and then just leave and move on to the next assignment with no respect to the aftermath experienced by the people with whom we experienced our brief time in hell. I ask myself again and again: What happened to all those people I interviewed in Sarajevo? I am back in London regaling friends with my stories of being under fire, and general danger, and the international importance of it all. But what about them, the people I reported on? That is what I want you to do. I want you to go back to Samashki. I want you to find your Hussein if he is still alive, or I want you to find his grave if he is not. I want you to gauge the impact of your very presence in that little town at that time and now. I want you to do an aftermath.”
Aftermath.
It was the logical, and now funded follow-up assignment to my original, almost-award-winning story on Samashki.
It filled me with inexplicable dread.
16
DEN OF INIQUITY
Much had changed in the eighteen months since I had last been in Chechnya.
For starters, there was no longer a war.
Just at a time when Moscow had declared the operation to “restore constitutional order” in Chechnya to be over, save possibly for afew “terrorist bandits” holed up in the hills, thousands of Chechen commandos materialized from nowhere and overran Grozny in August 1996. Arriving in trucks, buses, railcars, and on foot through sewers, the nonexistent Chechen army quickly infiltrated the city, trapping some six thousand Russian soldiers in their bunkers. Under threat of the Chechens annilihating the soldiers on live television, the humiliated government of Boris Yeltsin capitulated. Russia—Rossiya— the country that put paid to Hitler’s Third Reich, brought to its knees by a handful of Islam-inspired bandits?
The resulting cease-fire and subsequent withdrawal of all Russian military personnel from Chechen territory, negotiated by Chechen Commander-in-Chief Asian Maskhadov and Yeltsin’s National Security advisor General Alexandr Lebed, became known as the Khazavyurt Accords. They all but recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as an independent state. David had just slain Goliath, and the victorious nationalists moved back to power in the devastated capital. It was immediately renamed Johar Kala in memory of Djohar Dudayev, who had been killed by a Russian missile in April of that year.
But despite celebration, it was not the end of the Chechen crisis.
The first question that needed to be addressed in the de facto independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was that of leadership. With the mercurial Dudayev dead, this logically focused on his successor. The Chechen constitution was at least clear on this point. In the event of the death or disappearance of the president, the vice-president was to step in and fulfill presidential duties until the people elected a new leader.
Dudayev’s immediate successor was Vice President Zalimkhan Yandarbiyev, the main nationalist, Islamist ideologue of the Chechen revolution. A Soviet-style intellectual who described himself as “a shepherd and poet,” it was Yandarbiyev who had initially invited Dudayev to come home and lead the secessionist movement.
Yandarbiyev’s tenure as acting president of Chechnya was short, effectively consisting of the period between Dudayev’s death in April 1996 and the presidential elections held in January 1997. During that time he was credited with two accomplishments, both of which might be regarded as related pillars of his foreign policy.
The first was allowing an infusion of foreign Muslim essentialists into Chechnya as volunteers for the cause. Generically known as Wahhabites, or followers of the rigorous version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic legion came from all over the Muslim world, and even included a number of volunteers from among European and even American converts.21 While the Kremlin sought to convince the world that these mujahideen numbered in the thousands, most neutral observers put the more likely number in the low hundreds—and this was a number that also included diaspora Chechens from Turkey, Jordan, and Syria, who did not regard themselves as foreigners at all.