December 2003
Catastrophe in Chechnya: Escaping the Quagmire
As a result of the fighting in Chechnya, tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians have been killed. Human rights groups speak of war crimes in Chechnya, while Moscow characterizes its operations as the struggle with terrorism. The situation was supposed to improve after a recent Chechen referendum and elections. But has it? What are the facts and myths about Chechnya, and how can a permanent peace be established there? On December 10, International Human Rights Day, the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute, the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, Amnesty International U.S.A., Freedom House, the Jamestown Foundation, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty held a conference to seek a solution to the Chechen conflict.
The Quagmire
One hundred and fifty years ago, Russia was already engaged in a major campaign against Chechnya. The old Chechen wars were described in Leo Tolstoy's book Haji Murat. Stephen Solarz found it striking that many of the methods for fighting Chechens were applied again by the Russian military during the last two conflicts: from 1994 to 1996 and from 1999 till today. Homes and entire villages have been destroyed, and the Russian army has not been differentiating between the Chechen fighters and the civilian population.
What has changed in the way that Russia is fighting the Chechens is the application of more destructive weapons like cluster bombs. Also different from the past is the large number of Russian civilians who have suffered from the fighting. When the Russian forces began to shell Grozny, the capital was largely vacated by the Chechens. Most of the people who remained in the city were Russian pensioners. In David Ensor's view, bombing Grozny was as if the U.S. Air Force had been shelling Miami. The Russian army needs to be professionalized, he argued, as it cannot cope with this kind of a conflict. But serious reforms of the army could probably only be introduced once the fighting in Chechnya is over.
The Chechen conflict is not a battlefield in the war on terror nor is it just about human rights violations--the scope of destruction is too enormous. There are several estimates of two recent wars' death toll among the Chechen population, and they range from about 30,000 to 180,000 deaths. Chechnya's prewar population is estimated to have been about one million. According to Khassan Baiev, as the result of fighting large portions of Chechnya territory have become contaminated. One-third of the Chechen children are born with birth defects. As a doctor, Khassan Baiev treated children who were born with two extra ears and two extra eyes. It is not uncommon for twenty-year-old men to suffer from heart attacks. There are many suicides among the Chechens, and the entire nation suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
In the meantime the Chechen conflict has spread to cities on Russian soil, where desperate Chechens commit suicide bombings. These bombings must be unreservedly deplored. Nonetheless, the situation in Chechnya is far from being "normal." Disappearances of Chechens continue. Even according to the official statistics, the number of the disappeared amounts to about three thousand. The West cannot ignore the tragedy in Chechnya any longer and must confront the Russian authorities on it. David Ensor argued that by not raising the subject the western countries are not helping Russia.
Chechnya and Terror: Facts and Myths
The Russian authorities accuse the Chechens of terrorism. But what is terrorism? Rajan Menon reminded the audience that in the late 1800s the Russian colonizing army murdered seventy thousand Chechens. Then under Stalin five hundred thousand people were deported, while a similar number were killed--in some cases, hundreds of the Chechens were burnt alive. During the two most recent conflicts, tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The Russian authorities had also been saying that Chechens were fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan but, as Radek Sikorski pointed out, so far the U.S. forces in Afghanistan have found no proof to support this assertion.
David Satter examined the origins of the most recent Chechen war and concluded that it could have started as a Russian provocation. In 1999, just before the war broke out, only 2 percent of the Russian population had a favorable view of Boris Yeltsin's presidency. Then, in August 1999 the powerful Russian military stationed alongside the Chechen border did nothing to stop the incursion into Dagestan of a group of Chechen paramilitaries, and in September the Russian authorities attributed the series of apartment bombings in Russian cities to the "Chechen trail"--although no Chechen perpetrators were found. Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, used these incidents to justify a new Russian military intrusion into Chechnya.
According to David Satter, one cannot rule out the possibility that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) staged the bombings: In one case in the city of Ryazan, residents found a bomb in the apartment building's basement. The area was evacuated, and the entire city was put under emergency law. The police were then able to intercept calls made by the people who had placed the bomb, and they traced them to the FSB. The explosive planted in the apartment buildings, both in Ryazan and in Moscow, was hexogen, a controlled substance. The FSB later admitted to having planted the bomb but claimed that it had done so only to test the citizens' vigilance. Interestingly, those who tried to investigate the matter further, the Duma deputies Sergei Yuschenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, were found dead afterward. The first one was shot dead and the latter was poisoned. Speaking on behalf of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington, Aleksander Lukashevich said that his own relatives were victims of the bombings and urged David Satter to be more responsible in his remarks.
Andrei Babitsky asserted that now after almost five years since the outbreak of the last Chechen war, Chechens should start receiving compensation for their destroyed homes. They will most likely use that money to leave Chechnya. The people who will remain in Chechnya are going to be the Russians and radical Islamists, who have no connection to traditional Chechens. The latter are applying ever more drastic measures to rid Chechnya of the Russian forces. Andrew Meier argued that the "black widows" who commit suicide bombings are a well-organized movement composed even of pregnant women. The current Russian policy of "Chechenyzing" Chechnya--exercising Russian control through Chechen hands--will lead to a civil war. The activities of the present government of Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen president loyal to Moscow, are already perceived to be worse than those of the Russians. It is said that when Russian troops kidnap Chechens, they are willing to return them in exchange for money, whereas no one ever returns after being kidnapped by the Kadyrov-controlled militia.
