10 August 2000
Magomet Tsaroyev sits on a chair opposite me, his face quite still, like someone who has made a final decision. He gives a welcoming smile and repeats: "I don't want to work or to study."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Track them down and hang them, one by one."
"With your own hands?"
"Of course, that's the only way."
To anyone who doesn't know him, Magomet is a normal, modest youth. He is so like the rest that you don't notice him. Nothing would catch your eye if you passed him in the street.
Q. What's the matter with the courts? Don't you trust the police?
A. Not at all. I trust them, and they are now looking for this gang. Two are already in prison. But that changes nothing. Whatever happens, I must be the one to hang them.
[Every time he says "I" there is a particular emphasis, AP.]
Q. But why?
A. Because they'll have a soft time of it in prison. They'll never go through what I felt when they held me captive.
Q. And you want them to experience that?
A. That's all I want.
Q. What will you do then, after you've hanged them?
A. I'll live like everyone else. Like I used to, before.
Officially Magomet is only 16, but he has the eyes of a man of 40, as though a crippled older man has taken possession of him. He does not go to the cinema or the disco, he doesn't want to. For days on end he sits in a locked Moscow flat belonging to someone else; his mother found it in the hope of saving her son from the vengeful spirit that has possessed him. Rosa Tsaroyev secretly took Magomet away from Nazran in January after he caused a fight there: Magomet went out on the street and viciously beat up the first Chechen he met.
However, their hurried departure for Moscow, where the majority of the population hate Chechens just as much as Magomet, did not change anything substantial in his way of life. Whatever he talks about or describes, all his words radiate such a colossal hatred towards the individual CHECHEN that it makes you uneasy: just supposing he went out now, and the first person he met was a Chechen woman with a child . . .
No one would be there in time to restrain this young Ingush, Magomet Tsaroyev, whose family once owned homes in Grozny and Nazran. Everything was fine then and he liked strolling around the Chechen capital. His sister married a wonderful Chechen from a mountain village.
And then the catastrophe happened.
During the summer holidays in 1998, Magomet, a 14-year-old schoolboy, set off for Chechnya from Nazran. After the first war his parents had moved to Nazran, their shop was doing very well and the new house was already half built.
Actually, Magomet also had a purpose in going to Grozny. Like many another Vainakh66 youngster he had been invited to train at Khattab's camp near Serzhen-Yurt.
He spent two weeks there. He learned how to handle an automatic weapon, became familiar with a mortar – and then was given a short break before the next course of training, in sabotage and subversion. He did not go back to Nazran from Serzhen-Yurt, but to Grozny, invited by a friend who was also attending Khattab's "pioneer camp".
One evening he was watching an action movie at home. When it was quite dark his friend said: "Go to the store round the corner for some bread, I'm starving." When Magomet entered the building again four young men were waiting for him. Today Magomet comments: "So Khattab's people were even kidnapping their own. The only important thing was whether your family was rich. Nothing else mattered. I was set up: he told the gangsters about my parents' financial situation – my best friend at the camp!"
Then the car into which he was bundled drove into a courtyard and the boy was squeezed into a low basement cellar where he could only sit or half lie down. Life came to a halt.
During the daytime they beat Magomet, they tore his fingernails, slashed him with knives and burnt his body and, most important of all, demanded that he tell them how to put pressure on his mother "who didn't want to pay". At night he could not sleep for the hallucinations that hunger induced.
"They tormented and starved me. Starved me and tortured me. Nothing else happened," says Magomet.
Things were no easier for Rosa. The kidnappers, in contact with the family through intermediaries, demanded $1 million. The Tsaroyevs reported this everywhere: they told the prosecutor's office in Ingushetia, the organised crime squad, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the republic's branch of the FSB. It was no good. There were a great many promises but hardly any action. Meanwhile, time passed and the gangsters' demands over the telephone became harsher and more relentless.
