Let Our Fame Be Great (67 page)

‘Ha,' he shouted, with a flash of gold teeth. ‘Idiots.'

He, on the other hand, was sure his application would be approved. He had listed the beatings he had received, the harassment he had endured as the cousin of a famous rebel commander, and the difficulties he had faced just living in his homeland.

He took me on a tour of the hostels where Chechens live. At the first one, the atmosphere was tense and no one wanted to talk. The police had been there that morning, and taken eight of the refugees
away in handcuffs. Women stood on the balconies amid the washing lines and looked at me until I went away. It was a bleak place: an old hotel, overshadowed by a factory chimney striped like a rugby player's jersey.

The second hostel was a more welcoming experience. Here men stood around in the sunshine, and they welcomed me into their circle. They too had nothing else to do.

‘My profession is war,' explained one man, who called himself Zaur. ‘I did not even finish school. The war started when I was just fifteen years old. What could I do but defend my homeland?

‘We are military people, it is all we know. If Poland asked us to fight, we would fight for Poland. We would fight for England. We would fight for you like we fight for our own country. We no longer have a country, you see.'

The other men in the group nodded their agreement. They were soldiers without weapons, without a cause and without a country. It was desperately sad. They all had similar stories to tell me, and I could have stayed there in the dust all day, but we had to hurry. Musa had plans. He wanted to show me the office building where Chechens have to file their application requests. It was in central Warsaw, and we had a long drive if we were to make it there before it closed at 2 p.m. We roared away from the group of men with a flamboyant wheel spin in the dirt.

In Poland, Chechens have the chance to receive asylum, which gives them the right to work, to education and to state benefits. If they receive the coveted card, they are also allowed to travel throughout the European Union. More common, however, was the
pobyt tolerowany
, the right to remain in Poland but without state protection. Of applications, about half received this ‘pobyt', as the Chechens called it. They none of them wanted it, but it was better than having your application turned down altogether, in which case you could be deported.

Chechens tended to receive a pobyt, unless they could prove they were a former rebel or somehow discriminated against. Just being a Chechen was not enough. Normally, therefore, they needed to produce media reports that identified them by name, which – in a
war that had had little media coverage – could prove hard. Musa was not worried about that though. He had evidence, he said, of the suffering he had undergone.

Musa told me that the system was slow and bureaucratic, and that the officials were stupid. He decided it would be funny if I impersonated him at the processing centre and took his identity card up to the front desk to ask if there was any change in his condition. After the joke of having me detained earlier in the day, this would be a new way of amusing himself.

I refused to play along, although the photograph was of such bad quality that it could just as well be my face as Musa's on the card. If nothing else, I told him, it might prejudice his application if he played too many games with the authorities in one day.

‘All right,' he said, ‘but you have to stand next to me while I talk to her, so you can hear how rude they are. It won't make any difference anyway, they won't have made a decision yet.'

We arrived just before the centre was due to close, and walked straight to the only open window, where two women sat, one of them filing a tall pile of asylum applications, each with a passport photo clipped to it. They looked weary, and Musa had to speak quite loudly before one of them decided to notice we were there.

She looked up Musa's details in the computer, which took a while. Musa filled in the gap by explaining a new plan he had concocted. Apparently, the guards at the reception centre were less alert after 4 p.m. so I could get in there again, and we could all have a party. The guards might even come along. Before I managed to think up an excuse, the Polish woman broke into his prattle, telling him in her strange, Polish-accented Russian that his application had been refused, and the papers were in the post. That was that.

He could fill in a new form to appeal, and a decision would be due in six weeks, she added before turning back to her screen.

She was not exactly unkind when she said it, but it was clear she had told so many people these same words that all the edges were rubbed off them. She was a study in bureaucratic indifference.

Musa was stunned. ‘If you'd left me in Belgium, I wouldn't need a pobyt or anything,' he snapped.

She kept looking at her computer screen, and did not respond.

I have never seen a man change so quickly. The cocksure, jocular man who had tried to incite me into impersonating him was gone. Suddenly he looked old. His hopes of getting asylum were done. He did not even have the despised pobyt. That would have to wait for the appeal. He had nothing. He was suddenly an illegal alien in Poland, and could be deported at any time.

It was terrible.

‘I thought I'd get a status as a refugee, I really did,' he said, as we sat once more in the car. ‘They give refugees 1,000 zlotys a month, and now I will get nothing. Even if I get this pobyt, they won't give me anything. I think they did this because I went to Belgium. I've lost my mood now, I'm sorry.'

He was rambling. Earlier I had told him the British superstition about how seeing a single magpie was bad luck, and I felt guilty as he brought this up in his disappointment.

‘If only we'd seen a second magpie, I'd have got it,' he said.

When we had driven up to the office building, the stereo had been playing Boney M at full volume – ‘Rasputin' – but now there was just Musa's voice, bitter and broken.

‘I only came here to this centre to show you what it was like. I did not expect an answer. I won't appeal it, what's the point? It's not just in Chechnya or Russia that there's no justice. There's none here either,' he said.

He sat quietly in the car for a while as we waited at the traffic lights and then, when they turned green, he pulled over to the side of the road.

‘I'm sorry, I've lost my mood,' he said. ‘Can you go now? This is the will of the Almighty. Positive, negative, pobyt, it's not down to me to decide. But I've lost my mood. I'm going to drive away. Can you go now?'

I climbed out of the car. He did not even glance at me while I did so. He sat there motionless, and I watched him wait for a gap to pull out into Warsaw's traffic. His grin had vanished, his eyes were bleak and his face was grey. The gap came at last, and he pulled out steadily, without the tyre spins he had delighted in just ten minutes earlier. He
pulled into the outside lane. From his silhouette I could see that his shoulders were still slumped.

