The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova & The North Caucasus

The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and The North Caucasus

The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and The North Caucasus

Dedicated to Bella Ksalova 1984 – 2010

4

The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova and The North Caucasus

Rob Hornstra & Arnold van Bruggen The Sochi Project, Amsterdam 2013

5

The Caucasus, the mountains where humans and animals lived in harmony, and where nature was as wild and fearless as the men.

6

7

1.

The North Caucasus p. 21

6.

A happy childhood p. 111

2.

Khava Gaisanova p. 35

7.

Return and decay p. 121

3.

The mountains p. 45

8.

The beginning of the end p. 147

4.

Kazakhstan p. 75 5.

Hardened in exile p. 91 8

9.

The Second Caucasian War p. 157

10.

Prayer makes life bearable p. 189

14.

Clutching at straws p. 283

11.

Islam p. 201

15.

Counterterrorism p. 295

12.

The disappearance p. 233

16.

A secret history p. 325

13.

War becomes terrorism p. 243

17.

Epilogue p. 335

9

10

11

Gimry, Dagestan

12

13

Nazran, Ingushetia Salman Aliev, 35, guarded a police post in Ingushetia.

He was shot in the head by a sniper.

14

15

Nesterovskaya, Ingushetia Aligan Ganiev, 23, had just completed his training as a police officer when he was blown up at a local restaurant. “It felt like a wave of electricity kept going through me.

I only regained consciousness in hospital in Moscow.” Aligan lost his sight and an arm and has difficulty walking.

16

17

Churzuk, Karachay-Cherkessia An abandoned cultural centre in Churzuk, a depopulated mountain village on the border between Karachay-Cherkessia and Georgia.

18

19

Levashi, Dagestan Amina Isayeva, 19, in traditional dress.

20

21

Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria The state museum for history and culture, which tells the story of Kabardino-Balkaria’s socialist genesis, has remained unchanged for decades.

22

1. The North Caucasus

23

When the mountain village appears in the distance, we get out of the car to smoke a cigarette and enjoy the surroundings. The roofs of the village gleam in the sunshine. The road runs along the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a ravine. Two cars speed out of the village towards us, and screech to a halt on the gravel. Two men in long leather coats with fur collars get out, their black hair combed stiffly over their heads.

They do not identify themselves, but with a quick motion make it clear that they are armed. In the back of one of the cars we see a highly decorated police uniform. A bigwig. We are under arrest.

24

1. The North Caucasus

We had left early that morning. The journey from the Dagestani capital Makhachkala to our destination Gimry in the mountains is long and uncertain. Gimry is one of the most famous mountain villages in the country. In the 19th century, Imam Shamil and Imam Ghazi Mullah, two of the four great leaders of the uprising against the Russian occupation, were born in this village. Everyone in Dagestan and in fact everyone in the North Caucasus can recite their heroic deeds. Two centuries later, Gimry is once again at the centre of the uprising against the Russians and their local henchmen. One of the girls who carried out a suicide attack on the Moscow metro in 2010 came from a neighbouring village. A few weeks before our planned visit to Gimry, the police arrested a local boy on suspicion of helping the boyeviks, the terrorists, separatists or bandits in the woods – not an uncommon occurrence throughout the North Caucasus and one rarely with a good outcome, whether the suspect is guilty or not. This time the village fought back and barricaded the main road through the mountains. It was soon blocked with a long line of honking trucks. The police changed tack. The boy was released and the village went back to sleep.

The road winds through stunning scenery. The next Star Wars film should be shot in Dagestan. We drive through villages, each with their own speciality: fridges, bread, fruit, you name it. Long valleys crowded with apricot trees form a picturesque contrast to the rocks in myriad shades of grey, black, red and yellow. But the scene soon loses its charm. Men with black balaclavas and large automatic rifles guard checkpoints. Barricades have been erected along the side of the road. Our driver has a cheerful face and an amiable bristly moustache. That may explain why we are waved through at every checkpoint. We twist and turn our way up to a large hydro-electric power station. As soon as we descend into the valley on the other side we are arrested. “Can’t we go to Gimry?” I ask the leather jackets. “Of course not,” one of them replies curtly.

Our car is wedged between the senior officer’s jeep and the leather jackets’ civilian car. We are escorted in convoy back along the road to Shamilkala, the region’s main town, named after the 19th-century resistance hero. Shamilkala lies on a reservoir.

A few Soviet-style apartment blocks have been erected for the workers at the hydro-electric power station. It looks as if a suburb from any Russian city has been transplanted to the mountains. At the police station we navigate between the caltrops and other obstructions. Two bullet-riddled police cars are rusting slowly in the courtyard.

Inside we walk straight into a cage, the kind used to lock up criminals.

On the right is a list of policemen who have been killed and their portraits. Twelve officers have died here in recent years. We are taken to a room where two portly policemen laboriously input our details into the computer. One of them explains the situation to us. “A state of emergency has been declared in Gimry. KTO. Counterterrorist operation. We need to know who you are, where you are and what you’re doing. We have to protect you.”

Two men from the Russian FSB security service enter the office and begin to interrogate us. They play good cop, bad cop. The good cop has grey hair, the bad cop is dressed in camouflage. The good crop draws us into a conversation about football and Imam Shamil. The bad cop asks us what we think the consequences of our illegal actions will be. We try a response about journalism, information gathering and how interested we are in visiting the monument to Imam Shamil. The good cop points to his phone and says we are lucky. A bomb has just exploded in Gimry.

1. The North Caucasus

25

Cut to the next scene: the FSB officers have confiscated our documents, including our passports and press cards. The police and FSB leave the room and a small, grey man from the immigration service comes in and closes the door. He noisily fills his lungs with air and looks at us sternly. “Have you ever been imprisoned?” he asks viciously. We sigh. Here comes the intimidation. He licks his pencil, ready to write down our answers. “How do you know about Imam Shamil?” He asks the question as if knowing about Imam Shamil – the lauded, iconic historical figure – is a subversive activity. Our interpreter gives us a wink. This man is not to be taken seriously. “Lev Tolstoy,” I reply, referring to his book about the Caucasus. “Okay,” says the man, but does not give up. “Deportation would be such a shame.” He tries to wheedle a bribe out of us. We refuse. He decides to press charges. We have to go back to the capital.

On the floor below are the men with the leather jackets, fur collars and greasy hair. They are from the local counter-terrorism department, responsible for many disappearances and torture we later discover. They summon us to their office.

The wall is covered with dozens of mug shots, mostly of men with beards and women enveloped in thick black headscarves. Our pictures are added to them. The gang leader does not talk to us, but hisses and blows us to our seats. I am directed to the sofa, while Rob is photographed with an iPhone. Then it is my turn. Our names are written down again and we are hissed out of the room. With pounding hearts we walk back to the police officers. We are interrogated by the police chief, a fat man who tries to extract wax with a pencil buried deep in his ear, and subjects the result to an equally in-depth inspection. It is the fifth interrogation of the day, in this dank fortress in the mountains.

Welcome to the Caucasus. We angrily exit the police station. We are not allowed to go to Gimry and instead have to make the long journey back to the capital to hear our sentence. “Deportation, a lawsuit or a hefty fine,” the little man laughs at us and promises to see us again tomorrow in Makhachkala. It is late. Outside the police station we buy supplies for the journey back. Two men with beards curiously welcome us into their shop. They are father and son. The father is covered with injuries. I ask what happened. “Boom,” says the son dryly. They are stunned when I tell them that we are not allowed to go to Gimry. The son glances around and says, “Come, I’ll take you. I know all the shortcuts through the mountains.” We dare not accept. We never hear anything further about the bomb that allegedly exploded in Gimry.

We slither back to the capital over half-frozen roads. Next day we reluctantly head to the immigration office. We can only hope that the fine is not too substantial; that we do not have to appear in court. The man in charge appears to be a friend of our interpreter. He puts us in the care of a sweet girl who practises her English on us, gives us biscuits and makes tea. He winks at us and pulls a bottle of cognac from his desk. “For the wasted time,” he says. He has to settle the case properly, but he will try to get us off lightly. That is the Caucasus too. The two-day delay costs us a fine of €50.

This is exactly why we wanted to go to Gimry. Two centuries on and little seems to have changed in the Caucasus. For 200 years Russia has tried to gain control of the region. This book is a short history of that North Caucasus, the six contiguous

26

1. The North Caucasus

“Have you ever been imprisoned?”

Immigration officer

1. The North Caucasus

27

republics on the northern edge of the mighty Caucasus mountains in South Russia.

A patchwork of some 40 peoples and identities, but simultaneously a homogenous region. All North Caucasians share similar traditions, folklore and pride in a common past. Everyone is Russified down to the last glass of vodka, but can pinpoint exactly what sets him or her apart from a Russian.

The Caucasus is one of the most dangerous places to live on earth. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the on-going struggle against separatism and terrorism. Many more have been forced to flee their homes and in some cases have still not been able to return. In the fight against separatist and radical groups, hundreds of innocent people have been arrested and disappeared.

Scores of police officers have lost their lives in the line of duty. The civilian population suffers under the weight of the campaign against the insurgents as well as the endemic violence and corruption in the government. Critical journalists are few; they fear for their lives.

The North Caucasus is tiny. Cross the mountains from Sochi on the Black Sea, where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held, and you are there. It takes only half a day to drive from one side of the region to the other. A motorway, the Transcaucasian M29, dissects it from west to east, passing through Karachay-Cherkessia, KabardinoBalkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and finally Dagestan on the Caspian Sea – all dots on the map compared to the enormous landmass of Mother Russia that stretches to the north.

This book has been a work in progress since 2007, when Russia won the bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. It remains a mystery why the International Olympic Committee would award the Olympics to a city so close to a region plagued by war and terrorism. As we have crisscrossed the republics over the past five years, the same question keeps arising: why is the North Caucasus so incredibly violent?

And not just over the last 20 years but eternally? Furthermore, how is it that such a small region can hold such a firm grasp on mighty Russia?

This story is about a centuries-long struggle for a dignified existence; about life in times of war, violence and crimes against humanity. This story is about ordinary people’s resilience in exceptional and complicated circumstances.

Above all, it is the story of Khava Gaisanova, a proud woman from the heart of the North Caucasus, but who could just as well be from Kabardino-Balkaria, Dagestan or Chechnya. Her history too is filled with collective and individual violence. Her history and the history of the North Caucasus are inextricably intertwined. Both are also unfinished. The security forces in Russia’s violent hinterland do not like prying eyes. Too often our search for information and interviews fell foul of the region’s grim implacability.

Arnold van Bruggen and Rob Hornstra

28

1. The North Caucasus

1. The North Caucasus

29

30

31

Chermen, North Ossetia Taxi driver Isa and his wife grow green beans in their backyard.

32

2. Khava Gaisanova

33

Chermen, North Ossetia Musa and Ibragim, Khava Gaisanova’s son and youngest grandchild respectively.

34

35

Chermen, North Ossetia Lenin Street, the main road through Chermen, in front of Khava’s house.

36

2. Khava Gaisanova

37

38

2. Khava Gaisanova

Khava Gaisanova with her daughter-in-law Madina and granddaughter Dali.

“I looked and asked everywhere, from Dagestan to KarachayCherkessia.

I couldn’t find a trace of my husband anywhere.”

39

“My husband disappeared in 2007. He was probably kidnapped by the police.

He went to Vladikavkaz with our neighbour and hasn’t been heard from since.” This short conversation, in a chance encounter, was the beginning of our search for the roots of the violence in the North Caucasus.

40

2. Khava Gaisanova

In the flat central plains of the North Caucasus, where the mountains still seem far away (they occasionally peek through the clouds) is Lenin Street. It is actually a side-road off the Transcaucasian M29. At the roundabout that forms the border between North Ossetia and Ingushetia, you can turn west towards Beslan, east towards Nazran and south towards Chermen. Lenin Street is the main road through the village. Small streets, more often mud and gravel tracks than sealed roads, occasionally lead off it. On Lenin Street itself is the post office, newsagent and police station (reinforced with large scattered concrete blocks and sandbags to prevent cars from ramming it).

From the road there seems to be little life in the village. Only at the crossroads near the newsagent do we see men sitting on a bench. Behind them, in the shade of a tree, two police cars monitor the traffic. A roadblock, a spike strip, lies ready to be thrown across the road in the event of trouble. It is summer. The air shimmers and smells of hay. Swallows swoop through the air.

The road is wide. It is flanked on both sides by stately chestnut trees and behind them rows of houses. The properties are surrounded by high fences. Sometimes these are sheets of metal, in dull red or green, and sometimes railings with jagged embellishments. These offer a glimpse of the tidy vegetable plots and ornamental flower beds behind them. The summer kitchens are covered with vines. The pace of life is unhurried. The cars crawl by, slowed by the bumps in the road and the police behind the trees. Anyone entering the village first passes a military barracks and then a psychiatric hospital. As we drive in, we too seem to be overcome by the torpor. We park the car at the newsagent, buy some fruit and mingle with the men on the bench.

The police approach curiously, check our documents and strike up a conversation.

Further along the road is Khava Gaisanova. She is sitting on a small wobbly bench next to the fridge from which she sells lemonade and water. The high metal gate to her house is wide open. Three small children dart around her, sometimes jumping on the swing hanging from a tree or cooling off with grandma’s spring water. The passing cars leave behind swirls of dust. Khava often waves after them; they are acquaintances. The electricity cable keeping the fridge cold runs inside through the gate. There, Madina, Khava’s daughter-in-law, spends most of her time in the kitchen.

The house is surrounded by a high, red-brick wall. The local bricks are so bright that the colour of the houses and walls seems almost unnatural. Behind the wall are the family’s gardens. They grow cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, cabbages, carrots and other crops. A modest orchard supplies apples, pears, apricots and plums. A small flock of chickens and two turkeys peck at the scattered seeds.

Khava is just short of her 60th birthday, but her drawn face makes her look older. Yet she is beautiful. Her sharp blue eyes and clear skin make an instant impression on us as we pass. We stop and turn around for a bottle of water and a chat. Impassive, she awaits our arrival, inspects us – as foreigners we are a strange sight here – and finally welcomes us. We ask if we can sit down and talk to her. She beckons a boy and he runs inside to fetch chairs. She slides along the bench so we can sit down immediately. Only then do we notice that the smallest child has a large, knob of butter

2. Khava Gaisanova

41

melting on his head. “Oh,” says Khava, slightly embarrassed, “that’s a local tradition. He’ll grow up to be clever.” In the warm sun the butter runs in small streams down the child’s face. “My family has lived in Chermen for nine or ten generations.” Chermen is the next village. It is part of North Ossetia but is primarily inhabited by Ingush. If Khava walks to the end of the road that runs past her house to the east and stops in the middle of the fields, she quickly finds herself in Ingushetia.

From there, the glistening golden domes of the new Ingush capital Magas can be seen on a clear day.

“My family is originally from the mountains,” says Khava. “Like all Ingush. But when the Russians invaded the Caucasus, they were expelled from the mountains.

They lived off their fruit trees, gardens and livestock in the mountains and traded wool and leather. It’s better that they left: it was a hard life. The people were poor.

There was overcrowding and hunger.”

In Ingushetia’s high mountains, families traditionally had their own tower where they also once lived. “My family lived in Egi-Kale,” says Khava, “a large, elevated area on the Georgian border. The towers were used for defence. If we were attacked, the livestock and the entire extended family could fit in those towers. They still exist, but they’re crumbling.” Khava rarely goes there now. Her family roots are buried far away from the modern world, only accessible by dirt roads. She is a teacher at an Ingush school in Chermen. She sighs. “We didn’t used to have any trouble in the village. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. The Ingush and Ossetians started killing each other. Everyone wanted everyone else’s land, the border became fluid.

“The children used to sit together at school,” she continues. “Most older people can still get along, but most children don’t even speak each other’s language anymore. They can only fight with each other.” Small furry caterpillars fall continuously out of the chestnut tree. The grandchildren are kept busy picking them off us as we talk. Khava undoes her headscarf, leans back and ties it round her head again, a little tighter. “We Ossetians and Ingush have coexisted peacefully for centuries, but the authorities make money from war,” she says bitterly.

The taxi driver leans out of his window. He jibes maliciously that even in a small family, the Ingush still fight.

Chermen is in the Prigorodny district. It is controlled from Vladikavkaz, where we are staying. We travelled to the area with Dina, a South Ossetian interpreter and fixer, who makes appointments and relentlessly stalks the people we want to talk to.

The taxi driver, who we picked up on the street somewhere, is North Ossetian. The Ossetians hate the Ingush. This stems from the past, from the war during the Soviet era. It also stems from more recent events. “They are horrible people,” says Dina, a woman of around 50 who was once a refugee herself and experienced the atrocities of war in South Ossetia.“They are cruel and always cause trouble. And,” she whispers, “they have a lot of money. Just go to an Ingush village and see the palaces they build.” I ask – slightly mockingly, because the prejudices in the Caucasus quickly become tedious – whether she dares to go to the Prigorodny district and beyond, where those scary Ingush live. “Of course,” she says, “but reluctantly.” We wonder whether or not it is clever to take an Ingush hater with us to visit the people we want to meet on an unbiased and neutral basis. At the moment we have no choice.

An Ingush interpreter is no easy find.

42

2. Khava Gaisanova

The next day, the day we meet Khava for the first time, we drive eastwards from Vladikavkaz and pass the endless barracks of the Russian 58th Army before reaching the first villages and suburbs. Prigorodny actually means ‘the suburbs’.

After the army barracks comes Oktyabrskoye, a town that indeed feels like a suburb.

Then it starts. “Put an Ossetian family in an Ingush village and next morning they’ll be dead,” the driver sneers. He points to the houses with high walls and massive gates.

“All Ingush.” He points to the smaller, lower houses. “Those are the Ossetians.” He indicates men wearing white prayer caps. ‘”Ingush.” He distrusts all Ingush. “They come with weapons, blow up our markets and kill our children. And what do we do in return? We live in peace. They are dangerous people.” Dina nods along.

“What does your husband do?” I ask Khava, who stares coldly ahead of her at the driver’s comments. There is a short silence. She looks at us intently, but then lowers her gaze. “My husband disappeared. In August 2007 I went to Kazakhstan. My brother, who lived in the capital Astana, had died. I stayed there to support the family during the mourning period. Then my son Musa rang to say that my husband was seriously ill. I went home as quickly as I could. That’s when they told me that my husband had disappeared. Probably kidnapped by the police. He had been on his way to Vladikavkaz with our neighbour. Neither of them has been heard from since.”

The driver does not say anything now. Dina looks at Khava inquiringly. Sighing, Khava begins her life story. It is hard for her; she prefers not to talk about it. Her daughter-in-law Madina brings tea and sweets. We interject occasionally, while Khava silently begs us to answer the only question that matters: where is my husband?

It is late, night is falling and our driver and interpreter do not dare to drive back in the dark. Bidding farewell, we ask whether it would be possible to return to write the entire story. She agrees. Anything that could help to bring back her husband.

Trust has been established. Dina slowly stands up from her chair. With tears in her eyes she embraces Khava. One of the children runs outside and gives Rob, myself and the driver a handkerchief and a pair of socks and Dina a pot of home-made jam, as parting gifts.

2. Khava Gaisanova

43

44

2. Khava Gaisanova

45

Chermen, North Ossetia Magomed Lianov, Khava’s uncle.

46

3. The mountains

47

48

3. The mountains

3. The mountains

49

Gudauri, Georgia Old postcard of the Transcaucasian Military Way (Tbilisi-Vladikavkaz).

50

51

Gunib, Dagestan Shamil Gate (in the tradition of a photo by the tsarist photographer Prokudin-Gorskii).

52

53

Tsokh, Dagestan

The mountains are the soul of the Caucasus: it is where Russian armies have worn themselves down and where the inhabitants of the plains flee when they feel threatened.

We went into the mountains five times and were arrested or refused access three times. Wars are still being fought here. Indeed, over the past three centuries, few decades have been peaceful and few generations have not lived through a war.

54

3. The mountains

The road from Vladikavkaz to Tbilisi is a feat of strength. Officially known as the Transcaucasian Military Way, it was built in 1783, when 800 Russian soldiers carved the road out of the rocks and gorges that form the border between the North and South Caucasus. Thanks to this road, the Russians no longer had to cross the plains on the Caspian Sea or the rugged paths on the Black Sea to advance upon Azerbaijan and Georgia, and were finally able to gain a foothold in the Caucasus. We park the car by the side of the road, in the middle of the mountains. Herds of cows nonchalantly cross the road and effortlessly climb the slopes; there are no herdsmen in sight.

The air is stunningly fresh and light. We breathe it in whenever there is a break in the heavily laden trucks tearing past on their way to Armenia. This small tortuous two-lane road is Armenia’s lifeline. Surrounded by its sworn enemies Azerbaijan and Turkey, the country has little choice but to transport its import and export goods over this road to Russia. The Armenian economy thus suffered a severe blow in 2008, when the border road was closed during the August War between Georgia and Russia. There is an insurance office across the road from where we are parked.

Pimped-up Ladas with pumping music, belonging to young Armenians on their way to Vladikavkaz, are parked haphazardly in front of it. We are waiting for Khava’s uncle, Magomed Lianov, who wants to show us the towers where Khava’s family once lived. He has been warming us up for days. “I’m going to make you the best shashlik,” he promised us. “You’ll stay with me and I’ll first show you the Lianovs’ towers before we take a UAZ to the Gazdievs and Gaisanovs.” A UAZ is a Soviet all-terrain jeep, and if anything breaks, it can easily be fixed with a well-aimed blow from a hammer or a socket wrench. Khava’s uncle had already told us wonderful stories about his family. “My ancestors were progressive,” he said. “They lived in very primitive conditions, but they understood that the world was lager than their own backyard. Around 1900, my grandfather went to Tbilisi, where he bought oil lamps for the whole family. It may sound strange, but it was a revolution for the village. Until then they had lit their homes with fires and beeswax candles. They lived in a dilapidated house, not made of stone or wood but of a type of local clay. It stank, because they used cow dung as heating fuel. My grandfather continued his moder nisation drive and whitewashed the walls. They had the right idea about life.”

We had been sitting at Khava’s table when the uncle burst in with his stories. “You’ll see the photos of my ancestors,” he said. “They were as strong as wrestlers, tall as giants and they could easily eat a goat for dinner. At banquets, they had no problem consuming 400 kilos of meat.”

In the mountains, every family clan has at least one tower. It is the pride of the clan. In traditional families, the ancestral mountain community still determines who can and cannot marry. “Our family tower is unique,” said Magomed. “It is the only one which is still permanently inhabited.” The towers were built from a mixture of goat’s milk, eggs and sand, the uncle claimed, “and so they are strong as steel; until cannons were introduced, no army could take those towers.”

Magomed finally joins us on the Transcaucasian Military Way. He gets out of the car, apologising profusely for the hour that he has kept us waiting. “Follow me,” he says, “my wife and daughter have been cooking all afternoon. It’s high time!” We drive on through the mountains and near a bunker covered in camouflage nets cross a military bridge over the River Terek. On the far side a barrier blocks the road. Three Russian soldiers with Asian features indifferently wave through the cars that want to cross the border into Ingushetia. Magomed takes our passports and marches up to the Russians with a self-assured air. They greet him cordially – he is a

3. The mountains

55

regular visitor here. But from the car we immediately see a frown appear on their faces when he pulls out our passports. Magomed had promised us that everything would be alright: he said he knew all the soldiers and would personally vouch for us.

That is the most important and most significant guarantee in the Caucasus. Even at the height of the Chechen wars, when kidnapped foreigners and Russians were worth thousands of dollars, they were never harmed if they were hosted by a Chechen family. To harm a guest is to harm the family and thus the honour of the clan. A blood feud would be the inevitable consequence if a guest were hurt.

Magomed saunters back over. “They’re just making a call,” he laughs, “but I’m sure it will be fine.” We have already given up hope. We had seen a sign on the bridge in English – which is unique here – saying that this is a special border crossing for which a permit is needed. We had told the uncle this, but he could not believe that his small, inconsequential village would require a permit. “Border area?

If you head down that road you get to the border,” he indicates the road where he had picked us up earlier. We are denied access nonetheless. He announces the news like a dog with his tail between his legs, his honour as a host crushed by the rigid Russian laws. He rarely looks frustrated. “I can’t even invite my own guests home,” he says.

We say goodbye and he crosses the border to his house, which we will never see.

In Arabic, the Caucasus is known as Jabal Al-Alsun, ‘the mountain of languages’.

There are few places on earth where so many different peoples, many of them speaking totally different languages, coexist. Chechen, for example, belongs to a tiny language family, together with Ingush. The Kabardin, Cherkessians and Adygeans speak a language that is only spoken in the north-western Caucasus. The Balkars and Karachays, on the other hand, speak a type of Turkish, while Ossetian is an Indo-Germanic language related to Persian. More than 30 languages are spoken in the mountains of Dagestan – the most multi-ethnic area in the Caucasus.

Pliny reported that the Romans needed 130 interpreters to communicate in the 300 languages that are spoken here – probably an exaggeration, but it conveys the complexity of the region.

The Caucasus is a natural conflict zone, if you can call it that. It is comparable to the Balkans: a mountainous area that is difficult to access and control.

Perhaps this is also why it forms a natural boundary between different superpowers.

Empires come and go, but all the empires that have pitched their tents around the Caucasus have been worn down by these rugged mountains and – by all accounts – their equally rugged inhabitants. The Caucasus offers rich pickings for those interested in geopolitics and the extent to which the environment shapes its inhabitants. The higher the mountains, the more horizontal the social structures.

Feudalism does not work here: the territories are too small and difficult to control and distances are hard to bridge. Councils made up of the old, wise and warriors governed the tribes. The princes and chiefs only ruled the plains, but with every attack from a larger power, the hierarchy was cruelly disrupted. Even today, the mountains continue to offer a safe haven for fighters and insurrections. The mountain villages are widely considered to be the primeval home of the various clans in every population group.

The three passages through and around the mountains clearly reveal the centuries-old struggle for this region. On the west coast, the route is guarded by the forts of Tuapse and Novi Afon. But in the blue waters of the Black Sea, the ruins of ancient Greek fortresses and trading centres are occasionally still visible. From

56

3. The mountains

“Until cannons were introduced, no army could take the towers.�

Magomed Lianov

3. The mountains

57

Dioskurias, a restaurant (which was practically destroyed in the war of 1992) in the Abkhazian capital Sukhum, ancient Greek stones and columns can be seen just beneath the water’s surface. In the middle lies the modern passage where the city of Vladikavkaz (literally: ‘ruler of the Caucasus’) watches over anyone who travels into the mountains from this point. And in the far east on the Caspian Sea lies Derbent, the oldest city in Russia existing even before Russia itself. The city is steeped in thousands of years of history. On a low plateau in the easternmost foothills of the Caucasus, a large castle looks out onto the mountains, but also provides a stunning view of the narrow coastline to the north and south. It is hard to imagine a more strategic location.

On a warm summer’s day, we climb up the steep slope to the massive fort.

The city is chaotic. During the last decades of the Soviet Union, millions of tourists came here every year. But in the turbulent decades since, Dagestan has become a no-go zone. Located next to the central market, the old Intourist hotel is a large complex that appears as if it has been through a war. Elderly ladies have set up stalls at the entrance selling berries, fruit, sausages and honey from their own gardens. In the market itself, everything is on sale. This city, which lay on the Silk Road, has commanded a central position on trade routes for millennia. It is no less bustling today, as all the road freight from Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia passes through here.

However, it feels more like the chaotic bustle of a Middle Eastern market town than a Russian city. Indeed, modern Russian history is just the tail end of the earlier influences that can be found here. The churches date back to the 4th century, the synagogues are at least as ancient and the oldest mosque is from the 8th century.

The castle provides a perfect impression of the city’s original layout.

A guide who has clearly had to tell the story a few too many times, explains that a high wall ran westward through the mountains for 60 kilometres. It was known as the Great Caucasian Wall, he says. Four horses could run abreast over the wall; that’s how wide it was. We look back at the mountains and see nothing. “Everything was pulled down in the following centuries,” he says. “It was all reused to build houses and villages elsewhere. Small parts of the wall survive only in the least accessible places.” If you look out over the city, you see two city walls to the left and right of the castle. They drop steeply down from the castle plateau and then cut through town to the coast. These two walls used to mark the city boundary. There was no way travellers headed northwards could avoid the city with its tolls and markets. This also probably explains the town’s name: Derbent means ‘the gate’. The city walls did not end at the seashore, but stretched 500 metres into the sea. The area between them formed a natural harbour, a shelter from the turbulent Caspian waves. It is a brilliant concept: a monstrously large castle with two arms that envelop the city and penetrate deep into the sea.

It is hard to think of Derbent as a Caucasian city. Precisely because it controlled the plains, it was the playground of the Persians and the Turks, the Mongols and the Khans; in other words, the people of the plains. The thick walls, high towers and strategic location of the city’s fortifications express exactly what each old village and monument here expresses: war and control. It is exactly like the mountain villages further up, where the family towers of rough-hewn stone, beaten eggs and goat’s milk guard the valleys as well as provide shelter to the inhabitants.

Caucasians are proud of their history, which is defined by war and violence. Masculinity, too, plays an important role. The British historian John F. Baddeley describes it splendidly in his historiography from 1901, The Russian

58

3. The mountains

Conquest of the Caucasus Caucasus. The villages were located as remotely as possible, he writes, preferably on a south-facing rock, so that all the warmth of the sun was captured, even during cold winter days. The distance to water sources and farmland did not matter – that was the domain of women. The men lay in the sun, sharpening their sticks when they were not sleeping, eating or fighting. All the chores were left to the women. When a woman was worn out at a young age, the man would take a new wife. Polygamy was not unusual. When there was an attack, the enemy had to risk lives to reach the village. It was impossible to fire at it from a distance. In the village itself, all the houses were built like small forts: surrounded by stone walls and connected to each other via small, stifling alleyways. The enemy was faced with the almost impossible task of knocking down a new garrison of men and women in every house.

“In our culture, you aren’t a child for long,” says the old Dagestani historian Mogamedkhan Mogamedkhanov, who works at the university in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala. “In the West and in Russia, you can play around until the age of 16, or sometimes even 30. Here, a girl of eight is already grown-up and bears full responsibility in the household. Boys need to learn to fight at the age of eight and be ready for real life at the age of 14. Life in the Caucasus is serious and that’s reflected in children’s upbringing. Adolescent behaviour is considered irresponsible here. It doesn’t happen.”

In the good old days, when men were not lazing about, sleeping or eating, there was wrestling. As a form of fighting in times of peace, this sport is just as typical of the Caucasus as the high mountains. Even today, wrestlers from the Caucasus are a force to be reckoned with at the Olympic Games and invariably take home the majority of the medals.

In a legendary wrestling school in Makhachkala, the colossal former world champion Mogamed Ibragimovich Magomedov proudly lectures us. “Our ancestors told us that we need strong and courageous men,” he says. “Only the very strongest survive. All the Roman conquerors tried to place their crown on our mountains. Everyone tried: the Reds and the Whites during the revolution, the Mongols before them – but no one succeeded.” He voice reverberates around the hall like a bell. It is a story that he has told before and he seems genuinely proud of it. “One example,” he continues. “There is a monument in Iran for Nader Shah, the former king. He is a celebrity there: they call him the second Alexander the Great or the second Napoleon. But our mountain peoples defeated him laughingly. The coward fled and left all his troops behind, dishonoured. The same goes for Genghis Khan. He slithered along the coast and didn’t dare to penetrate into the mountains, out of fear for our swords. The rulers of Samarkand… well, you see what I’m trying to say: we fought and fought.”

The guide in the castle told us that Derbent was not only the gateway to the Caucasus, but also a dividing line between cultures. To the south of the gateway were the peoples of the great empires: the Persians, Turks, Armenians and Georgians. To the north were the barbarians. Nomads and tiny mountain nations lived to the north, and from the north came the wild Mongol Hordes. Sometimes they were a nuisance to the rulers south of the gateway when they came down from the mountains and robbed caravans or raided a village or town. But more often the tribes fought among themselves and the mountains were merely the source of the finest ironwork, felt, wool and leather products.

3. The mountains

59

60

3. The mountains

3. The mountains

61

The stars on this German map from 1856 depict Russian forts. The orange line along the Rivers Terek and Kuban is the Cossack defence line. In Chechnya, still shown here as a separate country, the yellow dots of Russian outposts extend to the foot of the mountains.

62

63

Gunib, Dagestan Gunib has acquired almost legendary status in Russia as the place where Imam Shamil ďŹ nally surrendered to the Russians.

Everything changed with the arrival of the Russians. In 1770, Russia’s expansion drive turned southwards. For centuries Russia had been flooded by the hordes from the endless plains to the east of Moscow and Kiev, the Slav homelands. Until 1699, Russia paid large annual bribes to the Crimean Khans – who were also the nominal rulers of some of the Caucasian peoples – to prevent invasion and war. But now the quest for land, raw materials but certainly also stability on the borders, spurred the great journey eastward to the Pacific and southward to the Caucasus. The rivalry with the powerful Ottoman Empire on the Black Sea also played an important role in this. It was an ambitious journey. Russia wanted to take its place on the world stage and had serious plans to compete with Britain to conquer the fastest route to India and its wealth. In contrast to the Western drive for expansionism overseas, Russia established a colonial empire within its own borders: an uninterrupted landmass of subordinate peoples under Russian supervision, where Russian gradually became the lingua franca and the Russian administrative system was imposed.

The Cossacks were instrumental in this gradual shift. These multi-ethnic gangs once formed autonomous sectarian groups on the Russian borders. While they also had their own countries and governments, they were gradually incorporated as Russian border guards in the 17th century.

From the end of the 18th century, a period known as the Caucasian War started.

The war officially started in 1816, but it cannot be dissociated from the events that preceded it. After the mountain road to Georgia – a mostly loyal state – was largely secured in 1783, the Russians started building fortresses to the east and west of Vladikavkaz. A line of fortresses manned by Cossacks and Russian army troops was built to the west along the River Kuban and to the east along the River Terek.

While they were initially regarded as a line of defence, these fortresses gradually also became a base from which to confront the restless mountain peoples. It is a classic concept reminiscent of Asterix and Obelix: the Cossack soldiers stand guard and the mountain soldiers occasionally attack the strongholds to steal men, women, food and goods.

The conquest of the Northern Caucasus largely advanced over these three fronts, which have, strangely, hardly changed since. From the start, the Russians found that the central front, where the Ingush, Ossetians, Kabardin and a number of smaller tribes lived, was easily pacified and not many great battles took place there.

In the east where the Chechens and all the Dagestani peoples lived, the Russians continue to struggle, even today.

In the west were the Cherkessians and many other smaller ethnic groups.

Their casual nation state is shown as Circassia on old maps. These western peoples felt most connected to – and protected by – Turkey. Their wars were a permanent game to win over the Turks, British and French and thus drive out the Russians. Until 1864 all the princes, villages and peoples fought against the Russians in a war that lasted decades. In the end the Turks, weakened by the Crimean War, only offered refuge to the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Caucasus. The tsar paid for the boats, his armies drove the peoples to the ports. Even today, large Caucasian communities can be found in the former Ottoman Empire from Istanbul to Cairo. These communities try to maintain their culture and language and in many countries such as Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Israel, Cherkessians have held special hereditary positions in the army since the wars of the 19th century.

Nowhere did the Caucasian War generate a larger stream of refugees than

64

3. The mountains

in this western area. Peoples like the Ubykhs, who previously lived around Sochi, were practically wiped out. The last Ubykh died in 1992 in Turkey and the language only survives on audiotapes and in language archives. In recent years the Circassian diaspora has launched a global campaign to have the genocide against them recognised. The final decisive battle on the western front of the Caucasian War was fought in 1864, in exactly the same place where the 2014 Olympic Games are due to take place, in the ski resort of Krasnaya Polyana. Today, a large memorial plaque proudly commemorates the final conquest of the mountains.

History is one of the most politicised subjects in the Caucasus. Visiting a historian at a local university can be a baffling experience, especially in such a small area where so many groups have different views about the same events – as if one has suddenly landed in the middle of a nationalist sect rife with conspiracy theories. Then we meet Arthur in the North Ossetian town of Vladikavkaz. Arthur is not a historian but an engineer, whose interest in regional maps started merely as a hobby. But maps bring sources and stories with them, which is how Arthur gradually became a historian.

