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April 18, 2003 The
Chechen Conflict and the Outside World Three snapshots relating to Chechnya from recent months: On December 16, 2002, four Algerians were arrested in a Paris suburb who were alleged to have trained alongside Chechen radical Islamists in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. (Later, a group of North Africans detained in London on suspicion of manufacturing the toxin ricin was also alleged to have been in Georgia). On December 27, a massive double suicide bombing at the headquarters of the pro-Moscow Chechen government administration in Grozny killed at least 72 people. On December 31, the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe closed its mission in Chechnya, after the OSCE and Russia failed to agree on an extension of its mandate. What all these three events grimly suggest is that while the problem of Chechnya is growing, international leverage to end it is diminishing. Hardliners on both sides are setting an agenda of escalating violence. On the Chechen rebel side, radical Islamists with ties to Middle Eastern groups are now the strongest element amongst the guerrilla fighters. The elected leader of the Chechens, Aslan Maskhadov, is losing authority. On the Russian side, the hardliners in the security establishment used the October hostage crisis in Moscow to reinforce their position. They blocked a planned downscaling of the troop presence in Chechnya, vetoed any negotiations with Maskhadov and demanded the extradition of his moderate envoy in Europe, Akhmed Zakayev. The Glaring Contradiction in Russian Policy At the heart of the Russian position is a glaring contradiction. Ever since it launched a second war in Chechnya in 1999, and particularly since September 11, 2001, Moscow has sought international legitimacy for its military campaign by labelling it as part of the “war against terror.” At the same time, the Kremlin continues to insist that Chechnya remains an “internal problem of the Russian Federation,” and rejects the kind of outside mediation the OSCE provided in 1995-7. In other words, while Russia is prepared to acknowledge the increasingly international dimension of the Chechen tragedy, it refuses to accept the need for an international solution. When Chechnya’s modern crisis began in 1991, it was a different kind of problem altogether. In that year, radical nationalists led by Chechnya’s first Soviet general, Jokhar Dudayev, took power and declared the province’s secession from the Russian Federation (still just part of the Soviet Union at the time). It is important to underline that radical Islam was almost entirely absent from the movement. The “Chechen revolution” of 1991 was comparable to the other chaotic nationalist revolts that sprang up in the last years of the Soviet Union in Georgia, Azerbaijan or the Baltic States. Dudayev tried to give his self-proclaimed state a secular constitution – the only figure who founded an “Islamic” party was a young gangster and opportunist, Beslan Gantemirov, who changed sides several times and is now in the service of the Russians. Moreover, the independence movement had virtually no contacts outside the Soviet Union; Dudayev was a self-confessed Soviet patriot. How then did we get from there to here – from a thuggish but recognizably Soviet independence movement, to suicide bombings, Middle Eastern militants and the mass seizure of hostages in Moscow? The answer lies in the brutal and bungled policy conducted by Moscow towards Chechnya over the last eleven years – a policy in which the West has played a dishonourably collusive role. Roots of a Catastrophe From the end of 1991 to the end of 1994, Russia was in chaos; Boris Yeltsin’s regime was characterized by extraordinary corruption, feuding and lack of strategic vision. This resulted in several competing policies towards the breakaway southern province. Partly due to the prickly egotism of both men, Dudayev and Yeltsin never met face to face – despite the Chechen leader’s claim that the two men could work out a solution to the problem if they were allowed to negotiate directly. Yeltsin’s decision in December 1994 to send troops into Chechnya was misconceived, ill-planned and ultimately catastrophic. Dudayev was transformed from a reviled autocrat into a national defender. A Russian army that was ostensibly sent in “to restore constitutional order” ran amok, committing atrocities and killing thousands of innocent civilians. The most economically viable region in the North Caucasus was reduced to ruins. Worse, despite carefully modulated statements of “alarm” and “concern,” the West mainly preferred to turn a blind eye to what was going on. In the scale of its violence, Chechnya was akin to Bosnia. But – partly due to its remoteness, partly due to the West’s perceived long strategic agenda with Russia – Western leaders were never pricked into action by the Chechen conflict, as they were by the wars in the Balkans. Yeltsin’s tactics in Chechnya may have been the same as those of Milosevic, but unlike Milosevic, he professed himself to be an ally of the West. At the OSCE summit in Budapest just a few days before the first Russian military intervention in December 1994, Western leaders did not bring even