Let Our Fame Be Great (56 page)

The scene in front of me encapsulated the horrors of the new Chechen war: the ruthlessness, the barbarity, the violence and the countless civilian casualties. The view behind me told another story: the three tanks summed up the brutal Russian response. Russia only had blunt tools for its job of crushing the Chechen people, and it did not care who got crushed along with them.

Of the 334 victims, 186 would be children, many of whom were going to Beslan's School No. 1 for the first time. September the 1st is a day of celebration in Russia – ‘the Day of Learning', it marks the start of the school year – and they were wearing their best clothes. The hostage-takers had chosen the date for its resonance; they had declared war on children, and the demands they made were straightforward.

They had passed a shabby piece of paper to an intermediary, with a series of promises and suggestions, bizarrely detailed in the light of
the horrific circumstances under which they were being proposed. Chechnya, they said, was prepared to keep the Russian currency, to enter the post-Soviet treaty organization, to remain neutral and to seek to prevent any violence against Moscow, if only Russia recognized its independence.

‘The Chechen people is waging a national-liberation struggle for its own freedom and independence, for its survival, and not so as to destroy or demean Russia. Being free, we will be interested in having a strong neighbour. We offer you peace, and the choice is up to you,' it said.

The Chechens' ‘national-liberation struggle' had come to this. The warriors who defended Grozny so bravely and gloriously in 1994, who had somehow miraculously defeated Russia two years later, were now forcing children to drink their own urine in a packed sports hall so they could win their independence. A disaster for both the Russian and Chechen peoples, it was a descent into darkness and evil driven above all by one man: the man whose name stood at the top of the demands handed over in Beslan.

‘From the Slave of Allah Shamil Basayev,' the heading said.

Basayev had learned his fighting as a volunteer in Abkhazia, a region within Soviet Georgia that broke free of central control in the early 1990s. During that war, he got very good at sending men and woman to detain, abuse and kill civilians. Taking his skills to Chechnya and beyond, he would be uniquely responsible both for prolonging the Chechens' ability to resist the invading Russian forces, and for blackening his nation's name in the eyes of the world. He himself admitted that he was a terrorist. Thanks to him, his whole nation was to be known as terrorists.

He was one of the most dynamic commanders in the Chechen forces in the 1994 – 6 war. But it was not warfare that made his name; it was a daring, ruthless and radical raid outside Chechnya in June 1995, when he and almost 150 men darted out of their homeland, pretending to be a convoy of military trucks full of coffins and loot. They battled police in the town of Budyonnovsk, and then, seeking a base to resist the heavy assault coming their way, they seized the town hospital and at least 1,000 hostages.

The siege that followed lasted from 14 to 19 June, and the Chechens beat off four attempts by Russian forces to storm the building. Russian heavy-handedness was broadcast around the world. Hostages waved white sheets out of windows in an attempt to stop the bombardment of the building, while Russian forces used snipers to try to take out the hostages so they could shoot the Chechens behind them.

In a crushing humiliation for the whole country, Russia was forced to negotiate. Television pictures of the prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, talking to this bearded bandit from the south (‘Shamil Basayev, speak louder! You are not audible' is the line that everyone remembers) seemed to confirm Russia's post-Soviet collapse. The ceasefire Basayev won allowed the Chechens to regroup, to breathe again, and eventually to win the war. Basayev and his men returned to their homes as heroes, and the hostage-taking raid was confirmed as a successful military tactic.

A deputy of Basayev's who was on the raid later justified the attack, saying what they had done was nothing compared to what Russia had unleashed on his home village of Shali.

‘We analysed the tactics of the Russian troops on Chechen territory and concluded that only diamond cuts diamond. Therefore, we concluded that the only way to stop the war was to retaliate in the same way,' said Aslambek Abdulkhadzhiev.

‘We did not make these plans except as a last resort. Why was the world silent when Shali was bombed, when some 400 people were killed and wounded? In fact, the evil we did in Budyonnovsk was not even 30 per cent of what they did in Shali.'