He based his analyses purely on what he saw on maps, not on folktales, propaganda or centuries-old genesis stories, going back to biblical times if necessary. It is a great relief to speak to him. I treat him to cake in one of the quasi-fancy cafes on Gorki Street. “The Russians were extremely influential here,” he says. It sounds like he is stating the obvious, but he means something else. “It was the Russians who traced the region’s borders,” he explains. “They started making maps, which needed names on them. That’s also how the Russians came to give names to the different population groups. They decided that the Ossetians – who called themselves Allans – were to be called Ossetians and at first they also classified the Balkars under that name.

When they discovered that the Balkars were in fact different, they called them Mountain Tatars. And when the name Balkars finally stuck, it was used for five different peoples. Just like the Cherkessians today, who are also made up of four ethnicities. The Chechens are also a Russian invention; they were named after the inhabitants of the town of Chechen-Aul. The Ingush are named after a town that used to be near Vladikavkaz: Angush. The Russians didn’t aim to cause such confusion,” Arthur emphasises, “it was the result of their inherent need to divide the area into administrative units. The Russians had no choice but to incorporate the Caucasus into their own bureaucratic system. Until then, such a concept was unheard of. Borders were not important here, not in the absolute sense in any case.

Ossetians could join the Georgian army and many Kumyks became Chechen because those peoples’ freedom appealed to them. Of course it is strange that the borders created by the Soviet Union, but also the ethnic divisions, sometimes led to people killing each other 200 years later.”

Russian expansion also had a lasting effect on another level. Sheikh Mansour was the first great resistance fighter who went to war against the Russians. He was the first to realise that Islam could be a unifying force in the struggle against the Russians. There was no other way he could unite the different peoples than under this green flag – an idea that still holds sway today.

In the period that the Russians had yet to gain a permanent foothold in the Caucasus, Mansour scored great victories. The Russians were distracted by their wars against Turkey and Persia and periodically left their positions and fortresses in order to deploy their armies elsewhere. Mansour plays an important role in the

3. The mountains

65

history of the North Caucasus because he was the first to seek to unite the whole region in a holy war against the Russians. He was also the first to successfully use guerrilla tactics against the Russians. When they realised that he was gaining influence among the different peoples, they organised a punitive expedition to his village. They set the village on fire, but found neither inhabitants nor combatants.

It was only when the Russians were retreating to the Terek line through the dense forests of Chechnya that Mansour attacked and killed more than 600 Russian soldiers. He must have been a charismatic leader. Wherever he fled, he was able to convince the local population to join the fight against the Russians and the Cossacks.

But the attack on the large, former Turkish fortress of Anapa on the Black Sea in 1791 was to prove fatal. Mansour was captured and died in captivity near St Petersburg.

After the Napoleonic wars, Russia was definitively a world power and wanted to embed the Caucasus within its borders once and for all. Until then, the mountain peoples had been a shifting mosaic of loyalties, wavering in their allegiance to Moscow. Tsar Alexander I appointed Aleksey Yermolov to the task. For years after, the mention of his name would make fighters in the Caucasus shudder. With Yermolov, Russia embarked on an uncompromising campaign against the mountain peoples and pushed back their borders. He moved the frontline from the rivers closer to the mountains. This is how he founded the current Chechen capital Grozny, which, freely translated, means ‘the terrifying’ – a name without double meaning.

Yermolov’s memoirs read like a divide-and-rule manual. With a relatively small army, he made his presence felt across the Caucasus, paying one tribe a considerable amount of money in exchange for its loyalty, while taxing other, loyal tribes. He employed a scorched-earth policy, cutting down forests to deprive the mountain peoples of their natural defensive positions. He burned down villages and killed women and children if they helped to defend the village. The Russians held the families of clan chiefs and regional leaders hostage and threatened to kill their sons if they did not remain loyal to the Russians.

Russian supremacy was not self-evident during this period. The mountain peoples formed a majority, but they were poorly armed and badly organised. In his book The Caucasus from 1854, the Russian historian Ivan Golovin gives an apt description: ‘Corruption is without doubt a discipline which Russia handles with uncommon skill. Thanks to corruption, Russia has been able to force its way through the Caucasus.’

The tribes and armies were organised horizontally and often per village or valley. For a long time, they were the Caucasus’ strength. But as enemy armies modernised, the lack of a more vertical power structure proved to be the Caucasians’ Achilles heel. The great leaders of the Caucasian War on the Chechen-Dagestani side leapt into this vacuum. As they looked for a way to transcend local village and family ties, they found it in Islam.

Imam Ghazi Muhammad was the first leader of jihad, the holy war against the Russians. In the Caucasus, Islam was not strict or orthodox. It was a mixture of local customs and was not dominated by Sharia, Islamic law. This was to change under Ghazi Muhammad. The struggle against the Russians could not be won without adherence to Sharia law, according to Ghazi Mullah and his successors, Khamzat-Bek and Shamil. The struggle against the Russians automatically acquired a

66

3. The mountains

religious goal, for as long as the Russians were the occupying or conquering power in the region, Sharia could never become dominant. The imams turned against local practices, against wine, drunkenness, blood feuds and the distorted form of Islam being practised. They organised themselves into a local version of monastic orders.

The revolt started in Gimry, the remote mountain village where we had miserably failed to stay out of the hands of the security forces. Within a relatively short time, the insurrection spread well beyond Gimry. At its height, Imam Shamil, by far the most successful leader, controlled a huge part of Dagestan, Chechnya and western Cherkessia. No leader in the Caucasus had threatened Russian authority as Shamil did. There are fabulous stories about him. In 1832 the Russians attacked Gimry in order to capture or kill the rebel leaders. After they had forced their way metre by metre into the impregnable village, they found Ghazi Mullah’s body in his hut. In an obscure German book by Ulf Seidl, the events that followed are described in this anecdote: ‘The only survivor? On the platform of the tower another figure appeared, slender and tall. The soldiers were already aiming their guns at him, but the man jumped over their heads and struck down three Muscovites. (…) Then he made his way over a bullet-riddled wall and escaped through the breach, leaving a trail of blood behind him.’ Shamil’s escape from the hell of Gimry formed the basis for this heroic image.

Time and again Shamil was able to evade Russian capture. The siege of the mountain fortress Akhoulgo near Gimry in 1839 lasted 80 days because the slopes up to the fortress were unassailable. Nearly 3,000 Russians lost their lives, an incredible number on the scale of the field battles that took place during the Caucasian War. Shamil also lost thousands of soldiers, women and children, but managed to escape unnoticed through the Russian lines.

For 25 years he held absolute sway over his faithful followers and a varying number of villages and regions, depending on the progress of the struggle. But his luck eventually ran out. By the late 1850s, his power was waning. People were tired of the violence, Shamil’s Islamic puritanism and Russia’s retaliations. He wandered through the mountains seeking allies, but Russian power had become too strong.

Gunib is a small town in the heart of the Dagestani mountains. In Russia it has acquired almost legendary status as the place where Shamil’s Imamate finally came to an end after a 25-year struggle against the much larger Russian empire. Drive up there now and the first thing you see in the mountains above the city is a great fortification, which is still used as a Russian army cadet base. Below, on a mountain wall between the fortress and the city, is a portrait of a man with a wild beard on a green flag. In Shamil’s birthplace Gimry the insurrection against the Russians continues to spread, but in Gunib, Shamil has become a veritable tourist attraction.

Gunib is strategically situated between steep cliffs that rise up to a high and inaccessible plateau on one side, and a hairpin-bend road that descends into a deep ravine on the other. The small town offers unencumbered views on three sides into the valleys and ravines. No one can approach it unnoticed.

Deputy Mayor Mogamed shows us around. He is proud of his town’s history. “Gunib has produced so many intellectuals,” he says. “We’re one of the centres of civilisation in Dagestan.” On the central square, the legacy of the tsarist conquest is still visible. A small church, which takes pride of place in old photos, has lost its steeple and become a kind of a youth hangout. The former residence of the military chief rises on a rocky outcrop. We drive up to the fortress and an old white

3. The mountains

67

Resistance groups in the mountains fought the communists until the 1970s.

68

3. The mountains

gate is known as ‘Shamil’s Gate’. Mogamed climbs on to a low wall to tell us the story. “At the time, the Russians had learned to take their time. They closed off all the valleys and sought out the highest positions in the surroundings. From there they could shell Gunib.”

Further along, the plateau is wooded. We pass an old sanatorium for Komsomol pioneers with respiratory diseases and then a small, whitewashed teahouse looms up against a rock face in the forest. “This is where it happened,” says Mogamed with an air of respect. Imam Shamil was surrounded by the Russians. His own army was tiny. Many had abandoned him; only the last faithful followers had remained. Shamil decided to capitulate in order to save his wife and children and perhaps himself. On the spot where the blindingly white teahouse now stands, endlessly reproduced on biscuit tins, postcards and tea sets, Shamil shook hands with the Russian leader Bariatinsky.

After his capture and to his utter amazement, Shamil was given a hero’s welcome in Russia. For days he travelled the country by carriage and train. He was apparently amazed at its unimaginable size. He had spent his whole life fighting for an area of a few hundred kilometres. Now he travelled for weeks through a seemingly endless country. In St Petersburg he was paraded before the tsar and aristocracy. People in theatres and at the opera gaped at him. Photos from that time show a tall, slightly unkempt man in a long habit, who looks fiercely into the camera. Shamil was unhappy in St Petersburg. He was eventually given permission to settle in Kaluga and later went on to Kiev, where he lead a luxurious life at the tsar’s expense.

In 1869 he was allowed to leave the country. He travelled to Istanbul via Odessa, where the sultan received him with great pomp. He then went on to Mecca and Medina, where he died in 1871.

The end of Shamil’s reign in 1859 in the east and the battle for Krasnaya Polyana in 1864 in the west marked the official end of the Caucasian War. But the Caucasus would never be calm. Immediately after Shamil’s arrest a new imam, who also attracted a reasonable following, took his place in the Dagestani town of Sogratl. The 600 men living in the district were exiled to Siberia.

Of all the figures in Caucasian history, Shamil was the ideal adversary for the Russians: a tall, bearded man, who time and again escaped from the Russians in seemingly impossible ways; an enigmatic, charismatic leader; the mouse who taunted the cat for so long. At the end of his life, Shamil had become larger than life.

His persona fitted seamlessly with the romantic image of the Caucasus, which, paradoxically, developed in parallel with the punishment campaigns of Yermolov and his successors.

Piatigorsk is the historical capital of South Russia. This was the main base from where the Caucasian War was fought. Vladikavkaz was of course closer to the action, not to mention later fortresses like Grozny in Chechnya and Kizlyar in Dagestan. But Piatigorsk attracted officers’ wives, rich Russians, writers, poets and charlatans who moved to the Caucasus in the wake of the war. Piatigorsk is located safely above the Cossack river lines. Abundant medicinal waters flow from the surrounding mountains, which soon attracted aristocratic tourists from the north.

Today, the city is still full of old sanatoriums and retains its 19th-century feel. There is also a museum to Lermontov, the author of A Hero of Our Time and many poems that are treasured as part of Russia’s national heritage. Memorial stones scattered through the town recall the trials of literary heroes like Pushkin and Tolstoy, respectively in exile and a soldier in the tsar’s army.

3. The mountains

69

It was the heyday of the Romantic Movement and Pushkin and Lermontov were fully absorbed by it. In their words, the Caucasus became more than just a border area where endless wars raged, more than a geopolitically interesting area. The Caucasus represented the mountains where humans and animals still lived in equilibrium, where nature was just as fearless as the men. The struggle in the Caucasus was the struggle against the noble savage, a civilising mission, a task for Russia. At the same time, it held up a mirror to Russia. While civilisation had brought calm to Russia, the Caucasian was still a real man, a fighter, someone whose honour mattered. Both in Pushkin’s story The Prisoner of the Caucasus and in Lermontov’s poem Demon, the women of the Caucasus are represented as mysterious, fairy-tale beauties; the women from The Thousand and One Nights, but in Russia’s very own Near East.

Much later, around 1900, Tolstoy tells splendid stories in his fictionalised portrait Hadji Murad about an envious ally of Shamil who sided with the Russians to defeat Shamil. Tolstoy describes how the Russians received Murad but did not trust him at all. Because of his symbolic value, however, they gave him a grand welcome and allowed him to stay at the court in Tbilisi in a form of exile. Tolstoy tells the story, he writes, because he found a beautiful raspberry-coloured thistle on his estate. When he went to pick it to add it to his wildflower bouquet, it was so tough and strong that he had to tear it off filament by filament. Such a life force, the writer reflects: man has subdued all of nature, but this one thistle refuses to give up. The writer pursues his meditation and uses the thistle as a metaphor in his history of the Caucasus.

The Romanticism of the 19th century persisted in 20th-century folklore. The fierce guerrilla fighters of the Caucasian War were translated into tableaux of supernaturally healthy, powerful men, noble warriors, rising above the common hustle and bustle, sitting proudly on horseback; or women – firm, proud types with large bosoms – engrossed in a noble craft such as jewellery making, pottery or fruit preservation.

During the Chechen wars in the 1990s, a song did the rounds among the anti-Russian fighters about Baysangur, Shamil’s ally who fought the Russians to the bitter end in the besieged town of Gunib. According to the song, when Shamil signed the peace treaty and surrendered, Baysangur called after him: “Turn around, I will shoot you down!” Shamil did not turn around, knowing that a fighter like Baysangur would never shoot someone in the back. The song was the Chechen answer to the romanticised history that the Russians had written.

The Caucasian War in many ways determined the future of the Caucasus.

This is where the inspiration for a holy war comes from; for a binding, supra-ethnic war like the one being attempted today. Russia’s paradoxical relationship with the Caucasus finds its origins in the Caucasian War. Pushkin and Tolstoy made the Caucasus an integral part of Russia’s cultural heritage, with all its romantic clichés and dissolution. At the same time, the Caucasus is a symbol of rebellion and brutality.

The Caucasus’ darkly romantic unpredictability prompts Russians to say that it is impossible to have a conversation with Caucasians, as they only understand the language of violence. This mistrust has had catastrophic consequences for the Ingush in Chermen.

70

3. The mountains

3. The mountains

71

72

73

Sogratl, Dagestan “After the Caucasian War, we dissolved like Dagestani honey in Russian tea,� says Sogratl native Ali Kemalov.

74

3. The mountains

75

Sogratl, Dagestan Weapon-handling instructions on the wall in the local school.

76

4.

Kazakhstan

77

78

4. Kazakhstan

79

Nazran, Ingushetia Fatima Gazdieva was deported to Kazakhstan as a child.

“We’d left everything behind, and had no idea where we were going.”

“It was Red Army Day, a holiday...”

This phrase is uttered frequently in the North Caucasus. As a result of what happened to the Ingush on Red Army Day 1944, Khava was not born in Chermen but in distant Kazakhstan.

80

4. Kazakhstan

“It was Red Army Day, 23 February 1944...,” Khava also begins her story. We are sitting with her and Uncle Magomed in her summer kitchen, a spacious, covered room between the house and the pantry. Large carpets cover a wooden platform. On one side are lush green plants and a few prayer mats ready to be unrolled. The grandchildren play next to the platform and son Musa and daughter-in-law Madina occasionally drop by to listen. They cook, bring tea and clear the table. They are not allowed to sit at the table or join the conversation, unless asked to by Khava or Magomed. Those are the rules in the Caucasus, where age matters.

“My parents didn’t talk about it much,” says Khava. “I think they found it humiliating, embarrassing for the children.” She reconstructs their story with difficulty. The soldiers came on a holiday, when most of the people in the village were at home. It was freezing and families were huddled together around their stoves. “The soldiers banged on the doors. They said, ‘You have two hours, pack your things, it’s a long journey.’ People took everything they could in the two suitcases they were allowed. Some buried valuables, others took them with them.

Then the soldiers came back.” Khava points outside. “They lined the roads and drove my parents and the other Ingush from the village, here to the right, towards the train station.

“My parents were still children.” She is the oldest in the family. In 1944, 11 years before she was born, her parents were just 13 and 14. “They said that they all walked happily along the street, oblivious to the disaster awaiting them,” Khava recalls.

For an actual eyewitness account, Khava sends us to her great aunt, Fatima Gazdieva.

She lives just across the border near Chermen, in the Ingush Nazran. She was deported herself. “Go and visit her,” Khava says. “She lives next to the entrance to the mill.” When we knock, a bent old woman with a face lined by age and sun exposure opens the door. Delighted, she invites us in; she always has time to talk about the past.

Fatima is 73 and remembers the deportation as if it were yesterday. She searches for biscuits and sweets while asking her daughter-in-law to make tea before starting her story. “Two soldiers came to our house. We didn’t know them so we didn’t want to open the door. My mother worked at the mill, my father was fighting on the front. But the soldiers found us. When my mother came home, we had already packed our things.

Then hell broke loose.” Fatima sits on the edge of her seat when she talks. From the sofa opposite, her son and grandson listen breathlessly to the tales of their mother and grandmother. “The journey lasted 21 days. The train was packed. We could hardly move. My legs swelled up because they began to retain fluid. It was horrible.” Fatima shakes her head as she talks. “It was freezing cold and we had little food. Some people had brought preserved fruit; they were the lucky ones. My younger brothers both got frostbite in their legs. They still suffer from it.”

Fatima gets emotional as she tells her story. A grandson is sent to get a glass of water. “So many people died,” she sobs. “All people we knew well from our own village. We had left everything behind. Our goats, sheep, furniture. And we had no idea where we were going.”

The trains rumbled out across Kazakhstan. Khava’s parents were dropped off at a kolkhoz in North Kazakhstan. Many others were set down elsewhere, up into the mountains of Alma-Ata. “It was an inconceivable time,” confirms Uncle Magomed, back at the kitchen table next to Khava. “I come from a family of six sisters and four

4. Kazakhstan

81

brothers. All but my younger sister were already born when my family was deported to Kazakhstan. The first four sisters died of hunger and exhaustion within a year of being deported. The fifth sister died prematurely from cancer. We think it was because of the hardships she had to endure as a child. She was never strong.”

Khava decided she could never trust the Russians, the people who had colonised her country, deported her parents and waged war in the Caucasus. “That will always stay the same, even though times have changed.”

82

4. Kazakhstan

4. Kazakhstan

83

84

85

Nazran, Ingushetia The mill where Fatima Gazdieva worked after returning from Kazakhstan.

86

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Mogamed Agilkov, 74, was forced from his hometown Vladikavkaz twice: during the deportations and again during the Prigorodny conflict.

“When I returned from Kazakhstan I lived for months with a Turk who had occupied my father’s house. I was eventually able to buy him out.”

4. Kazakhstan

87

88

4. Kazakhstan

89

Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia Vezir Kozayev, 73, has lived in an abandoned sanatorium near Vladikavkaz since 1992.

As a refugee from South Ossetia, he has been unable to build a new life.

90

91

Nazran, Ingushetia ‘Long live Russia and the Soviet Union, which brought us into the modern age’ is written on this monument, at the entrance to the tower commemorating the deportation to Central Asia.

92

5.

Hardened in exile

93

94

Grozny, Chechnya Akhmed Ustarkanov, 88, returned from the Second World War a highly decorated veteran to find a Chechnya without Chechens.

“What we saw as deportation, the Kazakhs saw as an invasion.”

5. Hardened in exile

95

The deportations of 1944 were by no means the first in the history of Russia and the Caucasus. In Tsarist Russia, the mass relocation of people or even entire nations had already been identified as a proven way of reducing unrest in one place while at the same time meeting other needs elsewhere.

96

5. Hardened in exile

Traveller and historian John F. Baddeley’s wonderful historiography, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, documents the deportation of the Nogay nomads in 1777 from the steppes north of the Caucasus to the Crimea of the Crimean Tatars (which, as Baddeley describes in 1908, was such a horrendous event in the history of the Nogay that they in turn fled to Turkey, an exodus from which the Crimea never recovered). With the Nogay gone, the road to the Caucasus lay open for the Russians.

Less than a century later, Caucasians were deported or fled to avoid the Caucasian War and Russian oppression. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Dagestanis, Cherkessians, Abkhazians and peoples like the Ubykh who can no longer even be found in modern Russia moved to Turkey, were put on boats by the Russian army or driven across the mountains. Following these forced mass migrations, Russians and Cossacks – often also under duress – were brought in to colonise the coastal area and southern steppes.

In 1937, the adventurous British diplomat Fitzroy Maclean travelled clandestinely through the Caucasus, as he describes in his fantastic book Escape to Adventure.. He arrived in Lenkoran, to the south of Baku, and was just thinking how peaceful and untouched the village was by the long arm of Moscow, when a convoy of trucks passed by. The trucks were carrying NKVD officers with fixed bayonets and ‘depressed-looking Turko-Tatar peasants’. In a newly laid ‘park for peace and culture’ (which marked the official start of the Sovietisation of the village), he learned that the peasants were part of the ‘deliberate policy of the Soviet government, who believed in transplanting portions of the population from place to place as and when it suited them’. He was told that these Tatars would probably be replaced by other peasants from Central Asia. A man then approached him with a copy of the satirical Soviet newspaper Krokodil.. He pointed to a cartoon about British oppression in India. “This is exactly what happens here,” he said and walked away. A comment like that at the height of Stalin’s reign of terror took courage.

Prior to the deportation of the North Caucasian peoples, Stalin had – these Turko-Tatars included – already moved 4.5 million people around the Soviet Union.

Amongst them were hundreds of thousands of Germans, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Romanians, Kurds, Kalmyks, Tatars and a large number of kulaks, the so-called wealthy farmers who owned their own property and refused to participate in the collectivisation of agriculture. The deportation of Khava and her contemporaries had yet to begin.

Less than 20 years earlier, many in the North Caucasus had regarded the Soviet Union as a good idea, following the poverty, war and terrorism under the tsar. A Soviet-style republic appealed to many, for had they not been governed for centuries by the old and wise in their villages and regions instead of tsars and princes?

Of course there were also other movements. The desire for independence was greater than the loyalty to the new regime in Moscow. In the chaotic days of the revolution, dozens of republics established themselves in and around the Caucasus, all with overlapping borders and conflicting loyalties towards the Whites, Reds, tsars, Turks and English. One such republic that held out for several years was the Mountain Republic of North Caucasus, where Imam Shamil’s grandson had a seat in the government. Others include the Caucasus Emirate, the Mountain Government and the Republic of Adygea.

The Cossacks and Ossetians remained loyal to the tsar and later the Mensheviks, ‘the Whites’. They paid a high price for this loyalty. A portion of the

5. Hardened in exile

97

Cossacks had already been deported to the Ukraine and northern Russia in 1921.

Less than 20 years after the revolution, the Cossacks and Ossetians were once again considered to be potential loyal supporters of Moscow, while the Chechens and Ingush were sent to Kazakhstan and further afield. In the new Red Russia, some peoples restored historic ties with Moscow, but amongst others the desire for independence remained undiminished.

The horrors of the ˈ20s and ˈ30s undoubtedly contributed to this. Stalin implemented the catastrophic collectivisation policy and removed all traces of opposition during The Great Terror. The Caucasus’ traditional councils were particularly affected. The old, the wise, the noble families and the mullahs were gradually eradicated during show trials, were summarily executed or deported to deepest Siberia, accused of being kulaks, or representatives from the old days.

While the remnants of the tsarist wars were still smouldering, the Caucasus cautiously began to rebel against the new regime again. Most of the uprisings did not have national support, but were instigated by smaller gangs, called ‘bandits’ by the Soviets. In the mountains, familiar territory for the Ingush, Chechens, Karachays and Balkars, it was easy to hide and set up guerrilla campaigns. The repercussions became increasingly deadly. According to the Soviet troops, the only way to punish the gangs was to cut off their supplies of food and assistance. Entire valleys of villages and hamlets were wiped out in the late ˈ30s and early ˈ40s with the aim of depriving the guerrilla fighters of their lifelines.

Despite this, resistance groups in the mountains continued to fight against the communists until the ˈ70s.

The uprisings only became a threat to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Just as the tsars had always sought an overland route to India, so the Germans regarded the route to the raw materials in the Caucasus and Iran as essential for their survival in the war. The first oil reserves were in Grozny, while in Baku, Azerbaijan it was said that you only had to dig a hole in the ground to hit black gold. The Nazi regime had another weakness for the Caucasus. Within German craniology, the Caucasus was a popular region in which to measure skulls due to its unusually high number of ethnic groups and languages. Beautiful books were published of superbly drawn Caucasian heads, accompanied by dry, quasiscientific summaries of the peoples’ character and their evolutionary state. The distinction between uebermenschen and untermenschen was made early here.

According to German race ideology, the Arians, the Indo-Germanic race, were ranked top of the list. Caucasian groups of Indo-Germanic origin, like the Ossetians, thus had an advantage in the Germans’ eyes. In preparation for their advance, the Germans sent scouts and pamphleteers to the Caucasus. They threw leaflets reading ‘For a free Caucasus’ out of aeroplanes. Under the Germans, the mountain peoples were led to believe, the Caucasus would finally be free again.

“It was a frightening period,” says 83-year-old Sofia Tshomayeva, a Karachay in the small mountain town of Karachayevsk in Karachay-Cherkessia. “The Germans were everywhere and spent the nights in our homes. Girls were so afraid of them that they didn’t dare to show themselves.” Even so, she named her two grandchildren Albert and Biebert. “Wasn’t that what Hitler’s children were called?” we ask. We are unable to confirm it, but the promises made by the Germans no doubt sounded tempting. With the memories of the Caucasian War still fresh in the minds of the older generation, along with the civil war from around 1920, collectivisation and The Great Terror, it is

98

5. Hardened in exile

perhaps surprising that rebellion against the Bolshevik occupation did not break out across the Caucasus.

Nevertheless, support for the German troops remained muted and fragmented. With the beginning of the war, thousands of Caucasians left for the frontline. Furthermore, the region boasts many war veterans, with the Caucasian peoples contributing disproportionately to the war both in terms of soldiers and victims.

The Germans only just reached the Caucasus. At the end of 1942 they ascended Mount Elbrus and proudly planted the Nazi flag at the summit. Footage of the event was shown around the world, but it was only the vanguard who would taste this short-lived victory. In the meantime, the war had reached a turning point and the Germans began their unprecedentedly rapid retreat. Less than two and a half years after the Germans had climbed Mount Elbrus, the Russian army had reached the gates of Berlin.

Akhmed Ustarkanov was just 17 when the war broke out. When he opens the door of his spacious apartment in Grozny, Chechnya, he is wearing blue satin pyjamas and a small scull cap. He is tiny. His wife is sent to the kitchen to prepare food and uncork the vodka. He is an old-school Chechen – as Russified as can be – and so we have to drink toasts to life and death, women, guests, friendship and future generations. “It was 3 July 1941,” Ustarkanov remembers. “Stalin called on us to take up arms. We signed up with seven friends from our village, Urus Martan. We were so desperate to fight that we even lied about our age. We were assigned to the cavalry and were given lessons at the barracks in Grozny. But things quickly started to go wrong.” The small, 88-year-old man sits on the edge of his seat. “In 1942, the Soviet Union was caught off guard. Stalingrad was under siege and we had to cut our training short to leave for the front. I was deployed as a mounted scout.” He shows us the evidence of his war: a jacket covered with medals, an endless array commemorating battles, sieges, jubilees and various other tributes. His pride and joy is a photo of him in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.

Ustarkanov left Stalingrad and travelled the country until he was stationed in present-day Kaliningrad to supply the frontline. His war was a long one. After the German troops capitulated, he was immediately sent to the eastern front where the war with Japan was still being fought. From there he was sent to Mongolia and then Manchuria. “I was 23 when I was dismissed,” he says. “I came home to an empty Chechnya. I realised later that I’d been lucky. More than 16,000 soldiers from Ingushetia and Chechnya had been captured at the front and sent to camps. It was only on my return home that I was declared a public enemy.”

In 1947, Ustarkanov went to Kazakhstan and found his parents in a small kolkhoz close to the Kazakh mountains. He became a gym teacher at a local school.

“It was difficult in Kazakhstan,” he says. “There were a lot of riots between us and the Kazakhs and Russians who already lived there. What we saw as deportation, they saw as an invasion.”

“They were the 15 darkest years ever for our nation,” agrees 74-year-old Mamatay Bostanov in Karachayevsk. It is a clear day and Mount Elbrus towers above the other peaks. The town is a tranquil paradise on the River Kuban, where apple trees hang with fruit and cows and chickens roam the backstreets. Dozens of crates filled with freshly picked apples and pears are stacked in front of Mamatay’s improvised garden bench. “For 14 long days our world was dark and bleak,” he

5. Hardened in exile

99

recalls the journey. “Each day we stopped somewhere and were given something to eat. The only thing I can remember is a sort of fish soup. If someone in the carriage had died that day, we gave the body to passers-by. That’s why many of us are buried in places that nobody can remember anymore. But even more people died in Central Asia than in the train – of typhoid, malaria, starvation.”

His own, small family of five survived the deportation, but his wife lost six of her nine siblings. She brings out a pile of old photos. “Some of them died there,” she says pointing, “others still live in Central Asia; some are now our neighbours.”

It is disconcerting to realise that every family in this village was affected by Stalin’s insane policies. One inhabitant was born in Kazakhstan, another in Kyrgyzstan, while someone else we speak to at a bus stop was a year old when he was deported and 15 when he returned.

Few, however, believe that collaboration with the Germans was the real reason for the deportations. “Stalin was Georgian. He wanted to clear this area for Georgians,” says 73-year-old Amir Uzdhanov, also in Karachayevsk. Georgians were living in his home when he returned from Kazakhstan, and in the intervening years his family had been decimated. When his father returned from the war, he found the area deserted. He soon learned that his family and kinsmen were living in Central Asia and followed them there. “He died less than a week after finding us,” says Uzdhanov. “The exhaustion was simply too much for him.”

While small resistance groups fought on, the disappearance of almost 500,000 inhabitants from the Caucasus was less like removing the sting from the wasp and more like wiping out the wasp itself. The remaining republics were renamed: Karachay-Cherkessia became the Cherkessian Autonomous Oblast, KabardinoBalkaria became simply Kabardino. Ingushetia was divided between North Ossetia and the new Russian region of Grozny. Within a few years the Balkars, Ingush and Chechens had been erased from maps, atlases and reference books.

Similarly, Khava’s parents, her old aunt Fatima and all the other Ingush were deported from Bazorkina, named after an Ingush general in Russian service, and would return 20 years later to Chermen, named after an earlier Ossetian hero.

Under the inspiring leadership of Moscow, Ossetians and Georgians from the South Caucasus and Russians from the north were relocated to the abandoned villages on the plains to colonise the new North Caucasus. In the mountains, home to the Russian resistance for centuries, there was nothing but silence. The villages blew away, crumbled or were overrun by grass and plants.

If you leave Chermen on Lenin Street and cross the roundabout on the M29 – past the fortified checkpoints – you reach Mayskoye. It is a village like any other, made up of comfortable houses with summer kitchens, grapevines and orchards. At the far side of the village is a canning factory. Next to it is the small Konservny train station surrounded by trees and fields of flowers. The canning factory no longer exists. A car dealer has set up next to the old entrance gate. Men with leather jackets and large moustaches tell us that the factory closed in 1991, like so many others with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The local police do not take kindly to foreigners asking directions and we are locked up in a factory building that has been converted into a police station. We are given tea and biscuits and treated politely. Our documents are checked and registered and we are served a second cup of tea or instant coffee before being

100

5. Hardened in exile

released. “Please don’t take this the wrong way. Standard procedure,” says the duty officer as he shakes our hand.

A flock of sheep ambles across the train track. They are startled by a slowly approaching train. It is the local Grozny to Mineralny Vody service. Station manager Fatima Gondorova walks slowly towards us. She takes care of the large wood burner that heats the antiquated station in the winter. In the control room a gigantic green device displays the railway line between Grozny and beyond to Beslan and the trains arriving and departing. Most of them do no come here. The big event is the MoscowGrozny train, which stops here twice a week.

This is where it happened – one of the many places in the Caucasus where a single day changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. An insane operation as well as a logistical triumph: in the middle of the Second World War, freeing up an army to transport half a million people from all corners of the North Caucasus. They were not the only ones. Belarusians, Volga Germans and various other ethnic groups were deported at the same time. But nowhere else did this occur on such a thorough, ethnically defined scale as in the North Caucasus.

Beria, the notorious head of the NKVD secret police, personally oversaw the operation. In a telegram dated 20 March 1944, he summarised the areas to which the deportees had been transported. It is a neat list of oblasts, regions, in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed by numbers that total 491,571. Other documents explain precisely which ethnic groups ended up in which sovkhoz or kolkhoz, how many died during and following transportation, and how many were arrested and sent to Siberia. This level of detail makes the deportations even more incredible: that the Soviet Union succeeded not only in relocating half a million people, but that it was able to document it all so accurately. Each deportee had their own file. One such file for Alaugin Agiyevich Temurziyev, number 5020, can be found in Ingushetia’s deportation museum. Under ‘category’ is written ‘North Caucasian Ingush’. There must once have been a basement somewhere filled with 491,571 of these files, which only account for those deported from the North Caucasus.

The deportation monument is located on the M29, the motorway that transects the Caucasus and Ingushetia from west to east. It is at the very least a curious piece of architecture. Right next to the road is a row of arches built in pompous neo-classical style. Behind them are two large arms with the same arches, extending back to a field.

There, on a small hill, one of the towers from the mountains has been reconstructed, complete with Disneyesque turrets. Inside, the genocide is commemorated, because according to the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part’ is also considered genocide.

The monument is a fine example of historical interpretation. At the end of the left arm is a large copper tableau showing the Ingush swearing the oath of allegiance in 1770 to the Russian envoy to the tsar in Angush, where Vladikavkaz is today. In later history, the Ingush, who incidentally look extremely angry in the tableau, gave this moment more weight than it actually deserves. It was a small delegation who took the oath, as the Ingush had no leaders or representatives, except for the council in each village, and they did not travel to Angush en masse for the occasion.

At the end of the right arm a similar tableau celebrates this Ingush-Russian bond. The tableau bears all the hallmarks of Soviet propaganda, even though it was

5. Hardened in exile

101

102

5. Hardened in exile

5. Hardened in exile

103

Map from a Russian atlas, 1955 (left). Kabardino-Balkaria is called Kabardin ASSR, the Prigorodny district has been swallowed up by North Ossetia and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR no longer exists. In the next edition from 1966 (right), Kabardino-Balkaria has its old name back and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR has reappeared.

Only the Prigorodny district has remained Ossetian.

only recently made. It celebrates the year 1992, when Ingushetia chose to become independent from Chechnya and remain an autonomous republic under the Russian federation. As a result, Ingushetia was largely spared the destruction of the Chechen wars. The tableau also depicts aeroplanes flying through the sky, a train racing into view, oil being drilled and architecture celebrated. In the foreground are athletes, scientists, farmers, welders and a mother and father complete with happy children bearing flowers. It appears to be saying: long live Russia and the Soviet Union, which brought us into the modern age! The message is admittedly true, but the point at which the two pompous arms glorifying Russia meet – somewhere between 1770 and 1992 – was when that glorified Russia deported the entire Ingush nation.

In the tower, several young women give guided tours. They were all born in Kazakhstan. Piles of documents from Beria and the NKVD are displayed in open, wooden cabinets. Beautiful, simple paintings by Ingush painters on the walls depict the deportation. Two soldiers in long yellow-green winter coats enter a room where a family of six children, a grandmother and a mother are preparing to leave. The oldest boy helps his grandmother put on her shoes. The window is open and the white curtains flutter dismally in the breeze. Outside, in the early morning light, the first of the families walk to the waiting trucks. Other paintings show the inside of the train and the bodies that are laid in the snow along the route. They are harrowing images, devoid of any macho Soviet realism. At the last painting, the guide points to the mountains. “That’s Tsori,” she says. Like all horrific histories, the anecdotes are even more terrible that the history itself. “Tsori, Guli and two other villages were so isolated that the NKVD missed them. When the NKVD finally arrived, the trains had already left. Moreover, Beria thought: all of the papers have already been signed to say the mission is complete. Let’s just kill these people to avoid any confusion in Moscow.” The fear of Stalin and the system was deadly for the inhabitants of these villages. They were herded into a number of family towers and, the guide emphasises, “with the greatest difficulty, because it was cold and wet, were burned alive.”

Around 20 per cent of the deportees died during the journey or shortly after their arrival in Central Asia. Once again, following the Caucasian War, the civil war around 1920 and The Great Terror of the 1930s, the mountain peoples were decimated. The deportees were subjected to severe restrictions. They were not allowed to leave the villages to which they had been relocated without permission from the police. In the chaos of the journey, some families were separated for years.

