Financial Times (UK)

12 November 1999

[for personal use only]

RUSSIA: Chechen tinderbox

John Thornhill and David Stern ask if Russia can contain conflict in the Caucasus and nationalism at home

As the Russian assault on Chechnya enters its seventh week, the government in Moscow is discovering that it is far easier to start wars in the Caucasus than to stop them.

Encouraged by its early successes, the Russian army is growing increasingly assertive in the region, flushing Moslem militants out of Dagestan, which borders the breakaway Chechen republic to the east, and threatening retaliation against the independent state of Azerbaijan, which Moscow accuses of supporting Chechen terrorists. Its bombardment of Chechnya has caused hundreds of civilian deaths and prompted the flight of about 200,000 refugees, causing terrible hardship as winter starts to grip.

It is because of this that a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, to be held in Istanbul next week, has assumed critical importance. It will be the only chance foreign leaders will have to put personal pressure on Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, to bring the war in Chechnya to a speedy conclusion.

It is not known how Mr Yeltsin is likely to respond, or whether he will even agree to discuss the conflict, which Moscow regards as an internal affair. The Russian government insists it is conducting an anti-terrorist operation that is strongly supported by the local Chechen population. US officials fear the west's relations with Russia could plunge to the coolest temperature since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But it is not only the international community that worries about an escalation of the conflict in Chechnya. Inside Russia, some politicians fear the war is feeding an ugly nationalism that could engulf the country's fragile democratic institutions.

Vladimir Averchev, an MP from the liberal Yabloko party, says it is becoming difficult as a Russian to speak out against the excesses of the Chechen campaign without automatically being branded as someone who is unpatriotic and soft on terrorism.

"There has been much talk about Russia searching for a new national identity. I am afraid that Russia has just found that idea in this war," he says.

Mr Averchev believes the conflict has brought militarists and nationalists together in a potent new political force.

The Communist party, which remains the biggest parliamentary faction in Russia, has temporarily buried its differences with the Kremlin and hinted it might support Vladimir Putin, President Yeltsin's prime minister and heir apparent, if he perseveres with his hawkish stance towards Chechnya.

Also significant is the fact that Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the army's general staff, chose to give one of his very few interviews about Chechnya to Zavtra, an ultra-nationalist newspaper.

"The fate of Russia today is being decided here in the Caucasus!" the newspaper trumpeted, urging the army to finish the job it had begun in Chechnya. In the interview, Gen Kvashnin promised to "free the Chechen people from the medieval yoke of bandits and murderers".

It is this rising militarist tide in Russia, rather than the rights and wrongs of the Chechen conflict itself, that is generating unease among the independent republics of the Caucasus.

Georgia, a small former Soviet republic that shares a common border with Chechnya and still has Russian military bases on its territory, feels especially vulnerable. Georgia shares a border with Chechnya and has had to cope with an influx of refugees. In addition, it has problems with breakaway movements of its own, and it suspects that Russian agents may be aiding the destabilisation of Georgia.

Peter Mamradze, chief of staff to President Eduard Shevardnadze, says that "living next to Russia is like living on the side of a volcano".

"Even now there are reactionary forces in Russia who never could accept that Georgia and the other republics are fully independent," Mr Mamradze explains. "The plan is to restore the Soviet Union."

Mr Shevardnadze told the Financial Times in an interview last month that if he won a second five-year presidential term next April, he would be "knocking very hard" on the door of Nato to apply for membership. "The Georgian people cherish independence and will not exchange it for anything," he said.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan, too, is afraid Russia has broader designs on the region. It has been stung by Moscow's accusations that it has been sheltering Chechen terrorists. "The active attacks on Baku [capital of Azerbaijan] from Moscow are conducted with the goal of weakening Azerbaijan's position before the forthcoming OSCE summit in Istanbul," says Vilayat Guliyev, the Azeri foreign minister. "This is a conscious provocation on the eve of the summit."

The military campaign against Chechnya has caused concern among Russia's 18m Moslems and outrage in the Islamic world at large.

Islamist Virtue, Turkey's main opposition party, has accused Russia of conducting genocide in Chechnya. Iranian politicians are also concerned about the fate of their Moslem brothers inside Russia. The Turkish government, which has been trying to reassert its influence in the Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has held tentative talks with Azerbaijan about opening a military base in the fellow Turkic country.

But although the western powers may turn up the rhetoric of outrage at the Istanbul summit, there are three reasons why they are likely to be ambivalent about taking action against Moscow.

First, Moslem militants based in Chechnya undoubtedly provoked Russia by conducting military raids into neighbouring Dagestan and - if Moscow is to be believed - by bombing several apartment blocks in Russian cities, killing 292 civilians.

The Chechens have hardly endeared themselves to world opinion by kidnapping, torturing, and killing several foreign visitors. Russian embassies around the world have been playing on this sense of repulsion by sending out grisly videos recording the torture of hostage victims. In addition, Interpol has put several Chechen military commanders on its most wanted list.

Second, foreign governments continue to regard Chechnya as a constituent part of the Russian Federation. Therefore, there is little international support for Chechen independence.

Third, although the western powers hardly like to admit it, the moral waters have been muddied by Nato's bombardment of Serbia.

Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian prime minister who helped broker the peace in Yugoslavia, tapped into a deep vein of national feeling in Moscow this week when he accused western human rights activists of ignoring the civilian casualties of Nato's bombing of Kosovo while highlighting those in Chechnya.

"Chechnya is an internal Russian matter and to put pressure on our country on this question is senseless," he said.

As he has done at several critical junctures in the past, Mr Yeltsin may pull himself back from the brink and prevent a full-scale assault on Chechnya's bigger towns - although whether the army would obey such orders must be open to some doubt.

But short of Mr Yeltsin's intervention, few politicians in Moscow see much hope of halting the unfolding tragedy - even though they can foresee its terrible consequences.

With an alarming sense of fatalism, Mr Averchev says: "If there is a military 'victory' in Chechnya it will give an enormous boost to the Communists and nationalists. But in case of a defeat - or a perceived defeat by holding negotiations - then there will be serious political consequences.

"There is no good outcome in this situation," he says.

Additional reporting by Andrew Jack in Moscow and Leyla Boulton in Ankara