Let Our Fame Be Great (58 page)

Babitsky asked how Basayev could possibly justify sending his people against the children in School No. 1. Basayev responded with a development of that same logical but horrific position expressed by his lieutenant after the attack on Budyonnovsk. Forty thousand children had died in Chechnya, he said, and no one cared about them.

‘It is not the children that are responsible but the whole people of Russia which today with silent agreement gathers food and things for these aggressors in Chechnya. They pay their taxes, they approve of these actions, they are all responsible. Therefore, until war comes to all of them, it will not stop in Chechnya,' he said.

‘You can ask why I did this, it was to stop the killing of thousands and thousands of Chechen children, Chechen women, Chechen old people ... I do not see a different way to stop the genocide of the Chechen people. Today there is a genocide of the Chechen people and to me the Chechen people is more valuable than the whole rest
of the world. You understand? My own people is more valuable to me because it is my own.'

He was right when he talked about the horrors faced by Chechen children. The handful of psychologists working in Chechnya said a whole generation was traumatized by the terrible warfare that had waged around them for their whole lives. They had no schooling, no health care, and their families were ill-equipped to deal with their damaged offspring.

In early 2005, a few months before Basayev gave that interview, I visited a building in Grozny used as a home by hundreds of Chechens whose houses had been destroyed. The families there had lived in refugee camps outside Chechnya, but the Russian government, embarrassed by the camps and their silent reproof, had forced the inhabitants to go home.

In one room, Viskhan Siriyev lay on a bed, and writhed away from me as I walked in. He was sixteen, but was as small as someone half his age, and his thin arms barely covered his huge eyes as he tried to hide himself from the upsetting visit of a stranger. Five members of his family shared this one room, and they took it in turns to care for their brother, who had not spoken since a bomb destroyed his family's home ten years before.

He might be still alive, but he was as much a casualty of the Chechen war as anyone who had actually died. And, in a cruel irony, he could not go abroad to receive the treatment he needed since he could not get a passport. The reason he could not get a passport spoke volumes about the cruelty and indifference of the Russian administration. He had to be photographed by an authorized photographer for his passport to be valid. His family dared not take him out of the room, since it upset him too much.

The photographer was too arrogant to come to this room, even if it might have meant an easier life for a terrified and ruined child. As a result, he had no valid passport and no chance of treatment.

Across the other side of the town was the Republican Children's Hospital, where staff and patients were bundled into huge coats against the cold, and the only heating was naked gas flames in the corridors. Doctors and nurses were doing what they could but they
lacked medicines, resources and equipment, and the health situation was disastrous.

Sultan Alimkhadzhiyev, the head doctor at the hospital, welcomed me to his office but had none of the exuberant Chechen hospitality when he described the horrors he dealt with every day.

‘Almost all the children, probably 80 per cent, have psychological trauma. They have seen death, explosions. That's about 300,000 children, ' he told me.

Infant mortality, he said, was probably 50 per 1,000 – double the level in the rest of Russia – and he guessed that every fourth or fifth child born had some kind of birth defect, reflecting the terrible state of their mothers.

While aid had been pouring into Beslan to help the children rebuild their shattered lives, he was left with just the hard-working staff of his hospital to try to reconstruct a whole country's future.

I could see why Chechens would be angered by what Russia had done to them. And it was that anger, caused by Russia's total destruction of Chechen society, that was driving Basayev's attacks on his enemies wherever he might find them. But it was enough to remember the morgue in Vladikavkaz, where the children were laid out like lengths of timber in a saw mill, to know that his response was wrong.

It did not help the children of Chechnya if the children of Beslan suffered, and no matter how horrible Basayev's response, the Russian state could withstand anything he threw at it.

No one mourned Basayev when he died in an explosion in July 2006, ending a chapter in Chechen history more terrible than anything before it.

When I think of his victims, I always remember first that boy in the morgue with the butter-pale face. The serenity of his features in that place of death was touching. I was holding cotton wool dipped in some strong-smelling liquid to my nose – it was being given out by medical assistants – to hide the smell, but there was no hiding from the horrors before my eyes. There had been no horror in his face though. It was whole and undamaged.

I do not know his name, but in my mind I imagine that he might
have been Kazbek Bichegov-Begoshvili, a nine-year-old boy who died in the siege.

I became, during my repeated visits to Beslan, friendly with Kazbek's parents. By the time the first anniversary came round, they had a new baby. They called him Sarmat.

‘I decided to have this child for my wife. She was crying all the time. And maybe I did it for myself as well, to make it easier for me. For my soul,' explained Roman, the baby's father, as we drank vodka on one of my many visits to the family in their home just a hundred metres from School No. 1.

Roman looked shattered, a decade at least older than his forty-two years. Most of the time he smoked, standing in the courtyard outside his single-storey home, and looked blankly into the distance. Sometimes we smoked together. Sometimes we talked, but most of the time we did not.

Sometimes we could hear Sarmat crying inside the house, a new life untouched by the siege. Perhaps he will grow up to be a man in a Caucasus without war.

‘I want Sarmat's life to be happy, not just his life, but all our children's lives. We have to hope this new generation will be without grief,' said his mother Zarema as she held him in her arms.

But, with the heavy load of anger and deprivation weighing down a new generation growing up just a hundred kilometres away in Grozny, I fear the cycle of violence will not stop just because she wishes it.

The victims and bereaved relatives of Basayev's actions rarely got the chance to see their attackers face punishment for what they did. Suicide bombers did not survive to face justice, and the hostage-takers also tended to know they were on a one-way mission.

