Let Our Fame Be Great (65 page)

Other poems recall more of the pleasures he has lost, and address the comforts of faith. The young athlete who tried his luck abroad aged twenty-two – just like I did, just like young men and women all over the world have done for centuries – has become a broken man because he was denied justice by the world. It is no way to win a war.

On 24 April 2008, I was a long way from the Caucasus, but it did not feel like it.

I was standing among the cigarette ends on the platform of the sad concrete building that is the Terespol train station, on Poland's – and the European Union's – eastern border. The railway line stretched off to my right and, in a few kilometres, would cross into Belarus, before stretching unbroken throughout the old Soviet Empire: to Kiev, to Rostov, and, eventually, to Grozny.

Waiting with me on the platform were five Chechen men. They were speaking Russian for my sake, and the thick Chechen accent was conjuring up a vision of the mountain peaks that would be visible if I were to hop on a train here, travel for two or three days across the plains of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, and finally see the sheer wall of rock and snow rising out of the steppes.

Now, though, none of us were planning to take a train; we were meeting one. A group of thirty Chechens had arrived here this morning, and their refugee papers were being processed. Their train had come in at 6 a.m. It was now 7.23 p.m., and the border guards had still not finished with them.

All the same, my companions were not impatient. One of them, called Magomed, I had met before. When I walked onto the platform, I had recognized his red beard, his cap and the shoulder satchel that he wore. He is a friendly man and he introduced me extravagantly to the others who stood around calmly smoking, chatting and laughing on the platform.

Suddenly, the conversation ceased. A middle-aged woman in a floral dress emerged from the office. We all looked towards her – slightly to her alarm – before we realized she was not one of the arriving Chechens. She was just a cleaning lady going off shift.

More cigarettes were lit, and one of the group started to engage a
Pole nearby in conversation with an anecdote about a car. The Pole probably understood less of his conversation than I did, since his version of Polish sounded more like deliberately non-grammatical Russian than anything else. Either way, none of us got to hear the end of the story, because, suddenly, an elderly woman appeared in the doorway with a flash of gold teeth.

She vanished into the embrace of her son Vakha – one of the men who had been waiting – and behind her came others: women in headscarves, men with black jackets and worn faces, girls, boys. They pushed past her, as she hung on to her son's shoulders. She crooned to him, and laughed. She rocked backwards and forwards, crying with purest happiness. They were united after a year apart.

As I stood watching the group of laughing people, I could not help smiling. A little girl in her best party dress caught my eye and made an elegant little skip of a dance before hiding to peek around her mother's skirts with a shy smile.

My friend Magomed brought over his sister for me to meet. They had not seen each other for six months and she was beaming across her face. Magomed, himself not a man to hide a smile, was practically jumping up and down. I shook Magomed's hand and smiled too, their joy contagious.

My eyes strayed back though to the old woman. Her son was busy with her luggage, while she was staring around at the crumbling walls and rotten concrete of the station. She looked along the platform, then through the grimy windows into the ticket hall. It was not, I realized suddenly, much of an advertisement for the European Union, but she did not seem to mind. Her look was one of unrestrained delight. Her gold teeth lit up the evening. As she walked past, I could not help myself.

‘Welcome to Europe,' I said. She dropped a curtsey, laughed, and I was rewarded with a grin.

And then, within just five minutes, they were gone. The waiting men quickly organized the new arrivals into groups, loaded them into cars, and drove off for Warsaw. Magomed packed up his sister, her husband, a teenage boy and two infants into his Volkswagen. He smiled and waved at me as they drove away.

The taxi drivers who had circled the group hopefully like grey-haired sharks went back to smoking on their bench, and the excitement was over. If I had arrived late, I would have seen nothing. Within ten minutes, Terespol had gone back to being just a normal provincial Polish town, with a sluggish trade over the border to Belarus.

You had to see a train arrive to realize what it really is: the gateway through which Chechens are pouring into Europe.

