BRUSSELS, 11 May 2004 — The four Russian Special Forces officers opened fire on the vehicle carrying six civilians on a quiet road in southern Chechnya. They killed the driver, then realized they had netted not a carload of “terrorists”, but a couple of village teachers, a farmer, and a mother of seven children. To cover up their blunder, the Spetsnaz commandoes executed all five survivors, doused the vehicle in petrol and set it alight to pretend that it had hit a land mine.
Another routine atrocity in Vladimir Putin’s dirty war, a war he pretends is long over, long won since there are no political dividends in it any more. The murder of the six took place two years ago. Ten days ago in Rostov in southern Russia, the headquarters for Russia’s creaking Chechnya war machine, a court acquitted the four officers of the killings. They were just following orders.
If the acquittals scandalized Chechens, the trial itself was a rarity, only the second time in a decade of conflict in Chechnya that Russian officers had been called to judicial account for their brutality toward its civilians.
While the US, Britain and the Arab world grow increasingly outraged at the torture of Iraqi prisoners, Putin’s forces have carte blanche to ravage Chechnya on a daily basis with impunity.
The Russian leader need not concern himself with the Russian equivalent of CBS airing any footage of humiliation. No need to lean on the editors of 60 Minutes. There no longer is an equivalent. Russian TV used to be a problem for the Kremlin and Chechnya. Boris Yeltsin’s 94-96 war there withered as Russian TV bloomed, a late flowering of glasnost. Putin solved the problem by taking control of all national television.
That control also helps Putin pretend the war is over. He rode to power almost five years ago by launching Russia’s second war in Chechnya within weeks of becoming prime minister. Last week, being inaugurated for a second term as Russian president amid Kremlin pomp, he did not once mention Chechnya by name in his big speech.
While he was speaking, Russian forces were “rounding up” another 160 men in Chechnya for the beatings and detentions that are a daily occurrence.
At the same time, four Russian troops were killed in Chechnya, also a daily fixture. Running at around 30 deaths a week, plus dozens more maimed and ultimately dying, the Russian death toll now runs into the thousands.
And still Putin pretends there is no war, until a “terrorist” bomb explodes on one of the holiest days in the Russian calendar, May 9, the day that Russia marks its greatest victory, over Nazi Germany.
Sunday’s attack, the boldest Chechen guerrilla strike since the Moscow theater siege of October 2002, deprived Putin of his self-appointed loyal Chechen leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, and, more importantly from the military’s point of view, of Gen. Valery Baranov, the Russian commander in Chechnya.
In Chechnya itself, there are no more prestigious targets for the guerrillas than these two. The retribution will be terrifying. And guaranteed to perpetuate the long spiral of violence in what Putin insists ad nauseum is Russia’s own war on terror.
That is the tacit deal struck between Moscow and Washington since 9/11. He gets a green light for his Chechen campaign, in return for sharing intelligence with the US and not resisting US bases in post-Soviet Central Asia.
And his spin doctors constantly equate the Chechen guerrillas with Al-Qaeda. There are inarguably links in the Islamist international, and increasingly so as the conflict becomes more embittered and radicalized. But the parallel between Russia in Chechnya and America in Afghanistan or Iraq is also specious.
Chechnya is a 200-year-old story of Russian empire and expansion, conquest and coexistence, rebellion and retribution. You can read about it in Tolstoy and Lermontov. Stalin put the entire Chechen population on cattle wagons to Central Asia, killing tens of thousands, in retaliation for collaboration during World War II.
Russia is not dispatching an expeditionary force thousands of miles overseas. It is fighting a homegrown war in its own backyard, one of the last battles of Russian colonialism. But if Putin really did win, the victory could also embolden the Kremlin to flex its muscles in the post-Soviet territories it has lost.
Complaining about EU protests at Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya recently, a Russian commentator typically described Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen guerrilla leader, as Russia’s Bin Laden. The comparison is absurd. Maskhadov is a legitimate leader, elected president of Chechnya in 1997 in a reasonably fair election.
Had there been any Russian will to negotiate a settlement, Maskhadov would. Instead, Putin’s tactics have marginalized and radicalized him, trying to turn him into a Bin Laden of the Caucasus.
Eschewing politics, seeking a showdown and violence, the Kremlin has preferred self-fulfilling prophecy. That may be the one area where Putin has been successful. He should not be surprised to be confronting fundamentalist Islamists, black widow female suicide bombers, and a jihad.
