Four
COMING TO AMERICA
Many media accounts of the Tsarnaev story have hinted or simply stated that they lied to get into the United States, that they never should have been granted asylum—indeed, that had the asylum process worked as it should, weeding the worthy victims from the dangerous ones, a tragedy could have been averted. In fact, the Tsarnaevs typified asylum seekers in America, and the process in their case worked as well, or as poorly, as it does the vast majority of the time. Future asylum seekers usually come to the United States on visitors’ visas and then, relying on a network of family and friends, try to make ends meet, not quite legally, while they apply for asylum. And yes, they usually lie, or at least embellish.
Making your case to the immigration authorities is different from making a case in court: rather than tell a coherent story, you, the asylum seeker, tell of everything that has gone wrong in your life—at least the things that went wrong that the asylum officer might find worthy of notice. You exaggerate, you mold your story to fit the requirements. It probably would not work to tell the officer that you were born in a country where you could never be a full citizen, a country that then broke apart into several others, which you crisscrossed trying to find a home and could not, and so you came to America. Instead, you have to say that you have been subjected to persecution based on your ethnic origin and you are fleeing a war. The Tsarnaevs did just that: they relied on the war in Chechnya and the ethnic discrimination in Kyrgyzstan to establish their credentials. Anzor appears to have claimed that he was briefly jailed and tortured in Kyrgyzstan as part of a broad anti-Chechen crackdown. He may indeed have been detained in Kyrgyzstan toward the end of his time there, though this was most likely to have been connected to his work for Jamal’s business. It would have been much too complicated to try to explain to an asylum officer that the Chechens’ very existence on the permanent wrong side of the law in Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere was a function of generations of disenfranchisement. Anzor could be said to have used shorthand.
THE TWO CHECHEN WARS, the one in the mid-1990s and the one that began in 1999, displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them stayed in the former Soviet Union, joining relatives in Central Asia or Russia. Tens of thousands sought refuge in countries of the European Union, where they often spent years in refugee camps. Very few made it all the way to the United States. The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping. “With any country early on in a conflict, the people who claim asylum first are usually the elites or people who don’t actually live there,” says Almut Rochowanski, a Columbia University legal scholar who in the early 2000s started an organization that helped new Chechen refugees find legal representation, although she herself was born in Austria and had no personal connection to Chechnya until research and human rights work took her there. The first Chechen refugees to arrive in the United States were members of the Dudaev pro-independence government and Chechens from Central Asia. Later came the people whose family members had been disappeared by the Russian authorities or the Chechen fighters. In refugee camps and in tiny Chechen communities that formed abroad, they often mixed with people who had actually been fighters—making for messy alliances at best and open conflict at worst.
The Chechen community in and around Boston numbers only a handful of families. This was the community that Anzor and Zubeidat joined when they came. It also happens to come close to representing the entire range of the Chechen immigrant experience in the United States. Makhmud Mazaev was probably the first to arrive—in 1994, just as the war was about to break out. He had been a urologist in Grozny, but learned upon arrival in the United States that he was too old to requalify as a doctor. He got a nursing certificate and worked as a visiting nurse. Later he created a thriving business, a day center for elderly Russian speakers. It is called Zdorovye, the Russian word for “health.” In the morning a half-dozen Zdorovye vans make the rounds of several Boston neighborhoods, collecting elderly people who are well enough to live on their own but not to care for themselves during the day. Zdorovye attends to their meals, tracks their medical appointments, and celebrates their birthdays with them. Mazaev is the classic—and rare—example of a successfully assimilated Chechen refugee. He goes by the name Max; his American-born son, Baudy, who is about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age, is a student at competitive Boston University; and he has friends in Boston’s large community of Russian-speaking Jews, from which he draws most of his clientele. One friend is a younger Russian Jewish doctor who often joins Mazaev on trips to New Hampshire, just an hour’s drive north, where Mazaev likes to go for target practice: even an assimilated Chechen man wants to get his shooting done, and the range in New Hampshire is the only open-air one in the area.
Not far from the shooting range, in a ground-floor apartment in a complex in Manchester, New Hampshire, lives Mazaev’s cousin Musa Khadzhimuratov, an entirely different kind of Chechen refugee. Khadzhimuratov joined the war effort in Chechnya as a teenager and in a few years became the head of security for Akhmed Zakayev, a former actor who served as foreign minister in the separatist government. At the beginning of the second war, a wounded Zakayev fled Chechnya—he would later be granted political asylum in the United Kingdom—and Khadzhimuratov went into hiding. Russian troops found him, shot him, and left him for dead. He survived. His family moved him to Azerbaijan, where he underwent a series of operations. He is paralyzed from the waist down, he lacks sensation in eighty percent of his body, he has frequent petit mal seizures, and he requires around-the-clock care, but he is alive. Khadzhimuratov, his wife, Madina, and their two small children were brought to the United States by a refugee foundation, on a plane with one other family from Chechnya and a score of families fleeing Afghanistan. The Khadzhimuratovs landed in New Hampshire by accident—they had been told they were going to the Boston suburb of Chelsea, where one Chechen family already lived, but were rerouted at the last minute to what they thought was Manhattan but turned out to be Manchester. They were placed in a second-floor apartment that had a hallway with a step in it, which meant that Khadzhimuratov could not make it from the bedroom to the bathroom. The entire family stayed in the living room, with Khadzhimuratov and his son sleeping on a mattress on the floor and Madina and their daughter sleeping in armchairs. By the time they found a ground-floor, wheelchair-accessible apartment a few weeks later, they did not want to think of changing cities. The Khadzhimuratovs live on public assistance, but perhaps because the relative isolation of New Hampshire requires this, they have also assimilated to a significant extent. Their spotless two-bedroom apartment is as open as any traditional Chechen home: the kids of the Sudanese family from upstairs come here after school with the Khadzhimuratov children and never leave; a retired American named Jim, who lost all ties to his family after a bitter divorce, has adopted the Khadzhimuratovs, or has been adopted by them—he is here every afternoon. Madina, on whom Khadzhimuratov is dependent for constant care, shows none of the deference traditional for a Chechen woman. She sits at the table with everyone else and interrupts with laughter and even with the occasional correction.
That other family from the Khadzhimuratovs’ plane made it to Chelsea, making a total of two Chechen families in that suburb. They were a middle-aged woman, her son, his wife, and their toddler daughter: the woman’s husband and her other son had been taken away by Russian security services and never returned. The other Chelsea family was that of Hamzat Umarov, his wife, Raisa, and their seven small children, who had come by way of a refugee camp in Turkey—and before that, they had crossed the border from Chechnya on foot, at the height of the fighting. An equally dramatic escape story belongs to the Boston Chechen community’s celebrity, Khassan Baiev. Before the first war, Baiev was an up-and-coming plastic surgeon with a profitable practice in Grozny and a side business not unlike Jamal Tsarnaev’s. During the war he ran a field hospital where, he says, he treated the wounded from all sides. At the start of the second war he was targeted, ostensibly for having aided the rebels. A human rights organization virtually smuggled him out of Russia and helped him apply for asylum in the United States; eventually he was able to bring his wife and three children over. Like Mazaev, Baiev concluded he would be unable to be recertified as a doctor in the United States. He tried to volunteer at a hospital. He wrote a memoir with the help of a Boston journalism professor who had once been posted to Moscow. Eventually, after the war ended, he drifted back to Russia, where he now once again has a lucrative plastic surgery practice, which keeps him in ostentatiously expensive clothes and his family living in the middle-class Boston suburb of Needham, in a cul-de-sac with a playground in the middle.