Refugee chess stars await other moves for Olympiad chance

Bengaluru: Ngong Atem Tak was born in the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya in 2006. In Swahili, Kakuma means “nowhere”. The 18-year-old is a member of the Refugee team for the chess Olympiad. For the first time, a refugee team was named for the Olympiad that began on September 11 in Budapest. The unfortunate bit is that Ngong and his teammates from Kakuma haven’t made it there yet. They are in Nairobi, awaiting visas, clinging to hope.

Set up in 1992 to serve Sudanese refugees, the Kakuma camp has asylum seekers and refugees from African countries such as Somalia, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. They are confined to the settlement and need movement passes from the Kenyan government and UNHCR to even travel within the country. Ngong started playing chess four years ago and became the U-18 champion at this year’s National Youth and Cadet Championships in Kenya. For the teen, who dreams of becoming a Grandmaster, chess is what makes life at Kakuma bearable. “I survive…chess is life,” he tells HT.

The ‘Chess for Protection’ project that Fide runs in collaboration with partners like UNHCR and the Kenyan chess federation has been in operation in Kakuma since 2021. The 10-member Olympiad Refugee team was drawn from community chess clubs, primary and secondary schools and girls’ clubs.

In August, Latvian trainer Sergejs Klimakovs travelled from his hometown Riga to Nairobi and was flown on a UN-chartered flight to Kakuma, as captain of the Open team. For two weeks, he worked with the players from the refugee camp at the Angelina Jolie school at Kakuma.

“A bunch of players living in a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere, with no experience or ratings…you expect them to be kind of weak. But here I was with guys who can calculate complicated variations, think at least seven moves ahead and suddenly I had no idea what to do. Their strength took me by surprise. They play really interesting chess,” Klimakovs tells HT. “They solve puzzles and play blitz and bullet on their phones all day.”

Klimakovs says he’s seen at least one of them thrash an International Master in an online game. “I happened to come across the profile of one of my pupils and saw that he had played some 150-160 games in a day and had an online rating of around 2400.” Rated 2350, Klimakovs says he helped them with opening work but doesn’t consider himself the “strongest or the weakest” of the lot and is pretty certain the team can pull off a few surprises if they make it to Budapest.

“For most of them this whole experience – living in a hotel in Nairobi, going to a mall, is completely new. At the Kakuma camp, it’s just kiosks and tiny local shops. They have been swimming in the hotel pool all day,” he laughs, “also, playing sports, doing physical workouts. We’re trying to keep them engaged because they were so excited to play the Olympiad and now, we don’t know if we can go at all.”

Documents for international travel were always going to be a challenge for a bunch of players who’ve never left the refugee camp and did not have passports. “We only got their passports printed three days ago because the passport printer was broken,” says Klimakovs. “We were at the Hungarian embassy on Friday from 5am for visas. The UN and Fide have been trying to help us but I’m sceptical of us being able to make it.”

Deputy chair of the Fide management board Dana Riezniece-Ozala says she’s hopeful of them “getting their visas so we can bring them to Budapest”.

Passports and visas aren’t the only adversities. Six playing members were diagnosed with malaria after they arrived in Nairobi. “We are consulting doctors from the UN in Kakuma, and they’re getting treated in a hospital in Nairobi,” Klimakovs says. “They should be OK soon.”

Klimakovs terms the experience of working with Kakuma players, “life-altering”.

“I train young, talented players from Europe. If they don’t do well in one tournament, they know their parents will buy them a ticket to play the next one. When I go back, I’ll tell them that there are guys in the world who are as talented as you are and they are very hungry to succeed. They understand that any tournament they play might be their only chance. In Kakuma, there are frequent power blackouts, there isn’t enough food, and geographically it’s not the easiest part of the world from a peace point of view …but nothing is enough to rob them of the will to play chess,” says Klimakovs. “It will be sad and awkward if this project doesn’t end with these players reaching the Olympiad. Even if it is for a couple of rounds.”