What underlies the bestial carnage of the Caucasus?
Mmegi, Botswana
Sept 10 2004
QUESTION TIME
PATRICK VAN RENSBURG
“DON’T these people have children, too”, Beslan residents asked each
other last week when Chechen rebels took a thousand of them hostage,
mostly Ossetians, and half of them children, resulting in the death
of several hundreds, and injury to many more.
What is it all about?
Towards the end of the 1914-1918 World War, when Lenin’s Bolsheviks
seized control from the Tsars of the Russian Empire that covered most
of Central and Eastern Europe and North Asia, it became the Soviet
Union based on semi-autonomous Republics that the colonies were
turned into.
Historically, the Caucasus, which separates the Caspian Sea and the
Black Sea, was a battleground of Chechens, Armenians, Georgians,
Azeris, Ingushis and Ossetians, in which the Tsars waged brutal wars.
Religious differences, Christian versus Muslim, often masked material
reasons for conflicts like access to land and other natural
resources. Sometimes, the ethnic differences were a more direct spark
of conflict.
The Russians, it seems, were especially contemptuous of the “swarthy”
Chechens, particularly those to the south of Chechnya, who were
Muslim. The Third Imam of Chechnya and Dagesta on the Caspian Sea,
Imam Shamil, had introduced Sharia Law and strengthened the hold of
Islam over his people in the mid 1800s.
Even after Imperial Russia conquered Chechnya, its brutality
continued, with burning of villages, hounding of Muslim clerics and
forced emigration to the Ottoman Empire, to the south, of many
defeated opponents.
A journalist of Southern African origins, Vanora Bennett, in her book
‘The Return of War to Chechnya’, written in the early 1990s, claims
that “what the Russians remembered with great bitterness” over the
years of their imperial occupation of Chechnya, were “dramatic
mountain kidnappings” by Chechen guerillas “of highly placed Russian
officers and their relentless bargaining over the price of the
release of their hostages”.
Even under Soviet rule, especially under Stalin, the Georgian, the
Chechens reportedly had bitter experiences. In her book, Vanora
Bennett records that Stalin had ordered that on 23 February 1944,
Chechens and Ingushis should collect on their village squares to
celebrate Red Army Day. Throughout their territories, she writes,
600,000 were rounded up by soldiers and packed off in cattle trucks
into exile in the Soviet interior in Central Asia.
The reason, reportedly, was that Stalin accused them of having
collaborated with Nazi Germany. Apparently, a decade after Stalin’s
death, many deported Ingushis and Chechnyans “crept home”.
In 1991, the Soviet Union began to collapse. As a semi-autonomous
Soviet Republic, Chechnya declared its independence.
It was a country divided between its north and south, between
Christians and Muslims. In 1993, its leader, Dudayev, is reported to
have dissolved the Chechen Parliament, and to have ordered the
execution of many opponents. By the end of 1993, opposition to
Dudayev had developed into a small-scale civil war, as a result of
which Northern Chechens called for Russian support.
Russian military intervention was questionable in international law,
critics argue, even if Chechnya was part of the CIS – Commonwealth of
Independent States. It would have been wiser for Russia to have
internationalised intervention and set aside historical prejudice and
national self-interest.
Chechens claim that 300,000 Russian soldiers presently “inflict a
regime of terror” in Chechnya, whose population has been reduced from
two million, 10 years ago, to 800,000 now. Thirty five thousand
children have been killed, they claim, and another 42,000 injured.
For all that, hostage taking, suicide bombings, planting bombs in
passenger aircraft and calculated, direct harm to children are
criminal acts, that must become punishable by life imprisonment,
anywhere, under international law.
The Russians are attracting some criticism for seeking to identify
Chechen nationalism with international terrorism. Separatist Chechens
see this, and Russian refusal to promote negotiations, as attempts to
undermine the legitimacy of their claims to national independence.
They accuse President Putin of personal antagonism towards legitimate
Chechen independence aspirations.
Are Chechnyan rebels, who now specialise in the evils of
hostage-taking, knowingly following ancestors who kidnapped Tsarist
generals in the Caucasian mountains 150 years ago, or is it but a
curious coincidence?
The truth is that today’s enemies are numb to the horrors of the most
extreme brutalities against each other, or between their respective
allies. The Beslan hostage taking shows that Chechen rebels no longer
kill only purebred Russians.
What they seek is the widest publicity, hoping that it will draw
attention to the oppression they suffer. The media are not without
blame for turning their reading and viewing public into spectators of
massive televised death. Maybe, through repetition viewers are being
made immune to its horrors.
I write this week’s column in Galway, less than 100 km from Northern
Ireland, which has also been the scene of great violence over a far
longer time, but that for some time, now has experienced calm. The
violence here wasn’t between people of different faiths, but between
Catholicism and Protestantism, which – as in the former Soviet Union
– has masked material differences of a political and economic nature
between the leaderships, here, of two conflicting Christian factions.
President Putin has inherited the outcomes of mistakes of his
predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in respect of Chechnya. Russia has little
materially to gain from the war-torn region.
Putin would gain immensely in international stature if he were to
invite the UN to involve itself in making and keeping peace in the
Caucasus.