#11 - RW 10-15-04 - RW Home
RIA Novosti
October 14, 2004
BESLAN - THE END OF CLASSICAL TERRORISM

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti political commentator Yuri Filippov) - Why can the Beslan hostage taking be qualified as a watershed in the history of the antiterrorist cause? What makes it different from the hundreds of terrorist attacks in Russia and throughout the world?

The Beslan events showed that the situation in Chechnya had changed dramatically and that international terrorists had stepped up their activities in the North Caucasus.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Chechnya ceased to be part of the civilized world, as it turned into the seat of political and, above all, criminal violence in the North Caucasus.

One factor that forced Russia to send troops into Chechnya in 1994, which the Kremlin said was an operation to restore constitutional order and law in the republic, was Moscow's fears that Chechnya would split away from Russia and other North Caucasus republics would follow suit. It should be recalled that a wave of separatist sentiments swept the entire world, particularly Europe, in the 1990s. Ethnic groups that had never enjoyed sovereignty sought independence.

Russia still had fresh memories of the Soviet Union breaking up into 15 independent states, while the bloody ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia were a more vivid cause for concern. Many experts in Moscow in the late 1990s believed a variation of the Balkan scenario could be played out in Russia. NATO's military intervention in the Kosovo conflict only heightened Russia's anxiety.

This was the background to the events of 1999, when the situation in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan deteriorated dramatically. At that time, Moscow took a series of energetic steps on the international arena and in the North Caucasus to minimize the possibility of separatists seizing power.

Those steps were successful in general. President Vladimir Putin managed to improve relations with NATO and leading Western nations. He even secured Russia's membership in the elite Group of Eight nations, which recognized Russia's right to ensure its territorial integrity. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, which was when international terrorism announced itself to the entire world, brought Russia, with the US, to the fore of the international anti-terrorism coalition. Simultaneously, Moscow managed to ease tensions in relations with the US, which had stemmed from the cold war times when bilateral relations were seen through the prism of nuclear confrontation. This also helped change the international community's approach to the Chechen problem.

However, the situation has changed dramatically since then, and Beslan was the watershed. The situation when the actions of separatists, or, if you want, freedom fighters using terrorist methods were merely appraised now belongs to the past. International terrorism is no longer fighting according to the "classical model", i.e., for the independence of small enclaves from bigger countries. It has made armed attempts to undermine the stability and sovereignty of some countries. In other words, it is playing for all or nothing; something we have witnessed in the past few years.

Today, it is obvious that these tactics have failed for international terrorists and their supporters. If it has not lost completely already, international terrorism is obviously losing politically to the "international of major states."

The terrorists' bloody and extremely brutal actions have to a significant degree discredited separatist movements worldwide and thereby unintentionally undermined the reputation of their closest and most "respectable" allies. This is seen not only in the North Caucasus and Chechnya, but can also be applied to, for example, Kashmir and Uighur separatists, who are following the Chechen example in trying to challenge the territorial integrity of the world's two most populated countries - India and China.

Following a series of brutal attacks in the world over the past few years, the separatist movements' chances of winning international recognition for their demands (at least, in the foreseeable future) have virtually been reduced to nothing.

As for Russia, its political positions in the North Caucasus have largely been consolidated thanks to a set of political measures that can be referred to as "Putin's political plan." It began with negotiations with the most influential former separatists: Akhmad Kadyrov and his circle. This was followed by the adoption of the Chechen Constitution, which declared the republic to be an integral part of Russia. Then came Chechen presidential election, the formation of the local State Council, and now parliamentary elections are being arranged for spring 2004. Chechnya is reviving and becoming more stable.

Against the backdrop of these political achievements, Russia came under another unprecedented terrorist attack: two passenger jets were blown up in mid-air, a bomb exploded near a Moscow metro station and then came the chilling massacre in Beslan. The terrorists' political demands were obviously absurd. For example, they wanted Chechnya to be part of the CIS and to remain within the ruble zone. These demands could hardly be viewed in the context of the violent fight for independence from Russia that the terrorists operating in Chechnya have been using as a pretext in the past few years. One could say that this ideology collapsed after Beslan.

The facts show that the terrorism spearheaded against Russia is now stuck in a political blind alley and will hardly be able to find any loopholes to enter the legitimate political space. Chaotic violence is all it has left.

This chaos, and not the disintegration of the country along ethnic borders, is now the main goal of terrorism in Russia. To all appearances, Moscow should heed these circumstances and change its strategic priorities to combat it. Only order - order in the security, economic and administrative spheres- established by civil society and the state can help repulse this challenge.

Chechnya and, to an extent, the entire North Caucasus, after dropping out of Russia's legal and economic field after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the unemployment rate in some North Caucasus republics reached 80% of the economically active population), should return to this field. Combined with further security measures, and not hopeless negotiations with terrorists, this will be a decent response from the state to the challenges of modern terrorism.