Anyone caught breaking the rules was brutally arrested and sent to prison camps in Siberia. An NKVD document in the deportation monument shows that of the around 24,000 people who arrived in South Kazakhstan in the spring, 357 were arrested and 1,267 had died by 15 June 1944.

Survival in these fragmented communities thus became a matter of creativity. One of the solutions was to take multiple wives – a measure sanctioned by the Koran to compensate for the shortage of men in times of war and repression. The women married young and the Chechens, Ingush and Balkars sought each other out where possible.

The deportees were housed on kolkhozes and sovkhozes, large collective state farms. They herded sheep, picked cotton and cultivated sugar beet. “The Russians said that we were traitors and even cannibals,” Mamatay Bostanov, the Karachay, told us. “Luckily, the manager of the kolkhoz sympathised with our

104

5. Hardened in exile

desperate situation. He gave us accommodation in the mountains and not on the plains where everybody else lived. As a result, it was easier for us to adjust than most of the Karachays who had been sent to the deserts or steppes.”

Fatima Gazdieva, Khava’s aunt, told us how immediately after their arrival in Kazakhstan, two nephews were dispatched to find her a suitable husband. Within a year she was married and at 16 she had her first son. “We were soon offered a job,” she tells us. “But where we lived was terrible. At home in Bazorkina or Chermen, we worked in the canning factory. Here we had to work in the fields. There were no factories. It was gruelling work and we had to improvise everything. There were no building materials available. My husband and I scoured the whole area. We built a simple house but we were able to whitewash it.” Little by little, the Caucasians rebuilt their pride. Fatima planted a small field of corn behind her house and ground corn flour between two stones she had found. “For a long time we weren’t able to afford new clothes, but life gradually improved. It was easy to make friends because everyone was in the same situation.”

In his book The Gulag Archipelago Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn writes about his experiences in the prison camps: ‘There was one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission – and not just individual rebels among them, but the whole nation to a man. These were the Chechens.’ Solzhenitsyn follows this description with a fairly classic ‘noble savages’ story about blood feuds and other Chechen virtues. But what he saw in the Gulag matches the stories told by the Chechens and all the deported mountain peoples. With man and might, they tried to uphold their clan structure and traditions – in exile more than ever.

5. Hardened in exile

105

106

5. Hardened in exile

5. Hardened in exile

107

Konservny, North Ossetia The train station from where Khava’s parents were deported.

108

5. Hardened in exile

109

Konservny, North Ossetia Fatima Gondorova, the station manager.

110

111

Konservny, North Ossetia The main event is the Moscow-Grozny train, which stops here twice a week.

112

6. A happy childhood

113

We lean over a large pile of photo albums. Khava, Magomed and even Musa join us. We witness a happy time.

We see Khava and her siblings growing up, playing and going to school. “I love Kazakhstan,” says Khava. She points to the children in a class photo. “Look, Germans, Kazakhs, Russians, us Caucasians. Everyone lived there.”

114

6. A happy childhood

We spread out the photos on a sheet of paper we have brought. A family tree of Khava’s family, the Gazdievs, and the Gaisanovs, her husband’s family, emerges. We see the generations going back to the 19th century, old-timers who lived through the tail end of the Caucasian War. They are beautiful, informal portraits from the Soviet era. Every time we start talking about her father-in-law or great father-in-law, Khava bobs up. I ask what she is doing. “Respect,” she says. “When you hear the name of your deceased father-in-law, you’re supposed to get up from your chair.” Traditions in the Caucasus are humorous and almost all are based on respect for men, age and the prevention of violence. We gently mock the tradition. “Now I won’t do it on purpose,” she warns us when she notices that we find her bobs amusing. Yet I occasionally see her bob inadvertently when her father-in-law is mentioned.

Khava was initially dubious about our interest in her family history. In this country, it is best to stay under the radar as much as possible. Anything that attracts attention can only lead to trouble. Now she is enjoying it. She shows us a small, discoloured photograph of her grandmother, Tamara.

“Ah Granny,” she says. “My grandfather was killed on the Western Front in the Second World War. When my grandmother was deported, ‘guilty’ of being a member of the resistance against the communists, she wasn’t even aware she was a widow. She only found out later in Kazakhstan. She wanted to go back to the Caucasus as soon as she could.” Khava lovingly strokes the picture. “My grandmother always hoped we would return. She loved Chermen and the Caucasus. My mother did too.

She was always telling stories about how beautiful it was here. All she could talk about was Ingushetia, the paradise of her youth. She told us about the vast fields, the trees, the gardens, the river. In Kazakhstan we lived on the steppes. We children had a good time in Astana. It was a city, we could go to the cinema and theatre. Although not without our parents’ permission, because the Caucasian children in exile were brought up even more strictly than here.” Khava’s finest memory is of Love in Kashmir, a beautiful love story she saw when she played truant from school. “That was an exception. We weren’t allowed to do anything. We wore long skirts and covered our arms.” She loses herself in thoughts from her childhood. “I still remember that my classmate Ramazan fell in love with me in secondary school,” she says. “He wanted to see me after school and dropped by with some excuse. I opened the door and there he was, red-faced. He asked for something, a textbook I think. We didn’t even touch each other, but my parents were furious when they found out. What else would the boy surely want? They were very protective. At the same time, our classes were mixed and after school we wore the uniforms of the Komsomol pioneers.”

From 1956, people were gradually allowed to return to the Caucasus.

Tamara went back straight away. “My grandmother was born in 1900,” says Khava.

“For her, going back was of paramount importance. In her long life, the deportation was just a short interruption.”

Khava’s parents found it harder to say goodbye to the adoptive country in which they had grown up. In 1957 they sold their house, but were unable to get a residence permit for the Caucasus. Moscow had been overwhelmed by the flood of people who wanted to return immediately. In their supreme ignorance, that had not been the Russians’ intention. “When the backlog of people didn’t ease, my parents built their own house in Astana.” She looks back at it with pleasure. “My parents worked at the bread factory. My father transported sugar, flour and fruit to the factory and my mother baked biscuits and sweets. She occasionally brought some home. They settled down there, had children and made new friends.”

6. A happy childhood

115

116

6. A happy childhood

6. A happy childhood

117

Chermen, North Ossetia Old photos from Khava’s album. On the left are family photos taken when Khava lived in Kazakhstan. Top right: immediately after her return to Chermen with Mukhazhir. Bottom right: Khava on a school trip to Sochi with her class.

Still, the household that Khava grew up in would always remain frugal, the frugality of people living on the edge. In 1957, her parents had already sold their large pieces of furniture in readiness for moving. “Later, my mother wanted to buy new curtains or another chair,” Khava laughs at the memory. “Then my father would say, ‘Is that a good idea? When we’re going back to our own country.’ Once she bought a lovely lamp. My father said, ‘It’s beautiful, but who’s going to visit us here? And we’ll buy everything new when we move back; our house will be wonderful.’

“They were unhappy, even though they had a good life in Kazakhstan.

With two jobs and a large family, moving isn’t easy. And they had been young when they were deported.”

Khava only knew the Caucasus from her parents’ and grandmother’s stories.

However, when she visited as a 20-year-old in 1975, she almost never left again.

“I didn’t like it,” she says. “Astana was a real city. I had friends and family there.

There was a nightlife. Chermen was so rural. I didn’t see the paradise my mother was always talking about.”

While Khava was staying with her grandmother, she caught the eye of Mukhazhir, a fine young man with a neat moustache and wavy hair that covered his ears. “He was very attractive, it must be said,” says Khava, looking at an old photo of him. “I was still studying in Astana and not even thinking about marriage and the future. But he saw me and managed to find out who I was. We didn’t talk to each other. You don’t do that.” As she talks she flips through a thick folder of photographs of him. A real poser, in tight 1970s fashion. “He sent his envoys to my parents in Astana. My grandmother lived in Mayskoye, three kilometres outside Chermen. He sent his father and aunts to her. The families appeared to know each other; they were both descendants of the four men who had once founded Egi-Kale in the mountains.

My grandmother was happy with this large, wealthy family, but one more sign was needed to seal it.”

Later that week, Khava’s uncle took the bus to Nazran. Mukhazhir took the same bus, greeted him jovially and bought all the bus tickets. That was the final proof he was suitable. “That’s how my family decided that this would be my husband,” Khava says laughing. “I was 20, he was 29.”

In the pile of photographs are pictures of Khava. She was indeed a beautiful woman, with thick curly black hair, a small firm mouth and limpid eyes full of melancholy. “I was very attractive back then,” she says almost coquettishly.

“Everyone wanted to marry me, but my whole family wanted him.

“My first instinct was to run away,” says Khava, “but I had nowhere to go.

My grandmother had my passport and money. Luckily I wasn’t kidnapped. A boy will often pluck a girl from the street and hold her captive for a few weeks, while his envoys arrange the wedding with the family.” It happened to Khava’s younger sister Aza. “She was lured outside and whisked away. It still happens sometimes in the Caucasus, but you don’t have to accept. When this boy’s representatives came to talk, my mother refused outright. She said that Aza wasn’t ready and she could find a better man herself. She eventually did find him, in the Nazran hospital where she worked.”

Khava believes that her grandmother really chose her husband. “She knew that he and his family were good. Even so, I would rather have stayed in Astana with my parents and my own life.” She married Mukhazhir in Chermen. Her own parents did not attend. It is the tradition in the Caucasus that the groom never sees the

118

6. A happy childhood

parents-in-law. The bride’s parents buy new furniture, gold jewellery, watches, carpets, clothes and curtains for the house. But parents-in-law only bring arguments and divorce.

In 1976, Khava gave birth to her first and only son Musa. She even graduated from the university in Astana. She picks up a photograph showing her proudly holding up her diploma, a new agricultural engineer specialised in grain culture. “I should have stayed in Kazakhstan,” she says, shaking her head. “I could have got a good job. Not in Chermen. It was a waste of three years studying. They don’t do anything with grain here.”

Khava and Mukhazhir built their own house. He worked on a kolkhoz, she became a teacher at School No. 2 in Chermen. “We had a good life,” she says. She shows us holiday snapshots of herself in Piatigorsk, the whole family in Sochi, her in a bathing suit in the Black Sea. She sighs as she thinks about what was to come. “The 1980s were poor. So much changed. The Soviet Union was teetering and we could feel it.

At the same time there were also more opportunities. I started making coats out of sheep’s wool, felt and leather and tried to sell them at the market in Rostov. But business wasn’t good. I didn’t make enough and soon gave up.

“You could feel the world was changing,” she says. “We sensed doom in the air. It felt like a storm brewing. You see the clouds gathering and darkening. Then you hear the rumble of thunder, when the clouds collide. It becomes eerily quiet and then the downpour begins.”

All that time Khava’s parents were thinking about moving back to Chermen, the paradise where they had been born, before Stalin and Beria’s troops moved them to Kazakhstan. The impending deluge held them back. “For the last 20 years, the situation here has been quite complicated,” says Khava. It is an understatement.

“That certainly played a role in their decision not to move back. Very occasionally they went there on holiday.” By then Astana had become the Kazakh capital and a real metropolis. “Unrecognisable,” says Khava. “They died two years ago in their self-built house in Astana. Shortly after one another. Far away from their home village and daughters.”

6. A happy childhood

119

120

121

Karachayevsk, Karachay-Cherkessia The earliest photos in Modalif and SoďŹ a Chomayev’s album were taken in Kazakhstan.

122

7.

Return and decay

123

124

7. Return and decay

125

Map in the deportation monument in Ingushetia. The checked and striped areas, according to the map, were taken from the Ingush between 1944 and 1956. When this map was made, however, Ingushetia did not exist – it was still part of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. As a result, the name of the new republic has been stuck on the map with yellow tape.

“Once we were in Central Asia, nobody seemed to care about our fate,” says Mamatay Bostanov, from Karachayevsk. “We wrote endless letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but nothing happened.”

126

7. Return and decay

The deported people felt betrayed, but then Stalin died. The shock reverberated through the Soviet Union. It is impossible for outsiders to understand the Orwellian worship of a person who caused so much suffering. For Mamatay and his family, it seemed like the end of the world. “We cried our eyes out,” he says. “We always sang songs for him, in which he was the father-figure. He meant everything to us and suddenly he was gone. We had no idea how we or the Soviet Union could go on. Then we received the news that we were allowed to return home...”

“No Marxist-Leninist, no man of common sense can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations responsible for inimical activity, including women, children, old people, communists and Komsomols, to use mass repression against them,” an impassioned Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed to a room of party delegates at the infamous 20th Congress of the Communist Party on 25 February 1956. Hundreds of delegates looked at him in amazement. Some people fainted, there was the occasional shocked outburst and when Khrushchev praised the Communist Party and the Soviet people, the hall erupted in familiar ovations. It was two o’clock in the morning and Khrushchev was only halfway through his lengthy speech. Then he said: “All the more monstrous are those acts whose initiator was Stalin and which were rude violations of the basic Leninist principles [behind our] Soviet state’s nationalities policies. We refer to the mass deportations of entire nations from their places of origin, together with all communists and Komsomols without any exception. This deportation was not dictated by any military considerations. Thus, at the end of 1943, when there already had been a permanent change of fortune at the front in favour of the Soviet Union, a decision concerning the deportation of all the Karachays from the lands on which they lived was taken and executed.” Khrushchev recited the names of all the other nations and ended the list with the cynical observation that if Stalin could have found enough space somewhere to deport Ukrainians, he would certainly have done so. This elicited a laugh from the delegates, but the speech had far-reaching consequences. Suddenly, the Karachays, Balkars, Chechens and Ingush existed again. They reappeared in articles, newspapers and official memoranda. Although it would take months for the Politburo to officially declare the deportations unconstitutional, the genie was out of the bottle.

The exiled communities in Central Asia became hives of activity. Many people tried to return home immediately. Police were posted at all the main stations along the railway line in Kazakhstan, Kirgizia and Turkmenistan, in an attempt to convince people to wait for a centrally organised repatriation. The return also had conditions attached. The most important of these was also the most familiar: to move anywhere within the Soviet Union, a residence permit for the place of destination was always needed. Without it, it was impossible to go anywhere. The Soviet Union decided to exercise caution, and as a result any available residence permits were traded at exorbitant prices.

Moscow was terrified that the hundreds of thousands of deportees would clash with the Georgians, Russians and Ossetians now living in their houses. To prevent this, Moscow offered the Ingush the steppes of South Russia. The Chechens could also be located further north, beyond the River Terek and in North Dagestan.

No such solution was proposed for the Karachays and Balkars, who were to be reintegrated into their home countries. As soon as Khrushchev gave the go-ahead in 1956, however, the floodgates opened. The majority of people moved back as soon as they could, to the homelands they had been forced to leave ten years earlier. Like

7. Return and decay

127

Khava’s grandmother, who moved back in 1957. She did not make it as far as Chermen however, but settled near the canning factory in Mayskoye to the north.

Eset Umarov lives in northern Chechnya, in the small town of Isheskaya on the Russian border. “This is actually Cossack country,” she says, “but we get on well.”

Eset and her family originally came from a Chechen village high in the mountains, but life in Kazakhstan had changed them. They were only too happy to accept the offer to move to the countryside beyond the Terek and were given a large piece of land. Eset shrugs her shoulders. “This is Chechnya as well,” she says diplomatically when we ask about it. “We’ve lived alongside the Cossacks for centuries. Life here is better than in the mountains.”

Her neighbours in the next village are Cossacks. Her family is blond haired and blue eyed with ruddy complexions; a stark contrast to the dark, stocky Chechens in the area. “Only Cossacks and Russians lived here,” says Galina Mokrousova, a proud old Cossack woman, “but from 1956 we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by Chechens.” It fitted the Soviet ideal of progress to settle the Chechens in these fields, where it was easier to establish large state farms and schools than in the mountains, she says. It must have been strange suddenly living amongst the people who had been your archenemy for 150 years, the reason your ancestors were moved to the forts on the Terek by the tsars. “We went to great lengths to become friends with them,” says Galina, “and our efforts paid off. By becoming good neighbours, we survived the wars in the ʼ90s.”

From 1944, the Russians, Georgians, Cossacks, Ossetians and others cultivated the fields and inhabited the abandoned houses where the deportees had once lived. To a large extent they were also part of the complicated political manoeuvres aimed at keeping the Caucasus peaceful and loyal. To this end, tens of thousands of South Ossetians from Georgia were brought to the North Caucasus, primarily to repopulate the Prigorodny district. And now the mountain peoples, whom the Russians had so feared for one and a half centuries that they had erased them from the history books, had come back – and had received reparation and compensation to boot.

Stories circulated throughout the North Caucasus about the dreaded returnees who entered homes at night to claim their former property. It led to a spontaneous exodus of new settlers from the North Caucasus. It must have been an incredibly confusing time for everyone.

Gamat-Khan Katzoyev, born in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, lives in the Ingush Kantishevo, a scattered farming village on the North Ossetian border. He can still remember that time. “When we came back from Kazakhstan, Ossetians were living in my house. They saw us coming and fell silent. They left the house without saying a word. The strange thing was that they hadn’t bought anything and nothing in the house had really changed. We returned to exactly the same house that my parents had left in 1944. The Ossetians sensed that we would come back.”

Rioting broke out in cities like Grozny in 1958. Thousands of Russians protested against the arrival of the Chechens and Ingush and the privileges they had received, such as housing, land and financial compensation. They also stormed police stations, Communist Party offices, the train station and other public buildings. One of their primary demands was to change the name of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the Multinational Soviet Socialist Republic. In addition, they wanted no more than 10 per cent of Grozny’s population to be made up of

128

7. Return and decay

“They were the 15 hardest years in the life of our nation.�

Mamatay Bostanov

7. Return and decay

129

130

131

Uchkeken, Karachay-Cherkessia Tribute to those who rebuilt the village on their return from Central Asia.

132

Chermen, North Ossetia Taimuraz Tsirigov does not expect peace between the Ossetians and Ingush to last.

“We’ll always live separately, like the Jews among the Muslims in Israel.”

7. Return and decay

133

Chechens and Ingush. After several days of destruction and occupation, the demonstrators were dispersed by the army.

The KGB archives from the time include wild claims in letters from Russians writing: the Chechens have come and have appointed a mullah as their leader and they pray to God / They want to appropriate the republic and restore mountain laws / They want to reinstate private ownership / They say that the Russians do not belong here / The Russians are terrified. Women and children are afraid to make eye contact, because new incidents occur every day.

One letter contains an offensive but accurate generalisation about the returning Chechens: Kazakhstan has taught them nothing, only embittered them towards the Russians and the Soviet state.

The Ingush staged their first protests in the ʼ70s, principally demanding that the Prigorodny district become part of the Chechen-Ingush Republic again, restoring the borders of the republic before the deportations. However, a new reality was emerging in the villages. The centres were now occupied by Ossetians and the new inhabitants, while the Ingush were building their homes in the foothills of the mountains.

Halfway down Lenin Street in Chermen, three men sit on a bench in front of the newsagent. Aslanbek, Nukhzar and Taimuraz introduce themselves. Taimuraz, a short, stocky man with grey hair and a strong, weathered face, speaks for the group. “The Chermen we were born in was the Chermen of the Russians, of Ossetians like us, Germans, Poles and Cherkessians. Chermen is named after the Ossetian national folk hero. He was born from lava and fought the rich to help the poor.” The other men nod vigorously. “We know each other from the army,” Taimuraz points to his companions.

He invites us to his house. “You are my guests,” he proclaims and rings home on his mobile to announce the visit.

His house, a small dwelling behind an iron fence, is a few minutes’ walk away. He claims to have lived here “for generations”, as people can sometimes so wonderfully claim. “Our village was founded by the tsars,” he says. “This isn’t an Ingush village.” I ask him about the time when the Ingush left and the village was empty. “There was no empty village,” he declares. “I already told you that the Ossetians, Russians and Cherkessians lived here.” His daughter Oxana brings us chunks of roast pork and half a carafe of home-made vodka. This is accompanied by gherkins and pickles. His granddaughter Dasha clambers over him. He looks at us proudly. “When the Ingush returned from Kazakhstan, land was cleared for them in South Russia. They had been away for years. The people who were living here at the time had bought their houses, cultivated the gardens, reared livestock. And don’t think that they had come here voluntarily.”

He nods meaningfully. In a few sentences and looks, he has exposed the whole rotten history of this region. Everyone here is a victim of the caprice of Stalin’s regime; but you can exaggerate. “I must tell you that the Ingush had it good, compared to the other nations. They lived peacefully in Kazakhstan, while 60 per cent of our boys died on the front. And the Ingush who moved to Kazakhstan were given thousands of roubles and two cows.” “And a house,” our interpreter Dina adds, before she can stop herself. She has been caught up in the accepted narrative of her nation. “The Ingush say that they are oppressed, but I lost six members of my family in the war,” emphasises Taimuraz, who likes to emphasise what every Ossetian asserts, that of all the peoples in the Soviet Union, the Ossetians made the greatest sacrifice in the service of the Red Army.

134

7. Return and decay

An air of poverty hangs over the summer kitchen where we are sitting. The cliché of the ‘big houses’ where the Ingush live and the ‘small houses’ of the Ossetians, which Dina and the taxi driver had so scornfully pointed out, seems to be increasingly accurate. “They earned a lot of money in Kazakhstan,” says Taimuraz. “When they came back, their houses were occupied. Some families gave them a room. They were often allowed to use the kitchen. No one was homeless. They tried to buy us out, but where were we supposed to go?” Taimuraz sounds bitter. “The Ingush started to say that this was their land in the ʼ70s; that they wanted it back. The situation grew worse each year. So did the corruption. The Soviet Union was perhaps even more corrupt than Russia today,” he complains. “Everything was state property, but it was also for sale. You could buy whatever you wanted. The Ingush started buying houses, land and good jobs. And they bought weapons.”

The Prigorodny district – an area of less than 20 by 60 kilometres – stretches eastwards around Vladikavkaz. Today, the area to the west of the city is also part of the Prigorodny district, although that was a political decision, made to anchor it more firmly in North Ossetia. South of the capital, the River Terek winds into the mountains, up to Georgia, Kazbek and the border crossing with Dzherakh, where we were once denied access to Ingushetia. A few hamlets still lie in the woods at the foot of the hills. This was once the Ingush home base, but they left a long time ago.

In Yuzhny in the produkty, the small supermarket found in every village, we ask who the local elders are, who knows the history the best. A fierce debate ensues.

The shop has not changed in decades. The ancient floor is still polished daily and an endless array of green plants in the window – Russia excels in the use of anonymous green house plants – lends atmosphere to the faded Soviet glory. After much deliberation, we are told to visit Sima Kasayeva. She is over 80 but knows everything, the customer and shop assistant say in unison.

We find Sima on the next street, basking in the sun outside her house.

A few chickens scratch around under a parked, vintage truck. The dog lying next to her scampers away in fright when we approach the house.

We are inevitably invited inside and she spends the first hour offering us samples of all her home-made jams, making tea and coffee and tearing pieces of bread.

“They started coming back in 1963,” she says, “but I can’t remember any real problems. They moved in with my neighbours and my son walked to school with an Ingush boy every day. There wasn’t any shooting, any fighting.” Sima gazes upwards, almost looking for problems. “In fact, we were a happy village. We took the bus to work in Vladikavkaz every day. Some people worked in the forest. My neighbour, who was Ingush, was always doing laundry. She helped me enormously.”

She broods for a moment. “Look, Stalin was Ossetian, Beria was Georgian.

Beria wanted the Ingush dead. Stalin knew them, he made sure that they were taken somewhere safe. No, things only went wrong when the South Ossetians and the other Ingush came,” she says, jumping to the 1990s.

Conduct interviews in the Prigorodny district and most reconstructions of the time between the Second World War and 1990 result in a dogmatic narration ending inevitably with the conflict. This can take two forms. Men like Taimuraz trace everything before and after the Prigorodny conflict back to the war. It was clear that the war was imminent, and after it ended nothing would ever be the same again.

7. Return and decay

135

“When we returned from Kazakhstan, the Ossetians left the house without saying a word.�

Gamat-Khan Katzoyev

136

7. Return and decay

Others say that the conflict broke out completely unexpectedly. Sima tells us about the generally happy time she remembers, just as Khava claims only to have good memories of these years. All the evil from that period seems to pale in comparison with what followed over the next two decades.

The bloody conflict of the early ʼ90s and the anarchy and violence of the years that followed make many people long for the relative peace and prosperity of the Soviet Union. The ʼ60s and ʼ70s were the heyday of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the Soviet Union became the only superpower to rival the United States. The farming industry produced fairly well while consumables and schooling were available to everyone. The photos that eyewitnesses show us depict the classic image of sun-drenched Soviet propaganda: large combine harvesters in cornfields, cheerful Komsomol camps, multicultural classes at school. Faster than they had perhaps ever thought possible, the Caucasians in Central Asia were embedded in the Soviet system that had previously brought them little more than war, terror and misery. The bitter agony of the impoverished and oppressed years prior to their deportation to the unforgiving climate of Kazakhstan and Kirgizia would not be quickly forgotten. However they embraced the new, relative prosperity. Central Asia became their home away from home. The prosperity even absorbed families like Khava’s; her parents lived out the rest of their lives in Kazakhstan, where they built careers, raised their family and enjoyed their retirement.

The North Caucasus was also developed. Remote villages were connected to water, gas and electricity, and every year millions of Russian tourists visited the spas in South Russia and the Caucasus mountains. Factories were built in villages and everyone had work, however specious this was in the Soviet system where unemployment ostensibly did not exist. A veteran in Chechnya, who worked for the police in Urus Martan, told us that in the past – during the good years – when a murder was committed in the republic, a team of ten men from Moscow was flown in to investigate. “How about that,” he laughed scornfully and looked at us knowingly.

In Karachay-Cherkessia, near the border with South Russia and Kabardino-Balkaria, is the provincial town of Uchkeken. We drive through it on one of our many trips through the region. In the central square is a curious monument honouring a long line of men. Most similar monuments in the former Soviet Union honour the local veterans of the Second World War, but this one dates from 1959. These are the men, reads the accompanying text, who returned from Central Asia, rebuilt Uchkeken from nothing and made it strong and proud. The men do indeed look proud. It is a touching sight.

The world-weary figures wear the trappings of the Communist Party: medals, the occasional sash – symbols of the system that nearly destroyed their people; the system that erased them from the map and denied their existence for almost 15 years. The longer one thinks about it, the crazier it becomes. Yet it is also remarkable that the distrust and perhaps even hatred towards Moscow did not increase significantly.

Following their return to their home countries, the deportees were quickly forced back into the straitjacket of the socialist state. They got jobs on the kolkhozes and in factories and worked their way up the communist nomenclature. There were no alternatives.

The Soviet Union used not only jobs, factories and education as means to pacify the Caucasus, but also imposed peace in the socialist tradition of friendship of the peoples. Shamil, the great resistance fighter from the Caucasian War, played a notable role in this. After the revolution he was declared a Soviet hero – he had

7. Return and decay

137

fought against the tsars, just like the Reds, after all. Following World War II and the deportations, however, Moscow began to view Shamil as a dangerous symbol.

Moreover, as a religious leader he was an advocate of a reactionary religion. The Caucasian traditions had to be rendered harmless. The dances became folklore, and the swords were blunted and served a purely decorative purpose in sword dance fights. Through the folklorification of local traditions, the Soviet Union tried to take the sting out of the past and to paint the Caucasians as noble savages, as Pushkin and Tolstoy had been so successful in doing. The Caucasus could be proud of its many peoples, its ironwork and embroidery, but only if these benefitted the gaiety and exotic character of the friendship between the diverse peoples in the Soviet Union.

But that was as far as it should go. Schools that taught in their own language were closed throughout the North Caucasus and local history was removed from the curriculum. Writers and poets were banned or also folklorified.

In the regions where the population was deported, only the odd monument commemorates this upheaval. The similarities with the other regions are greater: war veterans are honoured and every school has its own World War II museum. Soviet propaganda is observed in its entirety, Lenin quotes included. The factories are just as deserted, the villages just as neglected. The differences can be seen in the small things. In North and South Ossetia, Stalin is still revered, for instance. His portrait is carved into or painted on rock faces and his bust still occasionally adorns village squares. Here, Stalin is the Ossetian hero, the man who gave North Ossetia additional land at the expense of the deported Ingush, and South Ossetia autonomy within the Georgian Soviet Republic. This reverence is unthinkable among the Balkars, Karachays, Ingush and Chechens. “When Stalin died, life began again,” one Karachay put it succinctly.

The Soviet Union’s heyday was short lived. All in all, this period of relative peace in the Caucasus is unique in a troubled history of more than 200 years. In the Ingush monument to the deportation, a Disneyesque colonnaded tower, these years are portrayed as merely an intermezzo between two wars. Our tour jumps abruptly from the horrific deportations and exile in Central Asia to several decades later. We suddenly find ourselves in a room covered from top to bottom with photos, newspaper clippings and maps. We see horribly disfigured corpses, abused women, pictures of tanks and soldiers, interspersed with portraits of a still slim Boris Yeltsin – looking bewildered in front of a crowd of Ingush. For a moment we are transfixed, stunned.

What a transition. But here – simply yet powerfully – Stalin’s crime, acknowledged

by Khrushchev and Yeltsin, is linked to the historical rights of the Ingush: Chermen should be called Bazorkina and the Prigorodny district is Ingush.

138

7. Return and decay

7. Return and decay

139

140

141

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Gamat-Khan Katzoyev, 65, lost both legs during the Prigorodny conflict.

He was born in Kazakhstan. “When we returned, we moved into exactly the same house my parents had left in 1944. Nothing had changed.”

Through the folklorification of local traditions, the Soviet Union tried to take the sting out of the past and to paint the Caucasians as noble savages, as Pushkin and Tolstoy had done so successfully before them.

142

7. Return and decay

7. Return and decay

143

Uchkeken, Karachay-Cherkessia Almost every city in the North Caucasus has its own museum of national history, where local customs and traditional costumes are exhibited.

144

7. Return and decay

Naurskaya, Chechnya The Cossack twins Stanislav and Vladislav, 13, recited a Chechen poem for the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. The audience gave the boys a standing ovation and Kadyrov rewarded them with a luxury apartment in Grozny.

145

146

147

Nazran, Ingushetia Monument commemorating the cooperation between the Ingush and Russian army.

148

8. The beginning of the end

149

150

8. The beginning of the end

151

Chermen, North Ossetia Magomed, 14, Khava’s grandson.

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

We are sitting in the summer kitchen again and have spent the last few hours observing all the Caucasian hospitality rituals. We catch up with the men and drink litres of tea. Then food appears on the table. Stacks of pancakes, stuffed with herbs, meat and cheese, are followed by small bowls of oily broth redolent of garlic.

Mukhazhir’s photo album / Moechazjirs fotoalbum

152

8. The beginning of the end

It is almost impossible to come away from these feasts without abdominal pain. The broth is accompanied by hunks of beef, chicken and mutton, along with khinkali, half-cooked dumplings that are added to the broth. Then come salads. Caucasian cuisine is rich in wonderful salads. Tomato with cucumber, parsley and a good drizzle of oil is standard, but they can also be much more refined; with fresh red beetroots, cabbage or carrots. Or salads made entirely from herbs: coriander, parsley, dill, radishes and pickles; or roasted aubergines and spicy red peppers.

Dining with a Caucasian family is a delight, as long as you get along with the hosts.

Some are tolerant and allow you to eat while you chat about inconsequential matters, continue an interview or simply enjoy a moment’s silence. Others are more insistent – the majority, alas. Khava is one of the latter. During these endless, well-intentioned and more than hospitable sessions, she directs her son and daughter-in-law who scurry back and forth, and anxiously monitors our plates. As soon as a hole appears, she urges us to eat. “Look at all the food still on the table,” she says, and shaking her head serves us another chicken wing, a slice of mutton edged with fat and a second helping of salad. Then she points to the adzhika or some other spicy sauce that we just have to try. It is the kind of hospitality that can induce stomach ulcers.

Khava is in her element in these situations. It is an aggressive hospitality, in which she forces her best titbits on us and then leans back contentedly when everyone is eating. She would ideally like to have a man at the head of the table to entertain the guests. That is the way she has always done it. Men tell stories, talk about the past, chat to the guests, while the women act as facilitators. Now she has to do both. “Musa!” she calls. “Pay attention, the bowls of garlic broth are almost empty.” Or, “Madina! The khinkali are finished.” After dinner, Musa and Madina sit exhausted at their own kitchen table in the lean-to with the leftovers.

“My father-in-law soon came back to Chermen,” says Khava, when the table has been cleared after we ostentatiously feign stomach cramps and sigh from the excess of food. With the hospitality out of the way we can now relax. With a bulging stomach and carefully loosened belt, I laboriously put my notebook on the table. I can finally write something down. “My father-in-law came back as soon as Khrushchev announced we were allowed to return in 1956. But Ossetians were living in the house he had left. When the Ingush were driven out in 1944, they had to leave their houses with the key in the lock,” Khava explains. “The Ossetians moved in a few days later.”

For the first few years he lived together with the Ossetian family. They shared the kitchen and divided the two bedrooms. “I think they realised that they were all victims of the same regime,” says Khava. Several years later the Ossetians made the best of a bad situation and moved out. However, there were plenty of others who could not return to their own houses. “Of course I only returned in 1975. I wasn’t able to get my family home back, and my parents stayed in Astana. We did get money and land, as far as I can remember, so that we could build new houses.”

Aha, I think, those must be the large houses about which Dina and the Ossetian driver had gossiped when they talked about the Ingush; the subsidised houses that the Ingush received if they could not return to their own homes. I look at Dina, but she has long abandoned her prejudices about Khava.

“The Ossetians were actually hostages to the situation,” Khava says apologetically. “The government wanted Chermen to remain a mixed village at all costs. The Ossetians who lived here had to guarantee that. We never wanted to live in North Ossetia. That was decided during our absence in Central Asia.”

8. The beginning of the end

153

Madina and Musa bring tea and crystal dishes piled with biscuits, sweets and chocolates. Even after dinner, Khava has pulled out all the stops. Apricot and plum jams are served in small bowls alongside the tea. The abundance of sweets is accompanied by baskets of bread and plates of Ossetian butter and Ingush honey, as Khava points out. “A good combination,” she says laughing. “There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.” She pours her tea into her saucer and slurps it loudly.

Khava does not remember any major problems following her return.

Actually, she says, they had a good life in Chermen. Everyone was friendly to each other. Ossetians and Ingush attended each other’s funerals. “But,” she says, “dark forces were released and the conflict began. Even then, ordinary people continued to be friendly towards each other. The conflict was provoked by the Ingush and Ossetians authorities, that much is clear to me.”

The day the conflict erupted, Khava was in bed with flu. “I heard shots.

I thought it was a training exercise, but then my neighbour ran in. He had been going to pick vegetables in the field but had to turn back. He shouted, ‘Why are you lying in bed? The war has started!’ Then I saw the first armoured vehicles in the street.

“Everyone panicked,” Khava continues. She lives on the Ingush side of the village. This is the side that was built after the Ossetians took over the centre, following their return from Central Asia. It is only a few hundred metres to Ingushetia, down the road to the crossroads, and from there only a short distance to Nazran, the Ingush capital at the time. “People began to load up their children, gather as many animals and valuables as they could and race back and forth as militias appeared everywhere. It was very frightening.”

The war broke out in the autumn. There was a lot to do in the garden. Khava decided to stay in Chermen. She wanted to harvest her vegetables and prepare food for the Ingush men who had stayed behind. Her garden filled with the livestock that her fleeing neighbours could not take to Nazran. “The same day the militias began to plunder the houses of the refugees. My husband came home two days later and said that I really had to leave. He had seen Russian tanks and behind them bandits.

Ossetian bandits. They were Ossetian but chiefly bandits,” she says. She glances casually at Dina, our Ossetian interpreter, “and bandits have no nationality.

“We left our house on 3 November 1992. All the other Ingush had already gone. We went to Nazran, but that was almost more dangerous. The city was full of refugees. Anarchy reigned. Complete lawlessness. It sounds strange, but you get used to anything. In the beginning I heard shooting, explosions and I kept waking up. After a while it became background noise and eventually I slept right through it.

Those were strange days in the Caucasus. In 1997 I was in Grozny, Chechnya, where my sister lives. It was complete chaos. The whole city had been shot to pieces in the war. The crime was appalling. Men with guns and long beards were everywhere.”

