Through a Distorted Lens: Chechnya and the Western Media
by Anatol Lieven
The second Chechen war has not brought out the best in the Western media-with the usual exception of the brave and dedicated correspondents who have gone to report on it. All too much of the coverage and analysis has been relentlessly one-sided and relentlessly anti-Russian. Most of the media-and in particular, of course, television-were typically uninterested in the signs of growing crisis, and turned their attention to the region only when the Russians actually invaded. Equally typically, once the war had begun, the media lost themselves in the reporting of the unfolding events, rarely stepping back to analyze the background to the fighting.
(snip)
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.)
(snip)
GETTING IT WRONG
The failure to place the Russian intervention in this historical context is the key flaw in much of the Western coverage of the war. This coverage has not necessarily been wrong in itself, but it has lacked historical and international perspective, and a sense of comparison. Some print journalists-for example David Filipov of the Boston Globe, or Daniel Williams of the Washington Post-have presented admirably balanced accounts. But their efforts have been drowned out by the sheer weight of others' articles and still more the television coverage that did not incorporate the Russian case or include basic objective information. In behaving in this manner, the Western media have failed their own readers and audiences. My own conversations in the United States and Western Europe lead me to conclude that the vast majority of even informed Westerners are unaware of the full background to the war. A great many people working in the media and the wider field of international affairs still do not have a grasp of most of the basic facts concerning the events that led to the war; nor for that matter that the Chechens had always been offered full autonomy within the Russian Federation and were therefore not-unlike the Kurds of Turkey-fighting for elementary ethnic rights (how many times have I been asked, "But why don't the Russians at least grant the Chechens autonomy?"). Many informed Westerners also do not know of the presence of the international mujahedeen, since too many of the Western media have either ignored their presence altogether or, in an especially discreditable example in the Economist, presented them as a largely fictitious product of Russian propaganda akin to the legendary (but wholly nonexistent) Baltic female snipers, the "White Stockings." (5-)
Similarly, the role of Khattab and his forces, and the campaign of bombings, raids, and ambushes by Khattab's and Basayev's forces from 1998 to 1999, passed almost unnoticed. Even the August 1999 invasion of Dagestan was not adequately reported-and when it was covered, it was sometimes twisted to make it appear as an act of Russian aggression. Thus a report in the August 9, 1999 Washington Post was headlined, "Russian Assault in Dagestan Recalls Chechen War," and contained the line, "Russian officials say the Chechens now want to expand their self-proclaimed Islamic republic into Dagestan"-as if this was an unsupported Russian assertion rather than the publicly declared aim of the Chechen and mujahedeen fighters (to be fair, the Post corrected this with a balanced piece of analysis on August 18).
A particularly sad, and surprising, example of such a mistaken approach was an op-ed in The New York Times by Robert Kaplan on the invasion of Dagestan. (6-) This was one of only two op-eds that the paper published on this subject (the other was mine, in reaction to the first), approximately one-thirtieth the number that later appeared concerning the Russian invasion of Chechnya. A few editorials appeared, but these mostly took a detached view of "Russia's Problem." None that I have found expressed outrage at the attack, or noted that it risked plunging ethnically and religiously divided Dagestan into a Lebanon-like whirlpool of anarchic civil war. None in consequence gave real support to Russia, as they certainly would have to a United States ally in these circumstances.
Kaplan's op-ed, entitled "Why Russia Risks All in Dagestan," turned the entire conflict on its head. He described it as "Russia's assault on Chechen and Dagestani rebels"-as if Russia had invaded Dagestan-and argued that this was part of a general campaign to restore Russian hegemony over the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. He said nothing about the international mujahedeen or the shura. He said nothing about the fact that the Dagestani government and parliament had given their full support to the Russian campaign, and were backed by the great majority of ordinary Dagestanis. In effect, Kaplan was arguing that the Russians should be defeated in Dagestan, and that this would be in the interests of the West and the region.
Yet if one man could be expected to understand the real dynamics of what was happening, it was Kaplan, who has made a name by analyzing how conflicts are generated by a mixture of history, religion, and contemporary economic misery, social despair and anomie, and state failure. And all these factors (albeit severely exacerbated by the war of 1994-1996) played a key role in the first Chechen war and in the growing crisis in Dagestan. He also has not expressed any sympathy for radical Islam. But Kaplan knows very little about the Caucasus and the former Soviet Union, and so he simply followed his prejudices and those of much of his profession. He adopted what often seems to be the default mode of much of the Western media when writing about the former Soviet Union.
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