For the residents of the building who had been left in the cold and damp streets all night, many old and infirm, the idea that they were merely part of a vigilance test raised more questions than it answered, starting with the most basic. If their police had indeed made a positive analysis of the contents of the sacks as explosives, why had the men from Moscow carted the stuff away, only to declare it to be sugar?
And when people such as the “oligarch” and part-owner of the ORT television channel, Boris Berezovsky, and my friends over at the Itogi program at the independent NTV station started to look into the Ryazan incident a little too closely, they were soon silenced, or brought to heel for doubting the official line.
“We will crush the bastards in their toilets!” vowed street-talking Vladimir Putin, now elevated from KGB boss to that of Russia’s new emergency premier.
Further nuance was lost in the fury of renewed Russian hatred of all things associated with the murderous Chechens, as a wave of patriotism verging on racist frenzy gripped the Russian Federation.
I watched the war evolve from the sideline perspectives of Montana, Istanbul, Baku, and Tbilisi, wanting no part. But friends and colleagues kept asking a deeply troubling question: Other correspondents had taken up the insanely risky business of getting to Grozny to file reports by cell phone about the Russian blitz from the perspective of cellars, so why didn’t I?
I made my contacts through the person of the mysterious Mansour Jachimczyk, he of the Liz Taylor Orphan Concert in Istanbul, who had relocated with Khoj Akhmet Noukhayev and the Bebek-based Chechen Foreign Ministry on the Bosphorus to the fourth floor of a best-left-nameless hotel in central Baku.
Both Noukhayev and Jachimczyk were sitting out this round of war on the curious rationale that Asian Maskhadov’s vision of Chechnya was that of a territorial state, which the visionary Khoj Akhmet regarded as the root of the problem that had directly resulted in the current war. Specifically, Mansour explained, the new political concept he and his boss were promoting was based on the revolutionary concept of “devolution” of all existing, statelike entities into much smaller, clan-based authorities, where traditional ideas such as blood vendetta administered by local elders would hold sway.
What this meant, of course, was that Khoj Akhmet and Mansour were now theoretically against defending the Chechen state and its government. This was a leap of logic so staggering that I almost had to laugh.
“Mansour,” I cut him off. “Enough of your models. What I need are contacts to smuggle me over the mountains into and out of Chechnya without me getting killed.” Mansour reflected for a moment and then took out a pen and paper.
“These are your people in Georgia, and those are the people on the other side of the frontier,” said Mansour, handing me the names and numbers. “Go with God.”
It was early October 1999, and a good time to have old friends, no matter how strange.
20
COLD FEET AND A BURNING BRAIN
I waited for them at the confluence of the rivers, a point on maps called Shatili, the place where a pass through the towering Caucasus Mountains of northern Georgia became a pass through the towering Caucasus Mountains of southern Chechnya.
It was October 10, 1999. I remember it clearly because I was planning on making the cross into Chechnya that night to spend my forty-fifth birthday in Samashki the next day.
Georgia was the only country in the world, except for Russia, with which Chechnya shared a common frontier. Only fifty miles long, it was marked by vertigo-inspiring nine-thousand-foot passes cut beneath peaks of more than twelve thousand feet. Wildly beautiful and remote, it had now become a funnel for exhausted city people seeking haven and respite, and others, like myself, attempting to make the so-called “toboggan-run” down the Argun River into Chechnya at war.
On the Georgian side of the border, miserable knots of newly arrived and completely dispossessed people made pathetic fires out of washed-up roots and twigs, and other dry-fall to stay warm against the mountain chill. On the other side, a mile or two to the north, a dirty white plume of smoke rose like an evil cumulus cloud, marking a new explosion that had been inaudible due to distance, the acoustics of the valley, or just the river roar.
