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KHAZBULLAT KHAZBULLATOV, self-styled leader of Dagestan’s
Muslims, was waiting for us at the door of his house in Gubden, the
mountain village we had been told—no, warned—was the most religious
village in the country. Khazbullatov looks something like a French
professional Rugby player: fair, stocky, about 35, with a cropped
greying beard. That day he was wearing a white nylon shirt, blue track
suit trousers and the kind of skullcap favoured by the Meskhetian
Turks—a grey felt hemisphere quartered with red embroidery. Also he
didn’t look pleased.
“You are late.” He speaks tolerable Russian.
“We agreed after three o’clock.”
“It is now four-thirty.”
I apologized. Filming is notoriously a fight against time. He said:“It may be too late.”
“I’m really sorry. Too late for what exactly?” I still wasn’t sure
what it was that we had driven so far to film. Only that we were
promised “something for the BBC.”
We went inside the house to discuss plans: into Khazbullatov’s large, mediævally furnished room. Just a few Caucasian rugs looking lost on a great expanse of bare floor, their modest glow crushed by the visual weight of the geometrical designs stencilled in red, brown and black all over the ceilings and walls. The effect not Islamic, more ancient greek; not unattractive, but needing real strength of character to live with. An open staircase of painted wood in the corner. A poster of Mecca with a calendar on one wall; a radio buried in papers on a table; weight training equipment on the floor. One sofa. We all took our shoes off.
We had met in this room last December, when I came with only my Moscow researcher Yelena, looking for the authentic voice of back-to-basics Islamic scripturalism, for that contemporary folk-devil, the Militant Islamic fundamentalist.
Khazbullatov had been very nervous at first, thinking we might be
from the security police, but then he relaxed and became rather
excited.
“We have absolutely no intention of seizing power. Look at the film of
the demonstration in Lenin square last June. Five to six thousand
Muslims spent eleven days peacefully occupying the square. Dagestan
television has footage of all this. You must get it and show it in the
West. We were in the square for eleven days and did nothing. But the
footage is now being used against me in the investigation.”
He had been arrested once already and thought he might be in prison
by the time we came back to film him.
“Just because unfortunately in the heat of the moment, I said in a
speech, on only one single occasion, that the former Communists who so
oppressed us should all be hanged. Now I am being charged under article
79 of the criminal code.”
In the middle of all which, a boy had appeared—unannounced and
unremarked—to serve us khinkal—the macho national dish of
boiled flour and meat on the bone, the sort of thing one imagines
Homer’s heroes tucking in to.
“I was arrested on the 5th July in Moscow. I had tried to get in
to see Yeltsin to get help for Dagestan people wanting to go on Hajj. I was taken to Lefortovo prison. But I was not ill-treated.
Unfortunately Muslims are not like democrats. They can always go to
America for help. We must turn to Allah.” He made it sound as if Allah
was less than a match for President Bush.
Khazbullatov’s charm had captured even Yelena, whose Muscovite sensibilities generally found Caucasians barbaric. “A savage,” she had pronounced, “but an intelligent savage.”
This time, with a camera crew in train, there was no time for food. Khazbullatov would still say nothing about what he had arranged for our filming, only that it was some distance from Gubden so we must start immediately. He himself was not coming with us. Instead, he despatched the boy, his fourteen year old nephew, as our guide. The boy chose not to ride in the Volga, the bigger and marginally more comfortable of our two cars, but in the Moskvitch. I joined him with Josef the Czech cameraman and his Russian sound recordist. Our Dagestan consultant Magomedkhan drove.
Gubden is built on the slopes of a hill, its twisting lanes and alleys climbing between the houses up to a large new Friday mosque overlooking the village. The buildings are of stone or concrete blocks, with weather-beaten wooden superstructures often pierced, fretworked and painted in simple but striking geometric designs. The population is Dargin, one of the many nationalities—Lak, Avar, Lezgi, Mountain Jew, Ginukh, Archi and twenty-six more—each complete with its own language and its own traditions, who share small mountainous Dagestan. They look like western Europeans. One would think that the girls in floral print dresses, carrying water from well to house in long-necked amphora-shaped brass ewers, were Western tourists in a pre-classical theme park, but for the kerchiefs with which they cover their heads in the presence of strange men.