Khava left the anarchy of Nazran and returned to Chermen as quickly as possible to save what she could. “I didn’t have any enemies here,” she says. “When I came back, four houses were still burning. When they saw that Ingush were coming back, that stopped. They hadn’t reached my house. My conscience was clear, that’s why I could go back straightaway. I hadn’t killed anyone. My husband came back too, and my son got married here in 1995. He now has four children.”

The Prigorodny conflict is one of the many conflicts of that period, and perhaps the least known. “The problem was that Ingushetia didn’t exist back then,” says Khava.

“We were still part of Chechnya, where there were other things to worry about. We

154

8. The beginning of the end

didn’t even have our own television channel. All the news about us was from the Russian or Ossetian perspective. They reported on the unimaginable cruelty of the Ingush. They said that we were killing children and our men were raping Ossetian women. Our backs were against the wall.”

Khava describes how life after the war slowly improved. She went back to teaching at the school where Ingush and Ossetians have since been taught separately.

“It’s such a shame,” she says, “but the authorities in Vladikavkaz aren’t ready to bring them together.” She points to the sky when she says the word ‘authorities’, forces on which it is impossible to exert any influence from here. “There’s almost no contact now between the Ossetians and Ingush, but things are slowly getting better. The older generation is often friendly to each other, we talk to each other, kiss each other when we meet. But the young people are growing up in a strange village without getting to know each other. They don’t treat each other well. At my school, small fights break out between Ingush boys every day. But if a fight breaks out between an Ingush and an Ossetian boy, it becomes a big deal. We have to be careful, because it doesn’t take much to start a fire here.”

She points outside. “Around the corner, do you hear that? My grandson Magomed is playing football with the neighbour’s son. He has an Ossetian father and an Ingush mother, so it is possible.

“Do you remember my uncle Magomed?” she asks. “He gave up in those years. He saw no future in the Caucasus and went back to Kazakhstan, the place where he had been born in exile. Trade was the only way to earn money here. In North Ossetia that was vodka, in Ingushetia and Chechnya it was illegal oil and sometimes cars. But everyone was already doing it. Around 10 per cent of our people stayed in Kazakhstan. You’re embraced by the community as soon as you arrive. He did well, trading in millstones I believe. He just couldn’t adapt to the climate and had to come back. He still has a scar on his neck, which swelled up like a potato. He had to have surgery but it kept bothering him. He’s now decided not to worry about the conflict anymore. If you are beyond reproach, you need only fear Allah, he says.” She pours more tea into her saucer and slurps it loudly. “Madina,” she calls, “give the boys tea!”

8. The beginning of the end

155

156

9. The Second Caucasian War

Nazran, Ingushetia The museum dedicated to the victims of the repression in Nazran keeps photos of the hundreds of people who disappeared during the Prigorodny conflict in 1992.

“During the Prigorodny conflict, the genocide of the Ingush started in 1944 was completed.”

157

158

9. The Second Caucasian War

159

160

161

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Beslan’s airport is visible in the background.

The Soviet Union’s dramatic collapse in 1991 took almost everyone by surprise.

In the Caucasus, the collapse heralded a period of violence and conflict which can rightly be called the Second Caucasian War, and which continues to this day.

162

9. The Second Caucasian War

It is not a war of conquest, as was the case in the 19th century, but a struggle for influence. In an interview, a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow referred to the former Soviet states as Moscow’s children. He extended the metaphor, saying that children reach puberty and start acting up, but they will always be your children. The imbalance of power inherent in his words is perhaps still most evident in the Caucasus, a region deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. The Caucasus is comparable to the Wild West in the United States: romantic, full of pioneering spirit and laden with the heroism of the advancing frontier. A southern dream. The best restaurants in Moscow were the Georgian restaurants and films often depicted the emotional, half-savage, hairy men from the Caucasus. The soldiers who fought in the Caucasus are still immortalised in statues across the country, however gruesome the results of their military adventures were in practice.

Perhaps this is why Russia seeks to maintain more power and influence in the Caucasus than in Central Asia and the western countries of the Soviet Union. Russia has fought for the Caucasus for 200 years – a fight it is unwilling to relinquish easily.

Russia used divide and rule politics as well as military violence to subdue the Caucasus. These same tactics are being employed in the Second Caucasian War. The various uprisings and demonstrations in the ʼ80s all served a local goal. None of the conflicts from that period has been resolved and smoulder on as small, regional wars.

From 1987, the inhabitants of the Azerbaijani autonomous district of Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, sensed that an important change was imminent. The Armenian majority sought both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary links with the Armenian homeland, while Azerbaijan did everything in its power to keep the region within its borders. It led to a bloody war that could flare up again at any moment.

In 1989 unrest broke out in Georgia. In the capital Tbilisi pro-independence, anti-Soviet Union protests were crushed by the army. At the same time, newly formed independence movements in the Georgian autonomous regions of Adjara, Abkhazia and South Ossetia used armed conflict to gain de facto independence.

Russia’s ambivalence was clearly visible in these conflicts. Thoroughly informed about local government through its security forces, and military and historical links, Russia provided weapons and military support to one side (Abkhazia, for example) and political support to the other (Georgia led by the former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Shevardnadze). The conflicts may have indeed been local, but they were played out at the highest levels.

The conflicts in the ʼ90s can be seen as local attempts to reinstate the national borders that Moscow had redrawn in the ʼ20s and ʼ40s. South Ossetia and Adjara attempted to use their autonomous Soviet status to gain independence.

Protesters in Abkhazia demanded a return to the independence they had enjoyed between 1921 and 1931. The Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh were only too aware that these years would determine the country in which their children would be born: no longer in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union, but in a country dominated by either Azeris or Armenians.

Alexander Chibirov experienced the events first-hand. The historian from South Ossetia spends part of his time in the North Ossetian Vladikavkaz. As the son of the second president he does not always feel at ease in the small, cramped republic of

9. The Second Caucasian War

163

South Ossetia, home to fewer than 60,000 people. “I keep myself to myself,” he says.

“There are too many different groups jostling for power.” He prefers to talk about the history of the Caucasus, laced with a good dash of Ossetian patriotism. “In 1989, I was stationed with the Red Army in Vilnius, the capital of Latvia. Huge protests broke out.

Together with the police we were ordered to disperse the crowds. I knew that something big was about to happen. I decided to go back to Tskhinval, the capital of South Ossetia, as quickly as possible. The Georgians started their nationalist protests at exactly the same time. Georgia for the Georgians, they sang. War was inevitable.”

Chibirov tells fantastic stories about the almost clumsy start of the conflict. “If you whistle in Tskhinval, everyone will come to your aid. It’s a village. The violence started small, as a series of fights. But from 1991 things became serious and many people died.”

In 1990 Chibirov was working for OMON, the military police. He was shot and spent a year in hospital recovering from his injuries. “Only when the Russians came to help us did we become more or less independent. But that independence degenerated into total anarchy.”

Despite this de facto independence, the country remained a complex patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian villages. It was only during the next war in August 2008 that the country gained the sort of independence it wanted, Georgian villages were destroyed and the Georgians expelled.

We are in a cafe in Vladikavkaz. Along with Makhachkala, this is the only city in the North Caucasus with an established nightlife, beautiful tree-lined streets and an old city centre. The wall of the cafe displays a photographic history of the town, from tsarist, military Vladikavkaz to communist Ordzhonikidze, Dzaoudzhykhau cleansed of the Ingush between 1944 and 1956, post-Stalinist Ordzhonikidze and Vladikavkaz again from 1990.

“Nationalism plays tricks on the Caucasians,” says Chibirov. “Whenever someone wants an ethnically pure country, another group is always in the way.

That’s how small the Caucasus is. But you mustn’t get big ideas here. For that, you would have to be God. Communism didn’t work for a reason.”

In the North Caucasus, the first conflict was a direct result of Stalin’s divide and rule politics. Until the deportations, more than 90 per cent of the Prigorodny district was Ingush – and it was still part of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic for a reason. In the years following the deportations in 1944, some 60,000 South Ossetians from Georgia were settled in the Prigorodny district to populate the empty farms and villages. This migration continued after the first Ingush returned from Central Asia, until 1959. Despite this, the Ossetians continued to fear the returning Ingush. The murder of an Ossetian driver in 1981 sparked days of rioting in Vladikavkaz. Army units were deployed to quell the demonstrations. The Ossetians demanded a halt to the large number of Ingush returning to the city and the Prigorodny district. The government partially gave in to the demand and stopped issuing residence permits for Ingush, who continued to return anyway while building their houses illegally.

By 1990, 40 per cent of the population was officially Ingush. Unofficially, that figure was likely higher.

The North Caucasus seized the potential of the power vacuum created in 1991 by the collapse of the Soviet Union with both hands. Chechnya quickly declared independence. The Ingush opposed this decision, and following skirmishes and a referendum

164

9. The Second Caucasian War

declared itself once again independent of Chechnya and loyal to Moscow. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was divided into the Republic of Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as the Chechens referred to their country.

Ingushetia expected a reward for its loyalty and asked Moscow to reinstate the pre-1944 borders, including the Prigorodny district. It was election time, when promises were easily made. Yeltsin signed a law rehabilitating the victims of political violence and stating that they could expect territorial integrity to be restored. Simultaneously, the new Republic of Ingushetia was declared legal but without its borders being defined. Ingushetia’s deportation museum displays a photo of Yeltsin stiffly addressing a large Ingush crowd in a square in Nazran. “Salam alaikum Ingushetia,” he said. His words were greeted with cheers. Below him a banner reads: Genocide of the people – a disgrace to the country.

Tensions in the North Caucasus were growing. In a mixed city like Vladikavkaz protests and riots were an almost daily occurrence. At the same time, tens of thousands of refugees streamed into the country from South Ossetia. North Ossetia was under pressure from two sides. Moscow’s ambiguous position made the situation untenable..

An increasing number of people were killed or wounded in small, local fights and shootings between the Ingush and Ossetians. North Ossetia rejected any claims by the Ingush. Yeltsin’s election promises and the well-intentioned rehabilitation laws of the Russian Duma had no practical results after the elections. What should happen to the Ossetian population of Prigorodny? What would be the status of Vladikavkaz, which the Ingush also claimed? An armed conflict seemed unavoidable.

The guides at the deportation museum in Ingushetia have organised a meeting to learn the details of the Prigorodny conflict. We are escorted in a taxi to a large, new country house in the village of Kantishevo, on the Ingush-Ossetian border. A row of elderly Ingush men are seated according to age in the grand foyer. We greet the eldest man first, then proceed down the line. A similar row of women nod in our direction from the other side of the room. We move to the dining hall, because a good conversation is impossible without food and drink. Magomed Agilkov takes the floor. He is 74, was born in Ordzhonikidze, raised in Kazakhstan and in 1962 returned to Ordzhonikidze, remaining there until it was renamed Vladikavkaz.

“After I came back, I lived for months with a Turk, who had occupied my father’s house. I was eventually able to buy him out. But in 1992 I had to leave the house again. I didn’t want to, but I was forced to,” he says. The regret is visible on his face.

“It happened so quickly. In late October the body of an Ingush girl was found on the street in Yuzhny. Both Ossetians and Ingush stood around discussing who might have done it. Yuzhny was a colourful place. Armenians, Jews and Russians lived there too. We communicated well, but the conflict was coming ever closer. When I got home the same evening I heard the first gunfire. It came from both sides.” More and more men join us at the table, trying their best to disrupt the speaker by telling their own stories. Anecdotes and accusations fly about who started the war and how it broke out. There is no unified version, only agreement that the country was suddenly ablaze. Agilkov opted for safety, he continues. He loaded friends and family into the back of his truck and drove as fast as he could to Dzherakh, the Ingush town in the mountains near the Georgian border. “On the way, shots were fired at my cab. There was a long line of cars and Ossetian militias ahead of us. They were

9. The Second Caucasian War

165

drinking and roaring Ossetian songs. My hand was broken and the only thing I could do was jump out of the cab. I was knocked unconscious. Only later did I hear that other people had saved the column. I only woke up in hospital.

“In retrospect,” he continues, “it was clear the war was coming. There had been so many murders and incidents. The police in North Ossetia subjected us to an increasing number of checks and put roadblocks everywhere. I think that the Ossetians planned everything. They already had experience fighting in Georgia and wanted to remove us from their country definitively.” This is something all the men can finally agree on.

Sima Kasayeva, 81, was also in Yuzhny in 1992. She had previously told us that the return of the deported Ingush had proceeded so smoothly. “The whole war was invented by outsiders,” she says. “The Ossetians from South Ossetia are rude and anti-social.” She sincerely regrets that there are no Ingush left in her village. “What can I do about it? The Ingush were bad, they fought us, they killed us and took innocent hostages. My neighbours down the street lost a son, others lost a daughter.

All of them died in the months of the conflict.”

Sima describes how the Ingush organised themselves. Mass demonstrations and meetings were held in the nearby sports field. She describes them as tribal, almost animalistic events. “The meetings lasted two or three days. They slaughtered cows and sheep and ate them immediately. We didn’t know what was happening, they spoke in their own language.” She recalls those days in 1992 with evident fear.

When the conflict broke out, the Ossetians gathered in the house of a Turk who lived nearby. “We were terrified. The Ingush were shooting on one side. They started the war. After a while the Ossetians’ armoured cars and Russian tanks entered the village from the other side. The armoured cars took us all to Vladikavkaz, while the soldiers and tanks started fighting.”

The Ingush can never live here again, Sima believes. She stresses, “The innocent Ingush who didn’t want to fight were targeted and killed by Ingush soldiers.”

It is a tradition in the Caucasus to subject one’s opponent to extraneous cruelty. “The Ingush who remained incited the soldiers against us, they are just as guilty. Thanks to the Russians we won. We celebrated there,” she points to the square in front of the small shop.

In early November 1992 – six months after his visit to Nazran – Yeltsin determined that Prigorodny would definitively remain part of North Ossetia. Meanwhile, the conflict in the small province had already claimed the lives of 600 Ingush. More than 1,000 were injured and 60,000 fled the area. Nine thousand Ossetians also fled and 52 were killed.

It was not until 1995 that an agreement was signed between North Ossetia and Ingushetia concerning the return of refugees. To this day, however, more than half of Eastern Prigorodny remains off limits to returning refugees. Thousands of Ingush still live as refugees in Ingushetia and elsewhere.

Travelling between Ingush and Ossetians villages, history quickly becomes a blame game. “Make sure you talk to enough Ossetians,” an Ossetian historian says in alarm when he hears that we have spent several days talking to people in Ingushetia. Our interpreter Dina suppresses every conversation in which the South Ossetians are blamed for the conflict. Meanwhile, the conversation with the group of men around

166

9. The Second Caucasian War

“In retrospect, it was clear that the war was coming. There had been so many murders and incidents.�

9. The Second Caucasian War

167

168

169

Kantishevo, Ingushetia We are escorted in a taxi to a large, new country house in the village of Kantishevo, on the Ingush-Ossetian border.

170

171

Nazran, Ingushetia Anecdotes and accusations y about who started the war and how it broke out in 1992. There is no uniďŹ ed version, only agreement that the country was suddenly ablaze.

172

9. The Second Caucasian War

173

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Magomed Khozoev (51) was seriously injured in 1992, during the ďŹ rst days of the Prigorodny conict between the Ingush and Ossetians. He heard an explosion not far from his house and went to investigate. At that moment a second bomb exploded.

Agilkov has degenerated, ending up in a slanging match. “Not a single shot was fired in Ossetian villages,” says one. “Our people were killed in their own houses, sometimes in their own beds,” another shouts over the top of him. A filmmaker in the group, who swamps us with negatives and photos of disfigured corpses, tells us that the Ossetians liked to tie two Ingush together and set them alight. “They called it Ingush candles,” he says. The men are bitter. Eleven of the 19 villages in Prigorodny are still off limits to them. Their houses were burned down or occupied by others.

“Often South Ossetians,” someone almost spits out. “What actually happened,” says the filmmaker, who enjoys some authority among the men and thus often leads the conversation, “is that the genocide of the Ingush started in 1994 was completed.” His comment ignites arguments about whether Stalin was Ossetian or Georgian.

In Kantishevo, Gamat-Khan Katzoyev tells us more about the war. He lives on the border between North Ossetia and Ingushetia. “The Ossetians were smarter than us.

They had higher positions in Moscow. In the conflict we were killed like dogs. The Russian and international press were on the side of the Ossetians. They had a wellorganised lobby. Nobody cared about us.”

Gamat-Khan receives us on the doorstep of his exuberantly decorated house. On the quiet country road, two young girls race to and fro on roller-skates.

In the distance the air traffic control tower of the airport in Beslan is just visible.

Gamat-Khan is in a wheelchair. “I heard an explosion at the crossroads here in Chermen.” It is the same crossroads near Khava’s house. “In my naivety, I went towards it. Just as I arrived, a second bomb exploded. The Ossetians were bombing the crossroads. I only regained consciousness in hospital. When the conflict started, I thought it would stay small. But the Soviet Union deployed its entire arsenal: planes, tanks, grenades, machine guns. I worked in Vladikavkaz so I had a lot of Ossetian friends. Now I rarely see any of them. They’re afraid of us and we’re afraid of them.”

After our conversation, Dina and Gamat-Khan start talking. “What nationality are you exactly?” he asks Dina. “Guess,” she says blushing. “Georgian?” he guesses, “Balkar?” After all the hatred expressed towards Ossetians and in particular South Ossetians, Dina finally dares to reveal herself. At other times she calls herself Diana and puts on an exaggerated Muscovite accent. “I come from Tskhinval, South Ossetia,” she says. They look at each other and fall into each other’s arms. Dina gets into the car sobbing.

Back to the three old Ossetian men on the bench in the centre of Chermen, a stone’s throw from Khava’s house. They all fought in the conflict, they say. Yes, it was a nasty time, but they are reluctant to say much more about it. “The Ingush prepared everything meticulously,” Taimuraz tells us. “My Ingush neighbour denied it, but I know better. The war was made possible by the Soviet Union’s infinite corruption.

Yeltsin was bribed to support the Ingush.”

Taimuraz does not see relations between him and the Ingush ever improving. He also opposed the return of the Ingush to Chermen after the war. “It was forced on us by Russia. Look,” he explains. “The Ingush are Muslim. Their aim is that every Muslim kills an orthodox Christian in his lifetime. We’ll always live separately, like the Jews among the Muslims in Israel. Until the next conflict, that is,” he threatens. “Our ancestors were real fighters. I’m an old man, but I’ll be the first to defend myself. I’ll never renounce part of my motherland to anyone.”

174

9. The Second Caucasian War

Guram and Vakha, aged 36 and 20 respectively, pick us up. Vakha drives while Guram sits next to him in a drunken daze. We rattle through the Prigorodny district in an ancient Volga, once the limousine of Soviet cars. “This is the deal,” Guram shouts above the roar of the engine. “I help Vakha with the maintenance of the Volga and he drives me around when I need it. I don’t have a car.”

Vakha smiles behind the wheel. He tries to tune his old car radio but little more than a low crackle comes out of it. Guram slaps his hand away; he wants to talk. “Vakha and I have been friends for a long time,” he shouts, giving Vakha a thump. “Vakha is Ingush and I’m Ossetian so I’m allowed to hit him.”

We stop along the route so that Guram can ask for directions in unadulterated Ossetian, but he cannot get the door open. He pushes and pulls, until the inside of the door falls off in his hands, then smoothly snaps open the exterior. In frustration, he flings the inside of the door into the boot where a small lake has formed – another reason to thump his friend.

Our trusty driver Isa was unavailable that day, so he sent us Vakha. However, Vakha does not dare to drive out of Chermen into North Ossetia. He does not speak Ingush and his Russian is heavily accented. Moreover, he is driving a Volga with an Ingush licence plate, like most Ingush in Chermen. That is a problem, especially in North Ossetia. No police will let this car through. Neither will the Islamic flag on his rear-view mirror do him any favours. He almost faints when we drive into Ossetia. He would rather not be here, which is why he has brought along his repairman Guram.

There are few better forms of persuasion for a young Ingush man than a cheerful, inebriated Ossetian next to him.

We are not stopped (at the two checkpoints, Guram and Vakha hang out of the car laughing and waving) and judder on to our destination. Vakha keeps the engine running, revving noisily, so that he does not have to spend another ten minutes trying to get the car going again. “In my time we were still taught together at school,” says Guram. “I don’t have any trouble getting on with the Ingush. But since the war we’ve lived in a divided village.”

In terms of numbers, the Prigorodny conflict was a mere trifle compared to what was to follow. The two wars in Chechnya, which were fought between 1994-1996 and 1999-2006, cost an estimated 150,000 lives. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the country, first the Russians and other nationalities living in Chechnya, then the Chechens themselves. During the first war, the population of Ingushetia doubled as a result of the influx of Chechen refugees.

The wars in Chechnya were characterised by indescribable cruelty. Anyone who reads the stories by journalists such as the Russian Politkovskaya, the Polish Jagielski or the Russian soldier Babchenko, but in particular the endless testimonies in the reports by Amnesty, Memorial and Human Rights Watch can reconstruct the never-ending tableau of human rights violations, attacks on both sides and utter destruction.

Most of the Chechens we meet dislike discussing the wars in Chechnya.

We do not talk to prominent figures, but ordinary people who tried to guard their homes or protect their families. Almost all of them were affected. Some fled, only to return as soon as possible, or stayed permanently in one of the neighbouring republics, Moscow or Western Europe. They all refer to the terrible anarchy; to the front that was nowhere, or rather the front that was everywhere. Bombings and armed incursions were incessant. Friend and foe were indistinguishable. The Russians could be your

9. The Second Caucasian War

175

protectors or your murderers. The countless Chechen militias could save your country, but their presence in your village also invited disaster.

Chechnya is a depressing country to travel through. Not only because every resident has a gruesome story to tell, but also because the current, post-war leadership of the young Ramzan Kadyrov bears all the traits of a dictatorship. In every interview it is clear that the people we talk to are afraid either to talk about the current state of affairs, or scared that they might touch on undefined taboos. The Chechen history of the last 20 years is a confusing political power struggle that in many respects resembles a modern version of the 19th-century Caucasian War. It began so euphorically. In 1991, a monument to the deportations was erected in the middle of Grozny. It showed a Koran with two hands on either side reaching to the heavens. For the first time in centuries, Chechnya was in control of its own fate.

I find reports of the accompanying celebrations: mourning marches interspersed with expressions of great joy that the country’s grief could finally be commemorated. Two wars later, little remains of the monument except a pile of stones.

The monument was erected by the first president of independent Chechnya, Dudayev. The elections were a harbinger of things to come. Chechnya is a traditional country. Decisions are traditionally made by family clans, which are spread over several teips. These are groups of families originally from one village or region.

Ingushetia has the same system. The Gazdievs, Khava’s family, are one of the founders of Egi-Kale. That is the family clan. With three other families, including the Gaisanovs, who originated there, they form a teip. All important decisions are ideally made by the elders of the teip, and marriages can only be arranged among members of the same teip.

The teips survived 70 years of the Soviet Union. However, unable to choose a joint leader from their own ranks, they chose the ultimate representative of the old system: namely the highest soldier that Chechnya had ever had in the Russian and Red Armies, the eccentric Soviet Air Force general Dzhokhar Dudayev.

Infighting soon broke out, providing Russia the opportunity to intervene in the country.

“When the Chechens decided to become an independent state, the Ingush said: we want to remain part of Russia. Russia is a strong country, you shouldn’t fight that. You should have strong people as your friends, not as your enemies,” Khava had already told us.

In the North Chechen village of Isheskaya, Eset Umarov saw the Russian armies approaching. “We were chased out of Kazakhstan,” she remembers. “When Kazakhstan became independent, there were uprisings against the Chechens in some areas. I came back to Chechnya, proud that we had gained independence. Then war broke out here too.” Eset runs a shop on the main road from Mozdok, a garrison town in North Ossetia, to Grozny. “Thousands of soldiers and tanks passed by,” she says. “They were utterly unpredictable. Most of them were drunk and aggressive.”

She was able to keep her family together through the war, although her house was destroyed. Six years later, they are still repairing it. “It was a frightening, chaotic time,” she says. But now it is over and she does not want to talk about it anymore.

With her daughter she picks some strawberries from the garden and puts them on the table for her guests, accompanied by a foaming glass of fresh milk from her cow.

Arkady Babchenko fought in both Chechen wars. He witnessed how Chechen soldiers slit the throats of Russian soldiers and how Russian women wandered through

176

9. The Second Caucasian War

Chechnya like apparitions in search of their missing sons. Some of these women were raped, murdered and burned. There was little heroism in the Chechen wars.

Babchenko’s One Soldier’s War is a beautiful but brutal book in the tradition of Pushkin and others who were seduced by the Caucasus. Like so many writers before him, Babchenko muses on the green grass, the fragrant apricots and how this existence as a soldier in the Caucasus must be real life.. At the same time, he cannot comprehend how war could break out here. War, he writes, should happen in the Arctic Circle, where it is dark and cold. Not here, where the days are so beautiful but where dead Russian soldiers return to the motherland in silver body bags.

He describes Grozny as the Stalingrad he knows from Soviet propaganda: a lifeless, destroyed city; a city terrorised by frightened convoys, ripping to pieces corpses which no one dares to remove for fear of being hit by a lurking sniper.

Babchenko’s literary account paints a shocking picture of the Russian army.

The prevailing view at the time was that Russia was in complete chaos. More than the chaos, however, Babchenko describes an institution that was morally bankrupt. An army in which rank and seniority were used for the most heinous hazing, during which young soldiers frequently died, committed suicide or deserted. The arms trade with the Chechen rebels was lively and profitable. As described in books about the First Caucasian War in the 19th century, captured soldiers were employed by the Chechen militias. That was a fate reserved for conscripts, however; mercenaries were killed immediately.

Shamil Basayev thrived in this chaos. Named after the legendary Imam Shamil, Basayev fought in Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia before the war came to his own country. He was a daredevil, the man who took extreme action while his political leaders negotiated with Moscow over ceasefires and political solutions to the war.

He bribed Russian army units and in 1995 travelled with a group of fighters to the South Russian Budyonnovsk, taking a hospital and hundreds of people hostage.

The hostage crisis came as a shock to Russia. For three days, Russian troops stormed the hospital, killing more than 100 civilians in the process. Basayev eventually negotiated a Russian escort and went back to Chechnya with several hostages as a human shield. His return was treated as a victory parade. He had achieved definitive hero status.

Ailing Russia was no match for the ebullient Chechens. While the Russians occupied the large, ruined cities, the Chechens maintained control of the mountains and the countryside. The Russians appointed loyal Chechens to government positions in the hope of currying favour with the local population. In 1996, however, after more than two years of war, a combined Chechen attack in Grozny proved to be a defining moment. Support troops were destroyed and several days of fighting later, it was over.

The Russian army signed a ceasefire. In 2001, as stated in the Khazavyurt agreement, Russia and Chechnya would again discuss mutual relations. President Mashkadov (Dudayev’s successor, allegedly killed by a satellite-guided missile in 1996) was officially invited to Moscow. The war appeared to have been a political success, but Chechnya degenerated into an anarchic state where local militias held sway.

The population simply tried to survive. So much had been destroyed; houses, the state farms from the past. Many people tried to make ends meet by trading metal, weapons or oil. The motor trade flourished. The country was a black hole where illegal money could be laundered. Jagielski, for example, describes how Chechens with bags

9. The Second Caucasian War

177

178

Chermen, North Ossetia Guram (left) and Vakha (right) are friends, even though one of them is Ingush and the other Ossetian.

“In my time we were still taught together at school,” says Guram.

“I don’t have any trouble getting on with the Ingush. But since the war we’ve lived in a divided village.”

9. The Second Caucasian War

179

full of self-printed roubles went on shopping sprees in Moscow. As Chechnya did not yet have its own legal status, it was still part of the rouble monetary system.

The various militias were restless. The short period of peace between the first and second war was never entirely peaceful. There was too much violence and too many problems, such as the refugee problem, that had not been resolved. Radical Islam became an additional factor. Shamil Basayev, the mighty rebel leader who had brought Russia to its knees, was a precursor of this. He aligned himself with the international jihad movement, in which the Arab militia leader Al-Khattab was an important pawn in Chechnya. Originally secular leaders Dudayev and Mashkadov regarded the movement with suspicion, especially when foreign jihadists, trained in Afghanistan and elsewhere, arrived to reinforce the Chechen armies.

As in the Caucasian War, Chechnya was not enough. Basayev had grander plans for jihad and independence. In mid-1999, Yeltsin appointed FSB leader Vladimir Putin as prime minister. Putin was due to succeed Yeltsin as president at the end of the year. Basayev would provide him with the opportunity to establish his power definitively. Less than a week after Putin’s appointment, Basayev and a modest military force invaded neighbouring Dagestan. Simultaneously, apartment buildings in Moscow collapsed. The truth about the collapse would remain a mystery for a long time. According to the government, Chechen terrorists were to blame; according to eyewitnesses and a number of journalists, the security forces were behind the disaster. The attacks killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 600. It was more than enough reason for Putin to attack Chechnya.

The Second Chechen War proved to be even more devastating and destructive than the first. Once again, however, Russia failed to conquer and occupy Chechnya. The only tactic that appeared to work, apart from the massive deployment of troops and weapons, was divide and rule. As Tolstoy describes in his wonderful book Hadji Murad, in which the Russians make grateful use of the titular character to try to convince the mountain peoples to side with them against Imam Shamil, so the Russians also tried in this war to win over Chechens with status. They were successful. Akhmad Kadyrov, Grozny’s chief mufti and the highest religious authority in Chechnya, was prepared to take on the leadership. Like Hadji Murad – who allegedly made shashlik from dead Russian soldiers – before him, Kadyrov also had a long track record in the struggle against the Russians. He called repeatedly for a jihad and fought in the First Chechen War. However, the rise of religious figures such as Basayev and groups like the Wahhabis and Salafists from abroad caused him concern. In his assessment of this new religious reality, shifting allegiances and the prospect of another devastating war, cooperation with Russia seemed the best solution.

That says a great deal about the past two centuries of Chechen history: independence from Russia is an illusion. Only a form of cohabitation has brought Chechnya any kind of peace. The Second Chechen War and the destruction it brought created an even larger stream of refugees than the first war. One of these refugees is Ruslan, who now lives in the Dutch province of Limburg. His father was an ambulance doctor, a dangerous occupation in a country at war. In 2000, he was shot as he rushed across the street with a wounded person on a stretcher. Ruslan knows from eyewitnesses that the Russian army attacked the ambulance. Together with his mother and brother, he filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If he wins the case, he will not be the first. Every year, Russia pays out thousands of

180

9. The Second Caucasian War

euros in compensation to the families of the victims of Russian violence. The filing cabinets in Strasbourg are overflowing with cases from the North Caucasus.

Ruslan now travels to Grozny as often as he can. We meet him one evening in a billiard cafe in Grozny. He is delighted when he hears Dutch. After the war, Chechnya was rapidly rebuilt with money from Moscow and Ruslan saw a business opportunity. He now sources lamps in Germany and the Netherlands and sells them to the new Chechen elite, those who benefit from the reconstruction money from Moscow. “In Chechnya, stability never lasts long,” he says. “I have to strike while the iron is hot.”

In 2004, Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in a bomb attack while attending a World War II ceremony in a football stadium in Grozny. His son Ramzan Kadyrov soon became his de facto successor, seizing absolute control of the country. Akhmad is now regarded as the first president. Dudayev and Mashkadov no longer appear in local history books. The latter was shot in 2006 in Tolstoy-Yurt, near Grozny. His body was personally inspected by his rival Ramzan.

The war rages on. Basayev and Mashkadov’s successors are still hiding out in the villages and mountains of the North Caucasus, awaiting their chance to establish what they call the Caucasian Emirate.

In a Chechen bar, one of the few where alcohol is freely available, is Vacha, a bigwig in Chechnya’s judicial system, but tonight just a short man with a round stomach, a ruddy, equally round face and a taste for vodka. When the vodka has overpowered him, he takes to the dance floor with his vassals. To avoid any mishaps, he gives his gun to his driver. A boy stands behind a synthesiser and in a monotone voice sings rousing lezginkas, traditional songs that everyone in a dark Chechen bar should hear.

Vacha drags a waitress – the prettiest – from behind the bar and dances in wild circles, accompanied by loud, rhythmic clapping from his friends. His drunken attention then falls on us. He sends jugs of beer to our table and giving us an occasional thumbs up, monitors how we are doing. When it comes to a conversation, he claims savagely that “if Putin deposed Kadyrov, we would have 50,000 men ready to go to war against Russia within an hour.” Sometime later he kidnaps us and takes us to his house in Gudermes, a town 40 kilometres away. This is aggressive hospitality: you can protest, but ultimately you do not have a choice. We tear through the night and watch with regret as our hotel flashes past the window. Vacha’s gun clatters uncontrollably on the dashboard. At his house, he opens a 30-year-old bottle of cognac. Just before he falls into a drunken stupor and we lie down on his bed, we manage to hold a serious conversation with him. Clumsy from inebriation, he cuts slices of bread and sausage – drink without food does not exist. “If war breaks out again, I’ll immediately side with the Russians,” he says in a lucid moment. “They’re simply too strong for us; you can’t fight that.” And the rebels in the mountains? “Ah,” he says. “Kadyrov keeps them there. When Chechnya no longer has a problem with terrorists and separatists, we’ll instantly lose a few billion roubles in support from the Kremlin.”

Dagestan, Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria escaped the war dance of the ʼ90s, although not without a significant amount of unrest. One ethnicity dominated. In the Soviet Union, local governments were controlled by if not largely made up of Russians. When the Soviet Union collapsed, new power struggles emerged, some of them violent. Relations between the small group of Balkars (who were also

9. The Second Caucasian War

181

“In Chechnya, stability never lasts long. I have to strike while the iron is hot.�

Ruslan, Grozny

182

9. The Second Caucasian War

deported) and the large, powerful group of Kabardin are still strained. In KarachayCherkessia, fights often break out over which group wields too much power, with the Cherkessians as the leading protagonist. The crisis was perhaps most successfully resolved in Dagestan, home to more than 30 nationalities. These range from tiny tribes of a few hundred people to the Avar, of whom there are more than one million. To prevent Dagestan from sliding into violence, a complicated system has been devised to create a balance of power.

The various government posts and important functions are divided according to a precise allocation model. For example, the Avars get the prime ministership if the Lezgin get the presidency. The Parliamentary Speaker is then a Lak and so it goes on until all the 30+ nationalities have been accounted for and everyone is satisfied that no single group wields too much power.

In the ʼ90s, the Dagestanis watched with trepidation as the wars in Chechnya destroyed their neighbour. We are told proudly that poorly armed Dagestani villagers kept Basayev and his militias at bay. Ali Kemalov is a journalist and head of the Dagestani journalists union. He comes from the once indomitable mountain village of Sogratl. The village supports Russia in order to survive, using the same arguments Ingushetia used to remain part of Russia and not pursue independence like Chechnya. “After the Caucasian War in the 19th century, we dissolved like Dagestani honey in Russian tea. We were always focused on the south,” he says, “with an Arabic script and our Islamic faith. But Russia gave us access to the west, to Europe.” He tells us how Dagestan has always been coveted, and that it is perhaps better to seek safety under the wing of a large nation. “Freedom and individualism run in the blood of every Dagestani, but we also know that we’ll never be left alone if we’re independent.”

The Chechen wars weakened the Caucasus. The violence, anarchism, terrorism and corruption have destroyed all the early ʼ90s dreams of restoring local traditions and achieving greater independence and freedom. Out of this period of chaos and strife, a new phenomenon has emerged, something that Russian and local leaders are only too happy to label as alien to the Caucasus, but which simultaneously underlines the parallels with the First Caucasian War: Islamic radicalism.

Local, traditional Islam barely had a chance to recover in the years after the atheistic Soviet Union before missionaries from the Middle East and Afghanistan introduced new, more radical and orthodox strands. These thrive here, just as the Muridism of Imam Shamil and his followers struck a chord during the First Caucasian War. Linked to this radical Islam is a new movement, arising from the international jihadists and pro-independence militias of the Chechen wars. The wars in the Caucasus may officially be over, but the Second Caucasian War continues, in an unremitting struggle for control of the rugged mountains.

9. The Second Caucasian War

183

184

9. The Second Caucasian War

Isheskaya, Chechnya Six years after the last war, Eset Umarov is still repairing her house.

185

186

187

Goity, Chechnya “Imran Dzhambekov was a good boy,” says his mother Zainap. She is still fighting for the truth about his death.

