Current History October 2000 Through a Distorted Lens: Chechnya and the Western Media By ANATOL LIEVEN ANATOL LIEVEN is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He covered the 1994-1996 Chechen war as a correspondent for the London Times. His books include Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
---
WHY THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR IS DIFFERENT
Since these criticisms will of course be unpopular and disputed, I will first make my own position on Chechnya clear. I deplore the atrocities carried out by Russian troops in Chechnya, and also think that a good deal of the Russian bombardment of Chechnya was unwarranted and excessive. This judgment applies to the military's rocket attack on the central market in Grozny in November, the bombing of towns and villages far from the front line, and repeated attacks on refugee columns. Of course, in a war of this kind it is difficult to distinguish between fighters and civilians, and such attacks have taken place in many Western-conducted wars. The Russians, however, rarely seem even to have tried to distinguish between the two. As a result, civilian casualties have been high. In interviews with Russian soldiers who had served in Chechnya, reporter Maura Reynolds documented in the September 17, 2000 Los Angeles Times that Russian troops have also carried out widespread atrocities against Chechen civilians, including killings, torture, rape, looting, and at least one massacre. All this the Western media have rightly condemned. But the same judgment cannot be brought against the bombardment of Grozny during the assault on that city. Here, the Western media has portrayed standard military practice as a war crime.
During the 1994-1996 war, which I reported for The Times of London, my sympathies were strongly with the Chechen side. I believed and still believe that the Russian invasion and the suffering and destruction that resulted were wholly unjustified. I was delighted by the Chechen victories in 1996 and the peace agreement reached for Russia and Chechnya by General Alexander Lebed and the Chechen chief of staff, General Aslan Maskhadov. I welcomed Maskhadov's election as Chechen president; I hoped that the courage and ability to cooperate displayed by the Chechen fighters and their commanders during the war would lead them to rally behind Maskhadov and help in the creation of a stable state at peace with Russia and Chechnya's other neighbors. These positions are set out in my book on that war.2
Tragically, the Chechen commanders proved one of the most disastrous dominant groups of any people in modern times. Of course, the destruction, economic misery, and brutalization left behind by the war of 1994-1996 was key in subsequent developments, but this is a partial explanation rather than an adequate excuse. Of these developments, the most important were the complete failure to create an effective state (echoing but greatly exceeding the previous failure of President Dzhokhar Dudayev); the explosion of banditry and especially kidnapping; and the establishment in Chechnya of a powerful group of international Islamic militants dedicated to carrying the jihad against Russia beyond Chechnya's borders.
>From the Russian withdrawal at the end of 1996 to the new invasion of
October 1999, more than 1,100 Russian citizens were kidnapped by Chechen or
Chechen-led gangs, and often tortured and mutilated. The victims included
not just ethnic Russians, but numerous Chechens as well as the Chechens'
Ingush and Dagestani Muslim neighbors and several dozen Westerners
(including American missionary Herman Gregg, whose captors made a film of
themselves cutting off his index finger to back up their ransom demand).
The heads of the kidnapping gangs were leading Chechen commanders. For example, Arbi Barayev, who was responsible for the kidnap and murder of four British telecom engineers in December 1998, has once again become a prominent commander in this war, responsible for some striking victories over the Russians.
Western diplomats involved in attempts to gain the release of hostages held by Barayev told me that they were certain that he was closely linked to the Chechen vice president, Vakha Arsanov. This is not to suggest the responsibility of Maskhadov himself-in fact he broke with Arsanov-but it certainly brings out his inability to control even his own administration, let alone Chechnya as a whole. Most kidnap victims in Chechnya were taken for purely financial reasons, but senior Russian envoys to Chechnya were also seized, including Boris Yeltsin's personal envoy, Valentin Vlasov in May 1998 and the Russian Interior Ministry envoy, General Gennady Shpigun in March 1999 (both were supposedly under Maskhadov's personal protection).
The following extract is from an article by one Western journalist who did try to give a balanced account of the events leading up to the war, David Filipov of the Boston Globe:
"Kiril Perchenko, 20 [a Moscow video producer who was abducted in the Russian capital and spent six months as a hostage in Chechnya], said his Chechen captors, followers of the Chechen warlords Arbi Barayev and Ramzan Akhmadov, routinely chopped off the fingers and hands of captives while forcing the others to watch. . . .
"Children have not been spared. Adi Sharon's captors cut off the ends of both [of the 12-year-old's] little fingers to press their demands that his father, a wealthy businessman who works in Moscow, pay $8 million in ransom. Alla Geifman, [a] 12-year-old girl, told reporters after her release that her captors grew impatient as the months dragged on, cutting off one of her fingers. A month later, they cut off another and sent it to her father. They also sent him a cassette in which the girl is heard screaming 'Papa, they're taking off my pants.' Geifman was in the news several weeks after she was freed when the US Embassy in Moscow failed to grant her a visa, instead requesting more information about the purpose of her trip. That refusal was taken up by the media here as a sign of what many Russians view as the West's unwillingness to hear Russia's side of why it is fighting in Chechnya."3
>From the viewpoint of the Russian state, still more important was the
creation in Chechnya of forces that were no longer Chechen nationalists
dedicated to defending their "country" but who were committed to attacking
Russia itself and imposing their version of Islam on neighboring peoples.
