Fazil and his friend were not heard from again for eight months. And when they emerged from the last of a series of cellars and caves, they were completely emaciated and wearing chest-long beards caked with mud. They had become, Fazil later told me, experts in “the behavior of ants” and decent portrait artists. To relieve boredom, he and a cell mate had sketched pictures of each other in the caked-dirt filth that built up on their trousers.
The most frightening moment aside from the original capture, he informed me, came on the last day of captivity, when the two were dragged from their pit and brought into Grozny for potential release, only to be returned to another dungeon that evening.
“I broke down and wept, because I was sure that signaled a breakdown in negotiations, and that our captors would kill us,” he recalled. “Then one of the guards, who was not supposed to talk to us, tried to calm me by saying that we would be released at eleven that night. I was sure he was lying. But at a quarter to eleven our guards just disappeared into the night, and fifteen minutes later our liberators appeared. In other words, our kidnappers and liberators were the same people.”
And the rationale for kidnapping Fazil in the first place?
“They accused me of using the Solidarity Committee funds for my own purposes. I replied that I had not taken a dime, but even sold my car for the cause. They said that meant I was not a true Chechen, because a real Chechen would of course steal half the money. That is when my heart broke, and when I returned to Turkey I kissed the tarmac of the airport. I never want to see that place again.”
That was the confused atmosphere of Chechnya I planned to walk into for my Aftermath assignment for the BBC.
17
THE LAW OF THE MOUNTAINS
I planned my Return to Samashki assignment to overlap with the Chechen presidential elections of January 1997. The government of Acting President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, and the military forces under the command of victorious General Asian Maskhadov, had promised complete security for all foreign journalists and election observers who decided to pop into the country to monitor the polls.
The obvious problem with this pledge was whether the “rogue elements,” held responsible for the daily diet of murder and mayhem before the elections, would now listen to the country’s leadership and desist from their destabilizing activities. More to the point, if the successful secessionist government could not control said elements from kidnapping and killing foreigners when there were almost no foreign targets in the country, how could the government possibly control the same unidentified elements from kidnapping foreigners leading up to election day, when there would be more exposed targets than ever before?
Formally, the presidential elections were being held to replace the martyred Djohar Dudayev. The field of candidates was led by Asian Maskhadov, the silent and successful general of the resistance campaign and architect of the reconquest of Grozny that had resulted in the de facto independence of Chechnya from the Russian Federation. General Maskhadov was the clear favorite among all segments of Chechen society, but particularly among those folks who might be called traditional conservatives. He also commanded a grudging respect from the Russian military, and thus from a Kremlin perspective was viewed as a man with whom the Yeltsin government could do business.
Next came Shamil Basayev, the flamboyant 35-year-old field commander and Maskhadov deputy. Basayev was favored by the radical youth, who were not satisfied with some of the fuzzier points of the Khazavyurt Accords negotiated by Maskhadov that had formally ended the Chechen-Russian war. The fuzziest of all was the postponing of Chechnya’s de jure status as being a state legally independent from Russian for a period of five years. As for Moscow’s attitude toward Basayev, quite simply he was known as the most wanted man in Russia.
The dark horse candidate in the elections was Acting President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. Although the principal ideologue of the Chechen Revolution, his candidacy was tainted in the eyes of many locals by the fact that he had never been a combatant, and stained in the eyes of many outside observers by real or perceived connections to the “Wahhabi” foreign fighters, such as Khattab.
A handful of other candidates, most of whom were successful unit commanders, added color, if little contention, to the field.
Aside from specific political agendas and the personal style of the candidates, the main issue at hand was security, or rather the lack of it, throughout the land. The appalling murder of six Red Cross workers who had been bludgeoned to death in their sleep in Novi Atagi a month before remained unsolved, and scores of would-be international election monitors had canceled their trips to Chechnya, fearing for their lives.
This was a severe blow to whoever might eventually win the presidency, as well as to Chechnya as a whole, as the very act of monitoring elections suggested some tacit recognition of the renegade state. The head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe mission to Chechnya, Swiss diplomat Tim Guldermann, had invested a huge amount of personal effort and political capital to convince Moscow to accept the concept of Chechnya holding any elections at all. But his pleas to other OSCE states to send official observers to Grozny fell largely on deaf ears due to security concerns, and with the exception of a group of Polish monitors brought down from Moscow by the mysterious Mansour Jachimczyk (who was simultaneously campaigning for Yandarbiyev), official OSCE attendance was embarrassingly thin.
Not so with the media. Every news agency and newspaper and television station with reporters based in Russia, both local and foreign, seemed to have descended on Grozny. Lawrence Sheets had even brought up his cook from Tbilisi to break the monotony of the standard Chechen chow of boiled beef with fried green garlic with some Georgian-style home cookin’, and the so-called “Reuters House” near the bazaar soon became a veritable soup kitchen for the small army of reporters, cameramen, photographers, translators, drivers, and guards, whether they were working for Reuters or not. The most curious addition to the table, if not exactly a guest, was a wandering American youth dressed up in Pashtun garb. He burst into the Reuters House one night looking for a companion to go “meet the Muslims” in the mountains. We threw him out. To this day, I wonder if he was not John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” on his way to deepest, darkest Afghanistan, looking for one of Khattab’s training camps.
Unlike the crowd of foreign press, human rights advocates, and election observers from the former Eastern Bloc, I was not in Chechnya to track presidential poll results. My focus was Samashki. And almost without thinking about how easy it would be for anyone to kidnap me—a solo foreigner traveling alone at dusk—I jumped in the first car I found, and began my journey home, unsure of what I would find.
When did it first dawn on me that people were looking at me in a peculiar way?
Was it that first knot of men huddled over a tire fire near the burnt-out shell of the central school building who seemed unpleasantly surprised to see me? Or was it that attenuated greeting, almost sour, delivered by the blacksmith, Alkhazur?
The young man I found “brick farming” in the ruins of a shattered building picked up a piece of rubble and threw it at me.
Something was wrong, very wrong, and I knew it before knocking on the courtyard door, a long-lost son returned.
“As-salam aleikum!” I cried in my best Chechen, as the short, stocky form of Hussein’s father revealed itself in the half-open gate, illuminated by a candle. “Marsh vogil!”