Russian media may be docile or too servile but human rights activists in that country do not equate patriotism or love for one’s country with blind support for government policies, however unjust or unfair. And the Russian policy on Chechnya, they declare, is anything but just and fair.
Russian human rights activists, intellectuals and artists have gone one step further. On Thursday they went over the head of President Vladimir Putin to appeal to the leaders of the G-7 nations to force the Kremlin to negotiate an end to the 20-month war in Chechnya. The Chechen conflict was “our national disgrace, but also a disgrace for the international community as a whole,” said human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalyov, on behalf of the Committee for Ending War and Restoring Peace in Chechnya. The committee accused the G-7 nations of being “silent accessories” to the long-running separatist conflict.
Moscow launched its military intervention in Chechnya on Oct. 1, 1999. While no figures are available of the death toll on the Chechen side, human rights organizations accuse Russian forces of carrying out widespread atrocities in the republic where 309,000 inhabitants have been displaced since the start of the war. Though Russian forces have taken control of much of Chechnya, including the capital Grozny, following a hard-fought campaign, separatists launch daily attacks against Russian soldiers and pro-Moscow administrators.
By all accounts it is a full-fledged war complete with disappearances, mass graves, systematic torture and summary executions of civilians — a war more ferocious than Serbian President Milosevic’s offensive against Kosovo and more brutal and uglier than the Latin American dirty wars of 1970s.
But it is not merely European nations who are “accessory,” as the committee points out, to Russia’s “wide scale military actions aimed at the whole population.”
American attitude to Chechen suffering has been equally callous. Not because Chechnya is a piece of land in a remote corner of the globe about which Americans know nothing and care even less. This has something to do with geopolitical compulsions, as a group of russian human rights activists, intellectuals and artists who visited Washington recently found to their horror. Neither the Bush administration nor the Congress was willing to give them a patient hearing. To buttress their case for a negotiated settlement of the conflict, they said they have obtained a letter from Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov agreeing to unconditional negotiations with Russia. Even this did not cut any ice with the US establishment.
Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia find themselves in that narrow neck of land where Asia meets Europe. It is an area that Russia does not want to see go out of its federative control. Successive US administrations, in their own interest and out of concern for the sensitivities of a nation which has lost an empire and superpower status, have been unwilling to encroach on Moscow’s sphere of influence in the Caucasus. Herein lies the reasons for the silence which has greeted Russia’s brutal encroachment on the Chechen territory and rights. Complicating the situation is President Bush’s obsession with the national missile defense program. Bush knows that without Putin’s acquiescence missile defense may never be accepted by NATO governments. The politics of missile defense demand that Russia be appeased — even if the price is paid in Chechen blood.
