UK Press Features
Why cast me as a criminal?
The Times – January 31, 2003
Chechen freedom fighter Akhmed Zakayev was once the only separatist Moscow would negotiate with. Today he is in London, Fighting extradition on terrorism charges.
AT FIRST, the scene looks as beguilingly wistful as a Chekhov play. Vanessa Redgrave flits around her kitchen, passing around steaming teacups and murmuring in broken Russian. Her guest, a tall man with a touch of silver in his beard, is reminiscing about why he is in exile from the homeland he loves. But it doesn’t seem like Chekhov for long. The story that this man is caught up in is far less refined, a blood-drenched drama with hundreds of corpses. And the script, written by Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, says he killed them all.
By training, Akhmed Zakayev, like his hostess, is a classical actor. But life has given him a very different role. Today he is the only representative in the West of the President of Chechnya, whose people have been trying to throw the Russian Army out of their homeland for nearly a decade.
And Russia is out to get him. Suddenly, almost a year after he came to live in Britain, as Redgrave’s guest, to plead the cause of Muslim Chechens to Western politicians, Moscow has started demanding that this country throw him out. He has been accused of being an international terrorist and mass murderer — the Russian Foreign Minister has made him out to be Moscow’s equivalent of Osama bin Laden.
He was arrested in Copenhagen last autumn, and it is only because Redgrave stepped in when he got back to London, and put up £50,000 in bail, that Zakayev is at liberty today. If an extradition hearing — due to start today — goes Moscow’s way, he could be dispatched to undergo what Russia says will be a terrorism trial, but which Zakayev fears would be torture and death.
All this is only the latest abrupt transformation for a man of 43 who, during the fear-filled years of war, has gone from actor to culture minister to separatist fighter to field commander. When I first saw him, in 1996, he was still a field commander: a broad-shouldered, dignified man dressed in camouflage gear and a green headband. The sight of him on television in Moscow always reduced my Chechen actor friends to hysterical laughter — his metamorphosis was akin to Kenneth Branagh suddenly throwing away his greasepaint and living by the gun. “It’s crazy: he’s the last person you can imagine going into battle. He’s one of us: an educated intellectual,” they would howl, wiping tears from their eyes.
Zakayev’s last metamorphosis but one turned him into the high-profile good guy of Chechen affairs — the moderate right-hand man of the beleaguered President, Aslan Maskhadov, and the only separatist with whom Moscow would negotiate. So it came as a “complete surprise”, he says, to find that he had been recast as the bad guy.
Still, the man sitting across the table from me now, reaching for a pack of cigarettes and revealing the one note of colour in his sombre outfit — a signet ring enamelled in Chechnya’s national colours of green, white and gold — is not too downcast. “Moscow has made a lot of random accusations against me, and is obviously hoping to drag this case out for years to prevent me from doing my job of making friends for Chechnya in the West,” Zakayev says, sparking up and grinning mischievously.
“ But I’m optimistic. I think that I’ll get a fair hearing in Britain. I think that this is a country where the law counts for more than emotion. “ In a way, the Russian prosecutor’s office is actually doing us a favour. This court case is the chance we’ve wanted for years to show the world what the Chechen-Russian conflict is about, and get an independent legal opinion on it. It’s our big opportunity for a public hearing on our cause.”
Russia has put together a damning charge sheet. It accuses Zakayev of being behind the siege of a Moscow theatre by young Chechen suicide bombers last autumn. It alleges that he has killed 300 Russian policemen. It blames him for kidnapping and murdering two Orthodox priests. But most of the charges have turned out to be nonsense — most embarrassingly for Moscow, one of the “ dead” priests is alive and talking to the Russian press.
The implausible accusation that Zakayev somehow, from three time zones away, masterminded the theatre siege — which ended in tragedy after the Russian authorities ordered the theatre to be filled with gas, killing many of the 750 hostages along with all of their captors — has also been quietly dropped.
All that leaves is the killing of 300 Russian policemen during the war. And that just makes Zakayev look baffled. There has been enormous loss of life on both sides in a war waged largely across forlorn urban housing estates. Zakayev’s men took life at his command, he admits; after all, their wartime job was to fight Russian troops: “That’s no secret, and they’ve known it perfectly well for all the years they’ve been asking for me as a negotiator. It was never a problem before.”
So why is Moscow hunting down the one Chechen whom it used to treat with respect? And what does the way this case is being put together reveal about how Russia conducts the rest of its war, far from Western eyes, in a remote corner from which it has banned visitors? This has always been a conflict in which reality is kept backstage and illusion presented for public view. Russia has never admitted officially that the fighting is about stopping separatism and forcing the Chechens back under Moscow’s rule. Instead, its line is that its troops are stopping a crimewave spreading out of Chechnya into the rest of Russia, and it always refers to the separatists as “armed gangs” and “bandits” to make the point that they are no more than criminals.
From the moment that the first 100,000-man army was dispatched south, Moscow has been economical with the truth about its motives. Official press releases throughout that first day insisted that the army was going into Chechnya to hand out food aid, and gave detailed lists of the number of bags of flour and pork sausages on offer.
