- Perhaps the fact is that you always reported so cheerfully about all your projects that many did not take them too seriously at first. You - almost like Herbert Wales - were called the Kalmyk dreamer. And besides, many were quite skeptical about the people with whom you communicated. This is Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Assad.
- I have always been attracted by extraordinary personalities. I was friends with Pope John Paul II, and with Baba Vanga, and with the Dalai Lama, and with Henry Kissinger, and with Mikhail Gorbachev. A person does not live too long, so his most important wealth is communication with interesting people. And with regard to Hussein and Gaddafi, I really wanted to understand how, in the very difficult conditions of an ethnically heterogeneous society, they manage to maintain order in the country. How many nationalities, how many religions are there!
When I went there four years ago, the war had just begun, the Arab spring was flaring up... When I met with Bashar al-Assad, when I opened a chess club for children there, many asked: why did you go there?! And now it turns out that I was trying to act in the right direction! Yesterday I listened to an American journalist. Yes, they admitted that if they left Hussein and Gaddafi alone, there would be no IS there now. These were secular states! In Iraq, women went about without a burqa: in European skirts and with elegant hairstyles, and in the evening there were discos, music! In Tripoli, people rode bicycles, the music played until late! These are completely normal people! And they became more and more secular! And now refugees have flooded into Europe ...
Time has shown that I was right. It was necessary, as we wanted, to hold the Karpov-Kamsky match in Baghdad... We organized the World Championship in Tripoli, we opened chess schools! (Smiles sadly.) After all, I, together with world chess, advocate universal human values ... We are just trying to carry culture, to make humanity more intellectual. But the most important thing is that there should be peace and tranquility on Earth ...
Marina Makarycheva
24.11.2015