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The Eurasian Politician - December 2002
by Anssi Kullberg
Published in Finnish in Turun Sanomat, 8th Nov. 2002
The Chechen War II, which started in autumn 1999, has continued for three years already, but in fact the Chechen resistance struggle has been going on almost without a pause since the late 1700s, when Russia first time attacked Chechnya.
The only time Russians managed to crush almost all resistance was during the darkest years of Stalinism, when Iosif Stalin decided to destroy the entire Chechen nation and a few other persistent Caucasian nations.
In February 1944, anniversary of the Red Army, the orders of the notorious head of Stalin’s secret service, Lavrenty Beria, to imprison the whole Chechen nation were carried out. Massacres took place all around Chechnya, and the mountain villages were weeks in flames. Those who opposed the operation, as well as pregnant women, elderly, and others who would not have survived the transportation, were shot or burn alive.
According to estimations, even as many as over 60 per cent of the Chechen people were killed in massacres, during the week-long transportation, in concentration camps, or in the deportation places in Kazakstan, where surviving Chechens died en masse to hunger, cold, diseases, and poisons that were hidden in the "humanitarian aid" prepared for the deportees by the secret service. Ever since, the Chechens have remembered the Red Army Day as the memorial day of their own Holocaust.
Only when conditions in the Soviet dictatorship were relatively eased after Stalin’s death by Nikita Khrushchev, the Chechens could again return to their homeland, where they bought back their property from the Russians who had been meanwhile resettled there. A period of reconstruction could begin, although the Chechens remained discriminated and collectively branded nation within the Soviet apartheid.
Memory of the genocide never disappeared, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria declared independence in 1991. One of the arguments for the necessity of national independence was the survival of the people: Russia could not be trusted.
Are Afghanistan’s tragedies being repeated in Chechnya?
The Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta compared the Russian colonial war in Chechnya with the French colonial war in Algeria, arguing that Russia had better learn from Charles de Gaulle, who saved France by giving independence to Algeria.
From the inter-war period up to our days many have also compared the Chechen independence struggle with our experiences in Finland. In 1940-1942 the Chechen journalist, poet and resistance leader Hasan Israilov admired the Finnish Winter War (1939-1940) and said Chechnya would be another Finland. Again in 1991 the first president of independence-declared Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, had studied the history of Finnish and Baltic resistance well during his posting in Tartu, Estonia, and he held speeches glorifying the Finnish Winter War. In Finland, the author of a history of Chechnya and the North Caucasus, Antero Leitzinger, as well as a Russia expert of the Foreign Ministry, Ilmari Susiluoto (recently in a talk-show), have compared the Chechen resistance with that of the Finns half a decade earlier.
The Chechen affairs could also be compared with another, more distant, nation who fought against the Soviet Union, namely Afghanistan.
The Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, starting the period of more than ten years of Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation and the communist regime in Kabul relying on the Soviets. Finally in 1989, the Soviet Union had to remove from Afghanistan, humiliated, but the Afghans suffered an even heavier costs of the war: the country was in ruins, and the nation divided into various quarrying groupings, who continued civil war against each other after the Soviet troops had been pulled out. Side effects of the war and occupation included also radical Islamists and international terrorists, who got foothold in Afghanistan.
After the Chechen declaration of independence, Chechnya enjoyed three years of practical independence, although without international recognition. In 1994, however, after months of indicative provocations and failed attempts of destabilisation and coup d’état, Boris Yeltsin’s Russia invaded Chechnya. Chechens went to the first war as a united and honourable nation, literally to defend home, religion, and native land. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat and finally yielded to remove in 1996.
The first president Dzhokhar Dudayev had been killed in a Russian rocket attack, and the moderate Aslan Maskhadov was elected new president in a free election. Also Russia recognised Maskhadov as the legitimate president, although the decisions concerning the international status of Chechnya were postponed to 2001.
Chechnya got another three years period of de facto independence, but this time the country had been destroyed, and the period of inter-war peace was characterised by isolation and purposeful destabilisation of Chechnya. During this time, radical Islamists began to increase their influence in the North Caucasus.
Nearest to power, the Islamists had got after Dudayev’s death, during the short reign of the vice president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, but Maskhadov’s moderation willingness to consensus gave them much more space than Dudayev’s nationalism had given.
Like in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had used the principles of "divide and rule", provocateurs, and "false flag" tactics, to break the internal relations of the Afghans, for example by supporting and training Islamist terrorist groups, also in Chechnya Russia only welcomed the activities of anti-Maskhadov Islamist groups and gangsters.