188

9. The Second Caucasian War

189

Ekazhevo, Ingushetia Lis Ismailova (64) lives with relatives in Ingushetia. For decades she lived in the Chechen capital Grozny, until she was forced to ee during the Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2006. She cannot return. Her apartment was destroyed and as an ethnic Ingush she is not eligible for compensation from the Chechen government.

190

10. Prayer makes life bearable

191

192

“I only learned to pray in the Caucasus.”

10. Prayer makes life bearable

193

“Khava’s coming,” says her son Musa.

“She’s just...” and he makes the movement for praying. We had not seen Khava praying before, but had seen the prayer mats. She returns a short time later.

194

10. Prayer makes life bearable

We ask Khava about it. The Soviet Union was ideologically atheist, you were raised in multicultural Astana, how was your family able to hold on to Islam? “Our faith is very strong,” she says. “Even in the Soviet Union, you could come together and discuss and practise your faith. It was strictly forbidden until the 1970s, but it did happen. This room, the summer kitchen, is also a place for zikr, the Sufi whirling dance.” We try to imagine it, the famous stories of the mystical circling dance in which men whirl, pray, sing and murmur themselves into an ecstatic and hypnotic state of divine worship. Early travellers to the Caucasus wrote about these men in their beautiful outfits and hats whirling in a field or a room. As we talk, their role is temporarily taken by fledgling swallows. The fat youngsters whirl around our heads, settling nervously anywhere they can dig their tiny claws into and take a break. They are followed by their hysterical parents, who fly wildly back and forth chirping to their offspring, urging them in swallow language to fly back to the carefully constructed nest.

“It was only here in Chermen in the 1970s that my brother-in-law taught me to pray by myself. I already believed in God, that made it easier. Precisely because we were deported to Kazakhstan, my father, my mother but particularly my grandmother tried to preserve the traditions as strictly as possible – although they were predominantly Ingush traditions. When I was young I hated my headscarf. Now I can’t do without it.”

At the same time, Khava was a true Soviet citizen. She was a member of the pioneers in the communist Komsomol youth organisation and had a secular upbringing in Astana. It is a curious paradox. For 200 years the inhabitants of the Caucasus had been battered, villages had been burned down and entire peoples deported, while in just a few decades a hyper centralised and ideological education dragged them into the modern era. Khava is a typical product of this background, as we so often find in the Caucasus. Literate, well read, fluent in Russian and worldly wise, but at the same time traditional and conservative. She wants nothing more than to be Ingush, with all the peculiar traditions that entails; she wants nothing more than to be Muslim, just like her ancestors. And yet she is so Russian, so Soviet, with her childhood photos of her wearing a red scarf and swimming in the Black Sea in Sochi.

“My husband was a devout Muslim,” says Khava. “As soon as he got the chance, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He went in 1989 and then again in 1990.

That’s where he bought all our prayer mats. That’s also when I began praying, at 35.

Now I pray five times a day and fast during Ramadan.” She shows us a calendar with the prayer times. “But a new mosque was built nearby a few years ago. That makes it really easy.”

When her husband disappeared, Khava joined the large group of women with missing husbands. This entitled her to make the hajj to Mecca, which she did in 2009. A wealthy Ingush paid for her trip.

The summer kitchen is still busy. The baby swallows are back in their now overcrowded nest, and hang over the edge with open beaks awaiting the return of their mother and father. With all their frantic flying to and fro in search of flies and mosquitoes, the parents are now smaller than the overfed youngsters. “In another few days they’ll fly the nest,” says Khava.

“So much has changed,” she continues. ”Nowadays you can pray and be Muslim freely and openly. Though life has become much harder in the Caucasus, praying makes it easier, more bearable.” A cloth on the wall depicts the Ka’aba, the black cube in Mecca. A mihrab in the corner indicates the direction of prayer.

10. Prayer makes life bearable

195

“When I was young I hated my headscarf.

Now I can’t do without it.”

196

10. Prayer makes life bearable

“Ingushetia was the last place in the Caucasus to become Muslim,” Khava says.

“Nobody actually wanted to become Muslim. We were forced to.” I ask how it is possible that there are now fundamentalist groups here. She muses. “The Wahhabis are extremists. I don’t know them. They even deny the Prophet Mohammed and are against our own old Islamic traditions. If we wanted to dance the zikr here, they wouldn’t agree to it.”

10. Prayer makes life bearable

197

198

10. Prayer makes life bearable

10. Prayer makes life bearable

199

Chermen, North Ossetia From Khava’s photo album: Mukhazhir (left, 1989) and Khava (right, 2009) on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

200

11. Islam

201

Derbent, Dagestan “Religion doesn’t suffer from extremists,” says the sheikh of Derbent.

“People suffer from extremists.”

202

11. Islam

203

204

205

Shamilkala, Dagestan

206

Kirov Aul, Dagestan Saidakhmed Nasibov, 59, was a strict Muslim and spokesperson for the Salafist community in his village. In August 2012, he was pulled from his car by masked men and shot multiple times.

“If I were young and naive, and unaware of the consequences, I would join the militants in the woods.”

11. Islam

207

208

11. Islam

11. Islam

209

Kirov Aul, Dagestan One of Saidakhmed Nasibov’s son competed in Sambo, a Russian form of judo.

He and his cousin were shot dead by masked men in front of his house. The newspaper headline the next day read ‘Killed by mistake’.

“After 70 years of the Soviet Union, nobody knows what the real Islamic customs are,” says Mohamet Adzhibekov. He is the young imam from the village of Krasny Vostok (which literally translates as ‘the red east’), in peaceful KarachayCherkessia.

210

11. Islam

When he opens the door to his small, white-washed mosque on the main road through the village, he is dressed casually in jeans and a shirt. When he has to pose for a photo, however, he rushes into his office to change into a robe and turban. He comes from a long line of imams. His grandfather and father taught him the old traditions.

He was educated in Cairo, Egypt as well as Tabzon, Turkey. He does not attract many worshippers. “Every Friday, around 30-35 people attend Friday prayers, most of them with religious questions. They ask if they should throw fruit and drink into the grave at a funeral. ‘That’s not necessary,’ I tell them, ‘but there’s no reason not to either.’” The mufti of Cherkessia were recently murdered in cold blood. “It may have been the Wahhabis from neighbouring republics,” says Mohamet. “I don’t know. I try to practise my faith as purely as possible. Perhaps that’s the reason why I haven’t had any problems.” Women and girls do not attend his mosque. “Maybe they’re afraid of the stories about Sharia,” he says, adding for a second time, “I don’t know.”

It is more likely that after 70 years of the Soviet Union, Krasny Vostok’s inhabitants are no longer that interested in Islam. The Soviet Union regarded religion – in the spirit of Karl Marx – as the opium of the people, and attempted to eradicate any trace of it.

At home, a welcoming Soviet culture prevails, with pickled cabbage and large amounts of vodka and homemade wine. In public, the mores of the mountains hold sway. The village mayor is happy to list them. “On the street, no one will cross your path,” she begins. “That brings bad luck and we wouldn’t do that to each other.

Young people must never interrupt old people, even if the old people are wrong. A man on horseback must never pass a woman without first dismounting. Younger sisters may not get married before their older sisters. We don’t cover our faces anymore, but we don’t expose ourselves either. And,” she adds jokingly, “in the Caucasus we don’t get drunk. But that’s because of all the fresh air.”

Over dinner, we are told that there was once an imam who wanted to make a woman his wife. He had had his eye on her for a while. He thought up an excuse to visit her at home and told her that he urgently needed a woman’s hair to guard her from certain misfortune. The woman agreed and retreated to get him the hair. The next day the village awoke to the sound of the imam bellowing loudly among the cows in the barn. The woman had seen through his scheme and had given him a cow’s hair.

The Caucasus is rich with myths, legends and traditions, some of which are mixed with Islam and others which have no connection to it all. Every mountain has a story, for example. In Dombai, Karachay-Cherkessia’s ski resort, is a mountain that resembles a sleeping woman. Or, as they say here in Krasny Vostok, the mountain is a sleeping woman. She protects the adjacent valley from bad weather and disaster. “I can’t comprehend how people here become fundamentalists,” says someone at our table one evening. Even though we are in Krasny Vostok, she prefers to remain anonymous. Islam, fundamentalism and the violence associated with it have the fullest attention of the security forces here. “Yet with such high unemployment, corruption and the occasional use of government force, the Wahhabis’ message can be very appealing.”

Islam in the North Caucasus is relatively new. The majority of the population only converted in the 18th century. Prior to this, some were Christians, but most practised

11. Islam

211

local, animistic beliefs. As is often the case, the new religion blended with the old customs. As a result Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, emerged, incorporating dance, music and trance. However, the mores of the mountains would always exist alongside it.

Arguably the most beautiful mosque in the North Caucasus can be found in the predominantly Christian city of Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia. Standing on the banks of the swirling, bluish-grey waters of the River Terek, it is a multi-coloured brick creation, clearly recognisable as a mosque, but unique in the region where mosques are generally little more than a simple square box with a tin dome and a minaret. Another mosque is located not far away, on the opposite side of the Terek, but was altered beyond recognition during the Soviet era. In the struggle against religion, mosques were often converted into cultural centres, theatres, cinemas or even sports halls. “This mosque was one of the city’s main attractions,” a taxi driver tells us. He points to a small, round building. “That was the planetarium.” Posters still hang on the walls, but otherwise the antiquated mosque looks like a dirty, derelict squat.

Ibragim Dudarov is one of the senior imams at the mosque in Vladikavkaz.

As we walk to his office in a nearby block of flats, he explains how his neighbour taught him the Koran phonetically and then explained what she thought it meant.

“That’s how it was passed on,” he says, “from generation to generation.” Things that are passed on phonetically, however, can stray from their origins. “When the Soviet Union collapsed, missionaries from Muslim countries came here to refresh our memories. That’s how I ended up being taught by a Syrian.

“You can clearly see from our mosque how deeply rooted our traditions are,” he continues. “Even so, things have never been more difficult. The police keep a close eye on us because they suspect us of radicalism. Women walk away from us, because they’re scared of Sharia. On the other hand, it’s precisely those boys and girls that the police monitor so closely who become susceptible to radical ideas.

Dokku Umarov is now the leader of the Caucasian Emirate, of the extremists in the woods. Many people believe that what he is doing is the right path for Islam. They are convinced by a flawed vision, which is facilitated by an aggressive government.”

Ibragim cites examples of worshippers from his mosque who have been beaten and tortured in police custody. “From the official reports it’s clear that it’s just a sick joke. It doesn’t stack up. But the lawyers we use don’t always make a difference. That’s the biggest problem we face: if we just had a fair system, rule of law, we would be able to defend ourselves. And in turn there would be far less radicalisation.”

He takes a newspaper from his desk draw and shows us a photo. “This was a congress I attended for imams in Dagestan. Look at these imams,” he points to five of them. “They’re all dead. Every one of them was shot or blown up by extremists.”

Ibragim believes that extremists have emerged because Islam has deviated from the right path. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, many imams started to support local politics. Not surprisingly, Islam was suddenly permitted again, politicians began associating with us and asked the imams to disseminate their policies. And that’s where the roots of the conflict in the Caucasus lie. Fear of God is an important notion in Islam. You must follow God’s laws and do as they say. They supersede everyday politics. If you don’t, then you’re committing a sin.” Ibragim looks pained. “Sometimes politicians don’t understand the Koran at all, so they

212

11. Islam

“The Arabs who came here said that the North Caucasus must be the paradise referred to in the Koran because it is so beautiful.�

Anonymous Salafist, Nalchik

11. Islam

213

make their own interpretations. They say that one thing in the Koran is right and the other isn’t, while they themselves don’t follow a single law.”

In an old factory in a suburb of Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, four ‘extremists’ are sitting around a table. They all have thin beards and all wish to remain anonymous. It was quiet in the early ʼ90s, they begin their story. Tourists no longer visited the Caucasus and Arabs from Syria and Saudi Arabia came to preach in the empty sanatoriums. The Arabs were beautifully dressed, the men recall. They handed out tickets to Mecca and Islamic schools in the Middle East. What was particularly striking, says one man, is how soft-spoken they were and how attractive and intelligent.

The room smells of sawdust and male sweat. The four men set up this cooperation together because finding regular work was impossible. “We’re on the lists of the police and security forces. Even my 11-year-old daughter is on the list,” says the bald man in the group, “simply because we adhere to pure Islam, Salafism.

We see ourselves as original Muslims.

“The Arabs who came here didn’t come to tell us that we should kill. They showed us how beautiful Islam is. They even said that the North Caucasus must be the paradise referred to in the Koran because it’s so beautiful. We don’t have to impose our laws on anyone. Of course, we hope that one day we’ll have an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. But that will never happen if no one observes the laws.”

He continues: “I think that this has all happened because the government is unable to answer a number of questions. Why are the roads so poor? Why are there no jobs? Why are the hospitals so bad? And why are there no primary schools for our children? They’re using us as scapegoats to avoid facing the real issues.”

He tells us how his life is controlled by the security forces. “The day after my daughter, who lives with her mother, got internet in her room, an officer was waiting for her to ask if this was the first time she had used the internet.” He pauses to think. “Whatever it is, we’ve always been a Muslim country. But the Soviet Union ruined it. Many members of the government don’t understand anything about it. When they interrogate us, they beat us with the Koran because it’s such a thick, heavy book.

They don’t understand how fundamentally wrong that is.”

The government was alarmed by the turbulent rise of Islam in the mid-1990s. “In Kabardino-Balkaria, they responded by announcing that they wanted to close all the mosques,” says the bald man. “Not just ours. Some years it’s worse than others. A counter-terrorism operation was conducted throughout 2011.

When we left our houses in the morning, we didn’t know if we would see our wives and children in the evening. Many of our brothers are in prison.” Another man, with a short grey beard, tells us that the government forgets that this is the Caucasus.

“Fighting is in our blood. Our honour is sacred. You can beat us once, maybe twice, but then you can expect us to retaliate. If it happens again, then the best option is to head into the woods and take up arms against the government. What’s the alternative? To be beaten and tortured simply because of your religion. And if we’re killed, my son will ask my wife what happened to me, and as soon as he’s able, he’ll also take up arms to avenge his father.”

Chechnya is the exception to the rule in the North Caucasus. In no other state are politics and religion so closely interwoven. Akhmad, the father of the current ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, was Chechnya’s grand mufti and a religious traditionalist.

Whatever his considerations may have been, one of the reasons to cooperate with

214

11. Islam

Putin at the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999 was what he regarded as the increasing influence of Wahhabism, the Islamic movement so foreign and odious to Chechnya. At the same time – as a mufti – he embraced Islam wholeheartedly.

Where the other republics are led secularly and every conservative Muslim is a suspect, Chechnya under the Kadyrovs became – paradoxically enough – an Islamic state. However, it was a moderate, mystical brand of Islam more palatable to the Kremlin than the new Islamic radicalism.

Kadyrov plays the Islamic card at every opportunity in order to neutralise the republic’s radical movements. He allows rare Islamic relics to be housed in the ‘largest mosque in Europe’ he had built. He has made headscarves compulsory in schools and tries to limit alcohol consumption by making its purchase almost impossible. Thousands of police officers and security officers sport thick beards – something that in the other republics would immediately invite suspicion.

The mosque in Grozny is the realisation of Kadyrov’s dream for a new Chechnya.

The Akhmad Kadyrov mosque lies on the River Sundzha, at the point where Vladimir Putin Boulevard and Akhmad Kadyrov Boulevard meet. On the opposite side of the river is Grozny City, a complex consisting of a few skyscrapers that reflect the mosque’s minarets. With several billion roubles of Kremlin funding, a completely new city has risen from the rubble caused by a decade of war. The administrative centre occupies both sides of Vladimir Putin Boulevard. As we walk into the mosque we are able to exchange a few words with a deputy minister of Internal Affairs. He is surrounded by three well-built men armed with guns in their right hands, cocked and covered with their left. The mosque is equipped with lockers of varying sizes, some of them for storing simple handguns, others for more serious firearms. The mosque itself is a palace of unparalleled luxury. After the long period of violence and anarchy that flattened the city, it had to make an even more overwhelming impression on visitors than a newly completed Catholic cathedral in the Middle Ages. The mosque has underfloor heating and wonderfully soft, deep carpets. Gold shimmers everywhere and small groups of men enjoy a nap. Elsewhere, another group is talking animatedly – to a minister, we are told.

The officiating imam has his office in a side room. Mohamed is just 25 years old. Throughout our conversation, a surly man with a handgun watches us closely from the doorway. “We’re working on the re-Islamisation of the Caucasus,” says Mohamed. “Every day, I see the older generation coming to the mosque.

Sometimes I see the tears streaming down their cheeks as they come inside, and rediscover their roots.” He launches into a euphoric propaganda story about the success of this Islamisation. “I know so many Russians and Ukrainians who have worked here and gradually realised that Islam was the only path for them. Girls see the advantages of the headscarf and spontaneously start to wear one. Nobody pressurises them. My wife also realised that it would be better for her.” It is a rather cynical comment, given that in the months prior to this conversation several reports had surfaced about a sort of moral police who had been pelting immodestly dressed girls with paint-ball guns. One girl had apparently even lost an eye in one such attack.

Kadyrov’s response to the media was that he disapproved of such actions, but would gladly shake the hands of the perpetrators. “You can always find extreme examples,” says the imam. We ask to what extent the re-Islamisation relates to the region’s traditional Islam or to a new form of Islam. “Islam is one and indivisible,” replies the imam. It is the only answer he can give and a recurring stumbling block in conversations with religious figures. It is difficult to refer to Islam as being one and

11. Islam

215

216

Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia Ibragim Dudarov is one of the senior imams at the mosque in Vladikavkaz. On 26 December 2012 he was found dead in his car. He was the tenth Muslim cleric to be killed by violence that year.

“Look at these imams. They’re all dead. Every one of them was shot or blown up by extremists.”

11. Islam

217

218

219

Grozny, Chechnya Since the ofďŹ cial end of the Second Chechen War, Grozny has been completely rebuilt. Skyscrapers and shopping malls are even springing up next to the so-called largest mosque in Europe.

220

11. Islam

11. Islam

221

Grozny, Chechnya Footballers from Terek Grozny’s Paralympic team. Almost without exception, the men were injured after stepping on landmines during or after the wars. They now compete in the premier league of global disabled football.

indivisible when, in this small country alone, so much conflict rages over the correct interpretation. “If traditions clash with Sharia, then we’re against them,” the imam clarifies. “For example, in the Caucasus its customary to kidnap your bride. While she’s captive, you ask her to marry you. We’ve now forbidden that.” During our travels we have encountered many of these examples. Even though the kidnapping of brides is increasingly becoming folklore, it still happens frequently. Older women sometimes tell us sadly how they had to give up their dreams and ambitions when a local farmer snatched them from school and put them to work in the kitchen. “These days we’re able to live together fine,” said one woman with whom we were staying, “but I would rather have studied in Leningrad. I’m much smarter than him. Maybe that’s why he kidnapped me.”

Superstition here is ineradicable. For all his missionary zeal, the imam still has a lot of work to do. One of the most successful clinics in Grozny is the Centre for Islamic Medicine, which carries out exorcisms. Due to a bizarre twist of fate, the clinic, a large, red-brick building, is located in the headquarters of the Salafist Basayev. The place is like a house of horrors. On entering, you are met by the screams of women undergoing exorcisms. A doctor allows us to attend one healing.

A woman is lying under a white sheet on a hospital bed. Next to her head are two computer speakers emitting loud tuneless Islamic prayers – sometimes compelling, sometimes lyrical, sometimes discordant. The woman thrashes on the bed, groaning and emitting the occasional scream. “That’s the spirit being released,” the doctor explains. He moves the speaker out of the way and shouts in her ear: “What is your spirit called? Come out!” “Ruslan,” stutters the woman, trying to twist out of her awkward position. The doctor calls out: “Ruslan! What are you doing there? Get out!

Who are you? Who is your master? There is a foreign journalist and a photographer here. Spirit, you’re an idiot! Get out!” The woman moans: “My chest hurts. He’s been inside me for years.” “Her husband lives in Norilsk, far away in the north of Russia,” says the doctor. “He doesn’t trust her and thinks that she’s having an affair. If we can get the spirit, the jinn, out, the problem should be resolved.”

The clinic’s corridors are lined with patients, mainly women, waiting to be helped. They are crying and screaming. Among them are epileptic patients, the mentally ill and women with social problems. Their parents are often sitting with them, wringing their hands.

Kirov Aul has a notorious history. It is located in Dagestan, on the motorway between Khasavyurt in the west and the capital Makhachkala on the Caspian coast.

Kirov Aul is a well-known stronghold of what the authorities refer to as Wahhabis.

Like the group of men in Nalchik, they call themselves Salafists, which literally means ‘predecessors’. Salafists aspire to emulate the ways of the Prophet Mohammed and his earliest disciples. It is an extremely orthodox interpretation of Islam that is practised according to the exact examples and laws from the Koran.

They get angry if you refer to them as Wahhabis, we soon realise when we meet Saidakhmed Nasibov, one of the religious leaders in the village. He is a stocky man with a short, greying beard. His thick glasses spring from his nose as he talks animatedly about his ideas. Our translator Habib only knows them as Wahhabis and calls them exactly that. The immediate response is 15 minutes of theological arguments. “We don’t revere any man,” says Saidakhmed. “Wahhabi refers to a Saudi theologian from several centuries ago. We may agree with his ideas, but we will never name ourselves after him. We only follow Allah and his word.”

222

11. Islam

Saidakhmed is a missionary. He recently lost his son, but that is a story for later on in our conversation. He first wants to deal with any misunderstandings about his faith.

“In the 1990s people also called me a Wahhabi. When I was summoned to court, the judge asked the police: ‘Why do you call him a Wahhabi?’ ‘Because he has a beard and wears short trousers,’ said the agent. The judge said to me, ‘If I don’t convict you, the FSB and the police will make it impossible for me to do my job.’”

Saidakhmed speaks intensely and passionately, while his daughters fill the table with dishes of food and glasses of tea and juice. His ideas may be radical, but it is hard to believe that the local clergy and government regard this sympathetic, gentle man as subversive.

Life was tough during the Chechen wars in the ʼ90s, Saidakhmed tells us.

“Journalists and Dagestani government officials came to me and asked, ‘Basayev and Al-Khattab are also Salafists aren’t they? Don’t you want to support them?’

I simply answered, ‘Let them first establish an Islamic state in Chechnya and then we’ll see.’” In 1999, the army surrounded the village and demanded that the inhabitants surrender their weapons. The rulers in Dagestan were terrified that Kirov Aul would side with the Chechens.

The first Salafist mosque was built in Kirov Aul in 1987, right next to Saidakhmed’s house. He and his neighbours were initially forbidden from building the mosque, but they persevered, arguing that everyone is equal. “In Vladivostok they’re building a cathedral with state funds,” he snarls. “We’re organising everything ourselves.” There are significant differences between traditional Islam and Salafism, he stresses. “People here are very superstitious, for example. The highest spiritual leader in Dagestan is the Ustar. He lives somewhere in the mountains. People believe that he’s holy and the local imams agree. Imagine that!” he laughs. “They truly believe that he is their ticket to a better world when they die. They act as if he’s God!” He shows us an extensive collection of Russian books about Islam, including the Koran.

“Everyone should read the Koran, shouldn’t they? But the Ustar forbids us from doing it. He says that the only Koran is the Arabic Koran. He believes the Russian translation is a desecration.”

The mosque next to Saidakhmed’s house has already been closed twice in recent years. Men were taken hostage until the community promised to close the mosque. “We’re harassed continually. We’re always stopped at checkpoints. Friends of ours from the Tsumada district were once arrested and shown on television. They all had long, full beards. Then the police tied green bands around their heads, like jihad militants do. But the police put them on the wrong way around, and everyone read the Arabic text upside down. That’s how everyone knew that they hadn’t come out of the woods.”

Saidakhmed knows enough men who did go into the woods. He often mediates between them and the police. “I try to negotiate terms that enable them to return, but if they end up in prison anyway, then all trust is gone. As a community we’re treated harshly. That’s how I lost my son and my cousin.”

Saidakhmed’s son was a successful wrestler in Dagestan. Wrestling here is without doubt the national sport. Even the smallest town has a wrestling club, and wrestlers from the Caucasus dominate the Olympics. Ask why this is and the men on the benches in the club will offer the most elaborate theories. Wrestling is in our blood, they say, or you’re not a man until you’ve won your first competition.

“My cousin’s younger brother went into the woods,” says Saidakhmed. “We’re always trying to get him to come back, but he always leaves again. My son Magomed

11. Islam

223

“Boys and girls who are monitored by the police become more susceptible to the ideas of Islamic radicals.�

Ibragim Dudarov, Vladikavkaz

224

11. Islam

didn’t want anything to do with the woods. He was a wrestler and thoroughly enjoyed his career. A week after he and my cousin were shot, he was due to go to the Russian championships.”

Less than a month later, the cousin’s brother and another bandit ((boyevik boyevik as bandits, terrorists and/or Wahhabis in the woods are called) were shot too, just outside Kirov Aul. Saidakhmed and his family are too close to the fire, in a republic where the hunt for Wahhabis and terrorists heeds neither rights nor laws. “But,” admits Saidakhmed, “I should also be in the woods, but I’m too old. If I were still young and naive, and unaware of the consequences, I’d be one of the militants in the woods. At the end of the day our religious ideas are the same.

“The real problem lies with the government,” he continues. “Everything bad is attributed to the Salafists, while the violence is often started by the security forces. The government is corrupt. They should deal with that and leave us in peace.

We’re open to talking with the government, to making it clear that if everyone abided by the law, nobody would go into the woods.”

Saidakhmed turns on his computer and shows us how he stays connected with the outside world via a creaking internet connection. He gets his information from both Russian and Arabic-Islamic blogs and shares his own vision of Islam and the government. “Ultimately, our message is the only true one,” he firmly believes.

While I was writing this chapter, we received the news that Saidakhmed had been killed too. He, his wife and sister-in-law were on their way to the funeral of a murdered relative in Makhachkala, when masked men forced him out of the car and shot him in cold blood. His wife Nasibova fell to her knees and began to pray for the last living man in her family, she said in an interview. The masked men stayed until they were certain Saidakhmed was dead. Nasibova did not press charges she said; she just wants to be left in peace.

The conflict between the Salafists and the traditionalists is reminiscent of the 16th-century conflict in Europe, between the Catholics – the old church that conspired with those in power – and the new reformed church. Local Islam is under pressure from globalisation, the increasing knowledge about Islam that this brings and the other forms of Islam to which people are exposed. The logical conclusion is that only closer cooperation between the threatened ‘church’ and the government will strengthen traditional religion, leaving no room for a new, all-threatening faith. This is a mechanism that automatically leads to radicalism on both sides.

One of Dagestan’s five most important sheikhs can be found in Derbent, an old town on the Caspian Sea in South Dagestan. As a prominent figure for traditional Islam, he is the archenemy of Salafists like Saidakhmed. He welcomes us warmly into his house, where his wife and daughters bring us tea, biscuits and fresh fruit. We see a rush of activity in the kitchen. Another feast is being prepared for us. We are sitting in the study of a complex connected to the large mosque. A bookcase is filled with books, mostly in Arabic, and a laptop is open on a low table. We sit on cushions with our backs to the wall. “I write a short blog post every day,” says the sheikh.

“It’s the only way of staying in touch with the young people. There’s so much misinformation about Islam on the internet. The Wahhabis actively use it to recruit followers. I provide advice and tell stories.” According to the sheikh his blog is well read. “I work day and night to keep young people on the straight and narrow.

Unfortunately, too many people from Derbent still go into the woods.”

11. Islam

225

A couple of strapping men had entered the room at the start of the conversation.

They introduced themselves as the sheikh’s assistants. In a country where an imam or sheikh’s life is constantly under threat, however, it would not surprise us if they also had another function. One has a gun hanging from his belt.

The sheikh responds irately when we ask what he considers the wrong questions about Islam. It is always the same old story: Islam is one and indivisible, end of discussion. We recall the videos of the boyeviks in the woods, all solemnly raising a finger (there is only one God and that is Allah) as they walk past their comrade’s camera. Their views are the same.

The sheikh avoids questions about the men in the woods. “When you’re young you have to think about your old age, when you’re healthy you have to think about your illnesses, if you’re alive you have to think about your death,” he replies, hinting at the irresponsibility of the boyeviks. “Many young people who join these movements don’t know what it says in the Koran.” We interrupt. “Surely they know even better? They translate the Koran into Russian for just that reason.” The sheikh is furious. “The translated Koran is not a Koran. Allah sent the Koran directly to earth, in Arabic. It was intended to aid understanding of the religion. He sent parts to earth for 23 years. He could easily have sent a translation, but he didn’t. Why? The Koran is a collection of laws and the explanation of these laws – the Sharia – is definitive. Every case has definitive ayat or outcomes. It has outcomes specifically for you. If someone else reads it, it can be misunderstood. Anyone who wants to understand the Koran should talk to a sheikh or imam, because only people with a deep understanding of the Koran can explain which ayat apply to him.”

We ask why we have languages at all.

“God gave us languages to make communicating with each other more interesting,” replies the sheikh.

He has had enough of our conversation. His tone changes and he begins his closing remarks. “Religion doesn’t suffer from extremists,” he says. “People suffer from extremists. Religion will go on. Mankind was reborn after Noah’s flood. The non-believers were destroyed. If we stop believing, the world will be filled with injustice and everything will be destroyed. The true believers will eventually be saved. Salt water will become fresh water again, animals will no longer eat one another and trees will lose their thorns.”

Lunch is served: mutton with warm flatbread and a selection of salads. We are invited to pray before eating and are discouraged from asking anymore questions.

Instead, it is our turn to be torn apart with carefully rehearsed, razor-sharp comments that paint us as immoral Westerners, whose women go to work instead of attending to the family and household. At the end of the meal, the sheikh stands up and bids us a laughing farewell.

226

11. Islam

11. Islam

227

228

11. Islam

Derbent, Dagestan Nargiz Zaidova, 19, has lost both her brothers to terrorism and the ďŹ ght against terrorism. She witnessed police ofďŹ cers planting a grenade in the cellar as a pretext to arrest her eldest brother.

229

230

11. Islam

231

Derbent, Dagestan When Shamil Zaidov went into the woods he left a letter under his mother’s pillow. “I’m going into the woods. I’m joining the Mujahedeen brothers. Don’t register me as missing; it will only result in unnecessary unpleasantness for you. I can’t come back. I ask you not to stop Nargiz from saying her prayers.”

232

233

Chermen, North Ossetia Khava loves roses, which she grows in her backyard.

234

12. The disappearance

235

236

12. The disappearance

237

Chermen, North Ossetia A Polaroid of Khava with her husband Mukhazhir, her daughter-in-law and a friend posing among the owers in her garden.

“The trouble all started with Beslan,” says Khava. “Don’t get me wrong.

What happened in Beslan was incomprehensible and horrifying.

Those children taken hostage at the school, so many dead… I’m a teacher myself. It’s only 20 kilometres away.

I almost had a heart attack when it happened. But all Ingush were victims of what happened next.”

238

12. The disappearance

Relations in North Ossetia had just been somewhat restored after the war in 1992, says Khava. Then Beslan happened. Almost all the perpetrators identified came from Ingushetia. Since then, relations in North Ossetia have again been strained.

“Between 2004 and 2007, 20 people from Chermen disappeared,” says Khava.

“They were detained and simply disappeared into thin air. Never heard from again, either in prison or in court.

“I was in Kazakhstan where one of my brothers had died. Then my son rang.

He said that my husband was seriously ill. They didn’t dare to say what had really happened. I came back to Chermen and only then did they tell me. My husband had gone shopping in Vladikavkaz with a neighbour. They intended to drive to Ingushetia together, to buy a new car with an Ossetian licence plate. They never got there. They were probably arrested by men posing as the police, or stopped by the real police.

I don’t know what happened. No one knows what happened.

“I can’t think of any reason why he, Mukhazhir, disappeared,” says Khava. “He didn’t smoke or drink. He wasn’t a millionaire; he was just a taxi driver.”

A tear rolls slowly down her furrowed cheek. Her face ages when she talks about her husband, the colour seeming to drain out of it. “He was a nobody,” she says fiercely, like a cornered cat. “Even at home I was the boss.” It is a joke but even she does not laugh at it.

Mukhazhir’s car was found the same day, in a street near the Interior Ministry and Police Headquarters. Residents had alerted the police. A car with an Ingush licence plate parked in an area like that was suspicious. There had been a spate of bombings and residents were afraid that this car too would explode. “I got everything back,” says Khava. “All their important documents were still there, except my husband’s driving licence. That’s our only clue, that someone asked for his driving licence. Otherwise the car was clean. There was no trace of blood, nothing that indicated any violence.”

Khava says that the Ossetian authorities do not want to cooperate. But why not? She comes out of her house and walks awkwardly down the stairs to the summer kitchen. In her arms are binders full of documents and photos, a report of her five-year search to find her missing husband. “I’ve done everything I can to get my husband back,” she assures us.

“Will you be going to South Ossetia soon?” she asks suddenly. “That’s the only place I haven’t looked. Could you ask around? Take his photos? I’ve looked and asked everywhere from Dagestan to Karachay-Cherkessia and in South Russia.

I haven’t found a trace of him anywhere.”

The folder Khava puts on the table is filled with dozens of letters to the presidents of Ingushetia and North Ossetia, to Putin and Medvedev, to chiefs of police, prosecutors, investigators. The folder also contains the responses, including a frequently repeated request from Putin to refer the case to the relevant North Ossetian authorities.

The dominant tone of all her correspondence is utter desperation. Not one letter to Putin, but five. Not one to the prosecutor but an entire series, each one containing small, new facts.

Her search brought only one ray of hope, Khava says. That was when she received a visit from the most senior Ingush in the Kremlin power structure.

Alikhan Makhsharipovich Kalimatov, she respectfully recites his name in full. “It is difficult for people from the Caucasus to work their way up in the security forces,” she says, “but he succeeded. He worked in the highest echelons of Lubyanka, the

12. The disappearance

239

FSB headquarters in Moscow. His family belongs to the Ingush intelligentsia. His sister is a senior judge, for example.”

In 2007, Putin personally gave Kalimatov the task of investigating the wave of disappearances between 2004 and 2007. “He came here in person,” says Khava. “And he’s the only person ever to have done that. It was October 2007, less than two months after the disappearance. He arrived with a team of security agents, their cars blocked the street. It was a circus. He wanted to reassure me. ‘I know who the perpetrators are,’ he said, and promised to bring Mukhazhir back within a week.

Less than a week later, he himself was shot in a cafe in Nazran.” Khava shows us a commemorative book. It was a bestseller in Ingushetia, she says. Everyone was proud of him. He was expected to be the next president of Ingushetia, the first president who really knew how to make a difference. “They say he was killed because he interfered with the illegal vodka trade. Others say he was prevented from revealing the truth about the kidnappings. After his death, I never heard anything else hopeful from the authorities.”

Khava threatened to file a complaint against the local police for failing to investigate the case. “They laughed in my face and said, ‘If you send a letter to the head office, they’ll send it straight on to us.’” Khava eventually approached the republic's powerful criminal organisations. “Through their networks they know about all the offences," says Khava. “The crime boss swore to me that my husband had not been kidnapped by a criminal, because he would know if he had.”

Khava flips through the stack of documents and finds a picture of her husband at the bottom. She strokes it involuntarily. “Ah,” she moans, “ah.” The only result of her long search is a plot at the cemetery, paid for by human rights organisation Memorial. “I asked a lawyer to write to Strasbourg,” she says, “but we kept coming up against the same obstacle: I don’t have any witnesses. Without witnesses I don’t have a case. Without a case I don’t have an appeal and no chance of going to the European Court in Strasbourg. I’m powerless. I wait for him every day, but every day my hope fades a little bit more. In Ingushetia we have the blood feud system. If I only knew who had done it, I would have killed them with my own hands. But we don’t know anything. If we find out in 20 or 25 years, I’ll instruct my son or grandson to kill them. My husband was soft. I’m a bit more determined.”

240

12. The disappearance

12. The disappearance

241

242

13. War becomes terrorism

Beslan, North Ossetia Ilona Karkiva (15) was seriously injured during the Beslan school siege in 2004.

“Sometimes when it’s dark at night, I become paralysed with fear. I see masked men entering my room.”

243

244

13. War becomes terrorism

245

246

13. War becomes terrorism

247

Beslan, North Ossetia When special forces stormed the besieged school, a shard of debris lodged itself in 33-year-old Marina's back. She is still unable to walk. Her only hope is an expensive operation in Germany.

