LONDON, 31 August 2004 — Eight years ago in Grozny, at the end of the first war in Chechnya, I met a man who called himself a Shariah judge. He was an ex-footballer— turned-rebel fighter, one of the men who had come down from the mountains and thrown the Russians out. The twentysomething judge’s grasp of Islam seemed about as poor as mine as he chatted flirtatiously with my female colleague and smoked incessantly. His “Shariah court” had done virtually nothing.
The ex-footballer embodied all the confusions of a conflict that is still not properly understood. On the surface an Islamic radical, he was a Chechen nationalist who had picked up Islam like a lucky charm amid the ruins left behind by the Russian Army.
Things have changed in Chechnya since then. I thought of the Shariah judge last week on hearing of the plane explosions in Russia, which were probably the work of Chechen extremists or their allies. During the past two years, terrorism associated with Chechnya has killed several hundred Russian and Chechen civilians.
Five years ago, when Moscow launched an “anti-terrorist operation” to recapture Chechnya, there was no real terrorism there. Now, thanks mainly to Moscow’s policies, it is becoming a real threat.
From a distance, the war in Chechnya has acquired a dark aura of inevitability: An implacable Islamic warrior people fighting an invading Russian Army. But the Chechens are far from being Afghans. They are a small mountain people with a history of resistance to the Russian state, but also of pragmatic accommodation with it. Most speak Russian much better than they do Chechen, and almost all have relatives working in the rest of Russia.
Moreover, most Chechens I know are viscerally opposed to the fundamentalism that has slowly been infiltrating their republic during the past 10 years. If they are Muslim, they are practising a form of local Islam that is all but incomprehensible to Arab incomers. For years, the Chechens sent away these interlopers with curses when they were told to stop visiting their local shrines or to start veiling their women.
The Arabs have kept on coming, though in much smaller numbers than the Russians claim. There are ties with the Middle East that didn’t exist before. And there are Chechens whose lives have been so broken by bombings, abductions and “filtration camps” that they are ready to be suicide bombers.
The tragedy of Chechnya is that most Chechens are fed up with the zealots, but have nowhere else to turn. They would almost certainly give up the hope of independence for a peaceful existence in the Russian state — if only the Russians would guarantee them basic rights.
A villager in Paul Mitchell’s recent film on Chechnya for BBC4 says of Moscow’s second military intervention in 1999: “If the Russians had been just a little civilized and decent to the ordinary working man, then the people would have welcomed them with open arms. But so many innocent people have been tortured and killed. Everybody knows that hundreds of people just disappear. Where are they?”
Now, Chechens are governed by two vicious and criminal armed groups. Russian soldiers earn money from extra pay and black market oil trading, and have every incentive to stay, treating the Chechen population as a target for extortion and intimidation. The second group, the Kadyrovtsy, are Chechens loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the late pro-Moscow Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov. Kadyrov, 27, whose Balkan equivalents ended up in the courts of The Hague, uses thousands of armed men to maintain his economic and political power.
These venal agents of violence make Moscow’s “war on terror” unwinnable.
Corruption is so rife that in June the rebels were able to bribe their way past a dozen checkpoints and attack police stations in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, 100 miles from the “combat zone”.
Yesterday, the Kadyrovtsy’s man was elected president of Chechnya in a rigged poll. Alu Alkhanov had no real opposition and not many votes.
The official Russian position is more or less as follows: Chechnya is a front in the international war on terror and our policies there deserve unreserved Western support; however, it is a domestic political issue and no international organizations can be involved. The situation is getting back to normal; but it is still too dangerous for journalists or human rights workers to be given free access.
The Western position is equally short-sighted. It is to wish that Chechnya goes away, mildly condemn human rights abuses, express sympathy for Russia’s problem with terrorism and pray that the extremists do not attack a Western target next.
It will not go away. The extremists have nothing to lose. Almost everything has been tried except a broad-based political process not manipulated by Moscow, and a genuine international presence by the UN or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor what is going on. This darkest corner of Europe desperately needs some light.
— Thomas de Waal is Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
