#24 - JRL 8375 - JRL Home
From: "Michaela Pohl" <mipo@inbox.ru>
Subject: American friends of Chechnya
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004

Moscow, September 20, 2004

Dear David,

I m dismayed to see a spate of misinformed and misleading articles such as John Laughland s The Chechens American Friends (The Guardian, September 8, 2004), and Justin Raimondo's Putin, the Patriot: That's why the neocons hate him and love Chechen terrorists (Antiwar.com, September 17, 2004) in which the authors uncritically repeat anti-American insinuations that have become popular here in Russia, arguing that criticism of Putin in the West has been driven by conservative U.S. think tanks who are out to destroy Russia, and that the Chechen cause in the West is taken up only by the same crowd, for the same cynical reason.

Criticism of Putin has been caused primarily by Putin s own actions, and neither the American government nor U.S. public have shown more than lukewarm interest in the ongoing human rights catastrophe and near-genocide that has unfolded in Chechnya over the last 10 years. Why the sudden focus on the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC)? The ACPC is undoubtedly influential in the policy community and has helped with a number of refugee and asylum cases. But beyond organizing lectures and conferences in the Washington area it has actually been pretty ineffective in reaching out to the larger American public. ACPC is certainly not the household world Russian are being led to believe it is. The ACPC has made no effort to enlarge its membership base, which is indeed notoriously neoconservative, as Mr. Laughland argues. However, to state that its views are those of the US administration is simply wrong. Ilyas Akhmadov (hardly a terrorist, regardless of what Moscow says ) and a few dozen Chechen refugees have received political asylum in the U.S. only after years of denials, repeated court appeareances, hearings, and probes by the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Neither the ACPC, nor Amnesty International, nor the U.S. Holocaust Museum (which placed Chechnya on its Genocide Watch List) or other NGOs have been able to trigger anything remotely resembling mounting criticism of Russia s Chechen policy among Americans. In ten years, the Chechens have suffered the equivalent of hundreds of Beslan tragedies, but Americans, Russians, and the world public have stood by silently because these deaths were not televised. Both Mr. Laughland and Mr. Raimondo completely miss the genuine groundswell of support in Europe not for Chechen terrorists, but for international involvement in Chechnya, to stop state and bandit terror, and they miss some of the Chechens far more visible friends, for instance MEP Olivier Dupuis, whose Transnational Radical Party has collected over 34,000 signatures in support of a U.N. Interim Administration in Chechnya. The appeal has been most successful in Russia, Italy and Lithuania, with more than 8,000 signatures i! n each country. Fewer than 500 Americans have signed it.

I wonder if Messrs. Laughland and Raimondo understand what oddball company they find themselves in? Mr. Laughland's Guardian article was widely re-published and discussed in Russia, his ill-founded accusations regarding the ACPC were re-broadcast on TV as if he had carried out major and sensational research (on TV-Center s show Postskriptum, moderated by Aleksei Pushkov, see http://www.tvc.ru/v2/index/id/40101000080306-2004-09-11.html). The Guardian piece was gleefully welcomed in hundreds of on-line posts as solid proof that America and/or the Jews are somehow behind the Chechen rebellion (while the author, in turn, merely uncritically reproduced these notions from the Russian press), and it has already made a significant contribution to anti-American and anti-semitic sentiment in Russia. Terror and trauma are being used to manipulate the Russian public to revert to simplified stereotypes of enemies of the people, external ones as well as internal. Komsomolskay! a Pravda smugly subtitled Mr. Laughland's piece Amazing Condescension Towards Extreme Violence, (meaning ostensible double-standard American tolerance for Chechen terrorists) leaving unspoken the fact that Russian intellectuals and most of the public at large have been condescending and silent during ten years of murderous war in Chechnya, while the republic was turned into a closed zone of special operations, where death and torture became daily and commonplace occurences, and the price of human life was reduced to a few rubles.

I am definitely not writing to defend the gruesome malice of the terrorists who seized hundreds of school children in Beslan. Regardless of what they actually wanted and of the course of events, they committed a horrific crime, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent lives. Headlines like "Lies Provoked The Terrorists Aggression" (Novaia Gazeta, No. 65, 6 September) are not limited to the West and they are indeed misleading. The terrorists committed an unspeakable act of aggression simply by seizing a school, and it doesn't make sense to put Putin in the spotlight of every report on the tragedy in Beslan. However, the Russian president must now indeed act to make Russia a safer place for all citizens. Whatever the shortcomings of the U.S. war on terror, or of the war in Iraq, and despite the obvious Cold War origins of organizations like ACPC, it is a distortion of the facts to say that they want Russia to capitulate to terrorists. They support talks with moder! ate separatists, not with violent terrorists such as Shamil Basaev. They support the notion that the president elected in 1997, Maskhadov, must be given a chance to make a graceful exit, otherwise he will never cease to be an inflammatory symbol in the eyes of radicals. Instead of immediately seizing the chance to curtail what is left of Russian democracy, Putin could have started by initiating a truly independent inquiry into the causes of the disaster in Beslan. Imposing silence, putting medals on the chests of officers caught up in the deaths of hundreds of terror victims (as happened after Budennovsk and Nord-Ost), bulldozing the sites of explosions (as happened after the apartment bombings of 1999) these have not been effective in working out strategies to deal with similar situations. Putin's response to terror has left open too many questions and the aftertaste of too many lies. And a political resolution is indeed still necessary.

Sincerely yours,

Michaela Pohl
Assistant Professor of History, Vassar College