Search for Peace
The speakers presented several views on how to end the conflict. Alexander Lukashevich of the Russian Embassy argued that the Chechen people expressed themselves in the referendum in March 2003 and the following Chechen elections. As a result, the Kadyrov government rules Chechnya. There is no need for the Russian government to talk to bandits and terrorists and those who are associated with them.
In the views of Andrei Pointovsky and Leon Aron, the Russian authorities will be able to reach an agreement sooner if the international community does not get involved in the conflict. Andrei Pointovsky pointed out that the only person able to end the conflict would be the reelected President Vladmir Putin. The peace plan proposed by Zbigniew Brzezinski two years ago was an acceptable way for ending the war. The only trouble with that plan was that an American drafted it. The plan foresaw keeping a Russian garrison and Russian border guards in Chechnya. Pointovsky argued that in the case of Chechnya there is no problem of an end-state, but rather the problem of beginning the talks. Nonetheless, negotiations will have to resume as Kadyrov has failed to stop the violence and to consolidate Chechnya. The talks should begin in the first half of 2004.
Leon Aron drew attention to similar conflicts. He asserted that in Kurdistan about three thousand villages were destroyed and 3 to 5 million people were displaced. Suicide bombers first appeared in Sri Lanka, where government forces fought with the Tamil Tigers. Thousands were killed in Algeria in the fighting of the local population with the French. In the case of Chechnya, Russia cannot just go away. Independent polls show that the majority of Chechens wish to remain in Russia, while the majority of Russians want to grant Chechnya more autonomy than to any other region. It is easier to solve such conflicts when there are no religious differences. The struggle between the Kurds and the Turks has been settled because both populations are Muslim and because the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan was caught, convicted, and imprisoned by the Turkish authorities. Both Russia and Chechnya used to be secular populations, but the Chechens have now turned to Islam. This makes it much more difficult to reach an agreement, but Russia needs to make the first move towards resolving the conflict.
Aslan Akhmadov and Lord Judd argued for ending the conflict with greater international involvement. Akhmadov conceded that there are a large number of peace plans but that so far none could be successfully implemented, due to unwillingness on the part of Russian authorities to resume the talks. Instead, the Chechens were constantly being told to keep waiting for the next Russian-organized elections. The Russian side creates an illusion of normalcy in Chechnya. Right now the authorities are closing down the refugee camps in Ingushetia and forcing people to return to the destroyed homes. Lord Judd argued that peace in Chechnya would only come about if the Russian administration were to start negotiating with all Chechen factions, including the most radical ones. The net should be thrown as wide as possible. If the Russian administration refuses to deal with the radicals, they will only become more attractive to the Chechen population. The reason it was possible to end the bloodshed in Northern Ireland was that the British authorities began talks with the IRA and were able to reach an agreement.
Keynote Speech by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski began his speech by asking: "Why should I care?" He said that he is a child of the second half of the last century, and that more people were killed during that century than in previous ones. Anybody who has lived through that time must be more sensitive to crimes against humanity. The world's principal victims have been the Jews and Gypsies, whom Nazi Germany tried to wipe out completely, and the Chechens, whom in 1944 Stalin tried to erase as a nation. Half of the Chechens died then, and another quarter of the Chechen population was killed by the 1990s. How did all these people die? They died in solitude.
One must care about Chechnya because of what is happening in America. The attitude of the U.S. government towards the conflict has evolved from ignorance to self-pre-occupied indifference. The Chechen struggle was first compared to the American civil war, but after September 11 the American administration has tried to sweep this issue under the rug. There is a great difference between the British and the American approach to Chechnya, and it is best exemplified by how both countries treat prominent Chechens. The British have not only refused to extradite Akhmed Zakayev to Russia but also granted him political asylum. In a similar case, that of Ilyas Akhmadov, the U.S. government has been undermining the case for political asylum and delaying the court proceedings. Akhmadov has thus been prevented from caring for his newly born handicapped son who is now in Sweden. Appeals from Alexander Haig, Madeleine Albright, and senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy have mostly been left unanswered.
Finally one needs to care about Chechnya because of what the conflict is doing to Russia--it is helping to reverse Moscow's post-imperial transition. Russia is in a similar situation as France during the conflict in Algeria. Where would France be today, if it was still involved in Algeria? It would certainly not have modernized and democratized to the extent it did. The Russian elites still cherish the myth that a country's greatness is defined by how much territory it possesses. President Putin represents the last gasp of the Soviet era, but Russians who are now in their thirties and forties see the world in a different way. If Russia wants to be a part of the West, it will have to be a different Russia.
Chechnya needs to be put on the international agenda. There must be maximum international relief and responsibility for Chechnya. We must make it clear to Russia that there is no room for carrying out a colonialist policy in a genocidal fashion.
