Force no good for Putin now
S PARE A thought for Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, whose Chechen policy is now almost entirely in ruins after
the weekend assassination of his puppet strongman, Akgmad Kadyrov, and one of his leading generals. He's in even
more trouble than President George W. Bush is with his Iraqi policies and for much the same reasons. If anything,
however, Putin is much deeper in the quagmire, and with even fewer choices or exit strategies. But, as with Bush, it is
increasingly clear that pressing on in the way that his instinct tells him is a strategy bound to produce even greater
disaster and humiliation.
Putin's claim to fame, indeed, was that he had reduced war in Chechnya to mere rebellion, and that his soldiers,
and the Chechen henchmen of Kadyrov, were doing a reasonable job, if with the utmost brutality, in subduing the
population without making many international headlines. Putin has always claimed that the problem of Chechnya was an
internal matter for Russia, and has used his increasing control over the Russian media to restrict coverage of it. He
has also brought himself some international silence over the cruelty of the continuing war with his claim that it
represented Russia's own war again terrorism. There is an Islamic element to the struggle, which has attracted the
attention and the support of wider Islamist movements. Indeed, Kadyrov, a former religious leader and rebel leader
during the first Chechen war of 1994 to 1996, became Putin's man when in 1999 he split from other nationalist
groups over their increasing identification of the war as a holy war, linked to other Islamic struggles. But it also
very much a nationalist war, if one now massively complicated by the criminal connections of some of the players (on
both sides) and the bitternesses and horrors of nearly 15 years of unrelenting conflict and great cruelty. The two
phases of Russian intervention have been disastrous for both the people of Chechnya and Russia itself. Kadyrov's
forces and special Russian troops have progressively reduced rebel strongholds, and their inhabitants, to rubble, but
have hardly damped hatred and resistance. Indeed they have only fuelled it. As in Iraq, rebel forces can no longer
tackle Russian ones head on, and have resorted to guerrilla warfare, ambush and terrorism, some of the worst of which
has been in Moscow - as with the appalling hostage-taking incident of 2002, in which 130 Russians were killed. For a
Westerner, perhaps the parallels are with Vietnam and Iraq. For Russia, it is with its ill-fated Afghanistan disaster,
the reaction to which (with western assistance) did so much to focus, train and equip Muslim nationalist and
internationalist movements. Putin has sought to contain domestic criticism of his war by Chechenisation of the conflict;
the brutality of his occupation, and the excesses of his surrogates, has meant that this could never hope to buy him
more than time. Now, it appears, the time is now nearly up.
The acknowledged leader of the rebels, Asian Maskhadov, was democratically elected president of Chechnya in 1997. It
would be hard to write home about his devotion to human rights or democratic ideals, but he has a far better claim to
represent Chechen hopes and aspirations, and their desire for far greater autonomy, than any person selected by Russia.
For the moment, he is painted as the most brutal terrorist, but inevitably, a resolution of the struggle most involve
his presence at the conference table and a search for a political solution.
More war, more destruction of the infrastructure of the region, more random brutality on the whole population by
angry and disillusioned armies of occupation, and more central propaganda and electoral fraud have no prospects of
calming the situation down. Indeed far from calming the situation, they play into the hands of the Islamic terrorist
movement seeking to find common threads with struggles in Kashmir, the Philippines, Ambon, Afghanistan, Iraq and North
Africa - the common thread, inevitably, appearing to be the hostility of non-Islamic nations and populations. That,
apart from basic disgust at the scale of human-rights atrocities, ought to be pushing western nations to pressure Russia
to seek political rather than military solutions, and justice rather than force. Alas, the Russians are in a perfect
position, with Iraq, to say we are in no great position to lecture them.
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RUSSIA IN FACTS
