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Civilizing The ‘Barbarians’

Melik Kaylan, 04.02.10

Two "black widows," likely of Chechen origin, killed dozens of riders Monday
on the Moscow subway. Russian television said virtually nothing of the
appalling events through the entire day. Moscow residents resorted to radio
and the Internet for information. Sanguinary Chechen rebel leader Doku
Umarov claimed he ordered the suicide bombings, though a spokesman had
already denied it. The head of Russia’s Security Council publicly hinted
that Georgia may be involved, especially with that man Saakashvili in
charge, "whose behavior is unpredictable."

My friend Owen Mathews, Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief, with whom I appeared
on WOR Radio’s Joey Reynolds show this week, said publicly that already
there’s speculation in Russia as to whether the state secretly engineered
the attacks as a provocation. Many Russians believe that the FSB perpetrated
the notorious 1999 apartment bombings in several cities across the country
in order to justify the second Chechen War. Plus change in Russia. The sun
also rises–but never dispels the eternal murk of Russian affairs.

Already we’ve heard noises of concern in the West that the Moscow subway
enormities will fuel a return to police-state conditions. What we seldom
hear is a discussion of the Chechens–why do they do such things? Are they
merely a rabid offshoot of the infectious Islamist cult of death at large in
the world? Moscow has successfully sold its genocidal policies against the
Chechens as a legitimate reaction to mad-dog jihadism. We’ve bought into it.
But it won’t do–I’ve been to Chechnya and environs, and I can tell you that
the story is different: Something unimaginably horrifying happened there in
recent years, and before, comparable to the worst excesses of the Congo,
possibly even more depraved. And it hasn’t stopped.

A terrific op-ed in the March 30 New York Times by three Chicago researchers
into terrorism sets out to explain the nature of Chechen terrorism with its
strangely high percentage of women participants.

"Many Chechen separatists are Muslim, but few of the suicide bombers profess
religious motives. The majority is male, but a huge fraction–over 40%–is
women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of
the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus.
Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global
jihad."

It takes a stubborn kind of historical myopia to be mystified by Chechen
behavior today. The authors of the op-ed cover a great deal of recent
ground, but they shy from detailing horrors and ignore the long history–150
years and more–of Russian brutality in the Caucasus. Let me begin with
contemporary horrors. In the time I spent with Chechens in the Caucasus and
elsewhere I heard stories and saw evidence of widespread incidents so
utterly unspeakable as to rob you of sleep for a lifetime. Nothing in
Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon comes close. The op-ed authors’
well-meaning assertion that "suicide campaigns are almost always a last
resort to military occupation" doesn’t begin to describe the matter,
conflating as it does the Chechen experience with other conflicts, as if
American and Israeli military campaigns might fall in the same category.

There’s no comparison. Entire buses full of women and children charred to
death by Russian missiles. Children found with hands tied and scalped to
death. Women killed by having sharp stakes driven into their vaginas. Men
tortured and left to die trapped in basins of concrete. Chechen exile groups
have proof–photographs and videotapes aplenty–but they can’t get anyone to
pay heed.

The Chechens have endured three sustained waves of genocide from the 19th
century onwards. The Czarist conquest of the Caucasus region, waged
explicitly as a Christian crusading cause, continued on and off throughout
the 19th century during which, by some estimates, half a million indigenous
Muslims were killed or displaced. (Many ended up in the Ottoman territories,
which set the scene for the massacre of Armenians during World War 1). In
1859 Alexandre Dumas traveled to the Caucasus region and subsequently wrote
a memoir of his trip. In it, he describes his astonishing reception as a
celebrity so far from Europe in the country house salons of the Russian
elites there. He also describes how his genteel hosts invited him to go
hunting–a common pastime–in pursuit of locals to kill.