As I stood there, I did a little sum in my head. If 24 April was a typical day, and I saw no reason why it should not be, then thirty Chechens were arriving in Poland daily. Multiplied by 365, that made more than 10,000 refugees a year. It is generally considered that a million Chechens live in the world, so this little town was welcoming one per cent of the total Chechen population every year.

This was the response of the Chechens to the Russian pacification of their homeland. They were voting with their feet, and seeking a life away from the mountains, in a continent where they could be protected by a fair legal system. In 1944, Moscow had to force the Chechens out of Chechnya. Now they were leaving of their own accord.

In fact, as it turned out, my estimate was slightly too high. In 2008, Poland received 6,647 asylum applications from Russian citizens, almost all of them being Chechens. To put that into context, it received just 216 asylum applications from all the world's other countries put together.

A recent surge in the numbers of Chechen asylum seekers in Poland – and almost all Poland's asylum seekers are Chechens – had tailed off by the time I was in Terespol. Chechens are well-informed on European immigration legislation and there had been concern that Poland's entry into the Schengen Agreement, which removed visa regulation between EU states but toughened entry regulations, might make it hard for Chechens to enter the country.

Some 1,148 Chechens claimed asylum in Poland the previous November, and 2,275 did so in December. That was up from just 225 in July of the year before. Now, numbers were back to the steady few hundred a month that was normal.

According to these statistics, which are compiled by the United Nations, that number has stayed stubbornly constant for years. The
governments do not list Chechens as a separate category, but experts agree that almost all Russian asylum seekers are in fact Chechens.

In 2000, there were almost 17,500 Chechen asylum seekers in the industrialized world, a figure that jumped to more than 33,000 in 2003, before falling back to 21,000 by 2005. The number of applicants has stayed between 15,000 and 20,000 a year ever since. In 2008, the year in which I watched the train arrive in Terespol, there was a total of 19,483 – of whom thirty were the Chechens I saw arrive on 24 April.

Asylum figures can prove hard to analyse, because sometimes a single person can register an application in more than one country. However, under European rules, that is not possible in the European Union. Since almost all Chechens are claiming asylum in the EU, a rough estimate of the number who have arrived over time can be gained by just adding all those numbers together. Taken together, since the beginning of 2000, when Russia was pulverizing Grozny with artillery, bombs and rockets, more than 190,000 people – almost 20 per cent of the Chechen population – had applied for asylum in the West. And a further analysis of the figures shows just how catastrophic the situation really is.

In 2008, Russian citizens – i.e. Chechens – were the third largest group of asylum seekers in the industrialized world, behind only Iraqis and Somalis. And the Chechens were forming discrete communities. Taken together, two-thirds of them were going to just three countries – Poland, Austria and France. As I had seen with sons greeting mothers, and brothers greeting sisters in Terespol, when communities form they act as magnets.

This is not just a movement, it is an exodus.

The destination of the arriving Chechens was always a holding centre, where they would be registered, and then shipped on to another refugee camp elsewhere. In Austria, the camp is in a suburb of Vienna called Traiskirchen, accessible by a suburban train or a regional bus. When I visited it, I took the wrong bus, however, and was left to trek through the small provincial town to find the building I was looking for. It was an enlightening experience.

I wandered through street after perfectly clean street of two-storey houses in pastel shades. At one point, two houses in succession had
large dogs that threw themselves at the wire fence as I walked past. A grey-haired man turned and watched me out of sight with a neutral expression.

Eventually, I found the train tracks and followed them to the station. Here, the picture was very different. A group of African men squatted outside the station building, talking in their own language. Two Austrian women hurried past, pursing their lips. Three Chechen women saw my surprise at the Austrians' reaction and called me over. They were happy to point me in the direction of the holding camp.

‘Do you want to give yourself up,' one of them asked in all seriousness. New arrivals must be a regular event here, and they had assumed I was a Russian. The camp was not far, just a couple of hundred metres round the corner. It was a large yellow building surrounded by a spiky black fence.