The key event was an alliance forged in 1998 between Shamil Basayev, the
most famous Chechen field commander, other Chechen radical leaders, Islamic
radicals from neighboring Dagestan, and the followers of Ibn-ul-Khattab,
the Arab leader of a group of international mujahedeen who had gathered in
Chechnya.4 In April 1998 they formed the Congress of Peoples of Chechnya
and Dagestan, with the declared aim of creating an Islamic state that would
unite these two Russian republics. These men were in revolt not only
against Russia, but also against President Mask-hadov, whom they denounced
as a traitor to Chechnya and Islam. They continue to receive strong public
support from the Islamic Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which is also
sheltering Osama bin Laden. (In late August 2000 an aide to bin Laden told
the Associated Press that bin Laden is sending volunteers and arms to
Khattab.)
The 1994 Russian invasion was itself chiefly to blame for the appearance of Khattab and his men, many of whom had previously fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia. Until that war, the so-called Wahabbis (after the Saudi Arabian fundamentalist variant of Islam) were an insignificant presence in Chechnya. With the Russian invasion the mujahedeen flocked to Chechnya. As in Afghanistan,they re-ceived help in establishing themselves by their access to Arab funds.
>From April 1998 to their invasion of Dag-estan in August 1999, Chechen
fighters killed or took prisoner dozens of Russian police and troops in
raids across the Russian republic border. Terrorists also carried out many
bomb attacks in the region, including a massive bombing in the North
Ossetian city of Vladikavkaz in March 1999 that killed 51 people, and a
bombing on a block housing Russian soldiers' families in the Dagestani town
of Buinaksk in September 1999 that killed 64 people. No one has ever
claimed responsibility for these bombings, but they appear to fit into the
general campaign by the forces of Basayev, Khattab, and their allies, which
included carrying out bombings of Russian military and police targets.
Only with the bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in September 1999 that killed more than 300 people did the growing crisis make headlines in the West. Western reporting of these bombings was invariably accompanied by statements that proof of Chechen or Islamist responsibility for the bombings had not been established (no one claimed responsibility). It was also argued that the behavior of the security forces had been highly suspicious; notably, that they moved quickly to bulldoze the buildings affected by the Moscow blasts, thereby also perhaps destroying evidence, and that they carried out an alleged "antiterrorism" operation in the town of Ryazan, which involved planting explosives in a building-something of which they had apparently not warn-ed the local police. The blasts of course also seemed to be very convenient for Putin and his supporters. They created a great wave of public support for a new war in Chechnya and allowed Putin to present himself as a forceful and courageous leader in the run-up to the presidential elections of 2000.
This was all in itself correct; if not the Russian security forces, then it is certainly plausible that a tycoon supporter of Putin might have contracted such an operation. Yet, as far as the general Western discussion of the issue is concerned, the history of bombings in the North Caucasus was barely mentioned, nor was the character, antecedents, or links of Khattab and his men. Whatever the suspicions about pro-Putin forces, it should be obvious that the suggestion that a force largely composed of Arab Muslim extremists would have lacked the motive, the expertise, or the ruthlessness to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign against Russians is absolutely ridiculous.
In an interview with a Czech newspaper, Lidove Noviny, immediately after the September blasts, Basayev made the following remarks (he did not at that stage attribute the bombings to the Kremlin): "I denounce terrorism, including state terrorism used by the Russian empire. The latest blast in Moscow is not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis. Russia has been openly terrorizing Dagestan. . . . For the whole week, united in a single fist, the army and the Interior Ministry units have been pounding three small villages. . . . [A]ll this will go on, of course, because those whose loved ones, whose women and children are being killed for nothing, will also try to use force to eliminate their adversaries. . . . What is the difference between someone letting a bomb go off in the center of Moscow and injuring 10 to 20 children and the Russians dropping bombs from their aircraft over Karamachi and killing 10 to 20 children? Where is the difference?"
I have some sympathy with this point of view, which is almost identical to that expressed by an Algerian terrorist leader in Gillo Pontecorvo's anticolonialist epic film, The Battle of Algiers. But that is the point. One could just as well put these words into the mouth of an Algerian, or a Palestinian, or a Kurd in Turkey-and if they were, would the United States media have the slightest sympathy for them?
To suggest that Khattab and his men had no motive to carry out the Moscow bombings is similar to suggesting that Osama bin Laden had no motive to attack the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds of innocent Africans in the process. Bin Laden and Khattab share not only the same background but also exactly the same beliefs and attitudes. The tendency of too many Western commentators to believe automatically in Russian responsibility for the bombings is tragicomically reminiscent of the attitude of the old leftists for whom the anti-Israeli forces in the Middle East could do no wrong. Western Russophobes believe that Russia can do no right, and their views have colored Western media approaches.
Yet the bitterly anti-Western ideology of Khattab, Basayev, and their followers is not a matter of debate, and does not have to be sought out by intrepid journalists venturing to interview these men in the mountains of Chechnya. Their views can be found, on the Internet, in English, on the web site of the international mujahedeen in Afghanistan, at qoqaz.net. This is Basayev himself on the nature of the war (interviewed in early January 2000): "The crucifix is being raised anew and war is being declared against Islam and Muslims; this is proof that this war is like the Crusades, where all of Europe's intelligence capabilities are geared towards providing Russia with information and other support. . . . The Russians and their supporters in the West are fighting us collectively, as Allah has described them: 'And fight the unbelievers collectively as they fight you collectively.'"
_________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail