Regulars
ANALYSIS
The war on terror: Russia on the brink
by Catalin Dimofte
November 2004
In the October issue of Vivid Catalin Dimofte looked at the politics
behind what culminated in the awful tragedy that was Beslan. Here he examines
the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent Chechnya from sinking into complete
lawlessness, and suggests that Russia can only be pushed so far before its
approach becomes significantly more aggressive.
Relatives mourn inside the bombed shell that was the gym at Beslan’s School number one.
The Chechen quagmire
''From the start of the current war in Chechnya, Putin has characterised Chechen
separatism as a mortal threat not just to stability in the Caucasus but to
Russia’s territorial integrity,'' a high profile London newspaper wrote
recently. The sentence is an example of how subtle the manipulation of facts
and deeds can become in order to suit an ideological agenda. For Putin has
never talked of separatism in such terms; what he has indeed characterised
as a deadly threat – and thousands of Russian civilians killed in attacks
stand as evidence of this sad reality – was always terrorism.
Nobody, not even Putin, denies that Russia has a heavy historic guilt towards
the Chechens, one that begins with the bloody conquest of these lands carried
out in the first half of the 19th century by Czarist Russia. Closer to our
times, Stalin’s 1944 decision to deport over half of the Chechen population,
suspected of sympathies towards the Nazis, to the frozen Siberian and Central
Asian wastelands, came to nothing short of an act of genocide.
But the facts end there. Many conveniently forget the circumstances of the
first, and particularly of the second Chechen war, and what has happened since.
After Chechnya’s first President Dzohar Dudayev declared independence
in the turmoil of the early 1990s, the country enjoyed de facto independence,
with no Russian troops on its soil for almost three years. While a very talented
military commander, Dudayev failed to demonstrate the same abilities as a
manager of his own country. Chechnya had become a haven of lawlessness, divided
between competing warlords who drew their resources from trafficking drugs
and arms, or kidnappings followed by ransoms. It was mostly during this period
that ethnic Russians – who in the late 1980s comprised 30 per cent of
Chechnya’s population – fled en masse from kidnappings, torture
and slavery in what would have been called, if it referred to any other people
besides Russians, ethnic cleansing.
And it was the West’s poster boy, Boris Yeltsin, who listened to Oleg
Lobov, one of his advisers, who suggested that what he needed for political
purposes was ''a small victorious war''. And war it was to be - for slightly
less than two years, until Russia admitted defeat (not before conducting its
own bloody war, with tens of thousands of innocent Chechen victims dying during
carpet bombings of Grozny and other Chechen cities and the ensuing street
fights) by signing the Khassavyurt Treaty and pulling out in the aftermath
of the Budennovsk hostage taking operation.
Between 1997 and 1999, when Aslan Maskhadov was elected president and Shamil
Basayev had a brief stint as prime minister, Chechnya was again de facto independent.
This second bout of independence was even worse than its first. During those
three years, the ‘moderate’ government of Maskhadov (members of
which have since been more or less recently given political asylum by staunch
anti-terrorist countries such as the US and UK, as well as France and Germany)
managed to let Chechnya slip into total darkness and lawlessness. The country
was dominated by drug and arms dealers, kidnappers, thugs, competing warlords,
Muslim fundamentalists, paid Jihad warriors, many of whom often turned against
their own people - and, of course, run by the Islamic Sharia law. The gang
that kidnapped and murdered British workers in Chechnya during that period
had 'protection' from leaders in the Chechen regime.
Firing squads in public places, limbs cut off as punishment, slave markets,
hostage taking of thousands of people, Chechens and non-Chechens alike; schools
and hospitals shut down, never ending violence and chaos: such was the brave
new world of the Chechen Republic of Ichikeria under Maskhadov’s and
Basayev’s rule.
Yet some charitable souls could still say - well, after all, it was their
land, their government and their people, so why the fuss? The answer takes
one to the beginning of the second Chechen war, reported by Western media
as having been promoted by Putin in an attempt to portray himself as a strong
leader.
It is a theory that, at best, errs by omission of key facts. In addition to
regularly raiding, robbing and kidnapping people from the neighbouring Russian
republics, in July 1999 Shamil Basayev and his gangs from independent Chechnya
attacked another potential cauldron of interethnic mayhem, Dagestan, in a
desire to link up with the small local minority of Wahhabi Islamist extremists
and advance the goal of a greater Muslim state in the region. During the several
weeks that followed, dozens of civilians were killed, hundreds raped and 32,000
displaced. That was the reason and determining moment of the second Chechen-Russian
war. And the bombings of three apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk,
which claimed more than 240 victims (for which Basayev himself gave credit
to his Wahhabi comrades), further fomented Russian anger.
It would take a genius spin doctor to explain how attacking Dagestan was actually
part of the Chechen fight for freedom (do remember that at the time of that
attack Chechnya was already independent, and had been so for several years,
and there was no trace of Russian troops on its territory).
What followed was a tragic war in which, as always, civilians suffered most,
at the hands of ruthless and corrupt Russian troops, and by Chechen 'freedom
fighters.' Yet as Russians became aware of being trapped in a dead end, Putin
proclaimed victory two years later and began implementing his 'Chechenisation'
strategy, namely replacing Chechens with Russians in the local administration
and police.
The strategy worked reasonably well (or in any case better than anything tried
before) and for several years Chechnya lived in limbo, in a state of neither
peace nor war. The breakthrough should have been last year’s election
of Akhmed Kadyrov as president.
Kadyrov, a mufti (religious leader) and former field commander who fought
Russians during the first war, was not just the Kremlin’s man in the
republic but also the leader of a considerable number of Chechens who aim
for Chechnya’s peaceful existence within the Russian Federation. Using
his personal militia, he employed a stick and carrot policy of persuading
other Chechen warlords to follow his example and end armed resistance. For
its part, Russia poured considerable amounts of money into Chechnya - most
of which found its way into the pockets of corrupt local Russian and Chechen
administrators. Still, hospitals and schools reopened, buildings and roads
were repaired and progress was made towards the reconstruction of the war-torn
republic. Such a policy was never likely to win Kadyrov many friends among
the rebels, and he was assassinated on 9th May this year.
Nabi Abdullayev, a Harvard-educated journalist specialising in terrorism at
the Moscow Times (possibly the newspaper that has traditionally been most
critical of Putin), admits that the Kremlin’s policy in Chechnya is
not a forgone conclusion. ''I don’t think it is a dead end. It is absolutely
rational: it creates governance in Chechnya. This governance is bad, but how
could one expect a good one, given the abysmal lack of human resources potential
in Chechnya for creating a civilised political elite?''
Moscow is apparently ready to go far in supporting Kadyrov’s successor,
Alu Alkhanov, in restoring at least a shadow of normality in Chechnya. Putin
gave up the services of one of his most trusted and effective aides, Dmitry
Kozak, and appointed him special envoy for Southern Russia, charged with the
explicit task of rooting out poverty and restoring the education and health
systems in Chechnya. Kozak, who has a reputation for incorruptibility, would
also make sure that the funds due for Chechnya’s reconstruction are
spent on the right causes.
In a surprising move that left all other members of the Russian Federation
grumbling, Moscow agreed to one of Alkhanov’s key requests - placing
oil extraction in Chechnya wholly under the control of the Chechen government,
which would thus be able to use all the profits from the export of that oil
to fund local development. That, of course, is not reported, as it doesn’t
fit the conventional wisdom about Russia’s policies in Chechnya.
Hope, then, is not entirely lost. A survey (performed by a polling agency
whose head is a staunch anti-Putinite) revealed some surprising results –
and was therefore hardly ever mentioned for the same reason that many other
positive things Russia does in Chechnya do not get reported. Respondents were
asked if they supported Russia’s new policy in Chechnya. It turned out
that more Chechens (46 per cent) than Russians (41 per cent) supported it,
most likely not because of an overwhelming love for Russia, but merely of
fatigue and despair after a decade of war and devastation.
Where to from here?
To deny the lack of any connection whatsoever between Russia’s unwinnable
war in Chechnya and the Beslan tragedy is to deny the obvious. However, Putin
has stubbornly repeated that he sees no connection and that it was rather
an attack by international Islamist terrorists. And indeed, in the immediate
aftermath of the carnage, the Russian authorities also insisted that none
of the terrorists were Chechen. This weird insistence has been largely interpreted
as a sign of Putin’s intentions to force the West into giving him carte
blanche in Chechnya - as if he needed it in the first place - under the 'war
on terror' umbrella. But there is more to this than meets the eye.
Of Russia’s 145 million people, almost one fifth are Muslims. The most
densely populated Muslim areas in Russia are exactly the North Caucasian republics
and territories – from west to east, Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia,
Kabardino-Balkaria (Kabardins are mostly Sunni Muslims, Balkarians mostly
Orthodox Christian) and Karachayevo-Cherkessia – but many Russian Muslims
live further north and west of the Caucasus boiling cauldron, including in
the heart of the European Russia mainland, the Volga and Kazan regions, with
its large Tatarstan and Bashkortostan republics. Moscow itself has a minority
of roughly one million Muslims.
Since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, Russia’s leaders –
Putin, and even Yeltsin before him – have strived to maintain a balance
between the country’s two large religious groups, Orthodox Christianity
and Islam. Moderate Islam has been encouraged, as proven by the hundreds of
mosques and madrassas (seminaries teaching Islam) that mushroomed throughout
the country. Russia’s parliament, the Duma, has a handful of Muslim
MPs, and there is no discrimination on religious grounds. By and large, a
very reasonable degree of inter-religious tolerance was maintained in what
was possibly one of the very few successes of Russia’s leadership throughout
the 1990s.
And now, following the series of terrorist attacks that culminated in the
unspeakable Beslan tragedy, this delicate equilibrium has come under deadly
threat. With reports that Ingushs have been identified among the Beslan terrorists,
Putin is going to great lengths to emphasise the international dimension of
the attack, while playing down the role of Ingushs, as well as Chechens. Despite
the long series of attacks by Chechen terrorists, Putin has so far managed
to prevent a general anti-Chechen and anti-Muslim backlash. One could wonder
for how long he will be able to do that.
It is my firm belief that the first and foremost reason for Putin’s
apparently absurd denial of evidence – that the killers in Beslan were
mostly Chechens and Ingushs – as well as his insistence on the terrorists’
links with al-Qaeda - is a desperate attempt to prevent a giant popular movement
of Russian Christians against their Muslim neighbours. All the other reasons
are mere smokescreens, meant to divert public wrath against vague and invisible
enemies.
A total war against Muslims, and particularly against the Chechens, has never
been far away in the minds of some Russians and voices are now heard demanding,
for instance, the deportation of all Chechens in Chukotka, the Far East Russian
peninsula, or the adoption of the 'Israeli approach' to dealing with terror.
For indeed there was only Israel that sided with Russia from the very beginning
of the Beslan siege. A civil and inter-confessional war in Russia is closer
now than ever before; those who pour petrol on sparks risk unleashing a tragedy
of a global scale.
''The Russians have not yet done everything that they could do in terms of
savagery,'' says Anatol Lieven, of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, and one of the most respected Russia analysts. ''The
Russians haven’t done that yet, but another Beslan could provoke a ferocious
reaction.''
There is a theory in animal behaviour, which speaks of the risks of putting
an animal’s back to the wall, without leaving it with any other option
but fighting. The reaction can be devastating. The Beslan atrocity and the
world’s reaction to it have come dangerously close to cornering Russia
into a situation where it has no other option left than fighting its way out.
Thus far Putin has tried to avoid that deadly fate, and politicians around
the world should help rather than sermonise him.
