Read Let Our Fame Be Great Online
Authors: Oliver Bullough
Let Our Fame Be Great (64 page)
âHe had changed completely,' she explained. âHe was changed, he was a real nutcase. He ate badly, he slept badly, he did not talk to anyone. Even if people came to see him, he would sit in his own room. He was not himself. He had been such a joyful lad but he came back from there completely different.
âHe had had so many friends in childhood. I could not sit down at home even. They were mainly Balkars, but even a Russian who adopted Islam came too,' she said. âAs time passed, he became a bit better, but he did not talk to anyone but me and his brother, and even if he spoke to us his head hurt. He would go into his room and say: “Do not talk to me, I have to relax.”'
He needed medical treatment as well. He had terrible trouble with his liver, and the bullet was still in his hip. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow during his captivity, and he was weak. The wrestler had returned as a cripple. But he could not go to a doctor, since he lacked the internal passport that is the key to all the Russian state's services. Without documentation, you are effectively not a human being.
In the absence of medical care, the only thing that might have improved his condition was rest, but he did not even get that, because the police came and interrogated him any time they felt like it.
âRasul was at home between June 2004 and October 2005, and during this time they took him from our home in masks four times. They did not even say why they were doing this. One time they had him from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and we had to
call an ambulance afterwards because he did not get his medicine. The ambulance took him to hospital and they treated him all evening, but I refused to leave him in hospital because I was scared, so I took him and treated him at home,' remembered Tekayeva.
call an ambulance afterwards because he did not get his medicine. The ambulance took him to hospital and they treated him all evening, but I refused to leave him in hospital because I was scared, so I took him and treated him at home,' remembered Tekayeva.
Kudayev was taken to the police station and questioned on 23 May 2005. He was summoned again on 28 May and told a new case would be opened against him for alleged falsification of documents. On 19 June, he was visited by prosecutors, but was too ill to speak. In July, he was questioned by the FSB, then on 16 August he was abducted from home, and questioned for five hours about Guantanamo and Afghanistan.
It was a horrific time, but the next photograph Tekayeva showed me was rather lovely. It showed her son having finally gained his passport. He is grinning, showing a mouth of white, firm teeth, and his hair is brushed down over his forehead. He is wearing a grey jacket, and a dark T-shirt, both of which enhance his good looks. Through an open door behind him, you can see Tekayeva doing the washing up in the kitchen.
By this stage, Tekayeva had lost touch with all her other relatives, and was having to cope with just her sons for company.
âIf these relatives came to me and asked how Rasul was, then they would be visited and searched too. Since that time I have hardly talked to my relations so my problems would not affect them too,' she said.
But then, on 13 October 2005, the problems became worse. A group of possibly a hundred men, most of them local Muslims radicalized by the violence they faced from the police, attacked buildings belonging to security forces in the city. It is hard to know what they were trying to achieve. They did not publish any coherent demands; nor did they take a significant number of hostages. They just opened fire on state targets, apparently more or less at random.
Basayev, the Chechen warlord, inevitably got involved, issuing statements on his website about the insurgents' links to the Chechen resistance. But those links were tenuous, since the men in Nalchik lacked the skill of the Chechens, and were rapidly and comprehensively defeated. The uprising had been a murderous expression of rage by a marginalized generation.
Tekayeva left home that morning unaware of what was happening, and reached her workplace â a clinic where she worked as a cleaner â at around 11 a.m. The fighting had been going on for two hours by now, but she, Kudayev and her other son, Arsen, were completely unaware of it.
âAt work they all ran up to me and asked me why had I come to work. They said war had started in the town. They told me to go home and sit down with my sons and not to let them go anywhere. Arsen had driven me to work, but he had already left, so one ambulance agreed to take me home, because it was going nearby,' she said.
âI walked the 300 metres home and Arsen had not even got back yet. He was just getting back when I walked up. I asked him where Rasul was, and whether he was awake yet, and Arsen said that he was still asleep.'
The three of them sat, appalled, and watched the news â all burning buildings and dead bodies â for a while, before deciding that they needed to establish alibis, so the neighbours could testify that they had not taken any part in the attacks. So, they went and stood in the courtyard several times where everyone could see them.
Kudayev even spoke to Russian television after the attacks, telling them that he had no connection to the attacks, and had no idea who had carried them out. âSome people say it was Chechens, some people say it was Muslims, and some people even say it was an Orange Revolution, ' he said, referring to the colour adopted by the peaceful revolutionaries in Ukraine the year before. That last comment was surely a joke, but it was not one the police appreciated.