As we drove out of the village, the afternoon prayer was being called: thirty muezzins from the thirty small village mosques, the number multiplied by echoes from the surrounding slopes to make so complex a counterpoint that the message could barely be distinguished.“Come to prayer. Come to prayer. Come to salvation. Come to salvation.” Every villager stopped, some turning towards Mecca with their hands cupped in the Muslim gesture of prayer, others standing still at the roadside with downcast eyes, like a spiritual guard of honour lining our route back up into the mountains.
After about five kilometres of snaking hairpin bends, our Moskvitch suddenly started thumping on the road even more than usual and then limped to a halt. Magomedkhan opened his door and leaned out, as always, without using the handbrake—a relic of the horse-and-cart tradition perhaps. He look back at the rear wheel. “Puncture,” he said and we all stepped down. It was hot in the June sun, but the silence and bird song was refreshing. Magomedkhan opened the boot to get out the spare wheel; its tyre was also flat; he attacked it with a rusty stirrup pump.
Eventually even he was forced to admit defeat. The spare tyre was letting air out as fast as he could pump it in. We tried not to look reproachful. Khazbullatov’s nephew disappeared up the road. Meanwhile Josef and I filmed a few shots of the magnificent alpine landscape.
These are the north-eastern slopes of the Caucasus mountains, slashing diagonally, top left to bottom right, across the isthmus between the Black and the Caspian seas. From these deep picturesque valleys, lush green scored by white limestone rockfalls, Nadir Shah the Persian was sent packing in the eighteenth century, and Imam Shamyl, the authentic Muslim warrior-saint, resisted Russian imperialism for two decades of the nineteenth—while corresponding amiably with Queen Victoria. From these villages come men who prize male honour over everything, love fighting, distrust all authority, and boast that still today they are prepared to die in loyalty to their family and clan.
Here, in the teeth of history, photographs of Stalin are still
displayed with respect—in buses, cars and village houses. Stalin’s
edict as Commissar for Nationalities on the 13th November 1920 is still
wryly remembered:
“Those of you who have four wives, count yourselves lucky. From now on
the rule is—one only.”
After about half an hour Khazbullatov’s nephew returned—in a green car. Josef the cameraman, the sound recordist and I were told to get in, and we immediately drove off, leaving the others standing. It seemed we were in a hurry.
Another five kilometres or so, and we stopped again. The driver, not a Russian speaker, gestured for us to get out. One side of the road a was an almost vertical cliff, the other dropped away precipitously. Quite unexpectedly, half a dozen young men and boys materialized from the mountainside, picked up the filming equipment—one the tripod, another the lens box, yet another the battery light—and led the way at a run down the almost sheer slope towards the river coursing through the valley below. The crew and I followed: stumbling, slipping, and sometimes —I confess—sitting and sliding on my bum.
Ten breathless minutes later we reached white water. The narrow trunk of a birch tree had been laid from bank to bank and the boys were scrambling across with the equipment, balancing themselves with the help of a branch stuck upright into the river bed. I looked at the makeshift crossing, not sure it would stand my weight. I watched the young man in front run nonchalantly over, convinced I would end in the river. But pride won over prejudice. I stood on the thing, felt it give under my weight, gritted my teeth and walked. To my surprise, I found myself, still dry shod, on the other side.
