The fate dealt out to a pair of devoted British aid workers in a Grozny orphanage, Jonathan James and Camilla Carr, was only marginally less harsh: Captured for ransom, they were tortured and raped, but ultimately freed by Asian Maskhadov’s security detail.
The nagging question of whether the kidnappers and the antikidnapping security squads were not possibly made up of the same people working in collusion seemed to be answered, at least for me, by the case of Fazil Özen, president of the Chechen Solidarity Committee in Istanbul, whom I had first met way back when, in the winter of 1995, even before my first trip to Samashki.
Inspired by the example of other diasporas, the Chechen Solidarity Committee in Istanbul had raised and then pumped in some ten million dollars in material aid to the homeland, a place most diaspora Chechens living in Turkey had never seen, and where a language was spoken—Noxchi Mot—that they had long forgotten.
It was the same story of a romanticized relationship of people in diaspora toward their distant, beleaguered kinsmen, as experienced by such disparate peoples as the Los Angeles Armenians, Boston Irish, and New York Jews. Find a leader, send the money.
Some aid took the form of rented satellite time, so that Chechen television could continue to broadcast their idea of news, free of Moscow’s informational feed. Wireless communication equipment was smuggled in to aid fighters in the mountains. Getting material (and military) aid past Russian checkpoints was a little trickier and usually took the form of sending trusted couriers into Chechnya, who would bribe their way past the guards and then deliver high density aid—that is, hard cold cash.
“Djohar knows what he needs better than we do,” Fazil had explained to me back in the winter of 1995-96. “The Russian soldiers sell everything just to raise the funds to run away. There is no need for us to smuggle in weapons when the fighters can bargain for them and buy them on the spot.”
That arrangement worked well enough, until April 21, 1996. That was the day Djohar Dudayev was killed, allegedly by a guided missile that homed in on the satellite telephone he was using. The telephone and the expenses associated with its use were a gift of the diaspora community, where the shock of his death was arguably greater than in Chechnya itself.
I learned about Dudayev’s death from Fazil. It was very early in the morning in Montana when the telephone rang. I picked it up, heard the distinctive hum of an international call, waited for it to subside, and then found myself listening to a sobbing Fazil Özen on the Istanbul end of the line.
“I am calling you because I do not know who else to talk to,” wept Fazil. “They killed Djohar today, but everyone has a different version, and I have no idea whom to trust!”
He related the four or five or eight theories, including the one that Fazil had initially clung to for the first few hours: That all reports of Dudayev’s death were greatly exaggerated, and just another example of Russian disinformation. That one was punctured fairly quickly. Within hours of the announcement that the President was dead, seemingly every Chechen in Istanbul was advertising himself as Dudayev’s appointed heir—and demanding access to the monetary and material aid collected by the Istanbul Solidarity Committee.
Fazil Ozen’s immediate response to the announcement that Dudayev had been killed was to take revenge by volunteering to fight as a guerrilla.
“Fazil,” I cautioned him. “You are not a soldier, you do not know the country, you do not know the factions, you do not even really know enough Chechen to respond if some one tells you to duck because there is an incoming shell, or to shoot because you have fallen into a trap.”
“This is true,” he replied.
“Your role in the dava (cause) is to provide the second line of support,” I said. “You have raised and sent millions of dollars. Don’t do what you are not cut out for. You are not a fighter. If you try to be, you will only end up as a corpse. Don’t go.”
Of course Fazil went. Not as a fighter per se, but as the head of a tiny, over-the-mountain delegation from the diaspora to check out the new Chechen leadership in the person of Asian Maskhadov, the wily Chechen military commander who would bring the Russian Army to its knees.
“You see, I did not listen to you—I went!” beamed Fazil Özen the next time I saw him in Istanbul after the Russian collapse. He was sitting beneath a large, grainy slide-to-print color photograph of himself standing next to a triumphant and grinning Maskhadov. “No one thought we could do it—staring down the Russian bear!—and yet we did. And we, as members of the Chechen community in diaspora, would like to think that we played our small part in this legendary triumph!”
The Chechens might seem to have won an incredible victory against tremendous odds, but it was at the price of having lost up to a tenth of the population, with survivors living in an utterly destroyed landscape filled with refugees, orphans, and murderous psychopaths—even while a five-way power struggle began for the right to claim the mantle of the fallen Djohar Dudayev. Individuals would appear in Istanbul demanding money for a gaggle of different field commanders—and accuse Fazil of embezzlement of charity funds when he did not immediately fork over cash.
Inevitably, the question of fraud and misappropriation had even begun to touch on the reputation of the president of the Solidarity Committee, Fazil himself. His name was on the bank account in Istanbul to which donors might wire funds; but so were the names of the Vice-President and the Treasurer. Despite the fact that all incoming and outgoing funds had been painstakingly recorded and even registered with the Turkish tax officials, vicious gossip had it that Fazil had used some of the money for his own pleasure. For a man who had devoted the last few years of his life to the Chechen cause—almost to the point of destroying his marriage through neglect—it was not a happy time.
Equipped with copies of the documents concerning all cash transfers made by a score of couriers over the course of two years, he set off for Grozny to set the record straight.
Significantly, it was Fazil’s first legal trip to Chechnya. Rather than trudging over mountains or hiding in the trunk of a car, he and a companion applied for and received a visa to visit the Russian Federation, and flew from Istanbul to Nalchik, capital of the tiny North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. From there they made their way by road across the Republic of Ingushetia and then across the frontier into “free” Chechnya.
In Grozny, Fazil Özen began his business of resolving any misunderstandings about the purloined or misappropriated aid. He had meetings with old friends, such as President Maskhadov and the redoubtable Shamil Basayev, now Minister for Industry. All indications are that those contacts were friendly. There were, no doubt, other contacts and meetings, too, pertaining to various aid projects to be funded by the diaspora—a new school, perhaps, as well as scholarships for Chechen students in Turkish universities.
Business accomplished and name cleared, Fazil and his companion traveled to the town of Shali, located in the foothills of the towering Caucasus mountain range, and from there went to spend the last night in a neighboring village. One day, two, and then a week with no news. Fazil and his companion had been swallowed up by the earth. And in Chechnya, that meant only one thing. Kidnappers. But who, and why?