M.L. last saw her 11-year old son Jean-Majjis on 12 January 2003 in a St Petersburg hospital, where he had been taken with severe frostbite to his hands and face. Police had pushed him out of a car into the road, from where he was rescued by a passer-by.
In hospital that day, Jean-Majjis was recovering and eager to get home, but unwilling to talk much about what had happened to him, beyond the fact that the police had seized him as he was walking to a school party and that he had lost the present he had been carrying in the scuffle.
The doctors assured M.L. that he would be fine. But when she went to collect him two days later, she was told that he had been moved to the childrens wing of a psychiatric hospital, with severe mental disturbance. She hastened to the hospital, but was forcibly prevented from seeing him.
M.L., a geologist by training with a masters degree from Azerbaijan University, had been having problems and confrontations with the Russian police for many months. For almost a year, she had been involved with a group of campaigners protesting against the war in Chechnya, and what the Russians were doing to Chechen refugees.
She had already been obliged to flee her home town in Azerbaijan because of death threats against her Chechen second husband, Salimov, and her work with Armenian refugees. Her first husband, Jean-Majjiss father, was a Congolese. He had been killed in a bomb attack when he returned to Brazzaville after completing his studies in Azerbaijan.
Jean-Majjis had endured many racist attacks as a small boy. So we moved to St Petersburg, M.L. explains, because it had the reputation of being the most liberal city in Russia. But even there I was harassed by police. My office was ransacked and my computer and files confiscated. They beat me up and I had to go to hospital with concussion and severe bruising. Then they came back and this time they broke my ribs and dislocated my shoulder.
On 19 September 2003, M.L. was admitted to hospital with depression. Soon after she was released, Salimov was arrested and charged with spying, a frightening reminder of the brutality with which the Russians deal with the Chechen question.
By this point, not surprisingly, M.L had lost faith in Russian human rights. She went on campaigning for the Chechens because, as she puts it, I cant sit back and do nothing. I feel suffering like its mine. She went on working to keep herself and Jean-Majjis and to try to find ways of helping Salimov in prison. But the abduction of her son was more than she could bear. She was terrified.
I tried to get into the hospital, but they stopped me. I went home and as I walked in the phone went. The caller didnt give his name but said: We have taken your husband and your son. Now its your turn. M.L fled and went to stay with her 19-year old sister. Later, still unable to enter the hospital to see Jean-Majjis, she accompanied her sister to a dentists appointment. As the two women left the flat, there was a shot. Her sister fell into the snow, dead. M.L. thought she saw a policeman run away. Next time, said a telephone caller that night, we will not miss.
Friends helped M.L. find an agent, who provided her with a visa for Italy and put her on a plane stopping on the way in London telling her to ask for asylum immediately on landing at Heathrow. I had to leave. I had to stay alive because of my son. At Heathrow, police questioned her and sent her to a small hotel near the airport.
Three months later, the Home Office moved her to Newcastle, in the north-east of England, where she is now living in a former nurses home, waiting to hear what will happen to her whether the British immigration authorities will send her to Italy, for which she still has a valid visa, and let the Italians decide whether she has a case for asylum, or whether they will give her leave to remain in Britain.
Here she waits; alone, worried, miserable. She spends what little money she can spare calling friends in St Petersburg, asking for news of Jean-Majjis and Salimov. She knows little of her husband beyond the fact that he remains in detention. Her son, though still in hospital, has been visited by friends, and is soon to be allowed to leave. A friend has offered to take him home with her. M.L. has found an English geology book in the small library in her hostel, and practices her English, day after day, while she waits.