It was a dangerous and seductive philosophy. If the Russians were targeting civilians, why should the Chechens not target them too? Why should the Chechens not commit evil if a greater good should come from it? Basayev himself had lost eleven relatives in a Russian bombing attack just days before the raid on the hospital, so why should he not take revenge himself?

The trouble was that once he and his men abandoned the rules of natural justice, they found no stops. They had gained a great victory in Budyonnovsk, and they would try to do so again and again. But
the philosophy is corrupting. A victory based on such violence is no real victory, as the Chechens learned to their cost.

After the Russians signed the ceasefire and pulled out in 1996, Chechnya sank into complete chaos. The man who succeeded Dudayev as leader, an army colonel called Aslan Maskhadov, lacked the strength of character to keep the feuding warlords under control. Arab jihadis who had come to help the Chechens waved their money around, drove around in shiny new vehicles, and attracted private armies of men keen to earn easy cash.

Less violent foreign sympathizers gradually were driven away from Chechnya by a wave of kidnapping that spread across the region. Most foreign charity workers pulled out after December 1996, when – in the worst deliberate attack in the history of the Red Cross – six foreign aid workers were murdered in their sleep, before Maskhadov was even elected.

The lack of alternative sources of income drove more and more men into the arms of Basayev's extremists. Maskhadov imposed aspects of sharia law, but Muslim puritans imposed their own executions on people they deemed to be criminals. The dreams of independence had collapsed into a lawless morass of murders, kidnappings and viciousness.

Russia sent troops back in 1999, provoked by bombings that destroyed apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk and killed almost 300 people. The Chechens denied involvement (and lingering doubts persist that the FSB security service organized them for its own ends), but since they followed shortly after an invasion of Dagestan by Basayev, the Russian people was in no mood to hear their denials. The authorities blamed the chaos in Chechnya for fostering a nest of killers, and the Russian nation wanted revenge.

In the terrible years of warfare that were to follow, Basayev remained single-minded in his pursuit of his goals: the goals that he was to express in Beslan. But he was to become ever more dreadful in the tactics he chose to pursue, taking the war to Moscow as he did so.

My own first taste of those tactics came in October 2002. Recently arrived in Moscow, I had gone to the theatre to work on a feature article about foreign-style musicals in the Russian capital. The angle
was going to be something like ‘American razzmatazz in the home of ballet', but I never got to write it. As I stepped backstage to interview the producer, I was told that Chechens had seized another theatre on the other side of town. I was out the door, and taking a taxi as soon as I could.

It was a wet, cold, rainy evening, and outside the theatre on Dubrovka street was chaos. Policemen unsure of what to do milled about, local residents and escaped theatre-goers mixed with them. A handful of journalists like me had made it there already and were looking for someone to tell them what was going on. In fact, there was no obvious sign that anything was wrong at all.

Disappointed in my quest for information, I set off towards the front door of the theatre, thinking that the situation might be more obvious the closer I got. The building was a concrete monstrosity, with a huge light-blue poster stretching across its entire façade advertising the musical
Nord-Ost
which the hostage-takers had interrupted that evening by running onto the stage with their Kalashnikovs.

In front of the theatre was a large car park, and I set off between the cars for the 200 metres that separated me from the front entrance. When I was about ten metres or so away, the glass doors opened and a man emerged into the night, lifted up his Kalashnikov and fired off a burst of shots over my head. I was stunned. I had never heard a gun fired in anger before, and it had paralysed me. I stood there looking at him for what felt like a minute, but was probably no more than a couple of seconds, before a policeman dived into me, knocking me to the ground.

It was the beginning of a long two days of standing around, waiting for things to happen, and wondering if the Russians would once again cave in, as they had in Budyonnovsk and halt their military actions in Chechnya and agree to negotiations. This time, the Chechens had fewer hostages – about 850 people in total – but they were right in the middle of the Russian capital. The embarrassment for Russia was even greater than it had been seven years earlier.