The Second Chechen War spilled over the borders of Chechnya much more frequently than the first war in the 1990s.

Rather than a struggle for national liberation, this conflict quickly turned into guerrilla warfare, fought by militias more motivated by ideology than nationalism.

248

13. War becomes terrorism

Their goal was to establish an independent Chechnya, preferably a Caucasian Islamic state able to join radical Islamic movements elsewhere in the world, including Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, with whom they were in contact.

Attacks and terrorist operations carried out by separatists and radical Islamists had almost become routine. The news blog Kavkaz Uzel (Caucasian Knot Knot), affiliated with the Russian NGO Memorial, maintained extensive lists of events, ranging from the murders of police officers, soldiers, civil servants or politicians, to large-scale kidnappings, hijackings and (suicide) bombings.

The first major suicide bombing in the North Caucasus was carried out in June 2000, one month after the Russians had declared victory in Chechnya and introduced direct rule. An ex-Russian army prisoner and the widows of two deceased separatists drove cars loaded with explosives and inflammable materials into a Russian military roadblock. Since then, barely a month has passed without similar attacks being carried out.

The attacks form a monotonous litany of death and destruction; a litany of girls and boys, sometimes still only teenagers, who have lost brothers, sisters or parents in the wars or counter-terrorist operations; people who are impressionable enough to end their lives as human bombs. The most notorious examples have taken place beyond the borders of the North Caucasus.

– In 2002, during a performance at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, 850 actors and members of the audience were taken hostage by 40 Chechen militants. The attack was led by Movsar Barayev who, at just 23 years old, was already a veteran of Islamic resistance. He was rendered unconscious by the gas released into the theatre by Russian special forces, shot in the head and photographed with a bottle of cognac in his hand.

During the siege and rescue attempt, almost 130 actors and theatre-goers, as well as more than 30 of their captors, lost their lives.

– In 2003, two Chechen girls blew themselves up during a pop festival near Moscow.

Fifteen people died and dozens were injured.

– In 2003, a suicide bomber blew up a train near Mineralny Vody (Southern Russia).

A few months later another train was blown up on the same line, resulting in more than 50 deaths and 250 injured.

– At the end of 2003, the widow of a Chechen militia leader blew herself up outside the Kremlin. Six people were killed and several dozen were injured.

– In February 2004, 41 people were killed and 140 wounded during a suicide attack on the metro in Moscow.

– In February and March 2004, water pipes, gas pipes, electricity substations and heating stations came under attack at various locations around Moscow.

– In August 2004, suicide bombers blew up two aeroplanes that had taken off from Moscow Domodedovo Airport. In total, 89 people lost their lives. There were no survivors.

– In August 2004, ten people were killed and 50 were injured during an attack on a metro station in Moscow.

– In 2009, 27 people lost their lives and 95 were seriously injured during an attack on a high-speed train between Moscow and St Petersburg.

– In 2010, multiple bombs exploded simultaneously on metro lines in Moscow.

At least 40 people were killed and more than 140 were injured.

– In 2010, a bomb exploded at a theatre in Stavropol (Southern Russia) where a Chechen group was about to perform. Eight people lost their lives and at least 40 sustained injuries.

13. War becomes terrorism

249

– In 2011, in another attack at Domodedovo Airport, 37 people were killed and 173 injured.

Many of these atrocities were carried out by so-called ‘black widows’, women whose husbands had died in the war or during counter-terrorist operations. Numerous details about the black widows emerged during the trial of the Ingush Zarema Muzakhoyeva.

In 2004, she admitted to having a bomb in her backpack on a street in Moscow.

Her biography reads like a horror story. Her husband was killed in Chechnya, shortly after the birth of their first child. His family took the baby but refused to accommodate her. When her grandfather, with whom she was living, asked her why she did not die, her mind was made up. Her first suicide bomb target was a bus of Russian airmen from the Mozdok army base. She could not go through with the attack, however, and became nauseous in a bus shelter. A Russian pilot looked after her until she could be picked up. A day later, her colleague killed 16 soldiers by blowing herself up on a bus on the same route.

Zarema was sent to Moscow. She lived in an apartment in the suburbs with two girls who were preparing for a suicide attack at a pop festival. She did not want to die, but rejected by family and acquaintances, she did not know which way to turn.

Her mission was to set off a bomb in a cafe near the Kremlin. She decided to act as suspiciously as possible, at the same time terrified that her backpack bomb would be activated via remote control. Following the attack at the pop festival, Moscow was on high alert and it was not long before she was approached by three men who took her outside and called the police. She was arrested. The bomb disposal expert lost his own life disarming her device.

Zarema proved to be a valuable source of information for the police and security forces and her entire network was dismantled. She talked about her personal life, about her hopeless existence in her conservative family. She described how black widows were recruited and attacks were orchestrated. She led the police to so-called safe houses in Moscow, where terrorists prepared their attacks. She showed them the sedative she was given the week before the attack, which was intended to put her in the right frame of mind to end her life with the push of a button. Never before had the Russian government gained so much insight into the organisation behind the black widows. Yet Zarema was shown no leniency. Her sentence was not reduced and she was banished to a penal colony for 20 years. She has sworn revenge on Russia.

In a Moscow suburb, where dozens of grey blocks of flats tower above birch groves, 53-year-old Tatiana Grigoryeva lives on the eleventh floor, with just a rickety, antique lift to get her there. We arrive from the city centre on the red metro line and transfer into one of the small buses, known as marshrutkas, which serve the many metro stations. Tatiana made the same journey in 2010, but in the opposite direction. A beautiful, almost distinguished woman opens the door. She offers us sandwiches and home-made fruit juice from her family dacha. “From the start it was a strange trip,” she tells us. “The train stood for several minutes at the platform where I usually embark. I walked a little bit further than normal to the third carriage, then I called my work to tell them that there was a delay.”

With hindsight, Tatiana realises that was the moment the first metro exploded underneath Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters. No one at her office knew about it and so no one warned her. Neither were there any announcements in the metro itself. It is likely that nobody anticipated a second bomb.

250

13. War becomes terrorism

“The journey to Park Kultury normally takes me 14 minutes,” says Tatiana. “We’d already been travelling for 40 minutes when we stopped for the umpteenth time, this time close to Park Kultury. I heard someone in the carriage sobbing like a child. I was sitting by the first door, at the back of the carriage. The woman who detonated the bomb was between the third and fourth doors. Next to me was a young man, who I had been chatting to. He was tall and his height might have protected me.”

Although Tatiana’s story is approaching the moment of the blast, her tone remains cheerful, happy, almost as if she is describing something as trivial as a trip to the supermarket. “Then I heard the woman scream,” she continues. “Everything went flying through the air, mostly burning hot plastic and ash. I can’t remember very much. When I came to, my hands were black and my hair was stuck together with melted plastic. I had to cut it off.

“The man sitting next to me was slumped against me.” Tatiana has had to tell the story so many times to various investigation teams from the police and the FSB that she now recounts it almost automatically. From memory, she draws the layout of the metro carriage and the location of the bomber on a piece of paper. “There was a lot of smoke and I was afraid I would suffocate. I walked outside pushing the man in front of me. He couldn’t walk, but somehow I was able to push him along.”

Tatiana was confronted with complete silence. It was as if everyone had frozen, she tells us, even though the platform was filled with people who were undoubtedly panic stricken. “Perhaps my ear drums were damaged, or maybe it was shock.” On the platform she saw a sign: exit to the city. She continued to push the man towards the exit, up the long escalator.

Tatiana later heard that the delay had caused the suicide bomber to panic.

She thinks that was perhaps why she began to cry. She was supposed to set the bomb off at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, just as the other bomb had exploded at the FSB. However, the bomb was detonated remotely, to ensure that it would still work even if the bomber had last-minute doubts. Tatiana is still astonished: “She was just 17 years old, from Dagestan.”

At the top of the escalator Tatiana pushed the man into the arms of a police officer and walked out of the metro station. On the street she gave two girls directions.

“I explained that they should take the trolley bus, as the metro wasn’t running.”

Nobody commented on her burned hair, soot-blackened hands and the smudges on her cheeks. It was only when she arrived at work that someone called an ambulance.

In the hospital Tatiana heard that she had a displaced vertebra.

Microscopic pieces of plastic, steel and human remains, including splinters of bone, had lodged themselves under the skin on her neck and head. They cannot be removed.

“I have to learn to live with them,” she says.

“The first time I went into the metro again was extremely difficult. I still remember that I saw a woman with a headscarf and couldn’t control myself. I had to get out of the train. Sportivnaya station is nearby, on the red line. A lot of buses from the Caucasus terminate there. People in the metro always start to feel anxious at that station. I’ve often seen the majority of Russians get out of the metro when a Chechen woman in a black veil gets in. We don’t dare to take the risk anymore.

“I feel sorry for that girl,” Tatiana continues. “She suffered under her oppressive religion and a tough clan culture. In the 1980s I spent my holiday in a Dagestani aul.. My impression of those dark, sombre villages will never leave me.

The clan culture means that if anything happens to your family, it’s remembered for centuries. If a Russian kills a man there, they hold all Russians responsible.

13. War becomes terrorism

251

I sometimes ask myself why they want to bomb us. Why not the Kremlin or the parliament?”

Piatigorsk is located between Cherkessia and Nalchik, on the Transcaucasian M29 motorway. Piatigorsk is the main city in this part of Russia. The words ‘Spa town of the Caucasus’ are proudly displayed on flags and banners. Numerous memorial plaques adorn the walls of houses where the famous writers Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy lived or stayed. Five mountain peaks are visible around the city (Piatigorsk literally means ‘five mountains’), marking the gateway to the Caucasus. Yet no other city has turned its back on the Caucasus quite like this one.

It is raining and on a terrace at Prospekt Kirova, tourists shelter under a canopy with mugs of beer and freshly roasted shashlik. Prospekt Kirova is on the road between the sanatoria and baths located higher up, and the shops and restaurants in the centre. A small tram creaks and groans on its descent. A group of girls dressed in tiny shirts and hot pants runs squealing up the slope. A trio fight good humouredly over a shared umbrella. Everyone is relaxed. It is a scene unimaginable in the North Caucasian republics.

As we stroll between the tsarist sanatoria, theatres, museums and restaurants, not a single one of the eight people we talk to on the street has ever been to one of the six ‘real’ Caucasian republics. They are careful. This area is home to the large Russian cities of Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and the centre of the Russian universe, Moscow. The Caucasus and their mountain peoples are best avoided.

This indifference infuriates the Caucasian militants, inciting them to carry out their horrific attacks. In a video shot by the captors in Dubrovka Theatre, the following phrase stands out: “Russians are unaware of the innocent people – the sheikhs, the women, the children and the weak – who lose their lives in Chechnya.

That’s why we’ve taken this approach. For the freedom of the Chechen people it doesn’t matter to us where we die; that’s why we’ll die here in Moscow. And we’ll take the lives of hundreds of sinners with us. Our nationalists die, and they are called terrorists and criminals. Russia is the real criminal.” In an interview, Shamil Basayev referred to himself as a bandit and terrorist, but asked the question: how would you refer to the Russians? “The Russians have killed 40,000 of our children,” he said. “All Russians are guilty because they gave their consent by remaining silent.” He referred to the theatre siege as “a glimpse of the charms of war for the Muscovites”.

This explains why since 2000 the violence has spread from the North Caucasus into Russia, including Moscow, Krasnodar and Piatigorsk. Trains to Mineralny Vody and Essentuki have been blown up close to Piatigorsk and bombs have been set off within the city itself. Beyond the terrorist attacks listed earlier, however, most violence still occurs within the North Caucasus. Several times a month bombs explode in one of the republics, or a police station or government building comes under heavy fire – from troubled Dagestan in the east to the more peaceful, but certainly not unscathed Karachay-Cherkessia.

“Today we’re going to do something nice,” said 47-year-old Aleta Khasieva to her Year 10 children at 9 o’clock in the morning. “It will be a day that you’ll remember forever!” It was 1 September, the first day of school, and a day that has been widely celebrated in Russia for as long as anyone can remember. Less than ten minutes later, dozens of terrorists stormed the school and ushered more than a thousand adults and children into the gym.

252

13. War becomes terrorism

Of all the attacks carried out as a result of the unrest in the Caucasus, the Beslan school siege in 2004 was perhaps the most dramatic. Beslan is less than 30 minutes’ drive from Vladikavkaz and 15 minutes as the crow flies from Khava’s house. It is a small, sleepy town of around 30,000 inhabitants, known mainly for the large, steel-grey complexes that surround it. These are the vodka distilleries which brought fame to North Ossetia and which, in the ʼ90s, enabled a handful of local vodka oligarchs to prosper. The trains from Moscow, Grozny, Sochi and Vladikavkaz pass through here.

The railway lines divide the town into three areas.

School No. 1 is located next to one of the railway lines. The playground is dilapidated and partially overgrown with grass. The buildings stand empty – eerily empty. The outbuildings also look derelict and smell of urine. The full extent of what happened here only becomes apparent when you walk around the corner: the roof of the gym has been shot off and the windows of the main school building are boarded up. Wreaths have been laid in front of the gym where a tragedy of terrible magnitude once unfolded. The names of the victims and survivors, interspersed with wishes and hearts, have been scratched into the walls. On the weathered wooden floor, between the cracks and bullet and shrapnel damage, the faded lines of the basketball court are just visible and a basketball hoop still hangs from the wall. It recalls video images from the time that showed wires strung from the basketball hoops connecting makeshift bombs around the room. In this tiny gym, no bigger than the basketball court itself, hundreds of school children, parents and teachers were held captive. Photos of the more than 300 victims who died here line the walls. It is a poignant collection, showing pupils dressed in their Sunday best, ready to start the new school year.

If it was the captors’ intention to hold hostage as large a group as possible, they could not have chosen a better day. On 1 September, children make a special effort to dress up, encouraged by fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and are treated to large bags of sweets. The start of the school year is celebrated across Russia, which made the siege all the more shocking.

“Since the siege, I’m no longer able to enjoy life,” says Aleta. “Everyone in the Caucasus dreams of diamonds or a new fridge, but those things don’t matter to me.” She sits at her kitchen table in a luxurious flat in the small town. Following the siege the village was completely rebuilt with money from the government, churches, Islamic and aid organisations. New schools, playing fields and an enormous hospital were constructed. “What I saw is difficult to describe. We were packed into the gym like cattle. There were babies who had come with their mothers and grandmothers, as well as the pupils aged between 6 and 18. Some children could only laugh manically due to the stress. Others talked extremely loudly, too loudly, which was strictly forbidden. Many children who had come to school by themselves, or whose parents had escaped in the initial confusion, were on their own. I tried to be kind to them and calm them down like a mother would. I still dream about it. It isn’t as if it happened yesterday, but that’s how it feels.”

Ilona was eight at the time and lost her only brother and her mother. She now lives with Aleta and her father Igor. “I was a little girl,” she says. “I didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation. It was as if I was having a bad dream. Now that I’m older, I often think back to those three days. I mostly wonder what I would do if it happened to me again. Then I realise that I wouldn’t be able to do anything.

That’s absolutely the worst feeling there is.”

13. War becomes terrorism

253

254

255

Moscow Sketch of the Moscow metro bombing by Tatiana Grigoryeva. She saw the woman with the bomb crying in the third carriage. Tatiana survived the attack because the man next to her took the brunt of the blast.

256

Shatoi, Chechnya The imam and mayor of Shatoi plans to turn his troubled mountain town into the Switzerland of Russia.

“The authorities are like shepherds.

They lead the people in the right direction.�

13. War becomes terrorism

257

258

259

Baksan, Kabardino-Balkaria Baksan’s town hall.

Special forces, soldiers and police freed the school on the third day. Like the Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow, the rescue operation was widely criticised. Fast-acting but dangerous sleeping gas had been pumped into the theatre in Moscow to subdue the attackers. Hospitals did not have enough of the antidote available, however, making the gas the greatest cause of death among the hostages. In Beslan, special forces used heavy artillery to storm the school. Eyewitnesses say this even included a tank.

According to others, the captors caused the explosions. Russian reports contradict each other.

Ilona lost sight in her right eye as a result of the explosions. Her father only found her later in the hospital. She has no idea how her mother and brother died.

“I can only talk about it with my best friend, and nobody else,” she says. Talking to us causes her visible distress. “I remember the terrorists well. The men had full beards.

The women were the worst. They were the most aggressive and dressed completely in black. Sometimes when it’s dark at night, I become paralysed with fear. I see masked men entering my room. Then I try to fall asleep as quickly as possible.”

Ilona’s new mother, Aleta, strokes her hair lovingly. “I’m still angry,” Aleta says. “When I left the hospital I never wanted to teach again. But the director convinced me. I thought about my pupils who had been through the same ordeal. I went back, but I’d rather emigrate to a place where citizens have rights and are represented by their government. I sat in the gym next to Ali, one of the terrorists. They kept trying to establish contact with the outside world, with Vladikavkaz, but they were being tricked the whole time. At one point, they suggested that a paediatrician from Moscow should act as a mediator. Ali said, ‘I don’t want a doctor, I want a serious negotiator. I’m not ill.’ Then another terrorist came and said, ‘So far we’ve only made threats, but we haven’t taken any action.’ After that they killed ten people.”

Aleta speaks quietly, but her distrust of the government is clear. It is a distrust shared by everyone in the North Caucasus. The horrific end to the siege made people in Beslan look for alternative answers. Conspiracy theories soon started to circulate. “The terrorists heard that the government was playing down the hostage crisis in the media. They always referred to a group of 300 hostages, although there were more than a thousand,” says Aleta. “That made the captors aggressive. I believe that from the beginning the government was planning to intervene.” The captors made their not-insignificant wishes known a number of times. They demanded that Russian troops leave the Chechen mountains, that convicted terrorists be released from the prison in Vladikavkaz and allowed to leave Chechnya altogether. “None of the mediators they asked for was provided,” says Aleta. “That’s where it went wrong.”

When the explosions began, Aleta lost consciousness. “When I opened my eyes, I saw a carpet of dead children in the gym. I saw children jumping out of windows. There were gunshots everywhere. I chose the right way out. One of the doors led to the canteen where a lot of children and parents died. I took the door that led outside. A policeman was standing there crying. He beckoned me over and then I lost consciousness again.

“Beslan will never be the same,” she believes. Her husband Igor enters.

He is an ambulance driver and waited for three days outside the school ready to assist if necessary. The entire time, he faced the uncertainty of not knowing whether his wife, son and daughter were alive or dead. When asked a question about the siege, he breaks out in a sweat and searches haltingly for words. Aleta nods and says: “He can’t talk about it.” She tells us how the trauma of the siege lives on, even amongst children who were not involved. “We now have a new school. When the children

260

13. War becomes terrorism

arrived for the first time they saw the high windows in the gym. ‘We’d never be able to escape through those,’ they said, and refused to take part in sports.” A few years ago, the security forces that had been stationed at the school since the siege went on strike. They had not been paid for months. “When the pupils found out, they ran away as fast as they could,” says Aleta. “The same thing happened when the fire alarm was tested, and again when we heard about a bombing in Vladikavkaz. Everyone in our school is a wreck. On 1 September, our school died.”

Outside the village, a red marble monument acts as a reminder of the terrorist attack.

Hundreds of gravestones, all sponsored by Kazakhstan, stand in neat rows. Another monument commemorates the soldiers and elite troops who stormed the school. It is a grim site. In some places several gravestones are reserved for a single family – father, mother, grandmother and children who all went to school on 1 September to celebrate and walked into the terrorists’ trap. More than 300 people died during the siege, at least half of them children.

The goal of the Beslan school siege was to influence the war in Chechnya, perhaps like the unexpected storming of Grozny in 1996, where the capture of thousands of Russian soldiers led to the Khasavyurt ceasefire. Beslan had quite the opposite effect, however. Since 2004, the insurgence has lost more and more ground in Chechnya.

In 2005, President Mashkadov of Ichkeria – the name given to Chechnya by the insurgents – was assassinated, followed a year later by Shamil Basayev. The Chechen independence movement is increasingly viewed in the media as a purely terrorist organisation, rather than a struggle for liberation from the Russians.

Basayev was the self-proclaimed brains behind the most spectacular attacks.

In 1999, at the start of the Second Chechen War, he declared that the conflict should be extended beyond the Chechen borders using ‘kamikaze attacks’ into Russia.

He claimed responsibility for the Dubrovka Theatre siege, for Beslan and almost all large-scale terrorist attacks in Russia until his death in 2006. When he claimed responsibility for Beslan, he offered President Putin “security in Russia in exchange for independence in Chechnya”.

After the failed invasion of Dagestan in 1999, Basayev demonstrated his military force and bluffing skills on two further occasions: first in 2004 when he attacked Nazran, the largest city in Ingushetia, followed a year later by a raid in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria.

The operation in Nazran was perhaps the boldest. Using a large group of militants he occupied the city for a night, broke into several arsenals and attacked government buildings. Just before the Russian army arrived, the rebels fled with hundreds of looted weapons, many of which were later recovered in Beslan. A year later, the rebels occupied Nalchik using similar tactics.

Basayev died inspecting a truckload of weapons close to the Ingush village of Ali-Yurt, about five kilometres from Khava’s house. A landmine exploded, blowing up the man who had been a fugitive for so many years. The FSB claimed responsibility for the attack.

With the invasion in Dagestan in 1999 and subsequent daring kidnappings and terrorist attacks, Basayev paved the way for the current, pan-Caucasian insurgency, which increasingly opposes the firm hand of Chechnya’s pro-Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria have now overtaken Chechnya as the region’s trouble spots.

13. War becomes terrorism

261

“I sometimes ask myself why they want to bomb us.

Why not the Kremlin or the parliament?�

Tatiana Grigoryeva, Moscow

262

13. War becomes terrorism

In 1999, 2008 and 2010, bombs were set off in Vladikavkaz’s central market. In 2010 in Kizlyar, Dagestan, two suicide bombers detonated bombs outside the offices of the police and FSB. In 2012, a brother and sister blew themselves up at a checkpoint outside the capital Makhachkala, causing many casualties. These are just a few examples from an endless and relentless series of terrorist attacks.

The war and bombings create a vicious cycle of violence. Following the end of the conflict in Chechnya, it is notable that local leaders only announced successes. The press releases and statements from the time lead you to the impossible conclusion that from a maximum of 25-250 militants surviving in the mountains, several thousand have since been killed. Local governments and Moscow appear to consistently underestimate the size and thus the danger of the insurgency – whether for show, to maintain the region’s subsidies from Moscow or for some other reason.

In 2007, the mayor of Shatoi proudly announced that within a few years the Chechen mountain town would become the Switzerland of Russia. “We’ll open spas,” he is quoted as saying in The Guardian Guardian, “and very soon thousands of people will be able to enjoy our nature.” In 2010, we went to Shatoi to see the extent to which the mayor’s promises had been fulfilled. As we approached the mountains, we drove through a landscape dotted with foxholes and small fortifications. Everything looked derelict or abandoned, but deeper into the mountains soldiers were still entrenched on the hillsides.

Next to the road were two thatched huts, with huge clouds of steam billowing out of them. We stopped to look and found a couple of Chechens in a sort of mud pool, enjoying the therapeutic thermal springs bubbling from the ground. They invited us to join them, but the brown sludge did not look very tempting.

The road to Shatoi is a long and winding one. One of the most famous ambushes from the First Chechen War took place here. The rebels recorded a film of the ambush, which went on to become a hit on YouTube. Under the command of the Saudi jihadist Al-Khattab, the first and last tanks in a long convoy were taken out.

On the narrow mountain road there was no room for manoeuvre and the other tanks were taken out one by one. More than a hundred Russian soldiers died in the ambush.

Shatoi is also where Dokku Umarov, the current leader of the insurgency and self-proclaimed Emir of the Caucasian Emirate, was born. Shatoi is perhaps the last easily accessible place in the mountains, before the roads deteriorate and the distances grow too great to be passable in the winter. Just outside the town is a large checkpoint and roadblock. Chechen soldiers stand outside shivering. Inside – they say – a horde of Russians is playing cards. The Chechens give us a hearty welcome.

Any distraction is appreciated in the harsh cold of winter. “There are ten soldiers for every mountain inhabitant,” they boast. “There are a hundred of us at this checkpoint alone.” They talk openly and tell us about the 117 comrades already killed by separatists this year. At the checkpoint itself we are told that we cannot simply enter the area. “You have to wait,” says the soldier on duty. Several cars screech to a halt and an officer gets out. He says that we have to accompany him to Shatoi. We are breaking the law and the FSB wants to question us. The illusion of a Chechen Switzerland in the mountains vanishes in an instant.

The FSB agent in Shatoi lives in a compact bunker opposite the town hall.

Armoured vehicles are parked conspicuously on a slope behind the gates, ready to drive away at the hint of a crisis. Inside, behind secure gates, we have to explain ourselves. We mumble something about beautiful nature, little Switzerland and interviews with the local imam. The agent, a surprisingly agreeable man, struggles

13. War becomes terrorism

263

264

265

Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia In 1999, 2008 and 2010, bombs were set off in Vladikavkaz’s central market, killing nearly a hundred people and wounding hundreds more.

to transcribe our names and addresses into Russian characters. In the corridor, somebody’s son plays with a toy Hummer with a wailing siren. The agent does not take our visit too seriously and we are neither fined nor arrested. “But get out of here straight away,” he says. “It isn’t safe for you.” As we leave, we apologise for our shoes, which leave behind a trail of mud and melting ice. “Oh,” says the agent, “that’s nothing. You should see how filthy the terrorists are that we bring in from the woods.” We eat a Chechen garlic pasta dish in a small cafe, but leave quickly when two short men with thick, black beards and Kalashnikovs decide to keep us company.

A cheerful poster of the Keukenhof in Lisse, the Netherlands, flutters on one wall.

What a contrast.

At the last minute, our young Chechen interpreter manages to set up an interview for us. We arrange to meet a tall man, dressed entirely in black, in a car park next to the mosque above the village. He is the local imam and village head.

He is nervous about our arrival. It is not long before two armoured vehicles drive into the car park and what appear to be officers from one of the security forces monitor us closely. “I cover 30 villages in the Shatoi region,” says the imam. “Our primary goal is to train young people in the correct form of Islam, so that they stop kidnapping their brides, or developing the wrong ideas.” He proudly reels off the propaganda jingle of his big boss, Ramzan Kadyrov. “The authorities are like shepherds,” he says.

“They lead the people in the right direction. Our forefathers prayed for a president who would help them develop. And look, our prayers have been answered.”

“What happened to the previous mayor?” we ask. “His idea for a Switzerland in Russia hasn’t really succeeded.” The imam cuts the conversation short. Political affairs are off limits and only result in trouble. We drive out of the turbulent mountains, back to the plains of the North Caucasus.

‘Forever with Russia’ adorns the city gates of Nalchik, the capital of KabardinoBalkaria. In neighbouring North Ossetia, a large park has been laid to prove the enduring link with Russia. In Ingushetia, the deportation monument does its best to demonstrate the country’s positive bonds with Russia. In Chechnya, triumphal arches adorned with portraits of the Chechen and Russian presidents can be found at the entrance of almost every city and village. Likewise in Dagestan, the head of the Russian president cannot be displayed often enough.

The republics do everything they can to prove their loyalty to Moscow.

The war in the Caucasus is officially over and only a handful of rebels remain in the mountains, according to government officials. Yet the Caucasus resembles a fortress.

From the borders close to Piatigorsk and Nalchik, to the roads in Dagestan, every major crossroad is equipped with a watchtower, barbed wire and a checkpoint. At many more locations, concrete blocks and barriers lie ready to block off the road at a moment’s notice. The Second Caucasian War rages on, but this time it is a guerrilla war, characterised by terrorist attacks on one side and a constantly watchful government on the other.

The conflict continues to cost lives, particularly since Moscow’s metros and airports have become targets. But, in such a relatively small area, why do loyal governments, security forces and Russia continue to lose the struggle? Why do the rebels hold such appeal and to what do they owe their success?

266

13. War becomes terrorism

Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala is the North Caucasus’ largest and most vibrant city. In Soviet times, Dagestan was a popular holiday destination, where the local champagne, wine and cognac flowed freely. The republic is Islamic, but Russianstyle Islamic, according to Ayshad, a girl we meet in one of the trendier lunch cafes.

In absolute numbers radical Islam is probably still quite small, she says, but she sees how terrorism frightens people and affects their behaviour. “As long as a prostitute wears a headscarf, she’s okay,” she says provocatively. “All around us we see how radical Islam is increasingly becoming the fashion. People have started dressing like Muslims, partly out of fear maybe, but it probably has more to do with copycat behaviour.” She and her friends laugh off the violence. “It makes you nervous, that’s all. If there’s fighting in the mountains, let them get on with it. If there’s fighting in the city, I don’t care. As long as no one I know gets killed or injured, my life goes on.

It wouldn’t be possible to live here with any other attitude.”

On a cold day in February, we meet the 32-year-old policeman Hadzhimurat Magomedov. We eat a light lunch in a small coffee bar close to Leningrad Hotel in the centre of Makhachkala. Hadzhimurat limits himself to a small soup. A year ago he walked into an ambush in the woods and was shot in the mouth. He is still unable to chew properly and is now fighting for an invalid’s pension. He is so frustrated with the process that he is happy to reveal how the fight against terrorism is conducted in Dagestan. “I was born in the Tsuntin district, on the border with Georgia. After my military service I wanted to join the police. That was in 2004, when it was still peaceful in Dagestan, with no war or fighting. Then we heard that the boyeviks, the bandits in the woods, were coming our way. In a special joint operation with the army, we were ordered to eliminate them. It went disastrously wrong. Three police officers were killed and nine were injured. A bullet went through my left cheek, behind my nose. It exited just to the right, above my lip.”

Hadzhimurat sighs. He fled to a military hospital to recover. He no longer needs to be there, but it is a good place from which to pressure civil servants to organise his pension. Outside the hospital he has little else to do anyway. “It’s unbelievable how many officers die every day,” he says.

“Working for the police is a good job. It pays well, but it’s dangerous in Dagestan.” He remembers how they had just embarked on the mission in the mountains when they heard about the approaching militants. “We were walking through a metre of snow in our camouflage gear. It wasn’t much of a problem for us as we grew up around here. Russians can’t handle it because they don’t know the mountains. It’s a futile struggle.” Hadzhimurat saw a growing number of young men in his district choosing to go into the woods. “They do it for religious reasons,” he says. “And they do it because the bandits win. In my village a nurse was killed for helping the border soldiers. Shortly afterwards, they killed two hunters in the woods. People are scared to death, but if they know someone who has joined the bandits, such as cousins or second cousins, children or grandchildren, they’ll help them, whether they support their ideas or not. That’s our culture. You help your clan and you can’t change that. That’s why the bandits have such an extensive support network.”

Hadzhimurat also sees an economic component to the conflict. “Russia is profiting enormously. Soldiers are paid huge salaries to work in the dangerous Caucasus, while normal police officers are the ones on the frontline!” He muses: “If we were allowed to resolve it ourselves, I know for sure that we could end the conflict in a week. But the Russians thrive on the violence.”

13. War becomes terrorism

267

The same day, a few hundred metres away, we speak to the president of Dagestan in his palace on the magnificent Lenin Square. Magomedsalam Magomedov welcomes us jovially with gifts – a large traditional vase and a bottle of Dagestan’s jubilee cognac.

A Guus Hiddink scarf is wrapped around his neck. A local oligarch arranged for this well-known Dutch football coach to train one of the world’s most expensive teams in this troubled city. Our questions about corruption and terrorism do not go down well with the president, and the mood quickly changes. “Of course we’re defeating the terrorists,” he says agitatedly. “We’re taking care of that. It’s just a small group of 250 people, but they’ve been trained abroad. The most important thing for us to do is to make them less appealing. People are no longer allowed to support them. They tempt youngsters with false information.” To encourage the terrorists to leave the woods, the president has established a reconciliation tribunal to enable those who regret their wrongdoings to reintegrate into society. “As long as they haven’t committed murder, they’ll receive a reduction in their sentence,” he promises. Yet the terrorism continues unabated. The special tribunal seems to serve merely a symbolic function.

If caught, the true boyeviks are usually killed. It is mostly assistants or those recruited by force who appear before the tribunal.

The appeal of the militants appears to be growing. Videos of militants battling through knee-high snow and jubilantly laying ambushes can be viewed via shaky internet connections across the Caucasus. In a 17-minute interview, martyr Amir Supyan explains how to prepare delicious plov (an Uzbek rice dish) in a makeshift field kitchen. In another video, a militant mumbles his prayers while his comrade treats a gunshot wound. The images depict a sort of Islamic Boy Scouts, mixed with the heroic allure of war.

A wide range of websites and blogs supplies a complete multilingual news service for anyone interested. The Caucasian rebels also receive support from radical Islamic movements all over the world. The conflict in the Caucasus is no longer an isolated cause; it has become part of a global fight against the repression of Islam by Christian terrorists. The words used to describe Russia on one prominent terrorist website, Kavkaz Center Center, are almost comical. The site’s headline reads: ‘Russian alpha male Putin undergoing surgery on his back.’ The Kadyrov regime is continually referred to as ‘the puppet government’.

We speak to a family in Derbent, an old harbour town in southern Dagestan. As we enter the house, the family is waiting expectantly. The oldest son has gone into the woods, as it is euphemistically referred to, while the youngest has been arrested and accused of possessing a grenade. The family hopes that we, as foreigners, can make a difference. We quickly quash their hopes. This type of situation is always painful, particularly in a backwater like this where politicians, journalists and NGOs seem unable to stop the downward spiral into separatist and government violence.

“My son Shamil was the Dagestani national judo champion,” his mother tells us. “He was such a good boy. One day, we found a letter underneath my pillow.” She searches through a thick photo album and finds the letter, written on paper torn from a school book. It reads: I’m going into the woods. I’m joining the Mujahedeen brothers. Don’t register me as missing; it will only result in unnecessary unpleasantness for you. I can’t come back. I ask you not to stop Nargiz from saying her prayers. Nargiz, his younger sister, is sitting on the sofa, clearly affected by the letter that her mother is

268

13. War becomes terrorism

reading out loud. She has now lost both her brothers.

“It must have been well organised,” says his mother. “We called all his friends, but nobody knew a thing. He turned his telephone off straight away. A few months later we heard that he had been killed during a military operation.” She shows us a newspaper article with a picture of an overturned truck, peppered with bullets.

“He was unemployed, and he was religious, but,” she sighs, “we never expected this.”

The father jumps to his feet. “Everyone and everything is corrupt,” he shouts bitterly. He reels off a long list of all the things he believes are wrong. “The elections here are rigged, the police are corrupt. Everything can be bought, even the coastline if you want it. At the same time, they celebrate their weddings with hundreds of limousines, champagne and gold bars. Here, if your father’s a judge, then you become a judge. But nothing works. All of the services and facilities are improvised. If you want to visit a mosque, you’re branded a terrorist and thrown into prison without trial.

You can’t live here. It sometimes feels like it’s still 1937,” he laments, referring to The Great Terror under Stalin. “One of our sons is dead and the other is locked up. We can’t denounce the government. They were the ones who planted the grenade in my cellar, which they used to put my son away. If I take action, they’ll lock me up too.”

This is not a Salafist family. The father is a joiner and the family lives in a reasonably modern, middle-class house. Nargiz goes to school, is modern and assertive, and is not kept away from male visitors. The fact that even this family sympathises with the militants in the woods, despite losing a son to them, is poignant.

Simply put, this is not the type of family one would expect to support the Islamic radicals.

“Everything stands still in the Caucasus,” says Ahmad, a Chechen we meet in a cafe on Putin Boulevard in Grozny. “Because of the clan system, good, well-educated people don’t get positions of power or influence in Chechnya. The current politicians and bureaucrats aren’t willing to take any risks for fear of becoming redundant or superfluous to requirements. They employ their cousins or clan members and no one else stands a chance. The spoils are divided among themselves and everybody else is kept happy with little gifts.” It is a system that applies throughout the Caucasus – from Ingushetia’s single clan structure to Dagestan’s complicated balancing act of ethnic groups and clans.

Safudin Shibzbugov is the father of a murdered police officer. In 2010, he discovered his son’s body at the side of a road. “I had to bury him without his head,” he tells us.

“Terrorists hacked it off and took it with them. They lured him to a nearby village under false pretences and then decapitated him and a colleague.” The heads were later found in a fridge and buried alongside the men in their graves. Safudin had previously discovered a picture of his son’s head on a radical Islamic blog. He confesses that he has not told his wife. He wants to spare her the horrific details. Following the murder, he set up a small organisation for himself and other fathers who have lost their sons to terrorism.