Here too were Chechens – dozens of men – standing along the street or squatting in the dust. The distrust of the Austrians had clearly rubbed off on them, however. They refused to talk to me when I addressed them in Russian.

I gave up trying to make conversation and walked back to the station. A young Chechen man was checking the timetable as I handed over a ten-euro note for my train fare. The ticket-seller, a plump, pink man with dark hair scraped over his scalp, made shooing gestures at the young Chechen. I failed to understand what he was doing, and eventually he pointed at the Chechen, pointed at his eye, then made a ticking gesture with his finger. He was clearly trying to warn me about the young man's intentions. I hoped the Chechen might be able to compensate for my lack of German, so I asked him what the ticket-seller was trying to tell me.

‘Oh, he's just fucked up,' the Chechen replied with a grin.

It was easy to see that relations between Chechens and Austrians were not easy, and in fact they have not been for some time. Clashes have flared up in the past which populist politicians have exploited for their own ends. Jorg Haider, the far-right ex-governor of the province of Carinthia, deported eighteen Chechens from his region after an outbreak of violence on New Year's Eve 2007 – 8.

In an action of dubious legality, he threw out three families that he claimed were connected to an attack by young Chechens on a seventeen-year-old and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. The three families were sent back to Traiskirchen, where in a previous incident in 2003 a Chechen was killed in a fight with a group of Moldovans. The next year, more than 20,000 Austrians in Traiskirchen signed a petition calling for the camp to be closed, and a nightly curfew imposed on camp residents.

In protest meetings, they held up signs saying they did not object to receiving victims of persecution, but did not want to host criminals or economic migrants.

As I stood on the platform waiting for the train back to Vienna, I watched a group of teenage Chechens who had been leaning against the wall stand up as a slightly older, blonde Austrian girl walked past. They stopped talking and followed her with their eyes. One of them finally got up the nerve to address a few words in German to her.

She turned round and raised her middle finger at him, lifted her chin and stomped away. The boys grinned.

The train pulled up, and I climbed on board. As I sat down I pondered the difficulties of integrating Chechens into traditional Austrian society. I had already seen how Chechens steadfastly refused to integrate in Kazakhstan, in Russia and in Jordan, and I failed to see how they would do so here. If they truly were economic migrants, rather than fleeing persecution, it would make it all the more unlikely that Austria would welcome them warmly.

As I looked out the window, I realized I was being spoken to. A man across the aisle was asking me a question in German. He was middle-aged, sharply dressed in a pinstripe suit and a trilby, with dark glasses and very shiny, pointed shoes. In short, he looked like a Chechen, so I replied in Russian, and we struck up a conversation.

This, I discovered, was Khozhbaudi Denisultanov, aged forty-four, and if anyone was likely to give the Chechens a bad name for seeking wealth, not safety, it was him. The train journey was a short one, and he seemed to have a lot to say, so he invited me to visit him the next day. It was to prove an eye-opening experience.

He lived with a couple of younger cousins in a flat on the edge of Vienna. It smelt of cigarette smoke and fried food, and had the bare, functional look of a temporary refuge where only men live. Here, Denisultanov told me his business plan, and tried to persuade me to invest in his dream.

He had got the idea, he said, from watching television on 11 September 2001, when people trapped in the World Trade Center by the flames were forced to throw themselves out of the windows. While the world was appalled by the carnage, Denisultanov saw an opportunity. Could these poor people not have been saved by a simple and efficient device? He set to work and designed a harness that people could use to lower themselves out of windows too high for the fire brigade to reach.

He even had a prototype under the bed to show potential investors – such as me. It featured coils of nylon rope and a harness inside a rather smart metal box. Professional-looking drawings showed a man casually descending away from harm. The idea seemed flawed to me – surely the flames would burn through the nylon rope, let alone the descending escapee – but I was more stunned by the colossal cheek of his thinking he should qualify as a refugee.