#10 - RW 265
Transitions Online
www.tol.cz
July 16, 2003
Caucasus Diary:
Suicide--or Staged--Bombings?
History suggests Chechens were not behind the recent Moscow bomb blasts.
By Nabi Abdullaev

MOSCOW--Even before 14 people were killed at a Moscow pop concert on 5 July, it was already clear that a new pattern of Chechen warfare was emerging: suicide bombing.

In the seven months since the first such attack, Chechen suicide bombers have, in Chechnya, destroyed the government's headquarters, struck at the Russian military and secret services, and killed about 200 people. The talk now is of the 'Palestinization' of the conflict, a war waged not by armies or guerrillas but by individuals--and therefore all the more intractable. It is a new feature that, if it were to develop along Palestinian lines, could push back the prospect of a political solution in Chechnya not years, but decades.

"Chechens live in such a violent and tense environment that many become obsessed with getting revenge on Russian troops and those who support them, even at the cost of their own lives," says Oleg Nechiporenko, head of the National Anti-Crime and Anti-Terrorism Fund think tank.

The exasperation and desperation caused by years of war is being compounded by the lack of any significant improvement in the protection of Chechen rights and safety since a new, Kremlin-sponsored constitutional referendum was held in March. The campaign slogan of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration was "stability," but so far there has been little sign of it for ordinary Chechens.

The disproportionate number of women among the shahids, or "holy suicide fighters," also adds a social dimension to this new pattern that is also important for the future of the conflict. There is a simple numerical reason for the disproportion: Chechen men have opted for protracted guerrilla warfare rather than one-off attacks. There is also a compelling psychological reason: Women who have been assaulted and raped by federal troops and seen their husbands and sons tortured and killed might have a thirst for revenge that is even deeper than that of their menfolk.

The result is that there are many potential female recruits for Chechen warlords such as Shamil Basaev, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater in October that ended in a fateful Russian commando raid and the deaths of about 130 of the roughly 800 hostages--and all of the hostage-takers. Eighteen of the rebels were women; they were probably recruited from a pool of hundreds. Symptomatically, their leader was the widow of another warlord, Arbi Baraev.

Avenging widows have since become objects of fascination for the Western media and compassion for Chechens. For rebel ideologists, they have become the stuff of which myths are made. Movladi Udugov, ideologist-in-chief for the separatists, asserted to the BBC at the time of the hostage-taking that 40 widows of rebels were taking part in the raid. Commando leader Movsar Baraev declared on the pages of the Udugov-controlled website Kavkaz.org that these were women who had come to Moscow "to die, not survive."

Later, Salambek Maigov, the Moscow representative of rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, asserted that these women were regarded as heroes and martyrs in Chechnya. This may have been a rebel speaking, but it is also a true statement, at least for some Chechens. Several ethnic Chechens that I interviewed in Moscow at the time of the hostage crisis told me that they sided with the female rebels, who, they argued, had compelling reasons to take up arms.

THE PATTERN OF SUICIDE BOMBINGS

This month's bombings in Moscow have again stirred debate about a new Palestine and the role of women. But one fundamental thing has been ignored: There is a pattern to the suicide bombings, and the bombings in Moscow do not fit it.

Consider the litany of death:

In December, a truck loaded with explosives rammed into the gates of the main government building in Grozny and left it in ruins.

In May, a truck rammed into an administrative compound in a village. Two days later, two female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a religious ceremony, apparently aiming for Akhmad Kadyrov, the Kremlin-appointed head of the Chechen government.

Then, in June, a truck bombing in Grozny destroyed a branch office of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and a local government building. The same month, another female suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying Russian air force personnel from their base in North Ossetia.

Suicide bombing may therefore be a new form of attack, but it fits into the broader pattern of the rebels' tactics: The targets are in the Caucasus and are connected either to the government or to the military, and the bombings are led by people with reasons to hate the Russian military and their allies among local population. They were also attacks for which Shamil Basaev was always happy to claim responsibility. More were promised--Basaev announced shortly after October's hostage crisis that he had formed a special kamikaze brigade of 36 Chechen women--but, again, these were to be attacks against Russian military and government targets, not civilians.