Realising that they would never raise $1 million, Rosa, who had six other children, tried twice to commit suicide. All this time the thugs were living somewhere very close. They knew everything that happened and when Rosa was brought round the second time they kindly reduced the pay-off to $200,000.
She rushed off to Chechnya. Several times she spoke on the main Grozny TV channel and pleaded: "Give me back my son." She walked through the towns and villages and met everyone who worked in the republic's new Sharia Security Service.67 Finally, it was they who told her: "You have two choices. Either you give us money to conduct an investigation or you buy up another gang yourself. They'll free your son from his kidnappers and it'll cost far fewer dollars than the ransom they've set."
That was how the family lost their home, the dream home they'd been building in Nazran. It went for $17,000. They also sold off their car. The younger children went to live with relatives. None of the children were allowed out to school because the Tsaroyevs now lived in a world of constant threats: "If you don't pay tomorrow, we'll kill the little boy/girl." Rosa's husband could not stand the strain and had a heart attack followed by a stroke. Later he even began to show signs of TB.
Rosa herself tried to keep going. She travelled back and forth between Nazran and Grozny, taking whatever money she acquired in instalments. The senior investigator of the Chechen Sharia Security Service, Ruslan Akhmatov, alone received $11,000 from Rosa "for conducting the investigation". Another $5,000 went to one of Maskhadov's bodyguards who was pointed out to her as being very influential in those same gangster circles.
Everyone who took her money, of course, swore that any day now Magomet would reappear in Grozny. Rosa gathered up the younger children, and took them with her to Grozny, where, with the remaining money, she rented an apartment in the Zavodskoi district and hired bodyguards for the children on the advice of figures in the Sharia Security Service. She waited.
I ask her why she had to move back to Grozny.
"So that my son would find me more quickly when he was released," she says.
The "investigators" (there is now no doubt that they were in direct contact with the kidnappers) made a show of taking Rosa to basements from which Magomet had supposedly only just been removed ("We've missed them!"). In her presence they enacted negotiations and bargaining. For as long as the trusting Rosa's money lasted, they kept up this appearance of strenuous activity.
Later it became clear that they themselves owned the cellars where they kept their own hostages, one of whom was Magomet.
When all the dollars were finished, her bodyguards withdrew, and they stopped taking Rosa out on such tours. She began to realise that they were leading her by the nose. Then in January 1999 there was an announcement one evening on Chechen TV that the body of a teenager had been found at the Central Market. All interested parties were requested to go to Hospital No 9 to identify the corpse. Rosa remembered nothing for four months.
"Suddenly I saw it all quite clearly: since I had no more money to give them, they'd return a dead body to me."
Yet it was not Magomet but another boy-hostage, whose parents had been unable to reach agreement with the kidnappers. Meanwhile, Magomet's conditions of captivity "improved". When Rosa lost her memory, his jailers even began to feed her son frankfurters. Perhaps, in their own way, they felt sorry for him. They certainly realised that there was no more money to be had and his mother had nothing left to sell.
It soon became obvious what was going on. They were trying to get Magomet off their hands, and feeding him up to ensure a good sale.
One interesting detail of the hostage-taking business. The very day Rosa lost her memory, Magomet was told what had happened to her. It was clear that those "looking" for him and those holding him captive were all part of the same gang.
In April 1999 a much-weakened Magomet was driven to Argun. The hardest period of his captivity, when he was held in a basement for five months and three days, was over. During that time he had been bought and sold four times and among his "owners" he saw many famous Chechens.
In Argun he was kept in a five-storey apartment block where the new gang owned several flats. From time to time Magomet was moved from the ground floor to the fourth floor and back. Occasionally he was allowed to walk around the room; his legs grew accustomed to walking again.
