Moscow reaps the Chechen whirlwind

Theatre attack brings home failure of Kremlin strategy

Jonathan Steele
Thursday October 24, 2002
The Guardian

The hostage-seizure of hundreds of theatre-goers in a Moscow suburb last night is a grim reminder to the Kremlin of how badly its hardline policies in Chechnya have failed since the republic first declared independence as the Soviet Union stumbled to its end.

After two invasions by Russian troops and several earlier hostage seizures by Chechens, no solution is in sight.

It is eleven years since Chechnya's leaders caught the spirit of defiance which was prompting the Baltic and other Soviet republics to go their separate ways. But Chechnya was unusual in that it was not a Soviet republic but part of Russia itself.

Although the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, accepted the end of the empire, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the new Russia, was not willing to see his own multi-ethnic Russian Federation disintegrate in the same way.

His main tactic against the Chechens and their leader, Dzhokar Dudayev, was to use economic sanctions to try to isolate the small oil-rich region on the northern slopes of the Caucasus and bring it to heel.

When this failed, Mr Yeltsin took the disastrous decision to send troops into Chechnya in 1994. His advisers told him it would be a simple operation which would succeed within days rather than weeks.

He forgot, or was not aware, that the Chechens had always been some of the most rebellious peoples in the federation. They resented their conquest by Russian troops in the nineteenth century, but their biggest grievance was Stalin's brutal policy of deporting the entire population to central Asia in 1944. They were allowed back by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956.

The arrival of Russian troops, coupled with their poor discipline and brutal tactics, revived all the old bitterness. Resistance was intense. Most Chechens are Muslim, but their defiance was based on national pride rather than religion.

Massive and indiscriminate Russian bombardment devastated the capital, Grozny, and levelled scores of blocks of flats. Tens of thousands died. Russian forces regained most lowland areas in 1995, but the guerrillas held their ground in the mountainous south.

They also took the struggle to Russia itself, with hostage-seizures in southern Russia. In 1996 Alexander Lebed, a Russian commander from the Afghan war, who had been appointed by Mr Yeltsin to handle the crisis, persuaded the Kremlin to withdraw its troops. The Russians signed a ceasefire with the Chechens, leaving them with de facto autonomy but no formal independence.

Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of staff of the Chechen forces, was elected president early in 1997. War and isolation had turned Chechnya into a "failed state" in which armed groups vied for control, using banditry and hostage-taking of other Chechens as well as foreigners.

A new crisis erupted in August 1999 when a small group of Islamic militants invaded the neighbouring republic of Dagestan from Chechnya. Russian forces again used artillery and air power to try to dislodge them.

Then came a series of terrorist bombings of blocks of flats in southern Russia and later in Moscow itself. More than 300 people died and the political temperature soared. Chechens were never proved to have planted the bombs, and many Russians suspected the Kremlin's security forces were responsible.

Vladimir Putin, newly appointed as prime minister by Mr Yeltsin, decided to send troops into Chechnya again. In spite of Russia's defeat two years earlier, the move was popular among Russians who were reeling from the wave of terrorist acts.

The Chechen crisis became the dominant theme in the parliamentary election in December 1999, knocking Mr Yeltsin's poor economic record off the headlines and allowing Mr Putin's allies to become the main political force. He easily won election to the presidency three months later.

While Mr Putin benefited politically from the Chechen crisis, his troops fared as badly as they had in the first war. Almost three years after the re-invasion of 1999, they are still bogged down in the republic.

Although Mr Putin has repeatedly claimed the war is over, the fighting has been intense in recent weeks. In August, the rebels shot down a Russian military helicopter, killing 116 people.

Tens of thousands of Chechens have been forced to flee into the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia where they live in appalling conditions. The large Russian population has also fled.

Various international efforts to persuade Mr Putin to accept Mr Maskhadov's call for negotiations have come to nothing, further increasing Chechen determination to fight on.

The Russian president was quick to try to exploit President Bush's "war on terrorism", saying they were the first victims of Islamic fundamentalism.

Officials described the Moscow bombings as their own September 11. Western criticism of Russian tactics in Chechnya became muted, and the Kremlin felt strengthened in its refusal to negotiate.