Chechnya and Russia..a good article

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The Heavy Hand of Putin

Russia and Chechnia After Beslan

By BÃœLENT GOKAY

The intentional targeting of a school by Chechen hostage-takers and the cruelty and the brutality they employed against defenceless children has horrified the world. It is an atrocity and the Chechen fighters and Islamist terrorists who carried it out are ruthless criminals. Absolutely nothing progressive can come of such terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. The terrorist methods employed by these groups are absolutely reactionary and entirely counter-productive, and can neither be supported nor defended.

To recognise this political fact and state it openly in no way minimises the criminal repression carried out by Putin and the ruling elite of Russia against the Chechen people. The hostage-taking and other similar actions are the inevitable consequence of a war that has long since taken the form of state-organised terror. The brutal war carried out by the Russian army and security forces for over 10 years in Chechnia has fuelled the growth of separatist movements, increasing the desperation of the local people and driving layers of young people towards Islamic radicalism and suicide bombing.

Since the time of the tsars, the Chechen people have fought for their independence. The Russian rulers, for most of the time, despised their Muslim adversaries. They considered these fanatical fighters as half-witted and primitive, and treated all Chechens as rebels, bandits and terrorists. This had been the case in the 18th century, and it has been true for all Chechen opponents of Russia since then. In the Russian perception, the only way to deal with the Chechen resistance was (and still is) the policy of massive force, implemented with single-minded ruthlessness. The Soviet press provides rich material on the numerous trials of Sufi sheikhs from Chechnia and their murids in the late 1950s and 1960s. As a rule, the accused were always tried for "banditry" and "manslaughter". Russian leaders on the face of the evidence should have learned a good deal from history. One is struck by the repetition of the same remedies and mistakes in the military and political field for the last two hundred years.

Putin's own rise to power was closely bound up with similar aggressive campaigns against Chechnia. In August 1999, Yeltsin nominated the largely unknown former security service veteran, Vladimir Putin, as head of the government. Shortly afterwards a series of bomb attacks destroyed blocks of flats in Moscow and other Russian cities, claiming hundreds of victims. Although the perpetrators were never properly identified, there were many indications that the secret service agency FSB was involved. Putin used the bombings as an excuse to once again undertake a full-scale military mobilisation against Chechnia. Appealing to Russian chauvinism and making crude attacks on Chechens he was swept into office as Russia's president on a wave of nationalist hysteria.

According to the story published by Anna Politkovskaia, a journalist of Novaia Gazeta, an agent of the FSB infiltrated the group of Chechen terrorists who took about 800 people hostage in a Moscow theatre in 2002. This agent succeeded in escaping the building and surviving the government rescue assault, as a result of which 129 hostages and the whole group of about 50 Chechen militants were killed. If this report is true, then Putin's government is guilty not only of a cruel and merciless overreaction to the hostage crisis, but also of directly organising one of the greatest armed provocations in recent Russian history.

The Russian army established a brutal dictatorship in Chechnia based on naked terror. Ten years ago Chechnya had a population of 2 million. Today it is 800,000. At least 80,000 have died since 1994 (over 40,000 them children). All major towns, including the capital Grozny, have been razed to the ground. These are figures supported by reports of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International. The total destruction of Grozny by bombardment and military occupation of Chechnia by a force over 300,000 illustrates the continued application of a tsarist type colonial policy. Even Putin was forced to concede his surprise at the extent of the destruction of the city when he visited Grozny in May, following the assassination of the pro-Moscow governor, Ahmad Kadyrov.

During the last thirteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian federation has been attempting to restructure its political, economic and social systems. Underlying this structural transformation has been an effort to define a new Russian identity. Today, Russians are engaged in an ever-desperate search for their own identity. The break-up of the Soviet Union caused a tide of Russian nationalism. It is now popular to talk about a mono-ethnic Russia, a state of blood, a state of soil. Almost all groups of the present day Russian Parliament are overtly or covertly trying to exploit the "Great Russian idea". In the absence of an all-embracing visionary ideology and in the context of the current deep crisis, an outdated and nostalgic "Great Russian nationalism" has re-emerged as an unstable amalgam of the "glorious Russian past" and the authoritarian Stalinist legacy.

The continuation of the war against Chechnia is indispensable for Putin's regime for two main reasons. First, the war gives him the excuse he needs for the building up of the repressive sate apparatus. Putin's government employs the threat of "terrorism" to legitimise its posture as a bulwark of law and order and security. Since Putin took over as president, the powers of security and intelligence services have been massively expanded. Secondly, Putin's measures in his "war against Chechen terrorism" are aimed at asserting the Great Power ambitions of the Russian ruling elite. The loss of this small republic would decisively weaken Russian influence in the north Caucasus--a region with vast international significance because of its rich oil deposits and its strategic proximity to the key oil pipeline routes.

The decade-long extreme brutality of the Russian state-run policy of terror and impunity has turned Chechnya into living hell, and those hostage-takers in Beslan were, like it or not, the children of this hell. But the genocidal policies of the Russian government in Chechnia, and tens of thousands Chechens killed cannot justify the hostage taking action in North Ossetia. Such cruel acts against civilians will only strengthen the hand of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and further antagonise the broad mass of the Russian people.