Chechnya: Monster in the Mountains
John Russell, May 2010
The World Today, Volume 66, Number 5
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Chechnya has returned to haunt Russia. Forty deaths
by suicide bombs on the Moscow subway confirm that outsourcing rule in
the restive republic is a failed policy. But no other plan is in sight;
these are not likely to be the last innocent lives lost.
The ease with which terrorists detonated their bombs in the heart of
the Russian capital - under the very headquarters of the Federal
Security Service at the Lubyanka station and near the world famous
Gorky Park - raised serious questions, not just about the ability of
Russian security forces to defend citizens, but more fundamentally over
the entire Russian policy towards the North Caucasus, begun under
Vladimir Putin and carried on by his successor as Russian president,
Dmitry Medvedev.
Insofar as Putin's reputation and popularity were built on his
aggressive Chechen policy, the latest spike in attacks from the North
Caucasus calls into question his frequent assertions that the 'war'
against terror in Russia's southern republics has been won.
For Medvedev, who has been much more proactive in addressing the
root problems of the region: corruption, unemployment, low levels of
development, a question mark hangs over the future of his hand-picked
plenipotentiary to the North Caucasus - Aleksandr Khloponin - who was
appointed, one assumes, to tackle these issues.
For all his undoubted financial skills and business acumen, the
fresh-faced newcomer from Krasnoyarsk appears as vulnerable as a
sacrificial lamb in a political landscape increasingly dominated by
factions that have a tendency to behave more like wolves than sheep.
CAUCASIAN CAULDRON
In attempting to crush separatism and extremism, the Kremlin twice
tried and failed to implement the strategy employed by the Sri Lankan
government against the Tamils: to impose a military solution by force,
ignoring international condemnation of disproportionate civilian
suffering.
By 2000, then President, now Prime Minister, Putin turned to
Chechenisation, in effect delegating responsibility for countering the
insurgency in Chechnya to pro-Moscow Chechens, led by the Kadyrovs:
first the father Akhmad until his assassination in 2004, and then his
son Ramzan, now the young and controversial Chechen president. Never
popular with some of Putin's presidential advisers, let alone Russian
military leaders, the policy appeared to have paid dividends by 2007
when fighting in Chechnya largely subsided.
The Faustian pact between Putin and the Kadyrovs promised, in return
for offering the latter virtually a free hand in running their fiefdom,
not only Russian territorial integrity, but also a guarantee that
ordinary Russians would no longer be subject to such bloody terrorist
spectaculars as the 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege and the Beslan
hostage-taking two years later. The Moscow subway bombings effectively
demonstrate that the deal now appears incapable of fulfilling this
important last condition and that Russians must brace themselves for
further assaults.
FUNDAMENTALIST TRAJECTORY
Although surprise is necessary for any successful terror operation,
the warning signs have been there for some time. Despite the success of
Kadyrov in suppressing armed opposition in Chechnya, much of the
violence had merely shifted to the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia
and Dagestan. Last year there was a significant increase in the number
of insurgent attacks in the three republics as a whole.
As pressure on the resistance increased, the tactic of suicide
bombings reappeared after a considerable lull. In November the fight
was once again taken to Russia, with the bombing of the Nevsky Express
train between Moscow and St Petersburg.
In February, Doku Umarov, leader of the self-proclaimed Emirate of
the North Caucasus, warned after the loss of several key rebel
commanders - including the alleged perpetrator of the train bombing,
Said Buryatsky - that attacks deep in Russia were being planned. Umarov
took responsibility for the Moscow bombings in a video posted on
YouTube two days later - subsequently withdrawn - claiming they were in
response to the February killing and mutilation by Russian forces of
four local civilians.
Umarov, the only field commander who has been fighting federal
forces since the outbreak of the first Chechen war in 1994, has
gradually evolved from a relatively moderate, nationalist and secular
fighter into a radical Islamist pledged to spread the writ of Shari'a
law beyond even the North Caucasus to the Muslim republics of
Bashkortostan and Tatarstan on the Volga.
The evolution of thisMoscow-based graduate engineer to Russia's
'terrorist number one' appears to have imitated that of his former
comrade-in-arms, Shamil Basayev, who went from defending the capital's
White House during the communist putsch of August 1991, to
masterminding a string of 'terrorist spectaculars', culminating in the
Beslan school siege. In fact, Umarov roundly criticised the tactics
employed by Basayev at Beslan, vowing henceforth to target government
and security personnel rather than civilians.
However, just as Basayev's demeanour changed radically after Russian
forces killed eleven of his relatives in 1995, the savage treatment of
Umarov's family by pro-Russian Chechen forces - it is rumoured that his
septuagenarian father had his eyes plucked out by one of Kadyrov's
henchmen - appears to have similarly altered the tactics of the current
insurgent leader.
Like Basayev before him, Umarov gave up on any prospect of peace
talks with the Russians, especially after the assassination in March
2005 of Aslan Maskhadov - the one Chechen resistance leader who had
held out to the last the prospect of negotiations with Putin.
In his frequent webcasts, Umarov has complained repeatedly of both
the hypocrisy of the west and the indifference of the Russian public in
effectively ignoring what he termed the 'Chechen genocide' and has
followed Basayev's trajectory towards a more fundamentalist brand of
Islam than the Sufism traditionally followed by Chechens and
energetically promoted since Ramzan Kadyrov came to power.
