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TITLE: Russia Lost the Chechen War |
AUTHOR: Andrei Piontkovsky |
PUB: The Russia Journal |
DATE: March 17, 2001 |
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Russia has lost another Chechen war. Just like in the 19th century, in 1944 and in 1994-96. It's said this is a war for Russia's territorial integrity, which means, I hope, not so much the integrity of a patch of scorched earth, but that of the multi-ethnic Russian people - a war to make the Chechens feel themselves citizens of Russia with the full rights that entails. Such a war can be won only in the hearts and minds of people. For the first time in the last 150 years, Russia had perhaps a real opportunity to win this war. This was in September and October 1999, when refugees fled Chechnya, cursing Shamil Basayev, Khattab and the people behind the kidnapping business as they went. Many military and civilian experts proposed a political strategy, which could have provided a long-term solution to the conflict in Russia's interests. The plan was to stop federal troops at the Terek River and normalize life in Northern Chechnya. In this way, Russia would have had both strength and moral superiority on its side and would have been able to negotiate with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, isolating in the eyes of Chechen society the forces most hostile to Russia. But the election campaign, which made the war its central element, and the logic of the "successor operation" required short-term dramatic effects rather than long-term strategy. What was needed were TV pictures of Grozny in ruins, brilliant victories, the Russian flag raised over every mountain village and a crazed Orthodox colonel wishing Chechens a Merry Christmas by firing cannons at them. There was just enough of this patriotically uplifting video sequence designed to help "raise the Russians from their knees" to see the successor operation through to its triumphant close. Since then, a year has passed. "It's impossible to imagine a situation in which, say, an officer could take a stroll through the streets of Grozny. In a matter of minutes, he'd be either shot by a sniper or taken hostage. This is why the military authorities are based in Khankala. Almost no one goes to Grozny," leading military analyst Mikhail Khodarenok wrote last week in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Dissatisfied with this situation, Khodarenok called for harsher measures, the possibility of handing out punishment outside the courts and full disarmament of the "pro-Russian" Chechen militia, etc. But he adds in a melancholy tone that "Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov set a price scale by decree for the bandit troops. Some generals can fetch up to 40 or more bulls. The Russians also have price scales. For example, setting how much Chechens have to pay to free their relatives from the [prison] pit. The price varies depending on the prisoner?s age ? under 20, between 20-40, and over 40." Russian price scales and bandit troops seem to have become such routine notions that the journalist doesn't even notice the damning indictment he makes by putting them in the same paragraph. Did we enter Chechnya to put a stop to the slave trade or to take part in it ourselves? And how then do the Russian troops differ from their bandit foes? Russia has lost the Chechen war for good because after the mass bombing of towns and use of artillery against villages, after cleansing and "Russian price scales" practiced in prison pits and at checkpoints, almost all Chechens, including those obliged to cooperate with us, hate us. Or, as one Russian officer [Leo Tolstoy] who took part in this eternal Caucasian war wrote, "[the Chechens] feel toward the Russians a much stronger feeling than just hate." Russia lost the war because the Army, saddled with a task it was never intended for, is decaying, becoming ever more involved in doing business with petrol, hostages and with money sent for the rebuilding of Chechnya. Russia lost the war in Chechnya because this war has become a school of hatred and cruelty for tens of thousands of young people and it will yet spill over as a crime wave on the streets of Russian cities, just like after the Afghan war and the first Chechen war. What kind of integrity are we still fighting for in the mountains of Chechnya? We've long since stopped considering the Chechens a part of Russia. We can't even begin thinking about what hell 18-year-old Russian citizen Elza Kungayeva, who was murdered by a Russian officer, went through during the last hours of her life and feel even fleeting sympathy for her. We don?t think of her as a citizen of Russia or even as a human being. We call her torturer a national hero, greeting him with flowers and Nazi salutes, though he is above all a victim of this same war. That he had gone crazy was already clear on that Christmas evening. But where were the Orthodox shepherds who should have been there to heal his soul and explain to him the blasphemous sense of his words? Nowhere. Instead, the PR shepherds showed the shameful film over and over, "consolidating the patriotically orientated electorate." Every war has its war criminals. The Chechen side has its fair share. But we have to first remember our own. We have to remember the bankers who financed Basayev, the spin-doctors who calculated the electoral effectiveness of taking Grozny and the publicists who praised the "brilliant operation conducted by our secret services to lure Basayev and Khattab into Dagestan in order to have a pretext for full-scale military operations." We have to remember the liberals who proclaimed that the "Army will be reborn in Chechnya" and the businessmen in uniform or civilian dress who continue to grow fat on the war and have an interest in prolonging it. Thanks to them, Russia lost the war in Chechnya. END |