THE CASE FOR CHECHNYA
Editorial
What happened was what always happens when a state possessing great military strength enters into relations with primitive, small peoples living their independent lives. Either on the pretext of self-defence, even though any attacks are always provoked by the offences of the strong neighbour, or on the pretext of bringing civilization to a wild people, even though this wild people lives incomparably better and more peacefully than its civilizers . . . the servants of large military states commit all sorts of villainy against small nations, insisting that it is impossible to deal with them in any other way.
Leo Tolstoy, 1902 draft of Hadji Murat
In the decade and a half since the end of the Cold War, the map of Eastern Europe has been comprehensively redrawn. More than a dozen new countries have appeared as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav wars of succession, an arc of newly sovereign states stretching from Estonia to Azerbaijan. The majority of them have, at the prompting of the us, been incorporated into Euro-Atlantic defence structures, and several were ushered into the eu earlier this year; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now form the outer perimeter of the Single Market, while Georgia and Ukraine have advanced their cases for nato membership. The continent has been transformed.
Map of Chechnya
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Chechnya provides a stark contrast to these trajectories. Here, as in the Baltic states, a national independence movement emerged during perestroika, and a broad national consensus for secession was democratically ratified in late 1991. Earlier the same year the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania overwhelmingly voted for separation from the ussr; the results of the referenda were quickly approved by the ussr's Supreme Soviet and the three new nations, with populations of 1.6 million, 2.7 million and 3.7 million respectively, were admitted to the un within a matter of weeks. But Chechnya—at 15,000 square kilometres, slightly smaller than Wales, and with a population of around a million—has, since 1991, suffered two full-scale assaults by the world's fifth-largest military force, and is now entering the sixth year of a vicious occupation designed to reduce the populace to starvation and submission. While citizens of the Baltic states are now able to cross Europe's borders freely, Chechens must endure Russian checkpoints and zachistki—'clean-up' operations, ostensibly for checking identity papers—which routinely result in the torture, ransom, disappearance or summary execution of those arrested, as well as the pillaging and further impoverishment of those who remain. The devastation is unthinkable, the brutality endless and unchecked, while the casualties remain largely uncounted.
Discussions of the Russo-Chechen conflict have rarely focused on this staggering divergence of fortunes, often preferring the state-sponsored obfuscations of the 'war on terror', or else characterizing it as the all but inevitable product of a long-running historical antagonism. The legacy of Chechen resistance to Russian colonization—from the first confrontations with Cossack settlers in the sixteenth century to the southward expansion of the Tsarist Empire in the nineteenth century, and well into the Soviet period—has undoubtedly played a role in galvanizing the movement for secession. A strong impetus would also have come from the experience of deportation and exile suffered by several North Caucasian peoples in 1944. The immediate roots of the present war, meanwhile, can be found in the Kremlin's cynical plan to hoist Putin into power, and to reverse the defeats suffered in 1994–96.
But underpinning Chechen resistance, past and present, has been a consistent struggle for self-determination. The Chechens' demands are comparatively modest—full sovereignty, retaining economic and social ties with Russia—and have a sound constitutional basis. The response, however, has been staggeringly disproportionate, with Russian forces unleashing attacks of a ferocity unmatched in these lands since the Second World War. In the West, on the rare occasions that attention is devoted to Chechnya there has been almost total unanimity that Chechen independence is not to be countenanced, for the good of Russian democracy and its nascent capitalism. What follows is an attempt to demonstrate the weakness in fact, and shamefulness in principle, of the arguments used to deny the fundamental right of the Chechen people to govern themselves.
Frontier revolts
The Chechens are one of an intricate patchwork of peoples covering the North Caucasus. [1] 'Chechen' is in fact a Russian designation, after a village where a battle was fought between Cossack settlers and the local people in 1732; the Chechens—mythically descended, 'like sparks from steel', from the hero Turpalo-Nokhchuo—refer to themselves as 'Nokhchii', and are closely related to the neighbouring Ingush, with whom they share many customs. The two peoples, whose languages are mutually intelligible, are jointly known as the Vainakh. They have been present in the area for over 6,000 years, their livelihood predominantly provided by livestock, subsistence farming and the surrounding forests. As with mountain peoples elsewhere, Chechen society lacked feudal structures, being composed instead of groupings of clans living in formal equality—'free and equal like wolves', as the Chechen saying has it. This essentially democratic, acephalous form of social organization distinguished the Chechens from many other Caucasian peoples, such as the Kabardins or Avars, and was to have far-reaching implications: firstly because it meant that there was no native elite whom the Tsars could co-opt; and secondly because the Chechens were in a sense already ideally organized for guerrilla warfare.
The tradition of resistance to outside rule in Chechnya is striking in its depth and consistency. It has been stronger here than elsewhere due to a combination of factors: pre-existing social relations, cultural patterns, concrete historical experience and environmental conditions. Topography and demographics have been crucial: Chechnya's thickly forested mountains provided better cover for resistance than was available in, say, Ingushetia; moreover, as the most numerous of the North Caucasian peoples, the Chechens provided the majority of footsoldiers for rebellions against Russian rule. Their record of struggle sets them apart from their neighbours, among whom both admiration and resentment of Chechens are common. It was above all the disparity between Chechen and Ingush experiences of and attitudes to Russian rule—the Ingush largely abstained from the rebellions of 1840–59 and 1920—that lay behind Ingushetia's decision to separate from Chechnya in a 1991 referendum.
Resistance has been bolstered and perpetuated by Chechen culture in which, as elsewhere in the Caucasus, honour—both martial and familial—and hospitality are prominent. Memory plays a central role, not only in its oral traditions—notably the epic songs, illi—but also in the customary duty to remember seven generations of ancestors. History is no dispassionate record of events; it is the basis of Chechen identity itself. [2] Religion, too, has been an important element: Islam penetrated the East Caucasus in the 17th and 18th centuries, melding with local animist traditions. The Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhood, with its aversion to hierarchy and creed of resistance, held strong appeal for Chechens, and it was under Sufi leadership—uniting dozens of disparate Caucasian peoples behind the banner of Islamic solidarity—that the most effective resistance to Russian colonial domination was to be mobilized in the 19th century. [3]
Russia's southward expansion began with the conquest of the khanate of Astrakhan by Ivan the Terrible in 1552, and the first contacts between Chechens and Russians date from this time. But shifts in geopolitical fortunes and priorities meant that Russian imperial interest in the Caucasus revived only in the late 18th century—provoking the 1785–91 uprising of Sheikh Mansur, whose armies inflicted a heavy defeat on Catherine the Great. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Tsars began to colonize the region in earnest, constructing lines of forts along the Terek and Sunzha rivers, which laterally bisect Chechnya. Russia's colonial policy was similar to that adopted by other European powers in their dealings with tribal peoples; in the Caucasus it was personified by General Aleksei Yermolov, who from 1816 attempted to subdue Chechnya, where resistance was stiffest, by means of punitive raids on mountain villages, collective punishment, razing of houses and crops, deforestation, forced mass deportation, and settlement of Cossacks on lands vacated by Chechens. Not only did this approach dispossess and enrage an entire population, it also had longer-term sociological consequences. In his eagerness to drive the Chechens out of the agricultural lowlands and into the mountains where they would eventually starve, Yermolov blocked the formation of feudal and landowning structures in Chechen society, thus cementing the very clan-based order that had made resistance so effective. [4]
The Chechens initially responded to Yermolov's brutality with armed raids on Russian positions. But by the late 1830s resistance had coalesced around Imam Shamil, an Avar from Dagestan who advocated Islamic discipline in order to defend local ways—including the adat or customary laws—against the invader. Between 1840–59 Tsarist repression escalated into full-scale war against Shamil's proto-state. [5] The armies of Alexander ii eventually won through sheer military might, but the persistent trouble on his empire's southern flank evidently persuaded the Tsar, in the aftermath of the Crimean War, to press on with the task his father had entrusted to Paskievich, Yermolov's successor, in 1829—the 'extermination of the recalcitrant'. Forced deportations of the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus began in 1856 and continued until 1864; a total of 600,000, including 100,000 Chechens, were sent to the Ottoman Empire, where tens of thousands perished from starvation and disease. The Cherkess have never recovered demographically; most of the Chechens who survived, however, eventually returned, though many remained to form significant diaspora communities in present-day Turkey and Jordan.
-- Michael Pugliese