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#8 - RW 270
Moscow Times
August 18, 2003
A Dog in the Fight
By Matt Bivens
Back in 1992, Chechens -- then a totally obscure tiny would-be nation -- were
praying for the Clinton-Gore ticket.
"We prayed to the Almighty that Clinton would become president,"
said Vakha Arasanov, a leader of resistance fighters in the village of Samashki,
when I interviewed him in March 1995.
"[President] Dzhokhar [Dudayev] told me and others to tell the elders to
pray for Clinton, the Democrat. Because Dzhokhar said a Democrat would put
Yeltsin in his place. We heard [Clinton's] promises to Haiti, for example. And
we prayed.
"That's how we hoped on the Americans, and you, well, you've left us
hungry," he concluded politely.
There was no anger or recrimination. As another rebel, 35-year-old Arbi
Alaskhanov, put it, "We understand, America doesn't want to ruin relations
with Russia over little Chechnya. But even the slightest comment [from
Washington] in favor of Chechnya is a gift."
Three months into the war, such gifts were already rare. The very week these
rebels were sighing that they understood about realpolitik, about how the CIA
doesn't give Stinger missiles to the mujahedin anymore, and about big countries
with nuclear weapons and little countries with nada, the U.S. State Department
was turning its back.
Aid worker Fred Cuny had put together a presentation on the horrors of Grozny
as part of a plea to the Clinton administration to broker a cease-fire -- just
for a few days, to evacuate thousands of civilians from Grozny. (Overwhelmingly,
if this matters, these civilians were elderly ethnic Russians. The ethnic
Chechens had all fled to relatives in the countryside.)
The State Department professed itself shocked by Cuny's show (though similar
fare had been on CNN for weeks). And then, instead of a three-day cease-fire,
came a rush-approved $6.4 billion loan for Russia from the International
Monetary Fund -- which roughly covered the war's cost to date. "It's best
in such matters to leave it to the judgment of President Yeltsin," was
Secretary of State Warren Christopher's comment. "I'm sure he thought
through what he was doing before he did it, and it's best we let him run such
things."
Eventually, as the enchantment with Boris Yeltsin faded, America realized
that -- to use former Secretary of State James Baker's phrase -- we didn't have
a dog in that fight. Soon after the war began anew in 1999, a relatively clear
American position emerged: There can be no military solution, only a political
solution. For that, the two sides -- the Kremlin, and the elected,
Kremlin-recognized-then Kremlin-rejected president-in-hiding Aslan Maskhadov --
have to sit down and talk. (The Kremlin has disdained the idea; Maskhadov
welcomed it.)
Meanwhile, until that happens, both sides should rein in their most criminal
behaviors -- but in particular the Kremlin should, because the scale of its
crimes is so much more sweeping and massive, and because we expect more from the
professional military of a democratically elected world government than we do
from a handful of guerrillas.
Now, suddenly, we've backed our dog again. Secretary of State Colin Powell
has concluded that Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev's terror campaign against
Russia might spill over to harm American citizens, or impinge on the U.S.
economy, or "threaten ... [U.S.] foreign policy."
Threaten U.S. foreign policy? This takes us into the land of language as
meaningless sounds. Even if we had a foreign policy, I'm not sure how a
terrorist attack could damage it.
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, covered the first war in
Chechnya for the Los Angeles Times.
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