#18 - JRL 6524
Arab News (Saudi Arabia)
October 30, 2002
Folly in Moscow, tyranny in Chechnya
By Fawaz Turki

Many charges can be pressed against President Putin, but integrity is not among them. Yet after he botched a commando raid to knock out Chechen guerrillas holding hostages in a Moscow theater last weekend, killing 117 of his own people by pumping a deadly gas into the interior of the building, Russians’ reaction to the tragic climax was: What a swell fellow this Vladimir Putin is, putting his hard-line policies on Chechnya where his mouth is.

Forget Lenin at the Finland Station. Forget Trotsky, axed once, if only figuratively, by Stalin in 1929 and then again, this time literally, by one of Moscow’s agents in Mexico in 1940. Forget the Gulag, where millions perished. And forget the atrocities committed, and excused, in the name of socialist revolution and class solidarity, all the way from the Caucasus to Afghanistan.

Truth be told, it was not communism that defined Russian life. An ideology, as a strategy of insight, is after all what a people make of it. Rather what defined Russia as a culture and a polity was the totalitarian streak in the Russian character, whose origins, predating czarist regimes, are buried in time and beyond recall.

No need to recapitulate here the heart-stopping details of the 52-hour hostage crisis or its calamitous outcome. What concerns us is the backdrop against which the crisis took place: Russian brutalities in Chechnya and Moscow’s adamant refusal to negotiate with representatives of the Muslim republic’s national liberation movement who are, as the Washington Post editorialized last Friday, "fighting a legitimate war against an outside invader."

Instead, Vladimir Putin, noted for his wildly facile public statements, has deliriously claimed that the Chechen rebellion — a rebellion triggered not only by the Chechen people’s aspiration for independence but also by a reaction against Russian savageries going back to czarist times — is the work of "international terrorism."

Humbug! No manner of duplicity in Putin’s statements could obscure the difference between America’s war on terrorism and Russia’s war in Chechnya. The conflict in that sad republic is clear-cut and responsive to a political solution, should Moscow bring itself to recognize the fact that Chechnya is not "Russian" and that the Chechen people are not "separatists," but a long-suffering nation and community deserving of self-rule.

Above all, Moscow should recognize that its troops, notorious for inflicting all manner of mayhem on civilians, are an army of occupation that, like all occupation armies are wont to do, not only provokes resentment and hatred among the population, but the emergence from its midst of desperate elements prepared to go to extremes — including the one extreme of besieging a theater with a full-house attendance, in the heart of the enemy’s capital, in order to publicize their plight to the outside world.

Taking innocent theatergoers hostage is wrong? No question. Mounting an operation that clearly will set back the Chechen cause and stiffen the resolve of the Russian public to stand behind what Putin has called, in a litany of declarations, "the fight against terrorists"? Without a doubt.

But as the Washington Post editorial concluded, "In the end, it is the Russian government’s invasion — with its systematic bombardment of civilians, its human rights violations and its mass executions — that has created the anarchy in Chechnya." And, one may add, the desperation of the rebels.

Putin was elected in 2000 on the promise that he would crush the Chechen uprising in "two weeks," soaring to popularity with a public that saw this former KGB officer as a decisive commander who would reverse the failure of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, to subdue the people of Chechnya and bring them to heel. Instead, the war dragged on for two years, despite the Russian president’s repeated declarations of "victory" by his 80,000 occupation troops, who were never able to control, let alone subdue, the republic.

During the last three years, since the outset of this most recent rebellion, 4,000 Russian soldiers (unofficial estimates put the figure at 14,000) have died, and, according to human rights groups, as many as 80,000 Chechens have been killed, while another 35,000 disappeared. "At the same time," reported Peter Baker, the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, "Putin has enjoyed public approval ratings as high as 70 percent and there is little sympathy among the Russian public for the Chechens."

There is, it would appear, a racist dimension to this sentiment as well. "Chechens and other dark-skinned people from the Caucasus," adds Baker, "have often suffered mistreatment at the hands of Russians, who are Slavs."

Political correctness in Russia? Forget it.

We in the Arab world are given to criticizing the US at the drop of a hat. But America’s brand of John Lockian liberalism, even where it had gone haywire during the Cold War in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Third World, and even where it decidedly tilted its policies in favor of Israel, remains a mythology of the human future, a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand, penetrated by a sense of the values of intellect and art, and a respect for the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct.

The authoritarian streak in Russian culture, however, has been historically impervious to those charities of the compassionate side of human being which are essential to civilized discourse.

The violence that Russia has inflicted on the little but resilient nation of Chechnya, going back to 1816 when the czar dispatched the sadistic Gen. Alexei Yermolov to conquer Chechnya by brute force, and to 1944 when Joseph Stalin loaded on trains and deported to the Kazakh steppe the entire population of the country, is unspeakable, unpardonable and unacceptable.

It was folly for Chechen rebels to take Russian civilians hostage in their capital city. It is tyranny for Russians to continue occupying Chechnya, murdering its civilians and, by the indiscriminate use of terrifying firepower, reducing its own capital to a smashed husk.