For the police had a very clear idea of who was to blame. They blamed a Wahhabi underground organization bent on destabilizing Nalchik and establishing an Islamic state in the Caucasus. In the circumstances, it was inevitable that the police would think a former Guantanamo inmate had to have something to do with this illegal movement. Tekayeva at this point understood the logic of the authorities as well as anyone, and tried desperately to protect her son.
âWe never left Rasul alone at home. Arsen would either go to work or I would, but we basically guarded him at all times. On the 23rd [of October] Arsen went to work, and I sat and chopped tomatoes.
Rasul slept. And suddenly ... well, I have no idea where the cars came from, jeeps, cars, they surrounded the house. I asked what was going on. They told me to be still but I shouted to the neighbours to watch that they did not plant weapons or bullets on me. They took Rasul from his bed, they put him in handcuffs. I told them they should put me in handcuffs, but they shouted at me, swore at me. I called my other son, and he came home, but they would not let him in, they searched him, they took his phone,' she said.
Rasul slept. And suddenly ... well, I have no idea where the cars came from, jeeps, cars, they surrounded the house. I asked what was going on. They told me to be still but I shouted to the neighbours to watch that they did not plant weapons or bullets on me. They took Rasul from his bed, they put him in handcuffs. I told them they should put me in handcuffs, but they shouted at me, swore at me. I called my other son, and he came home, but they would not let him in, they searched him, they took his phone,' she said.
âThey had already taken Rasul out into the yard, they turned everything upside down in the house, I have no idea what they were looking for. Arsen told them to take him too, but they said they wanted the Guantanamo man . . . They took Rasul to the UBOP [the Department for the Fight against Organized Crime], and I waited there until about six. They had come to our house about nine or ten, and left about 13.30. I waited at the gates of the UBOP and saw how they were bringing young lads, how they beat them, what condition they were in, how they pushed their faces into the mud.'
Kudayev and the fifty-seven others detained that day have not been freed since, and those who got in to see them in the UBOP building were appalled by what they saw. A lawyer, Irina Komissarova, managed to gain access to him on 24 October, the day after his detention.
âUpon arrival at the Sixth Department I saw Kudaev R. V., who was sitting on a stool, in a contorted position, holding his stomach. There were a large bruise and many scratches on the right side of his face near the eye,' she wrote in a complaint to prosecutors and other officials, as obtained by the activist group Human Rights Watch.
âKudayev R. V. told me that he had been tortured and beaten after he was brought to the Sixth Department. The testimony in the interrogation record was not his, it had been made up, and it was not correct . . . When Kudayev R. V. informed the investigator that he would not sign the interrogation record . . . all hell broke loose!!! From all sides people in the office gathered around (by the way, none introduced themselves) and everyone started issuing threats at Kudayev R. V. In the end, he could no longer stand it and said that he would sign the interrogation record because he was afraid that after I left they would beat him again. Someone in the
room told me, “You are free to go, we don't need your services any more.” '
room told me, “You are free to go, we don't need your services any more.” '
Medical records show that an ambulance was called to treat Kulayev that night. He was diagnosed as having âpsycho-motor excitement, hypertension in the arteries, and numerous bruises'.
Komissarova saw him again on 26 October, when his physical condition was even worse.
âThey almost carried him in because he could not walk without outside help. In my conversation with him, he told me that he had been subjected to physical violence. That is, he was beaten when he was delivered to the building of the UBOP,' she wrote.
âHe was beaten in the area of the lower back and on the heels. One could see that he could not straighten out because of the pain, the leg that he could not stand on twitched, there were bruises on his face.'
More proof of his mistreatment emerged when the Russian security forces leaked a whole series of pictures of the fifty-eight men they had detained in their sweep through Nalchik that October. Some of the prisoners are holding up prison blackboards identifying them, but Kudayev is not. As a result, he is virtually unrecognizable, with only his eyes looking the same.
Tekayeva handed me this next photograph with a grimace. Her son's lower face and jaw area were swollen to almost twice their normal size, and the eye sockets were bruised and discoloured. The smiling man who had posed with his passport just a few weeks earlier was long gone.
So, this was the result of Russia's promises to the Americans that the Guantanamo detainees would be âtreated humanely'. The evidence of what was happening to him was available to the Americans, but they did not complain.
In the photo taken after his beating, Kudayev's eyes are hard and direct. They look straight at the lens with rage and resignation. Unlike some of the other men detained, whose photos show them to be scared, he knew about being beaten and being detained, and he was ready for it.
There seemed to be a deliberate government ploy to release pictures of the detainees and the dead attackers. I visited Nalchik around this time, and was shown a film recorded on a mobile phone inside
the morgue used to store the dead bodies. The naked men were piled up like cordwood, their limbs twisted back, and their heads lolling down. One mouth was open in a grotesque yawn.
the morgue used to store the dead bodies. The naked men were piled up like cordwood, their limbs twisted back, and their heads lolling down. One mouth was open in a grotesque yawn.
Under Russian anti-terrorist legislation, relatives do not receive the body of a terrorist for burial. It is a cruel rule, since the dead men had never been tried for terrorism, and were just assumed to be terrorists after their death. The law is intended to punish terrorists for their crimes, but it has the double effect of stopping any independent investigation into the cause of death. As a result, the security forces were free to do anything they wanted.
Komissarova was forced off Kudayev's case after she complained, but if the authorities thought that would mean no more trouble from Kudayev they were mistaken. Kudayev now has another lawyer: a Chechen called Magomed Abubakarov. Abubakarov is a typical Chechen, all flash and fire. But he combines his rage with a passion for the law, which he has turned to Kudayev's account.
âThe detention centre administration has a serious problem with Rasul. The more he is tortured, the stronger he becomes. He writes a lot, and now some people write about him. He has a book now as well showing what he can do by law,' Abubakarov said as we sat in his car one afternoon.
Now that Kudayev had started complaining, all of the inmates had started complaining too. He was organizing and mobilizing his comrades, and the authorities seemed powerless to stop it. I asked him what Kudayev's current mood was. Abubakarov grinned and answered in one word.
âMilitant,' he said.
Tekayeva had shown me three more photos of her son, taken through the bars of the detention centre at visiting time. The fresh-faced young wrestler is gone now, and the bruises of his beating have faded. Kudayev's hair is longer. It parts in the middle, and waves down behind his ears. A beard covers his cheeks, and his cheekbones seem more defined. The face is finer, though his good looks have not gone. His eyes, however, have changed permanently. They do not laugh any more. They have the same look as in the photo taken after his torture. He looks, in a word, militant.
I asked Tekayeva what her son was writing about in the detention centre and, after long negotiations, she managed to persuade him to let me see some of his poems. Here are two of the verses she sent me. They are not always grammatically correct â in one of them, he writes:
I have no talent to write poetry
But I can express my thoughts on paper.
I have not studied science at superior schools
But I can express my thoughts on paper.
I have not studied science at superior schools
Â
â and are scrawled in large handwriting on normal squared school paper, but they are from the heart.
They show, perhaps, that Abubakarov was not correct in calling him militant. He has gone beyond anger, to a realm of faith:
Oh mother, I see you in my dreams again.
I can feel your aching heart.
I remember and see your kindness.
My heart is aching that I am not near you,
That I had to part from you
On that autumn day in October.
I was taken away from you, by filthy hands.
And you were told that your son had been killed,
Even though you yourself, with your own eyes,
Saw me departing that day.
You were preparing your home for a big funeral,
But your mother's heart was beating with the thought
That he is alive, your son is alive.
Because is that what filth and evil wanted!!?
To bury your son!
But that is not what Allah wanted,
What the Almighty wanted!!!
To bury your son.
Although in my misery and pain I have asked Allah,
O Allah!!! Stop my heart!!!
I don't have the power,
I don't have the strength any more.
I have asked for a martyr's death.
But I did not deserve that grace, and remained alive.
But still, hoping for your grace,
I am alive again, O Allah, Almighty.
I am asking a blessing for mothers.
Give them patience and heart,
Strengthen them with faith.
O Allah, Almighty,
Give mothers the strength of spirit,
And feed them with the sweetness of faith.
And grant them satisfaction in both worlds,
And forgive all of our sins.
Amen.
I can feel your aching heart.
I remember and see your kindness.
My heart is aching that I am not near you,
That I had to part from you
On that autumn day in October.
I was taken away from you, by filthy hands.
And you were told that your son had been killed,
Even though you yourself, with your own eyes,
Saw me departing that day.
You were preparing your home for a big funeral,
But your mother's heart was beating with the thought
That he is alive, your son is alive.
Because is that what filth and evil wanted!!?
To bury your son!
But that is not what Allah wanted,
What the Almighty wanted!!!
To bury your son.
Although in my misery and pain I have asked Allah,
O Allah!!! Stop my heart!!!
I don't have the power,
I don't have the strength any more.
I have asked for a martyr's death.
But I did not deserve that grace, and remained alive.
But still, hoping for your grace,
I am alive again, O Allah, Almighty.
I am asking a blessing for mothers.
Give them patience and heart,
Strengthen them with faith.
O Allah, Almighty,
Give mothers the strength of spirit,
And feed them with the sweetness of faith.
And grant them satisfaction in both worlds,
And forgive all of our sins.
Amen.
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