One of the most notorious thug of Chechnya was Arbi Barayev, who led the kidnapping business. He was hated by Chechens, and Maskhadov’s government issued a murder case against him in 1998, and ordered him to be imprisoned. When Russia started her second Chechen War, she did not issue warranty against Barayev, although he was the main suspect for most cruel crimes, including the kidnapping and murder of several Westerners.
Barayev rose into rebellion against Maskhadov, and the Russian secret services backed him to raise his own paramilitary forces into rebellion against the Maskhadov government in summer 2000. When the local police arrested him in November 2000, the pro-Moscow puppet government ordered him to be released. Barayev was reportedly killed in uncertain circumstances in autumn 2001. This autumn, his nephew Movsar Barayev led the hijacker group of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow.
The Russian puppet administration in Chechnya is led by quite dusky persons. Ahmed Kadyrov, the nominal head of the administration, is a former mufti and Islamist, who once declared a jihad against Russia for the great harm of pro-independence Chechen leaders. The notorious Groznyi mayor Bislan Gantemirov is a former policeman, Islamist, and a criminal, whom Vladimir Putin’s administration released from a Russian prison to lead a rebellion against Maskhadov.
The most important radical Islamist – and the only one who might have had connections to international terrorism through his mysterious Arab ally Khattab – is Shamil Basayev, a former officer of the Russian OMON troops. As a young hothead, he went to Abkhazia to fight along with the Russian military intelligence GRU against Georgia, the only truly friendly state towards Chechnya. To the first Chechen War he went as a nationalist Chechen patriot. But after losing the presidential election to Maskhadov, Basayev increasingly started to present himself as an "Islamic Che Guevara", standing against both the "imperialist colonialism" of Russia and the "nationalism" of Maskhadov and other Chechen leaders.
Basayev is the man who has taken responsibility for the Moscow theatre hijacking. Maybe he really thought it would force Russia to negotiations, like his Budyonnovsk operation had worked out in summer 1995. Basayev’s example was then followed by the later captured Chechen radical Salman Raduyev in Kizliar and Pervomaiskoye, in January 1996. Unfortunately Russia showed with her own actions that the message of the Budyonnovsk and Pervomaiskoye tragedies had influenced her more than the efforts of the moderate Chechen leaders to achieve a peaceful solution.
Maskhadov had originally tried to make his Islamist opponents more moderate by including Basayev and some of his allies in the administration. Also Moscow had supported this policy. Basayev and his allies had, however, increasingly approached the radical Saudi-originating Islamism, so-called Wahhabism, and the differences to the views of the pro-independence Chechens supporting the traditional Sufi Islam of the Caucasus had grown insurmountable.
Maskhadov himself asked for Russia’s support for his efforts to fight criminal gangs and radical Islamists in 1998-1999, and for this co-operation, he sent Turpal Atgeriyev as his special envoy to Moscow. Russia answered by having Atgeriyev arrested and by refusing from all co-operation with Maskhadov’s government.
In summer 1999, Maskhadov’s own troops had driven Basayev’s Islamist militants to the area bordering Dagestan. When Basayev’s men then participated the provocation in the Avarian mountains, launched by Dagestani Islamists, Russia got an excuse to attack Chechnya again. When Russia invaded, she did not, however, attack against Basayev, but against the Maskhadov government, who had clearly condemned Basayev’s incursion into Dagestan.
Maskhadov and his closest supporters, like the moderate pro-Western foreign minister Ilias Ahmadov and vice premier Ahmed Zakayev, have time after time condemned terrorism and rejected the acts of fanatics like Basayev, or criminals like Barayev. During the inter-war peace Zakayev even wrote a book against Wahhabites, accusing the Islamists to be enemies of Chechen independence. Hardly any Chechen politician has struggled against radical Islamism and terrorism as tirelessly as Zakayev.
Still it was Zakayev whom Russia demanded Denmark to arrest and hand over, when Zakayev was participating a peaceful Chechen congress held in Copenhagen. Although Basayev has announced his responsibility for the Moscow theatre hijacking, Russia refuses to hear that, but instead wants to put blame upon the moderate Chechen leaders. Is it so that Russia is not, after all, interested in fighting terrorism? Movsar Barayev’s terrorist act in the Moscow theatre gained the Chechen case new attention both in Russia and in the West, but at the same time the moderate Zakayev was arrested in Denmark. Does this mean that terrorism actually pays?
Russia is not fighting against terrorists in the Caucasus, but against separatists demanding national self-determination. The issue is well crystallised in the reaction of the former director of the KGB Analytical Directorate, Nikolai Leonov, to the endgame of the Moscow theatre tragedy: "Russians must get used to sacrificing human lives, so that the sacred goal of Russia will become true – the unity of the empire."