September marked another anniversary, this one passing largely unnoticed by the outside world: the third year of the start of Russia’s brutal, ongoing war in Chechnya.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 85,000 troops came, they saw, but, lacking Caesarian attributes, they did not conquer. The Muslim republic in the Caucasus fights on. His demoralized army, afflicted with massive defections (recently about 95 soldiers left their unit en masse because of severe beatings by their superiors), not only has not been able to win the war for him, but has suffered great casualties at the hands of determined Chechen rebels. Reportedly, more than 4,500 Russian soldiers have been killed since the outset of the conflict, which may already be mirroring the Soviet Union’s disaster in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when American-supplied Stinger missiles turned the tide against Moscow’s occupation troops.
The Chechens resumed large-scale operations last August by downing an MiG-26 military transport helicopter, which crashed into a minefield outside Grozny, not far from the headquarters of Col. Vladimir Moltenskoi, commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, killing 119 servicemen.
The inefficiency of the Russian military was demonstrated when it was revealed that the daring operation had been mounted by two guerrillas, one carrying an anti-aircraft weapon, and the other a video camera to film the entire spectacle, who had sneaked into the base undetected.
More recently a large unit of Chechen fighters surprised occupation troops encamped in an area adjacent to the Chechen border with Georgia and in a fierce and bloody encounter managed to kill at least 18 Russian soldiers. Over the weekend, 11 were killed and 12 others wounded in separate attacks and land-mine explosions. According to news reports, the Russians have lost three helicopter gunships, shot down by rebels, over the past six weeks.
And the atrocities against civilians, which by now are legion, continue.
You would think that the Russian president would rethink his scorched-earth policy in the Chechen republic, an old but failed policy to bring the region into a state of full submission, initiated as far back as 1816 when the Czarist regime sent the sadistic Gen. Alexei Yermolov as commander of Russian troops in Chechnya; was continued in 1944, when on Feb. 22 that year, on orders from Joseph Stalin, the entire population of this Muslim republic — men, women and children, the elderly, the sick and the infirm — were loaded on trains and transported to the Kazakh steppe in Central Asia, with as many as 78,000 dying on route, or soon after they were unloaded, freezing and starved; and resumed again in the 1994-96 war, a war that cost an estimated 50,000 lives, most of them noncombatants.
Recalling that war, which he covered at the time, the Washington Post correspondent, Lee Hockstader, wrote in a reflective piece on Oct. 10, 1999: "I have never seen a more extravagant, terrifying and ultimately futile use of firepower in populated areas than that which the Russians unleashed on Chechnya ... Chechnya’s capital of Grozny was reduced to a smashed, smoldering husk reminiscent of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb."
Three years ago, they returned to launch yet another war against what they continue implausibly to call "separatist Chechens," a people who, culturally, ethnically and linguistically, have never been Russian, are not now Russian, and do not want to be Russian. In an egregious display of that lopsided logic, Putin in recent weeks has taken disingenuously to identifying his army’s brutal assault on the people of Chechnya as a "war on terror." In a transparently copycat fashion, he now has appropriated President Bush’s rhetoric of the current US anti-terrorism campaign, claiming that the guerrilla war in Chechnya is "armed, financed and fought" by Islamic militants from abroad, "international terrorists" and "Islamic mercenaries" one and all, infiltrating into the country from neighboring Ingushetia and Georgia.
In a piece filed from Grozny last week, the New York Times correspondent there, Steven Meyers, explained that these accusations "appear rooted in Russia’s frustration and a desire to assign external blame for the continued fighting," and in the inability of its military to crush the resistance, despite repeated claims that the Chechen war is "all but over."
The war is clearly far from over, though the rebels’ tactics have changed. It may be true that the Chechen resistance has been reduced to isolated pockets of fighters, who no longer engage Russian soldiers in battle over territory, but they are still out there engaging them in deadly clashes almost daily, and while Russian troops patrol Grozny during the day, they retreat to their heavily fortified bases at night.
There does not appear to be any effort by the government in Moscow to bring about a revision of its policy in Chechnya any time real soon, or to resolve the crisis by talking to Chechen field commanders. Russia remains today what it had always been under the brutal Czars and the Communist commissars — a totalitarian state. And to that you add today its post-Soviet inferiority complex, a condition that blinds it to the reality that it is pitted against a people who have fought it in a war without end, a war it could not win, for two centuries. You don’t mess with a people, in other words, to whom ridding themselves of hated foreign despots has long since entered their historical archetype.
For Vladimir Putin to justify his army’s continued occupation of and unspeakable atrocities in Chechnya behind the Bush Doctrine of defensive pre-emption is a pathetic joke. ([email protected])
<<10 October 2002>>
