No cheque mate

Olivier Renet, a Geneva chess club player who provided live commentary during the championship said tongue only partly in cheek, “Some journalists have been asking questions about the $5 million provided by the president of FIDE (Federation Internationale d’Echecs) for the world championships – apparently they are not that curious about when they are paid,” he said. Five million dollars? Or was it fifty million spread over a few years? No one knew and nobody seemed to care. Who’s paying? Why?

Meet FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the 35-year old leader of Kalmykia, Europe’s only Buddhist state, capital Elista, population, some 320,000. Ilyumzhinov who claimed during his 1993 election campaign that he owned 50 companies with a combined turnover of some $500 million is a colourful character. You’d think he’s straight out of a made-in-Chinatown thriller movie, the boss, complete with cell phones in both hands and black limousines slithering out of smoky alleys.

The young, ever-smiling, ever complacent president has impressed everybody with his dollars and his demeanor. In that order. Don’t ask questions, the smile seemed to be saying in Lausanne as he handed out cheques and shookhands with everyone – just keep playing chess.

“There are questions about this man. For instance Garry Kasparov wondered in an interview with me about the origins of Ilyumzhinov’s money. Some players are staying away from FIDE,” said Mikhail Ramseyer, a sports correspondent for a Geneva daily.

Ramseyer, a chess buff himself and a regular on the circuit says questions about FIDE’s instant wealth hang heavily in the air and are not about to disappear soon especially since the organisation was in the dumps till very recently.

Its hard to say why Kasparov, considered the world’s best player who has formed the breakaway Professional Chess Association did not participate in the FIDE tournament.

But big money questions have come to stay in a game which attracts huge sums as prize money, second only to heavyweight boxing.

Ilyumzhinov loves the mystique. It doesn’t matter whether he has $10 million or $50 million in Swiss bank accounts because his people don’t seem to care. His people? Who are the Kalmyks? Originally from Jungaria (now part of China) history books say the Kalmyks were driven out of their ancestral homeland by the Han Chinese and moved westward for 32 years before landing in the Volga steppe in 1608.

Peter the Great declared them Russians and gave them a Khanate or kingdom stretching from Stavropol in the west to Astrakhan in the east. The republic of Kalmykia, is a much diminished version of the original area, very poor and very lost. Today its a speck on the map in the Russian Federation just a little south from Kazhakstan. Some fifty years ago sheep were let loose in this region by Soviet Russia. Today, sheep numbers have reduced dramatically as have the Kalmyks themselves and half of the region is desert.

Ilyumzhinov, member of the Russian supreme Soviet before he became president of Kalmykia, rose from that post-communist chaos, like a lot of other people, richer by a few millions.

He now appears in search of glory and has decided to invest hugely in camels. He won his first presidential election by promising to turn the Kalmyk republic into a second Kuwait.

There would be, he said, “a cellphone for every shepherd” and living standards would rise ten-fold in 24 months. A 24-year old American of Kalmyk ancestry who is said to be a reincarnation of an Indian holy man has been sent to the republic by the Dalai Lama. Ilyumzhinov has been quoted as saying that he subscribes to a concept called “ethnoplanetary thinking” which was developed for him by Kalmykia’s “state secretary for ideology.”

Schools teach what is called “the enlarging of didactic units.” Soon after his re-election in 1995 he reportedly told a journalist from the Russian daily Izvestia, “Irrespective of what I tell people, I give them instructions on a sub-conscious level, a code. I do the same thing when I communicate with Russian citizens from other regions. I am creating around the republic a kind of extra-sensory field and it helps us a lot in our projects.”

According to one of the myriad stories floating around about Ilyumzhinov, when he landed the job of FIDE president his people thought he had attained international stature.

There must be some mystical, ethnoplanetary link between camels, dollars and chess. Maybe the cell phones Ilyumzhinov gives his people will be wired to sound that frequency.