Then the long struggle up the slope... then down... then up again,
the road and the green car left far behind and far below. The Dagestan
Caucasus is perfect guerrilla terrain—almost impassable to the
stranger. I remembered the words of the Head of Sociology at the
Academy of Sciences:
“In a land like ours, Imam Shamyl should really have won against the
Russians, as the Afghans did further east. If he had learned from the
Europeans other things than just how to make cannon, he would have been
unconquerable. He never understood or valued the democratic ideas of
his own people. He never understood the ethnic differences in his own
country, but tried to impose his own values on everybody. He had to
spend as much time conquering his own villages as fighting the
Russians. That’s the reason why he got beaten.”
In the end, Shamyl’s men were driven to improvising cannon out of wood—with deadly results to the gunners.
At last, with the final breath, the final ridge. We looked out over
a flat, grassy, secluded hanging valley with a partly derelict farm
house and, in front of it, a rudimentary assault course. A group of
men, most wearing track suits and white Islamic skullcaps, stood by
what looked like a set of goal posts with climbing ropes hanging from a
cross bar. They were watching us arrive. One detached himself and came
forward. He was short, fat, elderly and officious.
“Are you the BBC?”
“From the BBC, yes.”
“You have come to film us?”
“What is there to film?”
“We are the Dagestan Mujahedin.”
At last we had found them: the Islamic resistance movement of
Dagestan in the flesh.
But these were no ordinary fighters. These were
a veritable Dad’s Mujahedin, immediately bringing to mind the comic chatacters
of “Dad’s Army”, the long-running BBC series about the war-time
Home Guard, an unikely volunteer force of military rejects, whose task was to defend the British Isles
in the event of a Nazi invasion. Dad’s Mojahedin all looked either over sixty or under
sixteen. And sure enough, on closer inspection, I recognized familiar
characters: a greasy, gangly, ingratiating Sgt Wilson, a Dagestanian Pte Godfrey, eighty if he was a day,
mooning around talking to himself, while picking stones up off the
grass and putting them in his pocket. Even Cpl Jones the butcher, much given to absurd attacks of panic
panic was present and correct. And the spokesman was pompous, porcine Captain Mainwaring to the
life.
“Do you believe in God?” he barked at us.
I considered my vague and wimpish Western theology and decided it might
just about pass muster. “Yes.”
But Josef the Czech cameraman was standing dumbstruck, his eyes bulging, his mouth open. Until little more than two years ago, the wrong answer to that question could have cost him his job, his liberty, even possibly his life. But the wrong answer then was the right answer now. It took some getting used to.
Sgt Wilson was wringing his hands in apology. “I am so sorry,”
he said. “Do forgive us. You mustn’t mind. My friend had no right to
ask you that.”
Captain Mainwaring turned to him and snapped something in Dargin, but
the meaning was plain: “Shut up, Wilson.” Then to me: “Here we
follow the example of Imam Shamyl. This is a training camp for Muslim
youth. Only if you believe in God are you welcome here.”
“Religious training?” I asked.
“In a way.”
The Dagestanian Cpl Jones bustled up. “We train them to kill
Communists.”
“What Communists. Where?”
“I don’t know. But if any do turn up here, we’ll kill them.”
I asked: “Where are your weapons?”
“Here, here are our weapons,” said Captain Mainwaring and pointed to
his heart.
They would let us film nothing but their prayers. Having come so
far, I was for making the best of it and taking a few shots of the
group picturesquely dwarfed by their mountains. But Josef was suddenly
angry. The talk of killing Communists had upset him.
“Was that what the freedom struggle was all about? Just to start
killing again?”
“It’s a joke,” I said. “They haven’t got any weapons.”
“That’s easily remedied. Here on the black market a Makarov pistol
costs 3,000 Roubles, a Kalashnikov 150,000, and a heavy machine gun
700,000. You can even buy tanks.”
“But they’re nothing but foolish old men, Josef. They aren’t capable
of killing.”
The Mujahedin spread rugs on the grass and squatted down in rows.
Josef picked up the camera and moved into position for the first take.
“They will recruit fighters. They will buy weapons. What matters is
that the first step has been taken.”
And he began a long panning shot that swept the valley and ended on the tight little group of old men and boys saying their prayers in the mountain sunset.