WHY THE MOSCOW BOMBINGS DON'T FIT

This month's bombings in Moscow do not fit this template. We are told that two women were behind the bombing at the rock festival that left 14 people dead. In the other case, a Russian intelligence agent died in a blast as he attempted to defuse a bomb reportedly taken away from a female suicide bomber in downtown Moscow. She was arrested and identified as Chechen.

The location was different, the targets were civilian, and, unusually, no Chechen has admitted responsibility.

Either the rebels do not want to admit that suicide bombings are no longer a guerrilla military tactic but terrorism of the Palestinian sort, or something else is going on.

These are not the only oddities of this case. For example, Russian law enforcers claim they found a passport on the body of one of the women suspected in the bombing at the pop concert that revealed she was an ethnic Ingush living in Chechnya. Anyone who ever has been in Moscow knows that it would be better to be nabbed in a routine police check carrying no passport at all than carrying Chechen papers. A woman on a mission and carrying a belt of explosives would have even more reason not to carry a Chechen passport.

Law enforcers also told the Russian media that they found components of a radio-controlled device at the site of the blast. Clearly, suicide bombers cannot be in two places at the same time. This suggests someone set off the explosions.

In the second case, security guards stopped a woman from carrying a bag of explosives into an upscale club in downtown Moscow. She apparently argued with them at length and waited for police to arrive just to tell the officers that she was carrying a bomb. It was an odd conversation for a suicide bomber, and certainly not indicative the kind of determination that her predecessors have shown: One female bomber in Chechnya, for example, threw herself under a bus after she had arrived too late to board it.

These are, in short, strange acts in strange places committed in an un-Chechen way and against the stated policy of the rebels.

But what instills even greater distrust is the pattern of bombings in Moscow dating back to at least 1996, always blamed on Chechens but never proven--and always shortly before national elections.

Back in the summer of 1996, five days before President Boris Yeltsin was to stand for re-election, a bomb exploded inside a subway car. Four died. Officials linked the bombings to the war in Chechnya, and Yeltsin, the man who had launched the first war, claimed the aim was to disrupt the elections. No proof was found, but after two more bombs exploded in Moscow that summer, both on trolleybuses, the official version that Chechens were to blame became the accepted version.

Chechen rebels denied any role in those bombings. They did the same when two Moscow apartment blocks were brought crashing to the ground in 1999. To the minds of many Russians, it was no coincidence that the hundreds of deaths came at a time when Russia's political elites were vying for position ahead of national elections.

The suspicion is not just because former KGB officer Vladimir Putin then emerged from obscurity to ride to an easy victory on the back of a new war in Chechnya. It is also because of the odd discovery, soon after in the autumn of 1999, of bags of explosives in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Police claimed they had foiled another bombing. The investigation, though, was halted several days later after Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB (the modern-day version of the KGB) and a friend of Putin, announced that it had been an exercise by the FSB. So far, Russian officialdom has provided no coherent explanation of why real explosives were used in exercises and why it took days for them to react.

Now, Russia again stands before national elections. Putin may face no serious opposition in his bid for the presidency in March 2004, but December's parliamentary elections could play a critical part in shaping the political fortunes of his next four-year term.

And again, official assertions are leaping far beyond the evidence of the suicide bombings. Russian intelligence promptly seized on the notion of a kamikaze unit to claim that foreigners are drugging and brainwashing the women.

In another attempt to link the Chechen rebel cause to a global terrorist conspiracy, some Russian intelligence experts assert that suicide bombing, a trademark of Islamic extremists, indicates that the Chechens might be getting orders and money from abroad.

So were this month's bombings acts of Chechen terror or a Russian scheme? In this case, the weight of evidence cannot decide: The evidence so far is too flimsy. The weight of logic suggests Chechen rebels were either not to blame or have adopted a new terrorist policy. And as for the weight of history, Russian officials have a seven-year backlog of explaining to do if they are to lift suspicion from their shoulders. Nabi Abdullaev, a longtime TOL contributor and Moscow Times journalist, is a Dagestani based in Moscow. He is now a postgraduate student at Harvard University.

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