In 1944 Joseph Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to the
hardscrabble steppes of Central Asia. He suspected them of wishing to
collaborate with Hitler. By some estimates only half survived. They traveled
by rail, entire families and villages (those that weren’t killed outright in
their homes) for 20 days in closed cattle cars with scant food or water.
Upon arrival they were simply dumped out in the middle of nowhere and left
to survive by their wits. Nevertheless, many Chechen soldiers, deeply valued
by their Russian officers, fought valiantly on the Russian side against
Hitler. For their pains most were deported to the Gulags in Siberia. After
Stalin died, the surviving population was allowed to dribble back to the
homelands in the 1960s. Also, so many were dying of starvation in the steppe
that the weak would crawl to the cemeteries with their last breath so as not
to be eaten by dogs first.

Is it any wonder that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens,
followed by the neighboring Ingush and Daghestanis, all of whom had suffered
similarly, could think of nothing but freedom from Moscow? In the first
Chechen War of the early 1990s they kicked the Russians out of the capital
Grozny–a conflict in which there’s scarcely a mention of religion or Jihad.
During that war, many Caucasus Turks from families originally purged in the
various Russian campaigns went back to fight. They provided weapons, food,
medicine and a crucial sense of solidarity with the outside world.

But no, Moscow would not let the Chechens go. Putin came to power and
relaunched the Chechen campaign in 1999. The bombings of low rent apartment
blocks in three Russian cities served as a casus belli, even though most
Russians believed their own security services likely perpetrated the
outrages. In that year, the U.S. was allowed to bomb Belgrade, the Turks
were allowed to capture the PKK Kurdish insurgent leader, and Turkish
authorities cut off the secret supply lines to Grozny. Though no one in
authority has publicly said so, I believe the three countries struck a deal,
and the Chechens were left to fend for themselves.

During the Second Chechen War of 1999, Russian forces deployed notorious
bands of contratniki–paid irregulars many of whom are ex-convicts,
criminals or bandits on the run–from elsewhere. They were encouraged to
loot and decimate the locals along the way. Grozny itself underwent a kind
of carpet bombing campaign in which some 40,000 (other estimates says
between 100,000 and 200,000) inhabitants were killed or purged including
many ethnic Russians who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. The city became another
Hiroshima.

During and after the second battle for Grozny it was impossible for foreign
journalists to survive in Chechnya because Moscow encouraged a dirty
campaign of kidnapping and murder against them by proxy gangs of Chechens.
Indeed, word was leaked that all western observers were secret spies for the
Russians. In such an environment, only foreign bearded jihadis of equal
cruelty to the Russians could survive. And even they, having successfully
alienated the world, didn’t survive long. (There is some evidence that in
the Caucasus as in the former Central Asian republics, Moscow allowed
foreign Islamists to operate for a while as mentioned in Ahmad Rashid’s book
"Jihad In Central Asia".)

The average Russian thinks of the average Chechen as a kind of savage animal
unfit to breathe the air of civilization. Fit only for extermination. How
civilized would any of us be after suffering continuous Russian campaigns of
genocide? If the Chechens are such animals, why were Russian invasion forces
full of Chechen conscripts during the occupation of Georgia? Either Chechens
are too dangerously savage for use in civilized warfare or Russians use them
for exactly that reason as long as they’re directed against others. And why
hold on to a land of purported subhuman barbarians unless you intend to
empty the place of its population and keep the land? Meantime, Chechnya
itself resembles a post-apocalyptic landscape of refugees, feral dogs, war
criminals, armed gangs and shells of buildings where order is kept through
the predation of one set of Chechens against another.

The world must certainly mourn and deplore the atrocities on the subway, and
before that in the school at Beslan and elsewhere, but we should remember
how the brutality began and why it continues. The Chechens undergo a new
genocide with each change of regime in the Kremlin: the Czars, the Soviets
and now Putin. Why are there no Chechen Genocide bills appended to the
Armenian one in the US Congress, in the legislative assemblies of Sweden and
France and elsewhere? Why do we care more about atrocities from a century
ago and not from today in countries barely a few hundred miles apart? And
finally one might say this–if the Kremlin would wish the Chechens to become
more civilized, it should offer them a proper civilization to join.

Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for Forbes.
His story "Georgia in the Time of Misha" is featured in The Best American
Travel Writing 2008.