Chechnya stays

Sir-- Re 'Nothing comes from nothing' (3-9 December, Al-Ahram Weekly) "this latest incident is a serious blow not only to Putin's strategy of holding on to Chechnya at all costs, but to overall Russian security."

Rather it is a serious blow to the Putin-Medvedev attempt to control the situation by European human rights- style methods. Russia joined the Council of Europe in 1998 and is therefore bound to all sorts of commitments on human rights whilst at the same time having to deal with serious internal security problems. As Britain, the US and Israel, to name but three, have found, this can be inconvenient and makes it difficult to take a hard line. There is not the slightest chance that any current Russian leader, let alone Putin, will consider for a moment not hanging on to Chechnya. Just look at the map, the pipelines and Russian history.

I should be very interested to know what you think Israel has to do with it all. The US of course has its nose in other peoples' business everywhere. I wonder what will be revealed in 50 years time about all these destabilising events in Russia. Today in truth we have no idea who is behind them. We can only speculate.

The Russian Federation is in fact the last of the European empires, and sooner or later it will go the way of other multi- national entities in Europe. I think the Russian leadership knows that but, in a Russian version of the domino theory, they have hung on to Chechnya essentially for the oil and mineral wealth located in so many of the non-Russian parts of the federation. Once Chechnya goes, they reason, Ingushetia and Dagestan will quickly follow, then the other Muslim peoples (watch, in particular, the Tatars), and then the Far East, where the economy has, in practice, already been largely taken over by the Chinese anyway. And then, of course, Russia can join the EU.

Michael Kenny 
New York
USA

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/977/letters.htm