That was why the trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, a Chechen man born in 1980, was so extraordinary when it opened in May 2005 in the city of Vladikavkaz.

While gunfire had cracked overhead, and the rebels within the Beslan school building battled with special forces troops outside, he had been picked up by police trying to escape from the building.

He was not local, and he barely spoke Russian, so it did not take the police long to work out that he had been part of the group of hostage-takers. He was the only one that survived and so became a target for all the hatred and anger directed at the group of armed men who had brought death to School No. 1.

On the first day, as a prosecutor tried to read out the charges against Kulayev, the bereaved relatives packed into the tiny courtroom screamed and shouted at the defendant. Judge Tamerlan Aguzarov was forced to appeal to the crowd.

‘Let's not make this process into a disgrace,' he said, but his words had little effect. He postponed the session to another day, and he was forced to order that Kulayev's head be shaved. The crowd was angry that the defendant's long dark hair was obscuring his face.

The start of the second session was much the same.

‘I ask you all to calm down,' the judge said, but again with no response.

‘He should be forced onto his knees,' a woman shouted from the crowd.

And so it continued throughout that whole second day. Kulayev remained standing – voluntarily, as it happened; he could have sat
down – as the judge read out the long charge list, including a list of all the victims of the attack which alone took ten minutes to detail. The slim, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale figure in the defendant's cage was charged with terrorism, hostage-taking, murder and more – a whole litany of charges that seemed to span the entire Russian criminal code. The women and men in the courtroom stared at him with hatred. At the end of that long day, he was asked whether he accepted his guilt.

‘No,' he said, mumbling through his thick Chechen accent. He was asked to repeat himself, and to speak more loudly.

‘You shouted well in the hall,' one woman yelled at him from the crowd.

‘Not guilty,' he said. ‘I was there because of my brother.'

His chances of persuading the court that he was not guilty seemed slim. The awesome moral force of the bereaved mothers of Beslan was already being felt by the Russian government. They demanded a full inquiry into the disaster, and received visits by some of Putin's top officials on a regular basis. It was impossible that a single judge would withstand their desire for vengeance and go easy on the defendant. Kulayev discovered this when he asked if he could have a translator.

‘I am not agree. I without translator, I cannot completely. I badly understand in Russian. Without a translator I cannot, I have said. I do not know in Russian,' he said in broken and thickly accented Russian, but he won no sympathy from the judge.

‘What? You don't understand Russian? You speak Russian beautifully, ' the judge replied.

Even I could tell he did not speak Russian beautifully. His accent was so thick as to be almost incomprehensible, but his request was denied – the prosecutors weighed in as well to try to persuade him that having a translator was not in his interests, since it would make it difficult to ask questions – and the trial got under way.

The hearings were chaotic. Rows of women in black with headscarves packed the benches in the small hall on the first floor of the court building. Journalists sat downstairs, where a television link played a simultaneous recording of the events. Even from there it was obvious that the judge was failing to keep control.

Under Russian law, there are not just two sides to a case – the defence and prosecution – but also a side representing the victims. The victims now had the chance to question the defendant, the judge and the lawyers on almost any question they wanted. Regularly, they launched into long conversations with one of the other participants, or with each other. And since there were more than 1,000 victims – the former hostages or the killed hostages' bereaved relatives – the process threatened to last for ever.

Often, the judge had to call a halt to proceedings to calm down the angry women, who had organized themselves into a group called the Beslan Mothers. They had their own interests, and wanted a full inquiry into the events. They believed Kulayev could tell them more than he was being allowed to say, and regularly expressed sympathy for him.

But the majority of the victims and the witnesses had no such warm feelings. Hatred boiled out of people when they were asked to make any comments about him, regularly showing the amount of thought that had gone into fantasies of revenge.

‘I have heard that Kulayev beat children with the butt of his rifle. Maybe he killed them, or not, but he beat them. And kicked them. Which children, I do not know. But that he abused children, that is certain. He is guilty just because he was in the band. And he should be tried on all articles of the law. He should be shot. Take him out on the square and shoot him. He should be lynched. Three hundred children have been killed, 330 people,' said one man at the start of a long, scarcely coherent rant against the defendant.

‘There should not be just punishment. Shoot him! The highest form of punishment . . . Mr Judge, I ask you, believe no one, he was in the band, that means he is already guilty on all counts. All. If I had been there, I also would have been shot. The highest form of punishment. Because I would already have been in a group. It was a common group. Common. This group came together to take the school. They all know well that he was going somewhere.'

With witnesses dissolving into such anger, it is not surprising that the trial failed to establish much in the way of evidence. Kulayev's attempts to defend himself – which we will come to – were ignored by almost everyone. Victims came and asked him the same questions
over and over again. Why had he attacked their children? Why had he attacked them? Who had been his accomplices? And so it went on for sixty-one court sessions of grief and chaos.

Some witnesses, like the man quoted above, said Kulayev had beaten children, or shot in the air, but the majority said they had not seen him, and their evidence did nothing but complicate an already tangled mess of evidence. Some said he had been kind to them, and nicer than the other hostage-takers. But there did not seem any logic to the process. There was no attempt to establish which testimony was correct, or even to pretend the court was fair.

‘Who taught you to fight, so as to kidnap small children? Why could you not have attacked a military base?' asked the judge at one point, leaving no doubt that he had already made up his own mind about Kulayev's guilt.

And, in truth, who could believe this man's protestations of innocence? Kulayev had been caught escaping from the school, he admitted having been inside. His claims not to have fired a gun and to have not killed a hostage seemed farcical. There was no doubt at all, from the very start, that he would be convicted. And he duly was.