Safudin lives in Baksan, a small town near the capital Nalchik in KabardinoBalkaria. The same battle is being fought, sometimes by the same groups, from Derbent in the east to Baksan in the west.

“To date, only one person has been convicted of the murders,” says Safudin.

In court, the defendant said, “It is our divine duty to kill non-believers and people with other ideas. By threatening to murder policemen we are destabilising the status

13. War becomes terrorism

269

quo in the Caucasus.” Safudin reads the quotes from the trial with visible disgust.

He is a retired detective, but insisted on being given a desk in the local law office in order to set up his organisation that fights terrorism and extremism. He employs the same rhetoric as the FSB and local government when he talks about terrorists: “They are supported by our neighbours, who benefit from the instability,” he says. Or: “They’re now doing everything they can to destabilise us before the Olympic Games begin in Sochi. They know that a bomb there would be extremely damaging for Russia.” Yet he is also realistic. “There’s a potential army of people in the Caucasus susceptible to the bandits’ ideas. There are so many poor and unemployed people who are, by definition, suitable recruits for the boyeviks. That’s still no excuse for blowing up scientists, innocent people, police officers and politicians. It’s a system.”

In a conspiratorial tone he continues, “The men in the woods are extremely rich.

They’re the mafia. They extort money from shops. By killing the police, they weaken the police’s power and strengthen their own. That’s how the mafia system works.”

He recounts a story he has heard. Last year, one of the bandits’ camps was shut down in the woods nearby. “The police found bags of money in large 5,000 rouble denominations. They also found beer, packets of condoms and drugs. Call themselves Muslims!” he sneers. His finger inadvertently lifts the paper under which he has hidden the photo of his son’s severed head. He quickly covers it again. “Bandits,” he mutters.

Tiny Ingushetia has not copied the Islamisation of Kadyrov’s Chechnya. We see many more women and girls without headscarves. Police officers do not have beards and alcohol is still sold. Close to the Chechen border is the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya.

Beslan and his family business, which extends to a car dealership, a car wash and a large off-licence, have an office on the main street. There is little left of the off-licence.

It was bombed by Islamic terrorists two days before our visit.

Beslan’s mother sweeps away the debris. Beslan stands watching from behind a fence. He is particularly striking, with blond hair and bright eyes. He walks confidently towards us, with his sleeves rolled up.

“I saw it happen,” he says. “We were standing talking just down the street.

It was the evening. 21.47 to be precise.” He explains how two people entered the shop, where four customers and two salespeople were busy with the drinks. The terrorists were wearing masks and started shooting bullets at the ceiling. “The police said that they were hooligans, but that’s typical of the Caucasus,” he laughs. While the men were shooting, they stuck a bomb to the counter. Beslan had 12 cameras around his shop, which recorded everything. One terrorist ran outside, the other stayed inside and told those present that they had one second to get out before the bomb exploded. Everyone ran except for one customer. He was so frightened that he hid behind a fridge. Beslan says that he is now in hospital in shock. He invites us to join him at his house where tea and hearty pancakes are waiting for us.

The day after the explosion, trucks arrived and drove back and forth to the rubbish dump 11 times. New bricks have now been delivered. “This is the fifth time in two years that our shop has been blown up,” says Beslan. “It’s starting to feel like a routine.” We look at him bewildered. He opens his laptop which contains films of the previous bombings. We see a large box being placed in front of the off-licence.

A man hurries away. “The box was full of New Year’s presents,” says Beslan, “but a bomb was hidden underneath them.” His cousin detected the bomb because he thought the box smelled odd. For several minutes we see the cousin persuading

270

13. War becomes terrorism

“It’s unbelievable how many police officers die every day.”

Hadzhimurat Magomedov, Makhachkala

13. War becomes terrorism

271

everyone to leave. It seems to take an eternity for the cars to drive away and customers with large bags of drink to exit the shop. Then all is quiet. The next shot shows the box exploding, followed by a scene of complete devastation. The cousin staggers into the frame and falls to the ground. “Both of his legs had to be amputated,” says Beslan. “He was unlucky.”

Beslan’s family earned its fortune in the oil and alcohol trade in the ʼ90s.

“We’re almost on the border with Chechnya,” says Beslan. “There’s never a shortage of customers. For New Year’s Eve, half of Chechnya comes to buy their drinks from us.” We walk to the houses built behind the shop. In typical Caucasian style, the properties are split into a small living block and a sleeping block, divided by grapevines, a summer kitchen and a large, covered space without walls for parties and celebrations. We notice that the sleeping block has shifted and is sagging. Projectiles, perhaps drinks bottles or parts of the shop, have pierced the walls of the bedrooms.

An entire wall has been forced back 50 centimetres. One of the bedrooms now houses salvaged drinks. Although Beslan claims that he lost 7 million roubles (around €175,000) worth of products during the attack, a large room remains filled with expensive bottles of vodka, beer and other spirits. We are not allowed to take photographs. Beslan thinks it would be seen as provocation. The buildings reek of smoke, drink and something strange. “That’s the bomb,” he says.

He explains that the boyeviks harass him continually. “Sometimes they come and demand money, but we don’t want to give in. We tell them that we pay taxes. We have all the paperwork to prove that we’re legally allowed to be here and to trade. We say it as publicly as possible so that everyone knows the position we’re in.

This is a small town and news travels fast.”

The terrorists have spies everywhere, he tells us, from young children to old grandmothers. Every family member is loyal to a son, brother or cousin, even if they do not agree with what they are doing. He explains what happened when his brother-in-law was wounded a few weeks ago. Beslan and his parents visited the man in hospital, paid the bills and ensured that he could be transferred to Moscow to receive the best possible medical treatment. He had been shot multiple times because – Beslan mumbles between pursed lips – he is a police detective. He had been investigating terrorism. He knew who had carried out an attack earlier in the year and had been targeted.

“The terrorists are against off-licences because they support Islamic Sharia,” says Beslan. “It’s primarily poor boys who go into the woods because they can make good money. We’re vulnerable, and they know that.” He knows precisely who is behind the attack. “An old classmate of mine shot my brother-in-law. That classmate was also a terrorist, but he was killed when a bomb he was planting in the post office went off prematurely. They’re complete hooligans,” Beslan emphasises for the second time. “They’re misguided idiots who are too lazy to find steady work.”

It is a fundamental problem, he says. Terrorists feel at home in Ingushetia.

Even the police sympathise with them, perhaps out of fear, perhaps not. He hopes that the real battle will be waged after the Olympics. “If you smell something bad, you shouldn’t put a lid on it, you should get rid of it,” he says. He is hoping for a strong leader, like in Chechnya. Something like this would never happen there, he believes, but they have become accustomed to it in Ingushetia. The violence reached its peak between 2006 and 2010. They did not dare to open the off-licence then, but now they are going to reopen as quickly as possible, insh’Allah, God willing.

We walk back to the car. As we leave, the tension in the village is even more

272

13. War becomes terrorism

palpable. Beslan checks with the driver to make sure nobody has been near the car.

“You wouldn’t be the first to be blown up here,” he says. He thinks we are foolish to be travelling without bodyguards. We drive out of the village towards the M29 that will take us back to North Ossetia. Paranoid, we look through the rear window to make sure that we are not being followed. The only suspicious car turns onto a side street after a couple of kilometres. Through the dark Ingush night, we leave the hardship behind us.

Beslan’s comment about the collaboration between police officers and terrorists is remarkable. Police officers have probably the most dangerous job in the region. They are targets for every type of attack imaginable: suicide bombings, random shootings, grenades, kidnappings. Via the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs under which the police fall, we attempt to get the names and addresses of officers who have been seriously injured in the conflict. We first have to be approved. We drive to a square in the shiny new capital, Magas. We are surrounded by modern flats and the golden domes of government buildings. The city was established to celebrate regaining independence from the Ingush. Nazran, a few kilometres to the north, was formerly a Russian colony but the country’s leaders decided in the ’90s that it was too chaotic, busy and unsuitable. ‘Magas’ was chosen because it is named after an old prehistoric Ingush settlement. The soulless city has a short but turbulent history. On the square, a red marble wall is covered with the names of at least 400 police officers, all of whom were killed in the conflict or during attacks over the last 20 years. A small group of local journalists is waiting for us. They nervously begin to photograph us and record our conversation. A tall, recently decorated Hero of Russia is brought to our attention.

He is dressed in a suit bearing a star-shaped medal, and walks across the square with difficulty on his artificial leg. Ruslan the hero – who incidentally lives around the corner from Khava in Chermen – saved 94 police officers by reducing the impact of a suicide attack on the police station in Nazran. As the yellow van filled with explosives drove towards the police station, Ruslan made eye contact with the driver and began to shoot at him. The driver changed course and headed towards Ruslan.

According to the police officers, Ruslan’s intervention saved many lives. Despite his heroic act, 25 people were killed and more than 150 were injured during the attack in August 2009, as the exploding van set off ammunition in the police station’s armoury.

Ruslan, the giant, looks a little lost among the storm of media spokespeople and handheld recorders directed at him. A woman brushes him down and straightens his jacket in case anyone wants to photograph him. He says he would like to sit down as his new leg is causing him too much pain. “When I was a child I really wanted to be a cosmonaut,” he says, “but the police it was to be.” (Another police officer tells us later that Ruslan is not a hero at all, but that his family paid a significant sum of money on his behalf to organise his hero status. Even heroism is corrupt, it seems.)

Days of calling the MVD for the officers’ names and contact details result in nothing.

We learn later that in Ingushetia, publishing stories about injured police officers is regarded as a sign of weakness in the fight against terrorism. Our contact’s tone of voice is becoming increasingly abrupt, but our luck suddenly changes. An Ingush returning from Moscow does not understand the MVD’s reticence and promises to do his best for us. During a meeting with the MVD and the FSB, he bangs his fist on the table and a complete list of the injured officers appears. Over the following days, we trek from village to village and gather numerous stories about the fight against

13. War becomes terrorism

273

terrorism and the difficulties facing police officers in Ingushetia. We visit the homes of young people who have lost arms, legs, their sight or hearing. In the village of Karabulak we meet Vakha Yevluv, who was in the same attack as Ruslan. He says that he still has nightmares about his dead colleagues. He dreams that he is driving to work when he is blown up, or that the head of a friend appears before him and explodes. “The worst dreams are those where I have to dig my own grave,” he shudders. He wakes up with a pounding heart. He takes sedatives and occasionally receives psychological help.

“Despite everything,” he says, “it’s getting better in Ingushetia. Since the attack, the current president, the military warhorse Yevkurov, has taken terrorism seriously. All the security forces are working together, which is good.”

A day later, we receive a call from our MVD contact. He has been reprimanded by the FSB for providing us with the list of police officers. He thinks that it would be better for us to leave Ingushetia. Our interpreter once again changes his SIM card. Confidential conversations with people we really want to meet are no longer possible using the old SIM card.

The conflict seems to have changed again over the last few years. In the spring of 2011, three tourists were shot dead on their way to Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, in Kabardino-Balkaria. The same day, a bomb disabled an important ski lift.

In the spring of 2012, on the border of Chechnya and Dagestan, a major battle took place between insurgents and the Russian army, the latter supported by Dagestani and Chechen police units. Both the FSB and the communication portal for the insurgents, Kavkazcenter.com, published statements saying that the events were connected to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. “They are training exercises,” a Russian official said during a press conference.

Following mass protests by the Russian opposition against Putin and the results of the election in December 2011, Umarov, the leader of the Caucasian Emirate, announced that Russian citizens would no longer be the targets of bombings. “Russia is a peaceful nation that no longer supports Putin’s regime and his security forces,” he said in a video recording. Since that moment, there have indeed been no further attacks in Russia itself. In the Caucasus, the on-going violence continues to cause civilian casualties. However, the response of the government and security forces has had an even greater impact on the North Caucasus. In the fight against the terrorists, counter-terrorist operations are becoming a drug whose side effects are worse than the disease itself.

274

13. War becomes terrorism

13. War becomes terrorism

275

276

13. War becomes terrorism

277

Karabulak, Ingushetia Hamzad Ivloev (44) was a policeman in Karabulak. One night his checkpoint was attacked. To save his colleagues, he threw himself on a hand grenade that was about to explode. He lost both legs, an arm and his sight. “I sacrificed myself for a bunch of cowards,” he says bitterly.

278

279

Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Ingushetia “This is the fifth time in two years that our shop has been blown up,” says Beslan, the owner.

280

13. War becomes terrorism

281

Makhachkala, Dagestan Magomed Omarov, 68, has seen almost all the victims of terrorist attacks in Makhachkala and the surrounding region pass through his hospital.

282

13. War becomes terrorism

13. War becomes terrorism

283

Makhachkala, Dagestan Head doctor Magomed Omarov keeps the remnants of bombs and bullets in his desk drawer, in case the police ever ask for them.

284

14.

Clutching at straws

285

286

287

Chermen, North Ossetia The school where Khava is a teacher.

Khava’s grandson honks his horn outside, bringing an abrupt end to our conversation. Khava wants to show us her school and introduce us to her pupils – at least those not at summer camp. While we put on our shoes, we catch the conversation between Khava and Dina, our interpreter. “There’s a programme on TV with a psychic,” says Khava. “The woman is in Vladikavkaz now holding séances for anyone who wants one.”

288

14. Clutching at straws

Under Islam or communism, superstition is ingrained in the national character of Russia and certainly of the Caucasus. Would we like to visit her in Vladikavkaz and show her the photos of her husband? “She might at least be able to tell me whether he is alive or dead.” She saw an episode of the programme with an Ossetian family who had a similar story. It involved four children who had gone into the mountains on holiday. The psychic said that they had been kidnapped by bandits. One of them was dead, she said, and put that photo to one side, but the other three were still alive. If she could just find out something, Khava says almost pleadingly. Suddenly her guard is down; the guard of the tough, strong, almost implacable Caucasian woman who seems genetically programmed to deal with suffering and war. The psychic looks like her last chance to uncover the truth, she wants it so badly. I do not believe in psychics, but ask Dina to make an appointment.

Magomed races us to school, one and a half streets away. He is only 14 years old, but sits behind the wheel of the family Lada smiling mischievously. We drive past the shiny new mosque, built of red bricks and topped with silvery roofs and domes like all the mosques in the Caucasus. Khava sits in the front seat, her hands folded in her lap. She looks absently into the distance.

The school is a monument to Russian self-sufficiency, the kind so often found in places the government has failed to reach. It is the beginning of the summer holidays and most pupils are at the end-of-year summer camp in a field nearby. The pupils who remain are helping the teachers to paint the floors and walls, as they do every year. The beautiful shades of pastel blue, yellow and green are carefully applied to the walls, while a teacher turns the floor of a classroom ox blood red. Khava used to give history lessons, she tells us, but now she teaches crafts for 18 hours a week. From a collection of boxes in her small classroom, she pulls out her students’ handiwork: lacy tablecloths, slippers edged with gold and silver stitching, embroidery, the sorts of bits and pieces grandma used to have at home.

A boy interrupts us. The police are outside, he says. Could we come and tell them what we are doing here? The officers wait timidly in the garden. They write down our names and inspect our press cards. We have rarely encountered timid police officers.

Perhaps they are daunted by the presence of their old teachers. For the duration of our visit they stand vigilantly under a tree, guns at the ready, while around them a man herds his cows, occasionally chasing one violently out of a ditch in the direction of his orchard.

In the annex, where the youngest children are taught, a few remaining pupils eye us insolently from behind chess and draughts boards. Khava’s sister, Raya, also teaches here. She is three years younger than Khava but bears little family resemblance. She knows what we had been talking about that morning and shakes her head as she drops into a chair. “It was a huge shock when Khava’s husband disappeared,” she says. “He was a good driver and very courageous. He got on well with Ossetians. He was never stopped at checkpoints. That’s why everyone was so surprised that this happened.”

She shakes her head again. “As a brother-in-law, he was worth his weight in gold.”

A teacher approaches us beaming: Christians! She runs to her classroom and comes back with half a bottle of red wine. It is 11 o’clock in the morning. She is half Ossetian and delighted to take advantage of the situation. She pours us – and out

14. Clutching at straws

289

A teacher approaches us beaming: Christians! She runs to her classroom and comes back with half a bottle of red wine.

290

14. Clutching at straws

of politeness we allow her to – a glass of sickly sweet, syrupy wine. The bottle is passed around approvingly. “Merlot,” Khava reads on the label, but does not take a sip.

Outside, Dina has managed to reach the psychic. She has an agent, and we soon understand why. “The psychic would like to meet you and Khava,” says Dina. “but it costs 15,000 roubles for a 30-minute session.” 15,000 roubles... that is almost €400, an insane amount for a region where the average monthly salary is 13,000 roubles.

Even so, we whisper to Dina that we will do it. Suddenly, the psychic is no longer available. She says she is already fully booked and is flying out tonight. We look at each other. This will come as a heavy blow to Khava.

She is occupied with other things, however. Her car has a flat tyre and she is trying to charter the police car to take us home. Three officers stay behind in the shade of a walnut tree. Khava sits dejectedly in the front seat. Dina has told her the bad news. While we sit doubled up in the back, bumping along the dirt road, Khava begins to cry softly. A stream of tears runs down her strong, lined face. She says herself that her husband’s disappearance has aged her. Nothing is left of the beautiful woman in the old photos, she thinks. All she does now is wait for her husband. He has to be alive somewhere; or he is dead. A missing husband is neither. There is nothing she can do with that. She is clutching at straws and the psychic had been almost in her grasp. The psychic might at least have provided an answer: continue to hope or give up. Khava could then have said goodbye. All she has left is another legal quest, but she has already exhausted that avenue.

14. Clutching at straws

291

292

14. Clutching at straws

293

Chermen, North Ossetia Khava with her sister Raya, who teaches at the same school.

294

295

Goity, Chechnya A box containing memories of Imran, who was abducted by masked men in 2002 at the age of 22.

296

15.

Counterterrorism

297

298

Goity, Chechnya Adlan and Zainap Dzhambekov’s son was abducted by masked men in 2002.

He has not been heard from since.

“I’m too old to be scared of this government.”

15. Counter-terrorism

299

Throughout the Caucasus there are thousands of Khavas – women, girls and mothers who have lost a father, husband, son or brother through kidnapping, arrest, or armed attacks carried out by police troops, security forces or military agencies. It is a problem that plagues all the republics, whether they have experienced two decades of war and armed insurgency like Chechnya, or a few years of unrest due to the rise of radical Islam like Kabardino-Balkaria.

300

15. Counter-terrorism

It is not hard to find someone to whom this has happened. Just as we bumped into Khava fortuitously at the side of the road in Chermen, on our travels through villages and cities in the North Caucasus we are confronted with unbelievable stories without having to look very far. In Goity, Chechnya we are looking for someone called Zina, who we have been told has a story worth hearing. We are sent from one Zina to another. Every time the gate to the house is thrown wide open and the family comes outside with a tale about the war, about their lost sons or brothers, but we still cannot find our Zina. Just when we are about to give up, the last Zina waves us inside. Her son has been sentenced to 14 years for his alleged involvement in terrorism, and is incarcerated in a prison camp “at the North Pole”. She is eager to share her story, but begs us, “Please don’t write about it. Every time I take it up with Memorial or there’s a development in the case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, my son is beaten or tortured.” She is literally wringing her hands. “Why is there so much misery here?” she sighs.

Between Grozny and Urus Martan the road runs through dense woods. In the middle of the woods is a large checkpoint next to police barracks. We take a sharp left towards Urus Martan. The landscape becomes flat and barren, boring even. We pass a heavily guarded Russian army base. Many of the houses are spacious and new, rebuilt after the wars. The area around Urus Martan is known for its opposition to the Russians, and more recently to Kadyrov’s pro-Russian government. This is perhaps why a wave of state terrorism in the North Caucasus has hit particularly hard here.

One evening in 2002, Zainap and Adlan Dzhambekov were sitting on the sofa in their small house, listening to the radio. Their son Imran was asleep in the bedroom.

The war was all but over, and the Dzhambekovs counted their blessings that they had survived it unscathed. Imram was studying at the oil and gas institute in bombed-out Grozny. He was a healthy young man and a religious Muslim, who neither smoked nor drank. A thin beard covered his face, as is the fashion in Chechnya and an expression of piety. He was 22 years old and 1.92 metres tall. Every day he took the school bus to and from Grozny. His height made him stand out and he was often hauled off the bus at the checkpoint in the woods.

On that particular evening, the family's life would change forever. Around midnight, Zainap and Adlan saw that the lights in the village had gone out. Then Zainap heard a noise at the door. When she opened it, a group of armed and masked men forced their way into the house. They pushed Zainap against the wall and asked for Imram. When Zainap wrestled herself free from one of the men, she saw her son lying motionless on the floor, dressed only in a T-shirt and underwear, with his hands tied behind his back. Later, in court, she claimed that the attackers spoke Russian without an accent. One of them – the one who had asked for her son – had clear blue eyes.

Zainap’s younger children began to cry and they and Zainap were locked in another bedroom with a chair wedged under the door handle. Adlan was beaten to the ground and could no longer stand up from the pain. After ten minutes, Zainap managed to escape from the bedroom and saw that the attackers had left with her son.

Desperate activity followed. It was late and there was no traffic on the roads due to the curfew. Zainap ran after a convoy of army vehicles and was able to make a note of the licence plates. She and Adlan then drove to the local police officer and asked him to help them look for their kidnapped son. He refused. Then to the

15. Counter-terrorism

301

mayor, who was not at home. Then to the checkpoint in the woods on the road to Grozny. They were told that no cars had passed that night. They drove back through the village to the other checkpoint, where they received confirmation that the cars had passed that way, but they were not allowed through as it was long past the curfew.

They continued their search the following morning. They drove from checkpoint to checkpoint and police station to police station, but everywhere they went they were met by a wall of silence. Nobody knew anything. In Urus Martan they were allowed to speak to the prosecutor. He called various services that might have been responsible for the abduction, but they all denied any knowledge of it. They spoke to an army officer, who claimed to know that special police troops had detained someone from Goity during the night. On the way back to the barracks, they saw the trucks that had been on their street driving away. They were sent from pillar to post. One person said that Imram would be released in a couple of days, another that he had been sent to Khankala, the sprawling Russian military city just outside Grozny. The special police continued to deny any involvement. They claimed that the truck with the matching licence plates standing behind their fence could have been borrowed the evening before. Official legal proceedings were begun, but the plot thickened. From Khankala, the Dzhambekovs were sent to Rostov-on-Don, a city hundreds of kilometres to the north in Russia, where they learned that Imram had already been tried and charged with terrorism. The months went by and the case was passed backwards and forwards between local, regional and federal authorities. The Dzhambekovs have a thick file to prove it, but it does nothing to advance the investigation.

A year later, in 2003, Imram was added to a list of 1,250 missing people due to be investigated by the Russian parliament.

A year after that, Zainap and Adlan wrote a letter to President Putin, in which they said that the abduction bore all the hallmarks of a state operation. How else could the jeeps drive through all the checkpoints during the curfew and move around the country so easily? Furthermore, the vehicles were clearly government property and a few days later were back in the police car park.

They never heard from Imram again.

Zainap fetches the pile of documents from a large box. She flips through them and picks out a photograph of her son. “He was such a sweet boy. He was abducted to order, that’s what they call it.” She strokes her son’s head in the photograph. “To order. That means that someone had something against him. Anyone with a bit of money or simply a good contact can whisper in someone’s ear and they’re gone.”

In December 2002, Zainap heard that a Congress of the Chechen People was being organised in Gudermes, a city in eastern Chechnya. Journalists and members of parliament would be attending. She and several other mothers of missing sons made posters and banners with texts such as: ‘Give us our sons back’ and ‘Stop the abductions’. They were arrested within minutes and held in a dirty, windowless cell in the police prison in Gudermes. It was December and cold. Bottles of urine stood in the corner. They were searched and medication for diabetes and heart conditions was taken off them. On the second day, young men covered in bruises and injuries joined them in the tiny cell. They said that they had been forced to sign an admission of guilt under torture. The mothers went on hunger strike. They remained in the cell for four days and four nights until they were charged and fined.

302

15. Counter-terrorism

In 2008, the Dzhambekov case was heard before the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, under protest from Russia which said that it was still under investigation.

The judgement followed in 2009. Russia was ordered to pay the family €35,000 in damages for Imram’s death and the inadequate investigation that followed. In addition, Zainap received €10,000 for her illegal imprisonment in Gudermes, which took into account the appalling conditions in the cell.

“To this day, if we have a power cut at night, we know that someone is being abducted,” Zainap says. “It’s still happening.” She does not plan to sit back. “I don’t take part in demonstrations anymore. These days, under the young Kadyrov, demonstrations are dealt with harshly. But I’m happy to talk to you. I’m too old to be scared of this government. You can’t really be afraid of them. They aren’t human.” Zainap walks into the kitchen. Every interview is rewarded with a meal. “We’ve had everyone here,” she calls from the kitchen. “Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya Estemirova and many others. They’ve all since been murdered. Our lawyer is the only one who’s still alive.” She returns for a moment, dressed in an apron. “Politkovskaya’s death isn’t just a tragedy for her and her family, but also for Chechnya,” she says solemnly. “She was the only one to write the truth. In the meantime, 3,500 men have been abducted in Chechnya alone. Who’s going to tell the truth now?”

While Zainap prepares a meal for her foreign visitors, Adlan gives us a tour of the large house. “All built with the money from Strasbourg,” he gestures around him. At the side of the newly renovated house is an enormous covered concrete terrace – the summer kitchen. On the other side a small outbuilding has been constructed, where the Dzhambekovs want to open a shop selling home-made clothes and trinkets.

Parked at the back of the orchard is a Kamaz truck – the indestructible pride of the Soviet Union that is still in production. “For the shop,” Adlan explains. We are standing on the patio in front of the summer kitchen. “If you head 700 metres into the woods from the police post you just drove past, you’ll come to a clearing,” he says. “That’s where the abducted men were murdered. We never found Imram. But the abductors work meticulously; we found the bodies of seven men who had had their heads and internal organs removed. The grass was cut short, but it was littered with their body parts.” He gives us a searching look. “If I was young, I would have left a long time ago. But I’m old. My home is here. This is my country. I’m still afraid, but things seems to have settled down over the last few years. Life goes on.”

Less than 15 minutes’ drive from Goity is Urus Martan, at the foot of the Caucasus.

This is where one of the last remaining human rights activists for Memorial in Chechnya lives. Let’s call him Amir. He works in a non-descript office in an old block of flats. Despite his risky position in this country of numerous unsolved murders, Amir opens the door himself and smiles cheerfully as we enter.

Less than a year before our arrival, one of his last remaining colleagues, Natalia Estemirova, was bundled into a car in Grozny in broad daylight. She screamed to passers-by that she was being abducted. The same day she was found dead in a forest close to Nazran in Ingushetia. Like Amir, she was primarily involved with solving, raising awareness about, and where necessary taking cases like Imran Dzhambekov’s to Strasbourg. As a journalist and activist during the first war, she had documented Russian atrocities in Chechnya in documentaries and for NGOs. At the time it must have been an activity that Akhmad Kadyrov looked upon favourably.

15. Counter-terrorism

303

Now that his son Ramzan Kadyrov is working with the Russians, however, it is a line of work that is less than welcome. The head of Memorial, Oleg Orlov, was quick to state that he believed Ramzan Kadyrov was responsible for the murder. Just as quickly, Kadyrov sued Oleg for libel, but lost the case.

Amir’s office is adorned with a large EU flag with its yellow stars. “It all began in the summer of 2000,” he says. “At the time, the Russians and Chechens ran nightly operations to arrest and process boys and men. This soon changed and the operations became more random. After a while the arrests weren’t even registered.”

The practice spread throughout Chechnya and later the North Caucasus.

The authorities initially used pretexts for arresting the men, which quickly became fabrications, Amir tells us. These were soon dropped altogether. Each time, heaven and earth had to be moved in order to find the missing people. They would often disappear for days, held without food and interrogated without a lawyer being present.

“Frequently, the sentence would already have been passed before a lawyer for either side was present,” Amir says. Almost without exception, the men were taken to camps in the far north of Russia. Only short sentences are allowed to be served in Chechnya.

“You’ll be surprised when I tell you that human rights are well defined here,” Amir continues. “But that’s just on paper. The moment that you’re up against a uniform and a gun, you can forget it.” He says that there are far too few lawyers who will represent these men. “We sometimes have the odd small success, when people are actually released, or when we win in Strasbourg. But the chance of getting justice here is minimal.”

The sudden increase in kidnappings and disappearances in the ˈ00s gave rise to the most extreme theories. From Dagestan to North Ossetia and Ingushetia, the story circulated that abductees were being used as slaves in secret mines and factories.

“Think about it,” says Isa, a taxi driver from Chermen. “Who was being abducted?

They were all strong young men. That’s no coincidence, is it?” However unbelievable it all sounds, the story may not be entirely baseless. In the Chechen wars, captured Russian conscripts were forced into hard labour. Even today, reports of soldiers who have allegedly been working for years in stone quarries or factories in Dagestan still surface in the Russian press – although this is certainly no guarantee of the truth.

Isa has thought it all through. “There’s a large sanatorium called Tamysk in North Ossetia. It is completely inaccessible and heavily guarded. They say that there are slaves inside.” And what of Khava’s husband? He was almost 60. “Perhaps they needed him somewhere else,” suggests Isa. He continues immediately with another theory. “They kidnap people and then see whether they need the organs, otherwise they put them to work,” he concludes. It is an horrific idea and even more gruesome after one has spent some time in the Caucasus, as one cannot absolutely rule it out. “Yes,” laughs Isa, “welcome to little Zimbabwe.”

From the witness statements relating to Imran’s case, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that Imran had had no involvement with terrorists, resistance or anything similar. Khava’s husband was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong licence plates on his car. Even so, the case remains unsolved, like many of the cases that we have heard about, and like the numerous cases published on the European Court’s website. Imran and Khava’s husband have disappeared. Maybe they will be found in one of the mass graves that have recently been discovered in Chechnya. Maybe they were actually enslaved or had their organs sold, or – like the activist Estemirova – were immediately murdered next to the

304

15. Counter-terrorism

motorway. But what happens if you really are involved with terrorists, the militants in the woods?

On the Chechen border, near the market town of Khazavyurt, is Yareksu.

The village is actually called Novokuli, but it is divided into two parts. The Lak, one of 35 ethnic groups in Dagestan, live on one side of the small ravine carved out by the River Yareksu. The ethnic Chechens live on the other side and prefer to call the village after the river. A graveyard looks out over the village. Like almost every village in the Caucasus, the houses are surrounded by high, ornately decorated walls. Isita Aziyeva and her family live behind one of the gates, which looks as if it has been sprayed with bullets. Isita is a 28-year-old beauty with clear blue eyes. She is wearing silver sandals and a long purple dress. Her lawyer has arranged our visit. She welcomes us inside, where she has laid out pieces of cake for us. In the adjoining bedroom, her brother sighs with the effort or devotion of performing his afternoon prayers.

“In our district a KTO – a counter-terrorism operation – was declared. At the time, two policemen from Novokuli had been shot dead by the so-called boyeviks.”

The choice of words used during conversations in the region is telling. The men in the woods are referred to as militants or bandits, terrorists or Wahhabis depending on what the person you are speaking to is wearing on their head. In Isita’s case, this is a conservative, close-fitting, black headscarf. “I had only been married a year and my husband and I had a little baby,” she says.

“There’s virtually no work here,” she continues. “My husband decided to hang up flyers with his telephone number, saying that he was available for home improvement jobs.” We have seen this often in the Caucasus. Many families live almost self-sufficiently, growing a few vegetables, with an apple tree, grapevine and a scraggy cow or goat in the garden. Any extra money they are able to earn is welcomed.

We often ask ourselves how people here survive, particularly when they are expected to contribute financially to the many weddings and funerals that take place among their extended family.

Through his flyers, Isita’s husband Ismail succeeded in finding the odd renovation job. It turned out later that one of the houses he worked on belonged to a boyevik.. Once he had got to know and trust Ismail, he began demanding favours.

The militants needed people who were able to drive around freely and Ismail was the ideal candidate. “They asked him once, and then a second time,” says Isita. “They put him under a lot of pressure, saying he should remember that he had a family.”

The militants not only asked Ismail to take food to the woods; they also wanted a chauffeur and someone who could keep a close eye on the movements of the security forces and army.

Isita says that Ismail and his friend drove the boyeviks to the city of Khazavyurt twice. They took them food for two months, before trying to get out of it.

Ismail thought up all kinds of excuses, but they would not accept them. “If you don’t come to the woods anymore, you’ll return home another way,” they said. Ismail understood exactly the threat hanging over his head. Only he and his friend knew about it. Isita and the rest of the family only noticed that Ismail had started to behave differently. “Sometimes he said he just had to go to Russia and things like that,” Isita remembers. “We found that strange, but I never asked.”

In desperation, Ismail and his friend decided to confess what they had been doing to the police in Novo Lak, a village close by, and to ask for protection. Refusing to help the boyeviks was dangerous enough, but it was even more dangerous to tell the police. The police received Ismail and his friend with open arms. Their murdered

15. Counter-terrorism

305

306

15. Counter-terrorism

307

Levashi, Dagestan Idris Isayev, 46, works for the trafďŹ c police in Levashi. The village is the gateway to the mountains, home to most of the Islamic separatists in this violent republic. His job is not without risk, but the work is proďŹ table enough to make the risk worthwhile.

308

309

Yareksu, Dagestan The village of Yareksu, near Khazavyurt, where Isita Aziyeva lives.

310

Yareksu, Dagestan Isita Aziyeva’s husband was sentenced to 15 years in a prison camp, for helping the terrorists under duress.

“If I held a gun to a policeman’s head, he would go into the woods too.”

15. Counter-terrorism

311

colleagues were still fresh in their minds and they were looking for scapegoats. One of the police officers to whom Ismail spoke was the brother of one of the murdered officers. He said that the men should be sent to prison straight away.

Ismail was immediately locked up in Khazavyurt. During the investigation he was accused of being an accessory to 11 murders. His lawyer was not allowed to visit him for three days. The murdered police officer’s brother personally tortured him. “It was terrible,” Isita tells us. “He was already a broken man when the lawyer was finally allowed to see him. He explained everything. It was only then that we found out that he had helped the boyeviks. He and his friend were held in a wet cell in the basement. They couldn’t even pray.” The next time Isita saw her husband was six months later during the first public hearing by the investigation team. “Ismail looked the policeman directly in the eyes and said that they had beaten him with sticks, but he denied the charges.”

Ismail and his friend were sentenced to 13 and 14 years, respectively. They wrote to the sentence review committee, which is intended to give boyeviks without blood on their hands a second chance, consider a reduced sentence and the possibility of serving their time in Dagestan, close to relatives who could bring them food and clothes. The case had become a personal vendetta, however, and the committee would not take it on because Ismail and his friend had been charged with murder.

Members of the murdered policeman’s family attended the trial. “They were extremely threatening. They said we had to leave otherwise they would get us.”

Within a week the family appeared on Isita’s doorstep. Ismail’s father was beaten and the metal fence around the house was riddled with bullets from a machine gun.

“It was only then that we found out how trapped Ismail had been,” Isita tells us. “He had a choice of being taken by the police or by the boyeviks. The boyeviks would have murdered him. The police tortured him and threw him into prison.” He is currently being transported to Murmansk, she says. “The last time I heard from him, he was somewhere near Volgograd.” In total he will be away from the family for almost 15 years. “By the time he’s back we’ll both already be in our forties and his son will be grown up. His life has been ruined,” Isita laments.

Ismail’s brothers are in the room with us. Since Ismail’s arrest, their lives have also become more difficult, they tell us. “We go to the mosque and I wear this headscarf,” Isita tells us. “And we’re Chechens. The government here is Lak and doesn’t trust the Chechens.” Ismail’s brother Adam explains that the police come knocking every three months. “They ask if I have gone into the woods. If I put a gun to their heads, they would go into the woods too.”

The family walks outside to show us the bullet holes in the metal fence surrounding their house. Isita points to the hill opposite the house, to the first monument in the Caucus commemorating the deportations in the Second World War. It was erected in the dead of night in 1989. The site was lit using car headlights. “Our history repeats itself,” she says. Her mother begins to sob.

Adipgerey Umarov has an office in nearby Khazavyurt. He is the lawyer for Ismail and dozens of others facing similar charges and convictions. His office, located on an unpaved road in one of the suburbs, is filled with piles of papers and cupboards full of files. Umarov is 67 years old, but has no intention of retiring in the near future.