Thus, a man who admitted that, at the start of the conflict with
Russia, he barely knew how to pray, has become leader of one of the
most active and dangerous Islamic armed groups in the world. Clearly,
this conversion has been opportunistic, albeit in part, not least
because the bulk of funding for his forces comes from Salafist factions
in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the considerable north Caucasian
diaspora in the Middle East and Europe.
Western and Russian diplomats tend to agree that there is presently
no alternative to Kadyrov's one-man rule, so there appears to be no
place for opposition of any hue, let alone Umarov's militants. Indeed,
the bitter reality of the situation appeared to reach even the remnants
of the Chechen independence movement, led from exile in London by
Akhmed Zakayev. He broke with Umarov after the latter established the
Emirate in 2007 and at times seemed to be on the brink of an historic
reconciliation with Kadyrov.
WHO IS TO BLAME? WHO IS TO GAIN?
Basayev was finally tracked down and killed in July 2006, a fate
that, sooner or later, surely awaits Umarov. Inevitably, however, a
successor will be found and the conflict will drag on until and unless
a satisfactory political resolution is achieved.
While it is understandable that the Russian leadership is keen to
stress the international nature of the common threat posed by such
terror groups, and even point the finger at 'foreign intelligence
services' in organising the Moscow blasts, the reality is that Russian
domestic policy must shoulder the lion's share of the blame for the
North Caucasus tragedy.
Having effectively chosen, under Putin, to follow the Eurasianist
'great power' path of development, territorial integrity and a
highly-centralised political 'vertical' became essential for Russia's
survival. This inhibited movement towards genuine federalism and
democracy and enhanced the necessity for prerogative power to be
exercised by those factions which were, in fact rather than
constitutionally, running the country. Although Medvedev has recognised
the obstacles that such policies place in the modernisation path, he
seems incapable of shifting his country away from the course Putin has
set.
BENEVOLENT DESPOTISM
The bizarre outcome of these policies was the emergence of Kadyrov's
medieval style of benevolent despotism. In effect duplicating Putin's
'vertical of power', Kadyrov has emerged virtually unchallenged as the
arbiter of Chechnya's fate, eliminating all in his way, whether loyal
to Moscow or not.
Heavily dependent on both Putin's personal support and generous
subsidies from the Russian treasury, Kadyrov, to his credit, has
devoted much time and energy to rebuilding the shattered infrastructure
and giving his people, at least those who do not openly oppose him,
relative peace, prosperity and elements of cultural renaissance,
embodied in the massive new mosque in the capital Grozny.
Here lies the rub. By actively promoting the Sufi brand of Islam,
Kadyrov is not only marginalising the militant Salafis under Umarov,
but also turning Chechnya into a cultural, national and religious
enclave in Russia.
While this has brought some fame and popularity among his own people
and Islamic leaders around the world, his eccentricities clearly remain
somewhat of an embarrassment to the current Russian president and make
him an unwelcome guest in any western capital.
The Russian leadership's patent misunderstanding of the Caucasian
mentality has led separatists and radicals to be lumped together with
terrorists in cracking down heavily on any form of opposition. Deprived
of any legitimate outlet and subject to repression at every turn, it is
hardly surprising that young Muslim men and, as evidenced by the Moscow
bombings, increasingly women, are being drawn to the fundamentalist
Islamic resistance.
To be fair, even under the intense pressure of the suicide bombings,
Medvedev has balanced the tough-talking military approach of his
predecessor with a continuing commitment to socio-economic improvement
throughout the North Caucasus. Here, Russian interests will undoubtedly
at times continue to clash with those of Kadyrov.
Some Russian commentators have even gone so far as to claim that the
bombings worked to Kadyrov's advantage by weakening the position of
Medvedev's envoy Khloponin. Certainly, irrespective of whether he was
involved in any way, following the murders of the journalist Anna
Politkovskaya and human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, and the
assassinations of pro-Russian Chechen commanders Movladi Baisarov and
Sulim Yamadayev, it would appear that Kadyrov might yet again be the
immediate beneficiary of acts of political terror.
BLOOD FEUDS
However, neither Caucasian nor Russian politics are ever that simple
or transparent. It might equally be argued that, by outperforming his
predecessor in firmness and reason in dealing with the attacks, Dmitry
Medvedev may well have consolidated his position as a frontrunner for
the Russian presidency in 2012. His security forces will go after
Umarov and his supporters with renewed vigour, while measures aimed at
improving the welfare of citizens in the North Caucasus will continue.
Yet time is not on Medvedev's side. The ability of the Russian
economy to continue to bankroll the north Caucasian republics, the
growing resentment of ordinary Russians against such generosity and the
absence of the flexibility and understanding to reach a genuine
political resolution, not to mention the unpredictability surrounding
the likely longevity of Kadyrov's rule, all point to the fact that
Moscow has produced something of a monster in the North Caucasus
mountains.
Insofar as that monster was born amidst, and has been bred on the
blood of literally hundreds of thousands of victims, over the past two
decades in a region in which the blood feud still holds sway, it would,
regrettably, be foolhardy to predict that more will not be shed - be it
in Makhachkala or Moscow.
John Russell, Professor of Russian and Security Studies, University of
Bradford, author of Chechnya - Russia's 'War on Terror' (Routledge,
2007)
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/twt/archive/view/-/id/2025/