I had arrived from Tbilisi with two other correspondents who were making a rugged weekend trip of depositing me on the frontier. There, I was to link up with a man named Tom Dibb, the regional director of the land mine-removing charity organization, Halo Trust, who was making an illegal crossing into Chechnya that night in order to extract his staff.
There was, in fact, no border to cross. The mountain road to Shatili sort of ground to a gutted end at the white-water confluence of the Argun River and a minor tributary. A Georgian Army outpost had been set up on a bluff above the rivers to intercept volunteer Wahhabite fighters from the Middle East, who were said to be sneaking in to Chechnya from Georgia in order to join the fray in Grozny. At least that is what the Russian media had been reporting, thus necessitating some Georgian security response. Ironically, the only individual answering the description of the much-feared fundamentalists was a dual national Jordanian-American who had fled Grozny with his pregnant Bosnian wife and three-year-old daughter, only to end up an enforced guest of the Georgian compound. He apparently thought we were American consular officials because several were said to be on their way up to Shatili to interview him. He threw himself on our mercy.
“I was working for a Saudi relief agency in Sarajevo, but came to Grozny to develop a business involving honey products,” babbled the man, named Omar Al-Kurdi. He sported the thick beard and neatly trimmed mustache (and camera-aversion) usually associated with Wahhabites, but could not be described as fierce or threatening in any way. “The Russians bombed my house, and the Ingush would not let me enter their country,” he related. “Then bandits took my car, so we decided to make our escape. Please help! I am an American citizen, and a graduate of Fresno University’s faculty of linguistics!”
A Kurdish Arab from Jordan with American citizenship and Saudi charity connections involved in the honey industry in Chechnya, trying to make his way back to Bosnia? It ranked right up there with the mysterious Mansour’s ability to rope in Liz Taylor for a one thousand dollar-a-plate benefit dinner in Istanbul. Surreal.
“They collect all night near the frontier, and start across the river in the morning,” said Colonel Irakli Kopadze, commander of the post, referring to the refugees trickling across the frontier. He bore a remarkable resemblance to the actor Lee Marvin. “There is nothing we can do for them, apart from register those with passports. Aside from wild mountain sheep, even the villagers up here have no food to speak of.”
Most of the people stumbling across the river were actually citizens of Georgia, local Chechens known as Kists. Due to the whim of Soviet mapmakers, they had found themselves living on the northern slopes of the Caucasus range, but in Georgia, rather than Chechnya. During Soviet times, the delineation of the frontier hadn’t made much difference. Shepherds and sheep just shifted back and forth across the invisible frontier as they pleased. But following the breakup of the USSR in 1991, many of the Kists had felt the pull of ethnic nationalism and decided to relocate to Chechnya proper. Given the logistical difficulties involved, most arrived in Chechnya via the circuitous but much easier route of traveling to Grozny by road via Dagestan, or North Ossetia, the two Russian subrepublics that bracketed Chechnya. The reverse migration of both Kists and their Chechen refugee cousins, however, was happening under the most trying conditions imaginable: Up the Argun Valley from Grozny to Shatoi, via a road now being blitzed by Russian artillery and aviation, and from there still farther up an even worse mountain road to the logging community of Itumkale, and then finally across the twisting goat-and-cow path carved into the ridges above the upper Argun River toward the Georgian frontier post. And, once in Georgia, their reception was hardly warm. The total regional population of the Shatili region was less than five hundred souls, most of whom belonged to a clan of tough mountain Georgians known as the Khevsurs. Some maintained that the blue-eyed Khevsurs were really descendants of a group of crusaders who got lost in the area in the Middle Ages; others that the Khevsurs were the purest form of Georgians, as they had never been overrun by the succession of conquering armies that had swept through the funnel of land known as Georgia, throughout its long and bloody history. Whatever the case, the Khevsurs were deeply ambivalent about their Muslim Chechen neighbors, and had been for centuries, as witnessed by the shale and stone guard towers and fortress villages that marked the white-water gorges and alpine meadows of the rugged terrain.