The Russians were in no mood to repeat their concessions, however. On the morning of 26 October, gunfire suddenly boomed around the theatre. The Chechens were firing in panic in all directions,
as if they could see something the journalists could not. As it turned out, it was not what they could see that mattered, it was what they could smell.

The Russians had pumped gas into the building, in an operation so secret they did not even tell the doctors on hand what drug they had used. Soldiers carried unconscious hostages out of the theatre like sacks of vegetables, dumping them on the forecourt where I had stood that first evening, before returning for more.

The Chechens, unconscious in the theatre, had been executed where they sat. Television pictures showed black-clad women strapped with explosives slumped over in their chairs. Bearded men lay, shot dead, in corridors. A Russian soldier had placed a full bottle of cognac in one of the dead Chechens' hands: heavy-handed wit for such a sombre occasion.

For the operation had been, in human terms, a disaster. The Russian government had not been forced to stop its military operations in Chechnya, but 129 hostages had died. And all but one of them was killed by the gas pumped in to save them. Only one had died at the hands of the Chechens. Officials later justified their actions, saying they needed to gas the theatre to stop the Chechens blowing it up, but that was a nonsense. If the Chechens had wanted to explode their bombs and kill all their hostages, they had had plenty of time before they passed out. At the last moment, they had chosen not to wipe out all their hostages as they threatened, and they had died for their cause with little blood on their hands.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere in Moscow was one of fear. The funerals dragged on for days, and Muscovites wondered when the next strike would be. The threat was real for everyone, and tales of close escapes abounded. Months later, I learned that the hostage-takers in their quest for a suitable target had videoed the inside of two Moscow theatres. As it happened, they had decided to seize control of the theatre on Dubrovka, but they could easily have chosen the other one they filmed. Had they done so, I would have been one of the hostages.

Basayev blamed Putin for the deaths, and promised there would be no let-up in his terrible campaign. A series of suicide bombers struck
in and around Chechnya, destroying a government building, a bus used by military pilots and other targets. The bombers were often women, who were videoed wearing black veils and saying they were on their way to heaven, before they were sent out to blow themselves up. They became known in the Russian media as the ‘Black Widows'.

Moscow was struck again on 5 July 2003, a summer day, the kind of day when Moscow is at its most beautiful. It was a Saturday and I was shopping in a major electronics market on the edge of town when my phone rang. Reports had come in of a suicide bombing at a rock concert. Getting to the Tushino air field through the traffic was a struggle, but at last I was confronted with the grim reality of it: the crumpled heap of the bodies, the shrapnel from the explosive belts the two bombers had worn, and the continuing beat of the rock festival. Organizers had decided there was no need to end the party.

The two bombers killed fifteen young Muscovites, and injured many more. It turned out that only sharp-eyed security guards had stopped them entering the festival, where the carnage would have been even worse. The thought of two bombs in the heaving crowd was enough to make any festival organizer sick with worry.

And just four days later, another bomber was aimed at the capital: this time a young woman called Zarema Muzhakhoyeva was sent to explode herself against the plate glass window of a café, the idea being to kill all those inside with fragments of broken glass and shrapnel.

She later said she lost her nerve, and she was captured after she put down her bomb and surrendered to police. She was allowed to give an interview to the
Izvestia
newspaper from prison, and she told a story so bleak as to almost defy comprehension.

Her words showed how low Basayev has sunk in his quest to terrify the Russian people into peace. He was now not only targeting people whose only crime was to be in Moscow; he was actively recruiting vulnerable Chechen women to do it for him.

Muzhakhoyeva was just twenty-three when she was sent out into Moscow with a rucksack full of explosives by two men she knew as Igor and Andrei. Her background is so tragic, that it would be hard to condemn her at all, had the bomb she left behind not killed the sapper sent to defuse it.