But since September 11, 2001, Russia has been claiming that the war in Chechnya is about containing Islamic fundamentalism in its own little Muslim hotspot. These days, Russian propaganda officials are always reporting that they have arrested Chechen separatists with maps of the World Trade Centre in their pockets, with Arabic words and pictures of aircraft scrawled over them in red pen. In case listeners don’t get the message, press conference after press conference is told that the Chechens are the creatures of al-Qaeda.
The hawkish Putin, who came to power in 1999 on a promise to “flush the Chechens down the crapper”, now claims the same rights as America to crush the enemies whom he says threaten his country’s security. The quid pro quo of Russia’s support for the post-September 11 War on Terror is that the West gives him carte blanche to finish off the Chechen rebellion by force.
Zakayev has no time for al-Qaeda talk. “If the world were having problems with Martians, the Russians would say the Martians had links to the Chechens.”
Zakayev thinks that his real crime is giving the West a rare image of Chechen moderation. “It doesn’t suit the Kremlin to have me around, when it is so determined on war. My presence here means that every day there are more people who understand how hopeless it is to go on fighting, at a time when even in Russia some politicians have started calling on the President to stop the killing. And that’s why the Russian prosecutor’s office has decided to neutralise me — politically, and perhaps physically.”
Even if labelling him a criminal does not result in him being deported, the fact that he is involved in a criminal case will make it almost impossible for him to obtain visas to continue travelling. A plan to visit Washington, for example, is on hold.
Whether Washington would be sympathetic to Zakayev is, in any case, doubtful. All that most people know about the Chechens is the atrocities they have committed: six workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross butchered in their beds at a hospital in Chechnya in 1996; four telecoms engineers working for a British company beheaded in 1998, their
headless corpses left by the roadside. And the televised images of last autumn’s theatre siege will take a long time to fade.
Zakayev has explanations, even if they take some swallowing. The kidnappings and killings, he admits, were carried out by Chechens — but he claims that they were sponsored by huge payments from the Russian successor bodies to the KGB.
“ Even when the Russian Army withdrew, we were still fighting the Russian special services, and they turned out to be much stronger, more experienced and better equipped than us,” he says. “They dared to do things that were a nightmare for us, and discredited the Chechen leadership in the eyes of the world, making it seem that we were incapable of governing.”
Zakayev is on surer ground when he says that the suicide bombings are the tragic response of individual young people who have grown up knowing nothing but war, and who have been driven to desperation by the relentless Russian atrocities that are never reported in the Russian press.
“ There wasn’t a single suicide attack in the first part of the war. It wasn’t in our national mindset. It simply never happened. That it happens now is a great sorrow and problem for the Chechens, and the Russians, too,” he says. “But, unfortunately, these people make their decisions for themselves. They don’t come to our headquarters and get orders.”
It is unlikely that there will ever be conclusive proof either way on any of these questions.What we can say with certainty is that the history of Russian and Chechen mutual hostility goes back much farther than the current war. There is a hint of racism in it (Russians call the Mediterranean-looking Chechens “darkies”) and an element of the ancient religious suspicion between Christian and Muslim.
It first surfaced during the long wars of the 19th century, when the Tsars were trying to bring the mountain peoples of the south under their rule. Tolstoy wrote about Chechen villagers then finding their homes burnt by Russian troops: “No one spoke of hatred for the Russians. The feeling they experienced was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”
Meanwhile, elderly people in Chechnya today still remember being rounded up at gunpoint when Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to the frozen steppes of Central Asia in 1944 (his excuse was that they had been fraternising with the Nazis, even though the advancing Nazis had not reached Chechen territory). Zakayev is of the generation born in that 13-year exile or just afterwards, who remember being brought up under the strictest Moscow rule when they were finally allowed back to Chechnya.
“ We weren’t allowed to talk Chechen, even among ourselves,” he says now, his voice tinged with bitterness. “If they caught us talking our own language, in our own homes, the Russians would start telling us off, and they never said ‘don’t talk Chechen’ — just ‘talk human’.”
The Chechens declared independence in 1991, after a failed coup attempt in Moscow by hardliners wanting to bring back old-style communism brought down the Soviet Union. The immediate reason for their rush towards freedom was the rumour, which spread panic through their towns, that the coup plotters had wanted to show their power by sending the Chechens into exile again. The modern war has been marked by massive human-rights abuses against Chechen civilians, and massacres. But the only human-rights court case — against a Russian colonel who admitted dragging a Chechen teenager from her bed, then raping and stabbing her — has been quietly dropped.
Zakayev’s younger brother was killed early in the war. His wife is with him in London, as is one of their four grandchildren, but the rest of the family ekes out a precarious existence in the refugee camps on Chechnya’s southern border with Georgia.
What Zakayev and his separatist colleagues want is a Kosovo-type solution: international supervision of a peace settlement by foreign observers who, they hope, would at least keep them safe.
If the extradition case in London against Zakayev sheds some public light on the reality of one murky conflict, and encourages more politicians in the West to think about taking the heat out of it with an internationally monitored settlement, Russia’s inept casting of Zakayev as a villain could end up doing some good after all.
ENDS