| As he flew in a helicopter last month over Grozny, reduced
to rubble
by Russian airstrikes and artillery during 10 years of war, President
Vladimir Putin noted gloomily that the city was in terrible shape. It needed
some fixing up, he said, and immediately issued an order to that effect.
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref, hastily
dispatched to Grozny a few days later, echoed the president's Kafkaesque
tone. "I was struck by the state of the Chechens," he said.
"They are
dispirited and resigned." Then he delivered a real doozy: "What
we saw today
at Minutka looks almost like a set from a Hollywood movie," Gref
said,
referring to Grozny's main square.
This is not Putin's or Gref's personal theater of the absurd, but the
quintessence of an absurd decade. Were Putin or Gref ever to see their
native St. Petersburg reduced to rubble, it would never occur to them
to
compare the ruins to the set of a Hollywood blockbuster. Their reaction,
indeed anyone's reaction, would be completely different.
What are we fighting for in Chechnya? For the territorial integrity
of
Russia, of course. But territorial integrity does not mean uninhabited
scorched earth. We are fighting in order to prove to the Chechens that
they
are citizens of Russia. In doing so, however, we are destroying their
cities
and villages and kidnapping innocent civilians whose corpses turn up bearing
evidence of torture.
Take the case of Captain Eduard Ulman and three other agents of the
General Staff's Main Intelligence Directorate, who murdered six Chechen
civilians in 2002. The agents first shot up the truck in which the six
were
traveling, killing one and wounding two others. Ulman then contacted his
superiors by radio, and was ordered to kill the survivors and make it
look
as though the truck had been carrying rebel fighters and had run over
a land
mine. Jurors in the North Caucasus Military District court acquitted Ulman
and his fellow agents because they had simply been following orders. The
order was obviously illegal, but Ulman had been taught to follow orders
without fussing about their relation to morality or international law.
As commander-in-chief, Lieutenant Colonel Putin must accept both moral
and political responsibility for the actions of all the unidentified
officers who issued that criminal order to Captain Ulman. All the more
so
since the order was a distant but unmistakable echo of Putin's own
celebrated pledge to "waste" terrorists "in the outhouse."
On behalf of the government, Putin could have apologized to the
relatives of those six brutally murdered Russian citizens. Such a gesture
would have made an enormous impression on the Chechen people, changing
the
situation in the republic for the better and helping to prevent further
atrocities.
Too bad this never occurred to him. We consistently betray our own
grand pronouncements in Chechnya. We prove to the Chechens day in and
day
out that they are not citizens of Russia, that we have not considered
them
to be such for some time, and that their cities and villages are also
not
Russian.
Herein lies the fundamental absurdity of this war. Russian security
is
threatened not by the Chechen independence movement -- no matter how
great -- but by the presence of international Islamist terrorists who
penetrated the republic under the banner of Wahhabism at the end of the
first war, and particularly between the two wars, with the active
cooperation of such figures as Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, Movladi Udugov and
Shamil Basayev. These terrorists could not care less about Chechnya and
its
people. They regard the republic as a bridgehead in the global Islamic
revolution, just as for the "internationalists" who flooded
into Russia in
1917, the country was little more than kindling to set the world communist
revolution ablaze.
As we sink ever deeper into this Chechen-Russian hell of our own
making, the slogans that launched the conflict -- independence, territorial
integrity -- have lost all meaning. Russian leaders and Chechen politicians
must now set themselves two basic goals: To end the suffering of the Chechen
people, and to drive out the international Islamist terrorists who are
using
the republic as a base for attacks on Russia.
We must realize that the classic enemy we have been fighting with --
Chechen separatists such as Aslan Maskhadov, Akhmed Zakayev, other leaders
close to them and the portion of the Chechen people that sympathize with
their cause -- have now become our allies, because the radical Islamist
terrorists are destroying Chechnya first of all.
We will never reach an agreement with international terrorism, but
we
can reach an acceptable agreement with Chechen separatism. To do so will
require an abundance of political will and two simple things: an end to
the
excesses of federal troops in Chechnya, and a readiness to sit down at
the
negotiating table with anyone who shares our goals -- including those
who
have taken up arms against us as the late Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov
once did. Finally, we must stop treating Chechens in Russia as enemies
rather than as fellow citizens.
If we can do all this, the armed phase of the conflict in Chechnya
will quiet down for the next 10-15 years. What comes later will be the
responsibility of another generation. As Putin rightly remarked: "At
the end
of the day, the formal status of Chechnya is not all that important to
us.
What is important is that threats to Russia no longer issue from Chechen
territory."
If Russia is a strong, prosperous state in 10-15 years, it will have
no qualms about letting go of a pacified but still resentful Chechnya.
And
if not, Russia will have far bigger problems than Chechnya to worry about.
See also:
the original at
www.themoscowtimes.com
War in
Chechnya
| 