Let Our Fame Be Great (66 page)

He had lived in St Petersburg, he said, and although he had faced problems from the police, these did not seem in any way out of the ordinary for any Russian citizen. He had earned a perfectly decent living in a law firm. But he had become fixated on his plan to make escape kits, and wanted a better business environment to do it in.

‘The economic situation in Russia makes it impossible to realize myself,' he said grandly.

I asked him if he thought that the problems in Russia, where corruption can make it difficult to open a business, should qualify him for refugee status. He openly said they should not, and not only that, he knew the Austrians would not give it to him. He had previously become convinced he was about to be refused leave to remain, so he cancelled his application, left the country, flew to Ukraine, dashed back into Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic, and returned to Austria, where he had applied for asylum again.

Under European law, an asylum seeker must ask for refuge in the first safe country he visits. He would seem to have disqualified himself
from seeking asylum in Austria by visiting Poland and Prague, but Denisultanov insisted he knew better. He was a lawyer, he said, and had figured out a loophole in the system. Perhaps he had. I did not know enough about European immigration regulations to argue with him, but I knew I did not envy the official who would have to process his case. Just like the Chechens who had defeated the bureaucrats of Kazakhstan, Denisultanov and – no doubt – thousands of others like him were opening a new front against the regulations of the European Union.

Austrian officials have been left baffled by how to accommodate the Chechen arrivals into the economy. Unlike most asylum seekers, Chechens arrive in families, with their wives and children. The women often find work, but, according to Klaus Neumann, an Austrian who works with Chechen refugees, men can be very hard to accommodate.

‘Often the men are not prepared to work under a woman, or else they have no training and will not work in a restaurant or something, ' he said, and he noticed me smiling at the thought of a Chechen man working in a restaurant. It was an unlikely image.

In response, he asked me what I thought Chechen men could do to earn a living, saying he had been asked by the government to suggest jobs for them and was looking for ideas. I was stumped, and suggested he could employ Chechens as mechanics.

‘Most of these Chechens are not trained at all,' he objected. ‘Many of them say they want to be truck drivers, but this is difficult for them. Most of them don't learn German very well, and I have a feeling that most of them communicate only within their Chechen culture. It will be interesting to see what happens to them over the next ten years, because we have no history of Chechen immigration.'

He lamented the fact that the Chechen community had no one leader. It is fragmented into family and social groups, and is very hard to deal with as a united body. This was a very different exodus to the one that took place after the Russians defeated Imam Shamil in 1859, when the people's spiritual leaders led them into the Ottoman Empire. This new departure was happening in dribs and drabs, one family at a time. Many of the parents bringing their children to safety had had no
proper education during the fourteen years of war in Chechnya, and precious little in the chaos before that, so they were bringing few of the skills demanded by employers in a Western society.

And even educated men were finding it hard to integrate into a society so profoundly different to their own. The law-abiding, orderly Austrian system could not be more alien to a Chechen man raised on the concept that ripping off the state was a duty and a pleasure. Visita Ibragimov was one such man. He had been one of the leaders of the Chechen political awakening in the late 1980s, an ally of the poet Yandarbiyev in his goal of winning the Chechens their own state.

Now, he was a lonely man in a flat in Austria, reduced to welcoming a wandering British journalist into his home to talk about the past.

He pulled down Yandarbiyev's autobiography to show me details of the protests that engulfed Chechnya in 1991. Instead of a history lesson, however, his account became a macabre recital of how his world had changed. He started reading out a list of the leaders of the demonstrations, wanting to tell me their personal qualities, but his voice changed as he realized what had happened to them. He sounded stunned, as if he had never before noticed the extent of the catastrophe that had engulfed his generation.

‘This one was killed . . . this one is dead . . . this one is dead . . . this one was killed . . . this one I do not know what happened to him . . . that one was old, he is probably dead . . . this one is dead,' he intoned, as he stared into the gulf of his past. The list went on like that for several minutes.

‘I tried to build a state, but I lost everything instead. My wife wants a good husband, my children want a good father and here I am. I am always running here and there, trying to organize this and that,' he said.

‘I said to my son, he's a teenager, he's fifteen and he wanted some jeans, I said to him that I had no money but when he grew up he would be proud that his father was a patriot. He replied that it would be better if I were a traitor, at least then we'd have some money.'

Ibragimov had got out a bottle of vodka by now, and we sat drinking shots and eating snacks throughout the rest of the morning and the afternoon. He became increasingly morose as the drink took
effect, his face became blotchy and his stories became sadder. Curiously, though, he became more active in his gestures.

‘It is beautiful to say I am a patriot, but that word has required me to sacrifice all those who are close to me, this word causes problems for everyone. There is no longer a war between Russia and Chechnya. There are people in the resistance, there are people making money, there are people killing, there are other people. And I cannot take part in this, but it is hard to explain to my family that my moral principle means that I must cause them harm.'

He kept talking and talking, about how he had warned Basayev against his raid on Dagestan, about how he had escaped Grozny in winter 1999 – 2000, about his own quarrels with the religious extremists. But he said nothing about his life in Austria. It was like being transported back to Imam Shamil's exile, when the group of former rulers lived completely in the past. He dissected the events of his life in great detail, but could come to no conclusions.

‘This time in Austria is the most comfortable I have ever known. I live here. I do nothing. I receive money. It is socially speaking the best period of my life. But the happiest time was in 1996 – 9, the period between the two wars. I had no money, there were no salaries, but we were happy,' he said.