It was a sign that this gang were less tough and would demand less money that Magomet had only two guards, one of whom, moreover, liked to drink. This was the saving of the young Ingush. On 11 June one guard drank more than usual and the other said he was going to get some bread. Magomet realised this was his chance. He waited for the drunken man to fall asleep and jumped out of the window. He was helped to hide from the pursuit – they drove around in jeeps, firing their automatic weapons into all the surrounding bushes – by Isa, a young lad from Argun. He led Magomet to an abandoned construction shed and passed a note to his relatives. Soon they took him back to Nazran. His eleven months as a hostage had ended.
Now the mental torment took over.
Rosa put her son in hospital. His sight and hearing were poor and he had difficulty walking. For day after day, not trusting anyone else, she massaged his atrophied muscles, gave him herbal remedies to drink, and tried to distract him from his terrible memories.
By the onset of winter Magomet was back on his feet again. He played with his younger brothers and sisters, and walked about the apartment that Rosa had rented in Karabulak. She thought her son would now plunge hungrily back into his former life. Nothing of the kind. Magomet became more and more withdrawn. He felt worse, not better. In the meantime the family had been traced and the frightful notes began again. It was clear that Magomet's life still hung by a thread and that the gangsters would not leave the fugitive in peace – he had damaged their reputation by running away.
Once again the younger children were locked into their apartment (none of them had been to school now for two years!). Rosa used every ruse she could think of to raise money. But their life was hell, whatever she did. Realising what the gangsters were still doing to his family, Magomet told Rosa: "I'm telling you, I shall punish my tormentors. Both the guards and the kidnappers. I'm also going to find those who took all our money and did nothing. I shall make them give it back. I hate all Chechens. I shall kill them."
The first day he went out in Karabulak proved he meant what he said. It was then that he beat up the first Chechen he met.
Rosa wasted no time. She grabbed Magomet and brought him to Moscow, to save him. As a last resort she appealed to the Main Department for Combating Organised Crime and they understood her plight. The only people today who are really helping Rosa and Magomet are two officers from that department. For as long as they could, they kept mother and son at the police hotel and gave them money. Most important of all, they began to treat the xenophobia with which the young Ingush had become infected.
They are the only ones trying to return Magomet to a normal existence. They constantly talk to him, to instil in him those basic truths that he lost on his way back from captivity and to prove to him the elementary fact that not all Chechens are to blame for his misfortune. Two officers from the organised crime squad, and no one else. Two votes in the whole country for a genuine war against the gangsters.
Of course, psychotherapy does not form part of their duties; their job is to catch criminals. Who else, however, understands the reality of the situation? Another hostage is released and the whole country sees him on television; everyone applauds and celebrates the defeat of another gang, leaving the hostage alone with his broken soul. No one needs him and no one cares what happens to him now. The country is defiled by hostage taking and despite the war this profitable business goes on. There is, meanwhile, no service to rehabilitate the unlucky victims and return them to a normal life.
Yet no matter how hard these two officers try, it is difficult to imagine a worse situation than that of Magomet today. His family has nothing left to live on. Often Rosa and Magomet spend the night begging at train stations. Rosa has spent more than two years on the brink of a nervous collapse, she is homeless and sick, and she has left her younger children in the care of strangers in order to save her eldest son. She grasps at any straw, and often these hopes of salvation exist only in her imagination. Today she is convinced that she must get $600 somewhere. Then she could fly to Syria where very rich relatives of the Tsaroyev family live. They would certainly give several thousand dollars. She'll return to Moscow, buy a flat (but tell no one the address), bring all her children there and at last they'll be able to go to school. Magomet will come to life again and begin to work or study. Rosa is convinced their only chance is to never go back to the North Caucasus, and avoid living anywhere there are many Chechens.
And then? They'll try to blend in with the Moscow population. "We won't react when we hear Ingush or Chechen spoken," says Rosa. "We'll try to forget that we are Vainakh." Magomet nods in agreement.
A new happy life will begin? "Yes, and we shall gradually forget the nightmare that started in the autumn of 1998," she asserts. "All I need is $600, but where am I going to get it?"
MOSCOW