The New York Times

Tuesday, November 30, 1999

A Trap for Russia

By ANATOL LIEVEN

AZARAN, Russia -- The Western debate over Russia's assault on Chechnya has been largely polarized, with Russophobes crying genocide and Islamophobes warning about Muslim terrorists. But the attitudes of Chechen refugees whose lives have been upended by the war are far more nuanced, and may yield some insight into achieving a lasting peace.

There are two main story lines to the Chechen tragedy of the 1990's. The obvious one has been the ruthlessness with which the Russians have twice intervened militarily. An overlooked factor has been the collapse in Chechnya of the institutions of modern statehood -- law enforcement, schools, hospitals, courts -- since the national revolution of 1991. This situation was made much worse by war, but it also owes a great deal to the Chechens' historical resistance to any superior authority and their traditional tolerance for what we would now regard as banditry.

Most of the dozens of Chechen refugees I've interviewed at Chechnya's border with Ingushetia in the last week have stressed both these factors. Yes, they have furiously denounced the Russian military for killing hundreds of civilians. None felt that the carnage was on the scale that many in the West have claimed; nonetheless, it is quite bad enough.

On the other hand, the refugees universally lamented the anarchy that has gripped Chechnya since it broke free from Russia eight years ago. The overwhelming majority were bitterly critical of leading Chechen and Islamic militia commanders, not only for leading the attack on the neighboring Russian province of Dagestan in August that precipitated the Russian offensive, but also for failing to help Chechnya's president, Aslan Maskhadov, crack down on the wave of kidnapping and banditry.

"People have been reduced to complete misery over the years," Wahid Derbishev, a farmer and former policeman from the town of Samashki, explained. "There is no state at all in Chechnya. Maskhadov has proved very weak, but we have to follow him as our elected president, and the Russians should negotiate with him."

Almost unanimously, the refugees I spoke with expressed special hatred for the Chechens who are fighting in militias led by foreign Islamic extremists, who most Chechens believe are threatening their own religious traditions. Indeed, the tragedy of the Russians' ham-fisted brutality is that they might have attracted the support of most Chechens, had they tried to work peacefully with President Mashkadov to expel the extremist groups.

That said, Russia's impatience to act was understandable. Over the past two years, hundreds of Russian citizens were kidnapped by Chechen gangs, and often tortured and killed. This culminated in the radicals' attempted invasion of Dagestan and terrorist bombings in Moscow and elsewhere.

Now, paradoxically, even as its soldiers are closing the noose around Grozny, the Chechen capital, Russia is increasingly in a bind. As President Ruslan Aushev of neighboring Ingushetia told me recently, Chechen nationalism cannot be suppressed for long. If Russia tries to keep the renegade province under total control, it will create a gnawing ulcer, wasting Russian wealth and lives.

Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the few Russian politicians with the courage to criticize the war, has used the analogy of Israel, whose crushing military victories and territorial occupations led to decades of terrorism before it finally faced reality and struck deals with its enemies.

In the long run, the smartest thing for Russia to do may be to put Chechnya on the path to full independence. For political and security reasons, this would be possible only after the Islamic militia leaders are forced back to Afghanistan or Sudan. Having achieved its aim of eliminating the terrorists, Russia might have room to negotiate an interim settlement with President Maskhadov.

A deal might involve trading Chechen independence for Russian security. Initially, Russia would need to retain security zones in the areas of Chechnya it now occupies. But it would commit itself to accept the results of a referendum on independence after, say, five years, and only on the condition that the Chechen government succeeded in controlling lawlessness in areas under its control. Western aid would be needed to try to build Chechen institutions.

Western moralizers might view such a settlement as appeasement of an agressor; the Russian people might see it as forfeiting a certain victory. But the alternatives are horrendous, for both Russia and Chechnya.

Anatol Lieven, a Russia expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is the author of "Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power."