“I want to take Ismail’s case to Strasbourg,” he says. “He and his friend may have committed a crime, but not the crime for which they were sentenced.” The case keeps him busy. “This sets a precedent. If everybody who turns themselves in receives such

312

15. Counter-terrorism

a severe sentence, then nobody will ever come out of the woods. It makes all of the policies verbally acknowledged by the president of Dagestan and his sentence review committee worthless.”

Umarov believes that he has a good chance of winning this case. “There isn’t a single piece of evidence for the murders, and they were never found with a gun.

They turned themselves in. They should have got a maximum of two years, a sentence that they could have sat out in Dagestan.” This last point is important for the convicts and their families, the lawyer says. “Conditions in prison are very difficult. Extra food and the opportunity to see their family can be life savers.

“I have three children,” Umarov continues. “I hope it will never happen, but I can truly imagine why they might go into the woods. The police here break all the laws. Can you imagine? Sympathy for the boyeviks in a family where the father is a lawyer and the mother a judge!”

Umarov experienced first-hand how uncertain life in Dagestan can be when he found his house surrounded by the FSB, the police and a military unit. It was explained as a KTO. They searched his property but found nothing. “It may have been because of the sensitive cases that I take on, or possibly someone with a grudge who tipped off to the security forces about me.

“There are so many reasons to support the boyeviks,” he says. “And the leaders of this country don’t do enough to stop that.” He summarises the many arguments. “First, they claim Islam. They claim to support the traditions of Imam Shamil. They blame the corruption on traditional Islam. It’s an argument that doesn’t add up. In Imam Shamil’s time, the Russians waged a real war against Islam. Today people are free, they can go to the mosque again.”

Another reason is the lack of prospects in the Caucasus, Umarov believes.

There is such widespread unemployment and at the same time so much wealth, people become susceptible to propaganda. Yet nobody explains how hopeless it is to join the boyeviks.. Once made, it is an almost irreversible choice.

“In short, the boyeviks offer an idea – something to fight for. They offer a lifestyle. They offer a way out. They are winning the battle of ideas with the government, and that’s extremely worrying.” Umarov believes that only the country’s leaders can change this, but adds that nobody has ever made any serious attempts to do so.

“The elite earn too much money from the situation. They are overloaded with subsidies from Moscow. Half of the army and the Russian FSB receive huge allowances to work here. People have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.” It is the most commonly heard argument throughout the Caucasus: why so much violence? Because ‘they’ have a financial interest in maintaining it. On the other hand: how do the boyeviks survive? Because they are supported, Umarov says. “Georgia, the West, Arab countries, everyone has an interest in continuing instability in Russia. Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist in the Russian parliament, once said, ‘We don’t need the Caucasus, just let them kill each other, we’ll even give them the weapons to do it.’ Perhaps there’s some truth in that. Just let us be.”

The editorial board of Chernovik Chernovik, one of the more notorious Dagestani newspapers, is located in Makhachkala. Dagestan has an extremely lively newspaper culture.

Each ethnic group has its own publication, sometimes more than one. Chernovik is known as the most critical. Hadzhimurat Kemalov, the former chief editor, was one of the most influential journalists in the country. He often spoke with the president and ministers and was not afraid to criticise them publically. His cousin, Ali Kemalov,

15. Counter-terrorism

313

”The boyeviks are winning the battle of ideas with the government, and that’s extremely worrying.”

Adipgerey Umarov, Khazavyurt

314

15. Counter-terrorism

chief editor of another newspaper as well as the head of the Dagestani journalists union, knew Hadzhimurat well. ““Chernovik Chernovik is good at criticising the system. However, it remains analytical and doesn’t necessarily attack the person. Hadzhimurat challenged businesses and their ties with the government. You have to be careful doing that.” He tells a story about a counter-terrorism operation in which a journalist died – one of 16 local journalists who have lost their lives here over the last few years.

Portraits of all 16 hang on the wall above his head as a tribute. “The police stormed the journalist’s house in a mountain village and tortured him. The following day he was declared a terrorist on television. The proof they gave was that he spoke three languages: English, French and Arabic. This fits with the idea that the insurgency is supported by these countries.”

In the days following the death, Hadzhimurat organised demonstrations, which attracted significant support. During the demonstrations, Ali and Hadzhimurat were ordered to appear before the president. He urged them to stop the demonstrations. The minister of internal affairs (MVD) and the police were also present. “The president opened the meeting and asked: who first?” Ali remembers. “Hadzhimurat immediately seized the opportunity. He pointed to the MVD minister and said: ‘You accept the biggest bribes in the whole of the republic. The public prosecutors are afraid of you. You control the oil, customs, the nut industry, alcohol and amusement businesses. You’re the most corrupt man in Dagestan. You invent stories about extremists, declare states of emergency and kill our people. The only organisation that works is the FSB.” Ali’s face turns red as he relates the story. We listen breathlessly. It must have been a tense moment. “‘Hadzhimurat had of course been writing about that for a long time. It was nothing new,” says Ali. Following the meeting an investigation into the journalists was launched, but led to nothing. Less than a month later, the minister was shot dead. A few months after that Hadzhimurat himself was killed. “If he were still alive and we were able to choose the president ourselves, he would have been elected,” Ali says confidently. He walks to his desk and pulls out a gun. “I don’t think this will help me if they want me dead. But it makes me feel safer.”

Outside Chernovik’s office Hadzhimurat’s successor, Biyakay Magomedov, shows us where the murder took place. “It was here, right in front of the entrance. The whole editorial team saw it through the window. Hadzhimurat arrived and was shot immediately. He remained on his feet long enough to dodge around the car until he thought they had run out of bullets, then he collapsed. He had been hit in a number of places, but the murderer still had bullets in his gun. Then he was finished off.”

Biyakay walks in the shadow of his illustrious predecessor. “Everyone thought that our newspaper would fail. I don’t have Hadzhimurat’s network, but good, in-depth journalism is so vital. Should I explain Russia and the Caucasus? Then you’ll understand it better.” He does not have to convince us. We happily take a seat in his small, untidy office, ready for his explanation. He launches into a comprehensive history lesson about the English colonies and how they inevitably became corrupt.

“In all corrupt empires there are smaller empires that are also corrupt and therefore impossible to control. In Russia, President Putin has 81 districts under his control. If he were to see every governor and every president of those districts just once per year, it would take him more than three months. That’s why his last visit here was in 2010.

They can’t keep up.”

Biyakay notices our looks of despair. He throws another argument into the discussion. “Putin doesn’t want any demonstrations. If you can avoid unrest, that’s

15. Counter-terrorism

315

good enough for him. Then you can kill people, steal 20 million roubles, it’s all fine.

The local rulers know their limits. If they succeed in maintaining the peace, then they remain in power.” There is almost no alternative, Biyakay says. Dagestan is three times the size of Chechnya and mountainous. “Imagine if Russia wanted to go to war here, they would need at least 250,000 soldiers. In Chechnya they weren’t able to win with 100,000 men. Russia doesn’t have that many soldiers available. They would have to take them from the borders and the building projects they are deployed on. Dagestan would become a sort of Afghanistan. They could never win here.”

According to Biyakay, 30 per cent of the people are loyal to the boyeviks, 30 per cent are against them and 30 per cent have no preference. “War is on its way, it’s unavoidable. So many people give food and money to the boyeviks. In many villages Sharia is the law. When people see the system failing, Sharia takes over. That’s how they think. If charges are brought against an important person here, a telephone call from Moscow is all it takes and they walk free. That’s how loyalty to the system is maintained.” It is a deadlock, says Biyakay before embarking on another endless rant about corrupt mayors, ministers and businessmen. “The largest industry in Dagestan is channelling money from Moscow into Deutsche Bank and Bank of America. But if local entrepreneurs want to borrow money, they pay at least 15 per cent interest.”

During the demonstrations in Moscow, following the elections in 2011, Biyakay says that people could often be heard shouting: stop feeding the Caucasus! “We adopted the slogan for our newspaper. All that money doesn’t benefit the people here anyway.”

He laughs scornfully. “Did you know that 60 per cent of the authorities pay money to the boyeviks, so they won’t be attacked themselves? Who funds the insurgency here? The Kremlin!” He explains how it works. “A flashcard is sent to a politician or a senior civil servant. It also happens with companies. Sometimes someone simply walks into a building and places a flashcard on the counter. The card states how much they have to pay, where and when. If they don’t, they’re blown up or shot.”

The only solution, Biyakay says, is a stronger leader in Moscow. “In Chechnya they tried having a strong local leader. That ruined everything.” He does not believe that independence is an option either. “Civil war would erupt almost immediately.”

The deadlock can be felt across the Caucasus: an incompetent, corrupt government that everyone complains about; a hatred of Moscow, which at the same time appears to be the only solution to the conflict; an on-going war waged against everything and everyone with even the most tenuous link to terrorism, in order to keep the bosses in Moscow happy, Biyakay argues.

That war continues to cost lives. In an impressive report by Amnesty International from 2012, the Ingush President Yevkurov speaks openly about the disappearances. He blames the various security forces for operating across state borders without informing each other. “If someone is taken from their home by masked men in large jeeps and SUVs, who am I to say that Dokku Umarov’s terrorists have done it?” he says. “It has to be the security forces.”

Rustam Matsev is a scrawny young lawyer with thick glasses. He works from the basement of a block of flats in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria.

The walls of his office are decorated with mirrors and posters of models. The floor is covered with mosaic tiles. “It was a barbers shop,” he grins. “I could move in cheaply.”

There is little glamour in the lives of human rights lawyers in the Caucasus. “The police kidnap people in order to get information,” says Rustam. “They are often

316

15. Counter-terrorism

tortured.” He now has enough experience with these types of cases to make accurate predictions. “If someone is missing for more than three days with no sign of life, that sign rarely comes.” We think of Khava, who is still hoping for a sign of life five years after her husband disappeared. “Once,” Rustam corrects himself. “Once, someone was found alive after four months. He was locked in the basement of the Chechen Security Forces. He had been moved all over the place.”

Rustam has an enormous collection of evidence on his laptop. He scrolls through endless galleries of incarcerated, tortured men. They look dejected, humiliated and in pain as they expose their arms, back, stomach and legs for the camera.

They are covered in welts from sticks and ropes, burn marks where cigarettes have been stubbed out on their bodies and blisters caused by electric shocks.

“Actually, once you’ve been abducted you have almost no hope,” says Rustam. He summarises what normally happens. “You’re tortured for three days to get the first evidence. Then they bring in witnesses to make up a story and they fabricate a list of evidence that has been found, such as explosives and grenades. Then they put together the charge, which states in detail the sentence the judge should pass. Then at some point, the lawyer is allowed in.”

His profession must feel extremely pointless. “In 0.01 per cent of these cases an appeal results in a different verdict,” Rustam admits. He adds that judges can see from the charges how much has been fabricated, but they can do little but pass due sentence. They can, however, reduce the severity of a sentence, for example by assigning a convict to a prison close to home, rather than a labour camp.

“There’s only one hope for young men who are arrested,” says Rustam.

“But it’s only an option for a few.” He looks over the top of his glasses, and emphasises every word as he says: “Never admit anything under torture. Whatever they do to you, however they treat you, keep saying that you haven’t done anything and that you’re innocent. However strange it may sound in the Caucasus, that’s what’s so perverse about the lawless legal system here. It remains a legal system and they need your consent. Without your ‘yes’ they don’t have a case. They can still murder you, or make you disappear, but the only way I stand a chance of getting someone off is if they keep saying no.”

In Moscow, the Centre for Immigration is also located in a basement. It is a tiny office, filled with desks and filing cabinets. People from all corners of the world, or so it seems, wait in every corridor. Immigration exists even in Russia. The government has yet to develop a coherent immigration policy, although the approach is becoming increasingly nationalistic. Elena Burtina is expecting us. She provides legal advice to refugees and immigrants, a large number of whom come from the Caucasus, despite it technically being part of the Russian Federation. She is a small, inconspicuous woman who does not say a word more than is necessary about her work. Even so, she has presence. She is a lawyer through and through, and no conspiracy theories or unfounded accusations will pass her lips. The facts she has to deal with on a daily basis, she says, are more than enough.

“Russia is incapable of taking care of its citizens. I get so many refugees from the Caucasus. Not just because they’re persecuted by the government, but also because they’re threatened by the social conditions there, by conservative families, by brothers who want revenge for the pregnancy or failed bride kidnapping of a sister, by killing the sister or keeping it secret. I then have to try and organise an exit visa. They end up in Norway for example. Nobody wants to go there. They don’t

15. Counter-terrorism

317

speak Norwegian and they want to bring their children up here. But Russia refuses to protect them.”

Elena disappears momentarily and returns with a boy who is clearly reluctant to talk. “He was kidnapped from his home to be killed,” she says, stroking his shoulder. “He was tortured for four days in Karabulak, Ingushetia. It’s unbelievable that he didn’t give in.”

Hussein listens silently. Elena continues. “For one reason or another, the officers who had kidnapped him couldn’t bring themselves to kill him, so they passed him over to the Russians, but they wouldn’t do it either. The Russians took him back to the police where he was seen by a passer-by.” In the police cell, Hussein was beaten again. They switched their interrogation from terrorism to other possible crimes in order to get something out of him. They found an inflammable substance in his house and detonated it to demonstrate how dangerous it was – and to destroy any evidence.

He denied everything, but was charged anyway.

By this point Hussein was a complete wreck, Elena says. In court he was unable to talk, walk or hear anything. The trial was postponed. “That’s when we found him.” Human rights activists noticed him in the hospital. “He had gone completely crazy. He howled like a wolf.” Two months later he was released from hospital in a wheelchair. “But the case continued,” Elena says. “Together with Memorial, we got him to Moscow to recover. He slept in my house the whole time.” Every time they received news about the case, Hussein had a panic attack. The fear is visible in his eyes. He never wants to return to the Caucasus.

Elena and Memorial persuaded Yevkurov, Ingushetia’s president, to intervene in the case. He ordered the case to be dropped and even brought a case against two of the boy’s torturers. It was a unique occurrence in the North Caucasus.

Not that the police officers let it rest. Their colleagues in Chechnya made a video in which someone else accused Hussein of hiding weapons. And so the whole case has started anew.

“They kept bringing up the weapons,” says Hussein. “But there really weren’t any.” He explains in detail how he was treated. He received electric shocks for one minute followed by a 15-minute break. The next time it lasted two minutes with a 30-minute break. “They continued until it was up to six minutes of electric shocks,” he remembers in horror. “They were laughing and shouting at me to scream louder!

When I didn’t give in they said that I was good, a strong boy. But it got even worse.”

They stopped giving Hussein shocks. “They told me that if I wasn’t going to talk they’d see if my little brother would. Five minutes later I heard someone screaming in the room next to me. They said it was my brother being tortured.”

Torture is meant to eradicate terrorism, but it is more likely that the often random kidnappings, torture and prison sentences will give rise to new vendettas and a generation of boys prepared – whenever they get the opportunity – to take up arms against their leaders and the Russians. Not Hussein. He wants to remain anonymous and hopes to be sent to distant Norway, where he can live in peace.

318

15. Counter-terrorism

15. Counter-terrorism

319

320

321

Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria Rustam Matsev is the lawyer for dozens of young men suspected of terrorism. “There’s only one hope,” he says. “Whatever they do to you, never admit to anything.”

322

323

Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria Photos from Rustam Matsev’s criminal case. This man did not survive torture.

324

15. Counter-terrorism

325

Ekazhevo, Ingushetia Patinat Khamchuva, 7, lives in a dilapidated house outside Nazran, surrounded by the villas of the nouveaux riches. Her father, a policeman, was reduced to poverty after being shot and injured in the line of duty.

326

16. A secret history

327

328

329

Chermen, North Ossetia In a desperate attempt to ďŹ nd her husband Mukhazhir, Khava travelled across the Caucasus with this photocopy of his portrait.

Khava suddenly no longer wants to talk to us. Our travels through the North Caucasus are coming to an end. Our contact at the Ingush government has just rung us to say it would be better if we stayed away. The security forces are onto us and feel threatened by our interviews and meetings – for whatever reason. Our interpreter Dina nervously changes her SIM card again.

330

16. A secret history

We go to Chermen for the last time, to tie up the loose ends in Khava’s story. We also want to talk to some key people in the village, the imam, the school director and Taimuraz, our Ossetian friend. We visit the Ossetian mayor Bela Agkatseva first.

Her office is in the middle of the village, opposite the fortified police station. The 60-year-old receives us formally but cordially. “Chermen is doing well,” she says and adds a little pathetically, “If you hear the sound of a hammer, you know the people are alive.” She speaks proudly of the many nationalities that live in the village and of the reconciliation between Ossetians and Ingush to which she aspires. “There just aren’t any jobs. Only the army and the police offer employment.” She is the local jack-of-all-trades, she says. Today she is arranging the repair of an electricity substation, on other days she takes care of the water supply. “Even a cow that goes astray is my problem.” She tells us about the teachers’ low salaries and her dream for mixed schools. A policeman comes in. Bela smiles at him and nods to us. The low-ranking officer, portly in a high, broad hat, takes over. “Can I ask you to accompany me to Oktyabrskoye?” he says. “Your visit has come to the attention of the FSB and they would like to talk to you.” Rob and I look at each other. We know instinctively that this is the end of our plans, as is so often the case in this paranoid region ruled by security forces. During this long, final trip, our opportunities for interviews and travel have been dwindling one by one. “No,” we say, “we’re conducting an interview. We don’t have time.” The police officer and the mayor are momentarily panic stricken.

Another officer, with three stars on his epaulet, comes in. “It’s only a few questions,” he says. “It will take five minutes.” The pressure is slowly being applied. Of course we have no choice. We are forced to end the conversation with the mayor and leave the office, where a gaggle of policemen has now gathered.

The police do not see us as a threat. We are ushered into the back of a jeep, where a large rifle has been left on the floor. For half an hour we bump through the grey border region of the Prigorodny district to Oktyabrskoye. We are taken through several reinforced doors to the interview room. A woman sits in a cubicle behind a grating. She looks embarrassed. Her elegant high-heeled shoes catch our attention.

The five minutes turn into an endless interrogation session by the FSB, police and then the good old immigration service. We are photographed yet again, fingerprinted and our passports are copied. We are told that our presence in Chermen violates the law of 2006. They show us a copy of it. ‘Foreigners in North Ossetia may only travel in the four main cities and on the roads between them,’ is the bottom line.

‘Find me the man and I’ll find the crime’ is a frequently used quote attributed to Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. It still applies. We say that our credentials have already been checked twice by the police in Chermen. In fact they gave us a lift when Khava’s car got a puncture! The law is waved in our faces again.

Six hours later the immigration service decides we have to go to court. “This is a serious violation,” they say and show us on a computer our previous violations in Dagestan and Sochi. Our arrest in Shatoi, Chechnya is thankfully missing. “Three violations. We’ll recommend that you are deported.” The vision of the North Caucasus begins to fade before our eyes. With the telephone call from Ingushetia in the back of our minds, we see the region becoming one big no-go area. Exhausted, we indulge on overpriced shashlik and beer in a folksy restaurant in Vladikavkaz. Our imminent deportation keeps running through our heads. We inform the embassy.

The three-star officer’s five minutes have now stretched into one and a half days. The next morning at ten the men from the immigration service pick us up. Their body language indicates they smell blood. The courthouse is again built like a fortress.

16. A secret history

331

People with piles of papers hurry to and fro. They look at us strangely; foreigners in court can’t be good. After waiting for hours, a judge finally has time to see us. It is a relatively informal setting. The judge sits behind his desk, we take a seat at a table opposite. He wears a black cape with subtle stitching. He listens to the arguments of the immigration service and then to Rob, who cites extenuating circumstances because the law is not made known to visiting foreigners, and it is not obvious that they are forbidden to stray from the four cities. The judge is impatient. He rules in our favour and admonishes the immigration service. “Just give them a fine,” he says.

“Now move along.” The immigration service slinks off. However, it is made clear to us that the law is still in force and we are not allowed to return to Chermen. When we ring the FSB, they confirm that we will not be given permission to go. We try our luck in Moscow and are given similar arguments: it is a border area, there is an army base. In other words: forget it. A month later the Dutch Embassy to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (responsible for foreign journalists in Russia) is given a dressing down over our behaviour. From now on, the diplomat was told, we have to discuss all our plans with the FSB in advance. Our freedom is slowly being curtailed.

During the interrogation with the FSB, the police and the immigration service, the only name we have mentioned is Taimuraz’s, to whom we wanted to give a photo showing him with his baby. We thought, probably naively, that this could do no harm.

In the meantime, we have made ourselves so conspicuous that the authorities are perhaps already aware of our movements. We can only guess.

In any event, in the following days the Gaisanov family is no longer willing to receive us. Uncle Magomed says that he is in nearby Nalchik. We eagerly try to set up an appointment, but then he baulks and says that he is still in hospital. Khava’s daughter-in-law tells us that Khava has gone to Grozny and is unreachable. Can we meet her there? No, she has no time for us. We feel as if we are standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff. And we worry about everyone we have spoken to. We will get out of here, but who might we have got into trouble?

It feels as if our story about the North Caucasus is unfinished. Khava’s family has not forbidden us from using their stories, but something must have happened. The North Caucasus, which we have tried so painstakingly to pry open over the last two years, is closing to us again. It is a history that the authorities here and in Moscow would prefer to keep unwritten.

Despondent, we travel northwards through South Russia to Chechnya and Dagestan, in order to avoid North Ossetia and Ingushetia as much as possible. As we cross North Ossetia, we are suddenly subjected to minute checks wherever we go, something that has not happened before. We make detours in order to comply with that strange law.

In Chechnya, just over the border, the car’s rear axle breaks. Loaded down with luggage, we struggle along the motorway against the traffic. It is Dina’s first time in Chechnya. Bearded men in honking cars grin at us as we slog through the rain to the nearest village. “I want to get out of here,” says Dina, the toughest interpreter ever, who has been through so many wars herself. She is on the verge of collapse. “I never want to go to the North Caucasus with journalists again,” she says. When we arrive in Grozny the following day, we let her go. We will make it to Dagestan on our own. She arranges a shared taxi and flees as quickly as possible to her family in Vladikavkaz.

332

16. A secret history

During the writing of this book, Dina and our taxi driver Isa restored contact with Khava. She is prepared to talk to us again in the future, but it will have to be on neutral territory.

16. A secret history

333

334

335

Kutisha, Dagestan

336

17.

Epilogue

337

338

339

Ekazhevo, Ingushetia Dina Djidjoeva is an interpreter and ‘fixer’ in the Caucasus. “I never want to go to the North Caucasus with journalists again,” she says at the end of our final trip, when two republics have become largely inaccessible to us.

You can make the Caucasus as complicated as you want, although the towns and villages belie the differences: the same dust, the same drabness, as well as the same colours and the same trees. You can lose yourself in the details, in the infinite complexity of the region. Yet you can also oversimplify it – something that is very easy to do. People across the Caucasus struggle for a dignified existence, and seem to be thwarted at every turn. They rail against Moscow and their own governments, the corruption and the violence; against the inability of the regime to quell a seemingly small insurrection; against the arbitrariness of the situation, which has resulted in so many disappearances, arrests and deaths.

Russia appears utterly powerless to solve the problem of its North Caucasian colonies – in fact, Russia inflames it. Russian nationalists shout ʻstop feeding the Caucasusʼ and most Caucasians seem to agree. Leave us in peace, many say, we will fend for ourselves. It is almost as romantic an image of the Caucasus as that created by Pushkin, Tolstoy and others. At the same time, the region is plagued by innumerable ethnic prejudices, which all too often result in violence.

We could tell so many other stories about the beautiful North Caucasus; about Moscow’s ambitious plans to attract millions of tourists to the ski slopes in the mountains; about peace through economic development, an idea not without merit, all the decades of war and terror aside. We could write about the huge champagne and cognac factories in Dagestan – the pride of the nation – which have only been left intact because they pay off the boyeviks. We could write about KarachayCherkessia, where we ate freshly roasted shashlik on the banks of a fast-flowing river, while above us a beautiful, Soviet-style observatory glinted in the sun. We could say so much more about the magic of Dagestan, the charming villages, rich in stories and adventures, clinging to the mountains. Sadly, when I reread the 17 notebooks I have filled with interviews and observations over the years, the on-going war and accompanying violence always hit me like a sledgehammer. It is a war that officially does not exist, but in the North Caucasus is a bitter reality. It is the Second Caucasian War. Twice we were told that the history of the deportations repeats itself: during the Prigorodny conflict in 1992, when the genocide of the Ingush started in 1944 was completed, according to the filmmaker from Ingushetia; and when the Chechen Isita Aziyeva’s husband was wrongly accused of committing 11 murders in 2012. No generation in the Caucasus has lived without war or insurgency, and it seems unlikely that life will be any easier for future generations. From dank cellars in Moscow and the Caucasus, critical forces risk suppression, intimidation and death to do what they can.

We were unable to help Khava in her search for her husband. The psychic would not see us – for what that might have been worth – and lawyers and human rights organisations cannot do anything without evidence. It was a fool’s errand from the outset. The only thing we have been able to do is record this history and hope that any attention that this mangled region receives will improve the human rights and lives of all the wonderful people who live there. We could have chosen any number of other protagonists: Zainap, Isita, Dina, Safudin – all from different republics, and each with a story more gruesome than the last. But perhaps Khava, a Muslim in a Christian country, a widow who never buried her husband, a plaintiff without a case, is the ultimate symbol of the North Caucasus through which Rob and I travelled.

340

17. Epilogue

We met her by chance, on an ordinary day on Lenin Street, but stories like hers are not hard to find.

The Russian organisation Memorial (www.memorial.ru) and the journalists of Caucasian Knot actively defend human rights in the Caucasus, while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International publish well-documented reports on human rights violations. Please give them all the support you can.

The many characters and stories included in this book do little justice to the material I actually wrote down. Travelling through the North Caucasus has been a fantastic adventure, thanks to the incredible hospitality we enjoyed and despite the obstructiveness of the security forces, police and bureaucrats who so often stood in our way.

Crucial to this book were our fellow travellers, who endured the same endless days, privations in interrogations rooms and police stations, and tussles with recalcitrant, fearful bureaucrats. Our interpreter Dina was more than heroic in this respect. Besides offering her professional skills, she also had to face her own traumatic past and overcome the ingrained Caucasian prejudices in order to work with us. Habib, an eternally cheerful English professor in Dagestan, treated our trips as if we were three boys on holiday: smoking, drinking and checking out girls. Our experience of Dagestan would have been very different without him. Musa in Chechnya suffered greatly at the hands of the FSB while we enjoyed our Western immunity. Julia and Svetlana, two supremely professional translators in Moscow, oversaw the production of this project. And our good friend Olaf Koens, who accompanied us to Chechnya, provided us with accommodation and alcohol whenever we were in Moscow.

Our final word goes to Bella Ksalova, a journalist for the independent news site Kavkaz Uzel in Karachay-Cherkessia, who showed us her small mountain republic and gave us such valuable information, before she was killed by a car on the dark streets of Cherkessk. Her father believes that the accident was staged by a government that does not take kindly to critical journalists. In the months prior to the accident, Bella often said that she was under increasing government surveillance. It is more likely that she was one of the many indiscriminate victims of Russia’s oh-so-common lethal combination of drinking and driving. Bella died far too young. She had ambitious plans to expose corruption and the abuse of power, but above all she was a lovely woman.

This book is dedicated to Bella, as a monument to all the courageous people in the North Caucasus who work tirelessly to make the lives of Khava Gaisanova and so many others like her a little better.

17. Epilogue

341

342

343

Karabulak, Ingushetia Milana, Rizvan and Ravida. Their parents ed to this former student hotel during the Prigorodny conict.

344

Baksan, Kabardino-Balkaria Khasan Karachayev, 55, is the father of one of two police officers who were lured to a meeting by boyeviks. The officers’ bodies were found in the street the following day. Their heads, which had been stored in the perpetrators’ fridge, were only recovered several months later.

345

346

347

Chermen, North Ossetia Ruslan, Hero of Russia, with his parents. Ruslan was honoured for intervening in a suicide attack on the police station in Nazran, an act said to have saved many lives.

348

349

Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia

350

Colophon The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova & The North Caucasus is the fourth annual publication produced as part of The Sochi Project. © The Sochi Project 2013 / www.thesochiproject.org Photography: © Rob Hornstra Text: © Arnold van Bruggen Translation: Cecily Layzell / Scott Roane Design / Cartography: Kummer & Herrman, Utrecht Printed by: Robstolk & Dijkman Offset Binder: Patist, Den Dolder 1,100 copies Special thanks to: Eefje Blankevoort and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn This project has been made possible by support from Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten, Stichting Sem Presser Archief, Mondriaan Foundation and The Sochi Project donors.

Thanks to: Antoine Achten, David Adams, Jeroen Akkermans, Jessica Auer, Inga Lára Baldvinsdóttir, Harry Barkema, Saskia Barth, Det Bazelmans, Valentino Bellini, Joost M. Beunderman, Saskia van Beveren, Marc Bierings, J.J.M. van de Bijl, Michel Angelo Binsbergen, Eefje Blankevoort, Victor Blankevoort, Jelle Bloem, Kees Boef, Roos Boer, Maarten Boerma, Kris Borgerink, Maarten Boswijk, Nicolaas Bot, Els Bovenberg, Allan Bovill, Patrick Bras, Jacco Brink, Corine van den Broek, Gerard Broersen, Anke van Bruggen, Erik van Bruggen, Janny en Popke van Bruggen, Roderick Buijs, Irma Bulkens, Lynton J. Bullen, Simon Burer, Alfonso Calero, Romelia Calin, Stefan Canham, Theo Captein, Francesco Chiericoni, David Christensen, Sally Clark, Chris Clement, Toon de Clerck, Joerg Colberg, Giorgio Comai, Joëlle Cornuz, L.J.A.D. Creyghton, Wiktor Dabkowski, Dieter Danzer, Dorothee Deiss, Hans Dekker, Stichting Doel Zonder Naam, Carola van Dongen de Boer, Ivan Donovan, Albert Doorenbos, Marc Duponcel, Thomas Dworzak, Tom Dziomba, Simone van Eik, Anna Eikelboom, Jan Pieter Ekker, Frank van den Engel, Leo Erken, Peter Evans, Nicole Ex Asselbergs, Olivier Fierens, Richard Fieten, Jonas Fischer, Judith Fischer, Joeri Folman, Esther Gaarlandt, Francoise Gaarlandt Kist, Thijs Gadiot, Marijke Geelen Borker, Coen Geertsema, Catharina Gerritsen, Bertus Gerssen, Heidi de Gier, Frits Gierstberg, Jasper Gilijamse, Mariette Glas Albers, Jan Glerum, Tino Glimmann, Ingo Gotz, Annemarie Graft, Emiliano Granado, Henk Greven, Martijn Groeneveld, Cocky de Groot, Peter Guettler, Anke van Haarlem, Arjan van Hal, Ingrid Harms, Gregory Harris, Frans van Hasselt, Maarten van Heems, Mieke Heeringa, Hans Hendriks, Marlene Herkemij, Michael Hermse, Arthur Herrman, Marloes Hiethaar, Paul ‘t Hoen, Eva Hofman, Jeroen Hofman, Bert van Hoogenhuyze, Korrie Hopstaken, Joop Hopster, Jonas Hornstra, Joost en Joke Hornstra, Luc Hornstra, Tom Hornstra, Benjamin Hoewler, Laurien ten Houten, Elisabeth van ‘t Hull Vermaas, Eelco van Hulsen, Michiel Hulshof, Fred Icke, Lucia Janssen, Tom Janssen, Els Jekel, Fred Jelsma, Will Jenkins, Cornelie de Jong, Mayke Jongsma, Stephan Jourdan, Antie en Jan Kaan, Tomas Kaan, Lizette van der Kamp, Hennie Kamphuis,

Alke Kamstra, Dolph Kessler, Sophie Keurentjes, Robin Klaassen, Talmon Kochheim, Ria Kock, Meike Koster, Ben Krewinkel, Sybren Kuiper, Jeroen Kummer, Tom Lagerberg, Margaret Lansink, Pierre Le Gallo, Rindert W. Leegsma, Theo Willem van Leeuwen, Alexandre Lefevre, Percy B. Lehning, Andra Leurdijk, Baptiste Lignel, Geisje van der Linden, Christine Lindo, Emmy Lokin Piscaer, Alma Loos, Marijke Louppen, Ron Louwerse, Menno Luitjes, Femke Lutgerink, Michael van Maanen, Henrik M. Malmstrom, Paul Malschaert, Lesley Martin, Anton Maurer, Michael McCraw, C.F. van der Molen, Gerda Mulder, B.C.M. Neggers, Simon Neggers, Herbert Nelissen, Dieter Neubert, Pepijn Nicolas, Leonie van Nierop, Marieke Nijhof, Bart Nijkamp, Michiel Nijland, Bram Nijssen, Corinne Noordenbos, Job Noordhof, Koni Nordmann, Daniel J. Norwood, Susan van Oostveen, Lodewijk van Paddenburgh, Nell Pastors, Douglas Penn, Joao Pico, Cock Pleijsier, Rik Plomp, Astrid Pollers, Rianne Randeraad, Benjamin Rasmussen, Elsje van Ree, Wilfred Roelink, Laura van Roessel, Loek van Roessel, Johannes Romppanen, Tijmen Rooseboom, Lex van Rootselaar, Pieter Roozenboom, Jeanette van Rotterdam, Rixt Runia, Jacobien Rutgers, Erik Ruts, Dominique Sanchez, David Schalliol, Hannah Schildt, Marike Schipper, Samuel Schliske, Andreas Schoening, Meindert Scholma, Hannah Schwarzbach, Roel Segerink, Fabio Severo, Patrick Sijben, Iris Sikking, Fransje Sjenitzer, Bart Sleegers, Geert Slot, Robin Sluijs, Joshua Smith, Hans Snellen, Frans Soeterbroek, Milena Spaan, Sander Spek, Hans Stakelbeek, Bonnie Steenman, Conny Steenman, Jolien Steenman, Joop Steenman, Lorette Steenman, Roeland Stekelenburg, Anoek Steketee, Kitty Steketee, Truus Stevens, Philip Stroomberg, Ton Sweep, Marlies Swinkels, Mirelle Thijsen, Jeroen Toirkens, Reinier Treur, Piero Turk, Robert van Ancum, Serge Van Cauwenbergh, Pieter van der Straaten, Pieter Bas van Wiechen, Jan Vandemoortele, Anneke van Veen, Kirsten Verpaalen, C.M.E. Versteeg, Danny Veys, Marieke Viergever, Giedre Virbalaite, Dirk-Jan Visser, Ellen Visser, Henkjan van Vliet, Elise Volker, Jurryt van de Vooren, Zelda de Vries, Martijn de Waal, Brendan Walsh, Rob Wandelee, Rolf Weijburg, Theijs van Welij, Oliver Whitehead, Thomas Wiegand, Thomas Wieland, Friso Wiersum, Lars Willumeit, Goof van de Winkel, Jan Willem Wirtz, Marieke ten Wolde, Valentin Wormbs, Maud van der Zant, Iris van der Zee, Antonia Zennaro, Damian Zimmermann

351

352

Kantishevo, Ingushetia Madina and Khadi, both 12.

353

“On paper, human rights are actually quite well defined here.�

354

Khava Gaisanova lives in Chermen, a village in the heart of the North Caucasus. In 2007 her husband disappeared, like so many men in the North Caucasus disappear without a trace – kidnapped, arrested or simply executed and buried in anonymous graves.

Writer Arnold van Bruggen and photographer Rob Hornstra met her by chance and became intrigued by her story, which is drenched with blood but punctuated by the will to survive. Hornstra and Van Bruggen then came to the attention of the security forces, who ultimately prevented them from travelling through the region. Even the strong Khava was intimidated and her family has avoided all contact since.

Khava’s history reads like the history of the North Caucasus itself.

Hornstra and Van Bruggen have visited the North Caucasus numerous times between 2009 and 2012. They too became victims of the violence, corruption and abuse of power that have plagued the region for centuries. This book is a penetrating account of their travels.

Since 2009, Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen have mapped the region around Olympic Sochi on their website www.thesochiproject.org.

The unstable North Caucasus described in this book lies on the other side of the mountains from Sochi. In The Secret History of Khava Gaisanova, a grim picture unfolds of the region hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics.

“If someone is missing for more than three days with no sign of life, that sign rarely comes.�

The Sochi Project