He was on his way to the clearing in the forest where he would park his car and sleep that night. And after that? He had said he might go to Turkey. Or perhaps he will try his luck in western Europe again. Whatever he chooses – and I never even found out his surname, so I will never know – it would be even further from what he dreamed of as a boy.

Had he not been a Chechen, I would have called him a broken man.

While I was writing the previous chapter, a headline popped up on the news that Russia had finally ended its war in Chechnya. The anti-terrorist rules imposed there since 1999 had been cancelled, Chechens would be ruled under the same constitution as the rest of the country, and the rebels – if they emerged again – would be dealt with through normal procedures.

The war, in short, was won.

Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya on behalf of Russia, exulted in the news.

‘The nest of terrorism has been crushed, illegal armed groups have been neutralized, and militant leaders on whose conscience lay the grief and suffering of thousands of people have been destroyed, detained and brought to court,' he said, according to one Russian news agency.

Leaving aside the question of whether Kadyrov, who was barely literate when I first met him in 2003, could actually construct such a complicated sentence, the fact was impressive. He took over from his father, the mufti Akhmad Kadyrov, who disliked the Wahhabi fighters so strongly as to side with Russia, when his father died in a bombing in 2004.

Since then, he has established a brutally personal form of government that has little in common with the liberal values that still underpin Russia's constitution. Rivals to his rule have been brushed aside. The Yamadayev clan, for example, which allied with his father in helping the Russians in 1999 but became a rival for power, has been sidelined. Two of the brothers were assassinated in unsolved killings within six months of each other in 2008 and 2009. Their surviving brother blamed Kadyrov, but he denied involvement.

A week after the announcement that the war was over, as if the rebels wished to put their hands up and point out that they still
existed, they killed three Russian soldiers. So much for the war being over.

In truth, though, the legal changes would have made almost no difference on the ground anyway. The violence in Chechnya has spread to Ingushetia and Dagestan. Policemen, civilians and soldiers will continue to die sporadically for the foreseeable future. The war may have lost its intensity, but it has spread out and it will take years to vanish altogether.

Still, be that as it may, the Russians are right. There is no doubt that militarily speaking they have won. Kadyrov, a man professing loyalty to Moscow, is in charge. The rebels are marginalized and hunted. The most energetic opponents of Russian rule are almost all dead, and more of those who are not are in exile in Europe or elsewhere.

I have to admit though that the Russian announcement made me smile. Just a few weeks before it was made, I had been sitting and chatting with an exiled former rebel leader – he does not like to be identified, to protect himself from retaliation – who made completely the opposite point.

‘Chechens have effectively won independence,' he said.

‘Now the Russians have almost no influence in Chechnya. I remember a period when I could not speak in Chechen in the bus. We were slapped for this, and now day after day you don't hear a Russian speaking in Chechnya ... I remember the speeches of the Russians. “This is Russian land, this is our land. If they want to build a state, let them build it somewhere else, this is our city, it was us who built it.” This is what the Russians said. And now, let them try. In Kadyrov's Chechnya, let some Russian say it is Russian land.'

I was surprised by his apparent endorsement of Kadyrov, whom he considered a traitor, and surprised still further when he told me he would no longer encourage young Chechens to ‘go into the mountains' and join the groups resisting Moscow's rule.

He was still a firm believer in his people's cause, he told me, and did not regret having spent much of his adult life fighting the Russians. On the contrary, he exulted in it. But now was the time to sit tight and repair their damaged society. The Russians who once
dominated Grozny have left, so the Chechens have the space to rebuild their country in their own way.

‘We have won, the people won. There is no need for this any more,' he said.

So, who is right? Who has won? The Chechens, as the rebel leader with his fierce eyes and dark beard told me, or the Russians, as the Kremlin had insisted?

Perhaps they are both right. If both sides of a war have won, then both sides have lost, and that seems far more important than crowing about victory. Just as the Russians have won militarily, there can be no doubt that they have lost in every other way. The former rebel commander was right. The last time I was in Grozny I did not see a single Russian out of uniform. Young people on the street barely spoke the state's language, and my cosmopolitan Chechen friends, educated in the Soviet Union, despaired of the uneducated generation growing up.

The city, which had been so shattered on my earlier visits, had been tidied up and rebuilt. New façades made old buildings look new, and new shops and parks gave Grozny a pleasant air. A new and handsome mosque with minarets and extensive gardens laid out in the middle of town added a suitably Middle Eastern look, only added to by the portraits of Kadyrov on every lamp post and major building. These could have been posters celebrating an Arab dictator.

Kadyrov, though he pays lip service to the Kremlin, has a style of government far removed from the nominal democracy in Russia proper. He has imposed elements of sharia law just like the rebel government before him. I was in Grozny in Ramadan, and alcohol was – for people without connections – impossible to find. Gambling had been banned, and women working for the government had to wear headscarves.

The Russians who lived in Grozny before 1994, the Russians who sheltered with Yashurkayev and his dog Barsik when the bombs rained down, are gone. They live to the north now, in the heartland of the Russian state. The peripheries have been reclaimed by the nations – the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis – that the Russians tried so hard to displace.

And without ethnic Russians on the ground, the influence of the central government has slipped. In a farcical series of events in February 2009, Moscow tried to impose a new head of the government's tax department in Dagestan. His candidature was unacceptable to the locals because, quite simply, he was a Russian.

Mass protests followed his appointment, and when he arrived in Dagestan in spite of the popular opposition, he was kidnapped and threatened with murder. Not surprisingly, he decided not to take up the post. This is hardly the iron hand that the Kremlin is supposed to wield.