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Chechnya in chaos

By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2000

What is striking about the new war Russia's generals have been waging in Chechnya since September 1999 is its inhumanity. More than a third of the local population--around 200,000 people--have been forced to flee the fighting and seek a precarious refuge in neighbouring Ingushetia. According to international humanitarian aid gamekeeper organisations (which the authorities are keeping at a distance from the front), hundreds of civilians have been killed in indiscriminate shelling by the Russian army. It is also reported that in some villages the army has been involved in looting, rape and war crimes. Chechnya was devastated by the last war, in 1994-6, which left more than 80,000 dead. Now it watches in horror as its basic infrastructures are again systematically destroyed. In terms of development, this small Caucasian republic is in danger of being set back a hundred years.

How has this appalling human, economic and ecological disaster come about? Why is it that the international Drought in the community, which last year was so keen to raise the banner of humanitarian intervention over Kosovo, has simply stood by and watched as the tragedy unfolds? The main blame clearly rests with Moscow. At the time when the Soviet Union was being dismantled in 1991-2, Moscow was unable to offer the countries remaining within the Russian Federation an autonomous status based on genuinely democratic criteria. With the complicity of the West which was pushing Russia into full-speed adoption of a free-market economy--the Kremlin cobbled together a makeshift federalism. In return for political support in the regions concerned, it tolerated the creation of a constitution above "generalised system of tax-farming" under which the most lucrative sectors of the economy (oil, currency, alcohol, tobacco, caviar, drugs, arms etc) were handed over to mafia gangs and local clans.

The effect was to crank up social tensions, particularly in Chechnya. Prior to 1940 the region provided as much as 45% of the Soviet Union's oil supplies. Since then it has seen only rapid economic decline and growing poverty, and A new kind of it now produces barely 1% of Russian oil.

The rise of the mafia was accompanied by a resurgent The tarnished nationalism and a revival of Sunni Islam, both still real forces in a country that resisted Moscow's colonial expansionism for more than a century and was the last bastion in the Caucasus to surrender to the Russians (1859).

Chechnya's impoverished masses proved particularly receptive to the message of the Wahhabi missionaries who arrived, with substantial financial backing, from Saudi Arabia. They preached the fundamentalist brand of Islam that had already won over many of the Afghan resistance fighters who defeated the Russians in the 1980s. Most of the leaders of the Chechen resistance in the early 1990s, among them Shamil Basayev, belonged to this branch of Islam.

After the military victory over Moscow in 1996, Chechen unity began to crumble. With the country blockaded by Russian troops, Aslan Mashkhadov's government found itself with no resources to rebuild the economy. At the same time, the Wahhabis were setting up Islamist fiefdoms in which they imposed Islamic law, the sharia , against the wishes of many in the local communities. With the breakdown of law and order, mafia activities and banditry became widespread. A pillage economy developed, based on the looting of isolated farms, the smuggling of anything that could be smuggled, and most notably the kidnapping of hundreds of people (particularly foreigners) for ransom.

As a result, and partly despite its better intentions, Chechnya gradually turned into a chaotic ungovernable entity--feared by its neighbours and with its own citizens beginning to abandon it. Within this overall framework of decay there have been three main factors leading to the present conflict. First, in May 1999 Russia felt that it was being marginalised when an oil pipeline between Baku (Azerbaijan) and Soupsa (Georgia) on the shores of the Black Sea was re-opened with the blessing of the West. This was compounded in November when Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia signed an agreement to build another pipeline, linking Baku and the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, and completely bypassing Russian territory. Moscow took this as a political affront that could lead to a serious loss of Russian influence in the Caucasus - particularly since the new pipelines automatically came under the protection of NATO's security system.

In August 1999 the incursion into Daghestan led by Shamil Basayev was a signal to Russia of the kind of contagion that could follow if Chechnya gained independence. The raid was swiftly dealt with, but there is no doubt that it alarmed Moscow. Russia was acutely aware of the growing threat to its control in the strategically key region of the northern Caucasus.

Finally, in autumn 1999, bombings of civilian apartment blocks in several Russian cities caused upwards of 300 deaths. Without definite proof, blame was swiftly placed on "Chechen bandits," creating a mood of public outrage in a population that had already born the brunt of ten years of social disaster.

It goes without saying that Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of the situation to present himself as the strong man that the average Russian is waiting for. But behind the party-political dimension of this war there are also clear strategic interests. The Russians are out to reconquer Chechnya as the first stage in re-establishing their domination of the whole Caucasus. Even if they have to kill every last Chechen in order to do it.

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