The Guardian (UK)

12 November 1999

[for personal use only]

Russia's mistake is to think Chechnya can be conquered

The hardest lessons of the Caucasus have been forgotten

By Martin Woollacott

The hardest lessons to learn are sometimes the easiest to forget. Who would have believed that Russia, which seemed to have learned that Chechnya would never submit to rule from Moscow, would embark on a war of reconquest there? For that is what the campaign, which began two months ago as a response to Islamist incursions and terrorist bombs, has insensibly become.

The Russian army's modern history is entwined with war in the northern Caucasus, a place in which its commanders came to understand in colonial days that, while others might submit, the Chechens were perpetual rebels. Stalin's deportation of the Chechens only revealed more clearly their capacity for survival, their attachment to their land, to which they returned in spite of extra-ordinary obstacles, and their refusal to accept that incorporation into Russia was anything but an accident to be reversed. The most recent lesson for the Russians came with the withdrawal in 1996 of Russian forces which had failed to defeat the Chechens in spite of their superiority in men and equipment.

It now looks as if Russian officers drew precisely the wrong moral from that defeat, attributing it entirely to their own mismanagement of the campaign. Mismanagement there clearly was, but the essence of the problem was that the motivation of the Chechens, fighting for their homeland, was more powerful than that of the Russians, fighting for an imperial outpost beyond their ethnic frontier. The commanders of the new campaign have not repeated, so far, the technical mistakes of the earlier one and, in particular the ill-prepared ground attacks in which they lost so many men. Success has emboldened them. At first Russian forces attacked only a few targets which, rightly or wrongly, they claimed were bases used by the Islamist irregulars of Shamil Basayev. Then the bombing expanded to include targets all over Chechnya. Then the advance on the ground began with an occupation of the northern part of Chechnya, and now a developing pincer movement from east and west.

As the military pace quickened, Russia's war aims were revised upward. At first the talk was of putting pressure on the Chechen government to deal with extremists. By early October, the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was asserting that Russian armed forces had the right 'to be deployed wherever they want on the territory of their own country'. Putin in effect cast aside the painfully achieved settlement of 1996, which gave Chechnya control over its own affairs and shelved the question of independence for peaceful settlement later. Then the generals running the war began to make statements about taking control of the whole of Chechen territory, and about their readiness to fight Chechen guerrillas for as long as it would take.

Finally the defence minister, Igor Sergeyev, a few days ago made the aim of complete occupation official. For western countries, one of the most painful aspects of this disastrous turn of events is that they provided a twisted precedent for it in the shape of Nato's Kosovo campaign.

Moscow is using as a military model the Nato campaign against Belgrade, with its heavy dependence on air power, in order to pursue a political policy akin to that which Belgrade pursued in Kosovo. More broadly, there is no doubt that the Russians saw Kosovo as Nato meeting a challenge on its own 'territory', with Russia's advice and interests largely disregarded. If Kosovo is on Nato's side of the street, Moscow could then argue, Chechnya is on ours. Such thinking stiffens resistance to western advice, and, still more, to western attempts to force a change in Chechnya policy by withholding the financial aid and credit Russia needs.

None of this means that Russia was not provoked. The other side of the 1996 settlement was that the government of Aslan Maskhadov would undertake to keep his extremists under control. But Maskhadov, a former Soviet artillery officer who had ably commanded the Chechen forces during the fighting, was less successful in peacetime than he had been during the war. He proved unable to check crime and general lawlessness, which continues unabated, with kidnappings for profit going on in Grozny even as the Russians bomb. Above all, he could not rein in the Islamist warrior chieftains like Basayev who had emerged during the hostilities.

Basayev, a man whose ruthlessness is only exceeded by his heedlessness of consequences, was prominent in the formation of a movement aimed at the creation of an Islamic state incorporating both Chechnya and its neighbour Dagestan and led an incursion into Dagestani territory in August. The Russians repelled it, to the relief of the Dagestan government and of most Dagestanis, who have little interest in a dangerous Islamist adventure and prefer, for prosaic reasons, to remain within the Russian federation.

The Russians took a gamble on Maskhadov, and on Chechen secular nationalism prevailing over the Islamists, and it did not come off. The bombs in Russian cities, although still not proven to have been Islamist atrocities, may have tipped the balance in Moscow in favour of a Caucasus campaign. Whether that was aimed at reconquest from the start or whether it grew in scope after early successes is not clear. But the Russians are now openly saying they will go all the way - to capture Grozny and to reincorporate the whole of Chechnya. In the process they are adopting techniques of population control that make it even less likely that Russian rule will be accepted, herding off the men for screening and planning, according to one Russian official, to put families into 'protected'' villages.

The dangers of this new war touch everyone. Chechnya could be thrust into a guerrilla struggle with Russian occupiers that would further brutalise both sides. That could lead in turn to a destabilisation of the rest of the Caucasus, both the independent states and the areas within the Russian federation. In Russia itself, the victors of the Chechnya campaign, if it continues without the disasters which marked the last one, could emerge as political winners. A worse qualification for running Russia and its armed forces than 'victory'' in Chechnya is hard to imagine. Relations between the west and Russia must suffer at a time when they are already battered. Western pressure on Russia is likely to be both ineffective and counter-productive.

The best hope lies in Russian common sense, for there is a basic contradiction underlying Moscow's Chechnya policy. The new Russia may have the military means to take Chechnya, but is the new Russia capable of the tsarist or the Stalinist ruthlessness which were the only way previous governments kept Chechnya under control? That is the question which Moscow must ask itself.