up the subject of the expected invasion – something the Russians understandably took as tacit support for what they were planning to do. The next year, at the height of the fighting, Russia was accepted into the European human rights forum, the Council of Europe, and received extensive IMF loans. In 1996 Western leaders extended their support to get Yeltsin re-elected president. In Moscow in April 1996, President Bill Clinton was asked a question on Chechnya and chose to make a spectacularly inappropriate comparison to Abraham Lincoln in his reply. Clinton said, “I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country, in which we lost on a per capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the twentieth century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our Union.” All this was a source of continuous pain and frustration to those Russian liberal politicians and human rights activists who believed that they subscribed to “European values” and who desperately wanted to enlist Western -- in particular European -- support in their campaigns to stop the killing in Chechnya. The former dissident Sergei Kovalyov, Russia’s best-known human rights defender, has recounted a sharp exchange he had with Ernst Muehlemann, the Swiss chairman of the Council of Europe’s committee on Chechnya during the 1996 presidential election campaign. Kovalyov complained that the council was being soft in its criticism of Russian war crimes. He says that Muehlemann responded by saying, “What do you want? For [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov and not Yeltsin to be chosen at the elections?” When Yeltsin finally came to his senses and abandoned his military adventure in Chechnya in 1996, it was not because of foreign pressure, but because of low morale in the army and plummeting public support for the war inside Russia. One Western European did play an honourable role in bringing the conflict to an end. The Swiss professor Tim Guldimann, head of a tiny six-member OSCE delegation in Grozny, was the broker of a peace agreement that saw a Russian military withdrawal, internationally monitored elections and a five-year postponement of a decision on the final status of the relationship between “the Chechen Republic” and the “Russian Federation.” However, after the OSCE successfully monitored the January 1997 presidential elections in Chechnya, the international community again lost interest in the republic and its newly elected leader, Aslan Maskhadov. Between 1997 and 1999, Chechnya collapsed into chaos and lawlessness. Maskhadov must bear some of the responsibility – but so must Russia and the rest of the world, which gave almost no economic assistance to what was one of the most devastated parts of the planet. The Chechen leader toured foreign capitals and was given cursory attention everywhere he went. Radical Islam Takes Hold In ruined post-war Chechnya, radical Islam began to flourish, as it had not done before. Saudi preachers and proselytisers began to come into the republic, finding natural recruits in many young fighters who had just come through the war. There was strong resistance to the new Islamists within Chechen society. A significant number of Chechens were secularist, along with millions of other nominally “Muslim” Soviet peoples. Most of those who were religious were Sufis, adherents of a strongly idiosyncratic version of Islam that had almost nothing in common with the fundamentalism being imported from the Middle East. Chechen society fractured. Maskhadov had publicly rejected the Islamist route on many occasions, but he was also indecisive, and was constantly seeking consensus with all the armed groups that laid claim to victory over Russia in 1996. The rebel movement began to split between the Islamists and the moderate nationalists. Life became intolerable for ordinary Chechens, as their republic was wracked by lawlessness and kidnappings. The decisive moment came in the summer of 1998, when a group of Islamists rose in open rebellion against Maskhadov’s government. Loyalists fought a pitched battle with them outside the town of Gudermes, and dozens of Chechens were killed. Maskhadov decided not to arrest the Islamists but instead let them go free. At the same time, he abandoned Dudayev’s secular constitution and introduced nominal Shariah law. A little earlier, as we now know from a Wall Street Journal report, Osama Bin-Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman Al-Zawahri, had decided to visit Chechnya. Using a false name, he got only as far as Dagestan to the east, where he was arrested. He spent six months in a Russian jail before being deported, his true identity undiscovered. Chechnya’s ever-closer embrace with radical Islam was by no means inevitable. Even now, Chechen human rights workers estimate that only around one tenth of the population is sympathetic to the “Wahhabis,” the catchall term for the fundamentalists. As
ever, the Russian hardliners made the difference. Boris Yeltsin
and Vladimir Putin’s second military intervention in Chechnya
in 1999 drove the different Chechen separatist leaders back together:
the moderate Maskhadov with the radical nationalist Shamil Basayev