Former separatist politicians like him are scattered all across Europe. Akhmed Zakayev is in London. Apti Bisultanov is in Germany. Others are in Norway, in Belgium, in France and in Italy. And perhaps the hardest thing to bear for them is their complete irrelevance to the lives of Chechens today. These men once led the independence struggle, but the Chechens refuse to group under their banners in exile. Once again, the Chechens are proving impossible to organize at anything but a family level.

But those families were keeping a close eye on their members. As I saw at the Terespol train station, Chechens told their relatives when they were arriving and those relatives would come to the border to pick them up and take them to Warsaw, where they would be processed. For the Poles have a single holding centre too. All arriving asylum seekers had to report to a former barracks in a forest outside Warsaw called Debak.

The situation here was very different to that in Austria. This was not a large building in the middle of a prosperous town; it was a ramshackle complex surrounded by a tall fence, with trees in every direction. Once again, though, like everywhere I went in those weeks, Chechen men stood or squatted outside the gates, chatting away in their guttural language.

There was not much to do in the depths of this wood, so they welcomed me as a pleasant distraction when I wandered up and greeted them in Russian. They were insistent that I needed to see inside the centre though, to appreciate the size of the challenge that had overwhelmed the Polish authorities. There were, they said, at least double the number of people inside than the centre was designed for.

I tried arguing that I was not allowed in the centre – in truth, I was slightly nervous – but my resistance crumbled in the face of good-humoured insistence from my new friends. Smuggling a British journalist into a detention centre was the kind of thing that might amuse them for an hour or two, and eventually I went along with the joke.

We set off, in a line of four, into the trees and made a big loop around the compound. At the far end, two of the pieces of metal that made up the fence had been pushed aside. I squeezed through and walked into the centre: the first port of call for Chechens in the European Union. A clump of crumbling buildings, once painted yellow ochre, were to my left, and a boy was kicking a football against a wall. Ahead was a long, low, building, with women in headscarves hanging out washing, and men sitting around and chatting to each other.

We ducked through one of the doors, and the scale of the influx became immediately apparent. Camp beds lined the corridors, and every room held four or five people. Women looked out of the doors curiously as I passed. A girl smiled at me as she sat and watched her mother mopping the floor.

Ahead of me was the entrance hall. It was a spacious room, with windows and a higher ceiling, and must once have been rather pleasant. It was probably designed as a place where inmates could gather and watch television, but here were beds too: perhaps as many as thirty, all clumped together in the middle of the floor, with just a narrow walkway around the side. The centre was bursting at the
seams. Now, all the inmates were outside in the spring warmth, but I shuddered to imagine what it was like in winter.

The noise in here at night must have been frightful too, but I had no chance to find out, since my illegal invasion of the refugee centre had come to a sudden end. A porky security guard appeared from nowhere, demanded my documents, and marched off with them towards the command post at the front gate.

His bosses were, not surprisingly, worried to have found me there. The overcrowding in the centre could probably have made a story for a Polish journalist looking for a scoop. They asked if I was a journalist, I replied that I was a tourist. This ridiculous explanation failed to satisfy them for a second, so they seized my camera and started to scroll through the pictures.

As it happened, I had not had time to take any pictures in the centre, and all the photos on the memory card were from a recent holiday in Africa. The first image was of my girlfriend swimming, then there was an elephant, followed by a giraffe, then by a warthog. The security guards were stumped. Perhaps I was a tourist after all. They told me to wait, speaking in broken Russian, and I tried to keep a straight face as my new Chechen friends – who had not had this much fun in weeks – jumped up and down outside the window, pulled faces and tried to make me laugh.

By the time the guards released me, I had become something of a hero in the camp, and I was greeted with sarcastic cheers. Musa – one of the men I had spoken to earlier – volunteered to drive me around all the Chechen sites in Warsaw, as long as I provided the petrol. It was a perfect offer, for both of us. I got to see how Chechens live, and Musa got to conquer his boredom for a little while.

‘We sit here, then maybe we go and sit over there, then we go to the shop if we have any money, which we normally don't,' Musa had said earlier, explaining the ritual of a normal day.

I examined him as we walked to his car. He had grizzled stubble, a scarred cheek and dark hair falling forward over his eyes. He gave me a roguish grin as he unlocked the car. He lived in the car as it happened – it being more comfortable than the accommodation provided – but he did not normally have enough money to fill it with petrol.

As we drove off through the forest, he slipped a tape of Chechen music into the stereo, and I tapped my fingers on the roof. It felt like being in Chechnya for a minute or two, until we passed a Catholic church and I realized how far we were from Musa's home.

He told me about his life in little chunks of information, which all added up to a typical Chechen story of loss and horror. He had left Chechnya after being harassed by the police, following an accident between his car and a Russian armoured vehicle. He had lost his documents, which made him an easy target for arrest whenever the police needed a suspect. They had beaten him, and abused him, until he could take it no more and had left the country.

He had arrived in Poland the previous February and then, frustrated by the slow pace of his asylum application, left for Belgium nine months later. He was picked up there though and, under European law, he had to be sent back to Poland, where now he was in limbo again.

‘When I was young I used to talk about what I would be: a doctor, a farmer. And look, I have become no one. Look at me, I'm no one, this is not what I imagined when I was seven,' he said at one point as we drove through the countryside.

But his bad moods never lasted long. He changed the tape to the Bee Gees – ‘How Deep is Your Love?' – and started joking about Chechens who came to claim asylum saying they were former rebels when they did not even know the smallest thing about weapons. He took his hands off the wheel to make his point.

‘They think you hold a grenade launcher like this,' he said, with a shout of laughter, clutching his hands to his stomach. The car lurched sickeningly into the opposite lane, and we faced the oncoming traffic for a worrying half-second before he swung the car back to safety.