and the Islamist Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. The Georgian Connection It was here, rather than in Chechnya itself, that foreign Islamists began to form lasting ties with the Chechen extremists. The Georgian security services have recently confirmed what they long denied: that for three years the Pankisi Gorge was basically out of their control and home to a mix of several hundred “foreign Mujahadin” and Chechen fighters. We do not know what they plotted there. We do know that, after Russian and American pressure last year, the Georgians moved to take back control of the Pankisi and the militants scattered. Most of the Chechen fighters, it seemed, went back to Chechnya. Where the “mujahadin” have gone is anyone’s guess. This adds a frightening new element to the Chechen conflict. But it should be stressed that the Georgian connection was a sideline to the war, not its main theatre. None of the main Chechen rebel leaders crossed into Georgia – they are still leading a guerrilla campaign from the mountains of Chechnya itself. The Russian generals have a strong interest in talking up the Georgian connection, because it diverts attention from their failure to win a military victory inside their own territory. It is also important to stress that while the extremist Chechens began to dally with al-Qaeda and international terror, Maskhadov sought – and still seeks -- a peaceful accommodation with the Russians. He appealed to Western institutions like the Council of Europe and the OSCE, trying to use his legitimate status as Chechnya’s elected leader to enlist outside mediation in the new conflict. A Set-Back for Peace As recently as last summer, serious efforts were underway to initiate a new peace process. A dialogue initiative had begun between representatives of the rebels and a group of Russian and Chechen pro-Moscow politicians. Akhmed Zakayev was the key mediator on the Chechen side. The talks culminated in a broad-based meeting in the Duchy of Liechtenstein in August. A second stage of the process was to have been the World Chechen Forum in Copenhagen in October. But this was blown out of the water by the appalling mass hostage seizure in Moscow a few days before the congress was due to begin. The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who went into the theatre to talk to the hostage takers, said afterwards that there were two camps amongst the security personnel dealing with the siege. One camp was happy for her to go in to the theatre and try talking to the hostage-takers; the other was extremely hostile to her – they were impatient to start using force. When the siege ended, the hawks prevailed. Russia ordered the arrest of Zakayev and called for his extradition from first Denmark and then Great Britain. President Putin categorically rejected the idea of negotiations with Maskhadov, comparing him to Osama Bin Laden. Finally, the Russian government called for the downgrading of the OSCE mandate for Chechnya, resulting in the closure of its mission at the end of 2002. The OSCE mandate spelled out that it had a duty to “promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the establishment of facts concerning their violations.” Clearly this was one reason why it had to be removed. A peaceful resolution of the Chechen conflict is very much back to square one. The “constitutional referendum” in Chechnya that took place in March of this year was patently a device for the Kremlin to try and entrench its chosen loyal leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, in power. Yet Kadyrov is part of the problem, not the solution. His government offices are still in ruins after the terrifying suicide bombing that devastated them in December. With the OSCE gone, the only international organization with any role in Chechnya is the Council of Europe. Its rapporteur Lord Judd made genuine efforts to remind European governments about the bleeding wound of Chechnya. But he resigned in March in protest at the Russian Government’s insistence on going ahead with the referendum. More recently, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly called for a war crimes tribunal for Chechnya to end the climate of impunity surrounding the conflict, but the head of the Russian delegation rejected the proposal. There is a real danger that it will take another atrocity like the theatre seizure in Moscow to draw attention to Chechnya again. It is possible that the war that spread from Chechnya to Moscow will now flare up somewhere else, perhaps in Europe. At that point Chechnya may finally rise to the top of the agenda of the outside world. What state Chechnya itself will be in by then and whether it is repairable are different questions altogether. The biggest losers in this tragedy are Chechnya’s forgotten majority – those ordinary Chechens, who reject both the marauding Russian military and the extremist Islamist militants, but are unprotected from the ravages of either. They desperately want some kind of international guarantees for their day-to-day survival – but currently the world prefers to look the other way. Thomas de Waal is Caucasus Editor with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London. He is co-author, with Carlotta Gall, of ‘Chechnya: A Small Victorious War’ (Pan, 1997).
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