Subject: About Andre Glucksmann
Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000
Dear Mr. Johnson, As you probably know, the French philosopher Andr Glucksmann is one of the most outspoken opponents of the war in Chechnya. He organized several protests of French and European intellectuals, and is very active himself in this domain. Last week he returned from a five weeks trip to Chechnya and Daghestan where he went with the help of Chechen fighters, without a visa from Russian authorities (which he was refused a few days before going there through Azerbaidjan). I interviewed him the day he came back, asked by an independant journal, Novaya Gazeta. The text will probably appear tomorrow, but this is not sure, and it is sure they will make cuts, because of some passages about Mr. Putin. However, I think Mr. Glucksmann analysis is very interesting and contains some new points. I am sending you the text of this interview both in Russian (slightly shortened by myself) and in French (this is practically the transcription of the interview). May be you would be interested to publish it in
your list. Sincerely, Galina Ackerman
Conversation with Andre Glucksmann by Galia Ackerman [translated from French for personal use only]
G.A. You have just returned from a rather dangerous five-week trip to Chechnya and Dagestan. Why did you go there?
A.G. I did this for two reasons. The first one is rather odd: Russian embassy in France denied me a visa to Moscow. Thus, I am prohibited from going to Russia. This new way of setting up "black lists" is dishonorable for the embassy and very honorable for myself, but I find this to be a dangerous precedent established in relations between Russia and the West. The setting up of black lists of intellectuals is an old KGB method which is difficult to accept, and I am partly glad to have returned the favor to Russian authorities by spending without their authorization more than a month on a territory that they claim to control. This is a kind of revenge for the experience that the FSB thrust upon Brice Fletiaux. You know, Mr.Putin told that his kidnapping should serve as a lesson to Western journalists, because Fletiaux had not asked for Mr.Putin's authorization to take pictures of what was going on in Chechnya. Well, this will be a reciprocal lesson: there are people who can dispense very well of Mr.Putin's and
the Russian embassy's authorization to go in Chechnya, in spite of the presence of the Russian army.
The second reason is more important. The simple fact that the FSB did not capture me and was not able to put me through the experience undergone by Fletiaux demonstrates that the Russian authorities do not control the territory and that the forces of Chechen resistance who helped me to stay on the ground, so as to observe, to listen, and to be a witness, do control at least a part of the territory. So this challenge is not from Glucksmann any more, it comes from the Chechen people.
G.A. You are not a journalist, though, you are a philosopher, someone who reflects upon the contemporary world. Wasn't there some more profound reason which was driving you?
A.G. In a philosophical sense, I undertook something rather fundamental. Since 1945, moral and political authorities of the entire democratic world recognize the notion of crimes against humanity. A crime against humanity is to kill someone just for the reason that this person had been born. This someone could have been born as an Armenian, a Jew or a Chechen, and this is enough to have the right to kill him. Crimes against humanity are being committed in Chechnya. This has already been acknowledged at the time of the comprehensive destruction of Grozny. When a city is being wiped out, a capital that had 400,000 residents in 1995 is being reduced to dust, this is an obvious crime against humanity. Because one does not erase a town for the sake of the struggle against terrorism. When Hitler wiped out Warsaw in 1944, nobody thought that this was about a fight with the bandits.
Further, the United Nations, as well as the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunal, established that crimes against humanity ought to be brought before international juries. For example, Milosevic, whose actions in Bosnia and in Kosovo had not outdone Putin's actions in Chechnya, has been indicted by the Hague Court. He has not been tried yet, but he has been accused of crimes. I believe that Putin can just as well be accused of crimes against humanity, and if not himself, then at least the top brass of the Russian army. But if there is a crime against humanity that ought to be brought before international legal authorities, these latter cannot conduct a trial without an investigation. Thus, one needs to have an international investigation of the alleged crime, and this investigation should be conducted immediately, if possible, before the criminals will eliminate the evidence of their crimes. And if an international court is superior to national courts - which is recognized by everybody, including Ru
ssia - this international investigation should also benefit of this primacy of the international law. If a certain state accused of crimes against humanity closes its borders, the investigation has a priority over the national law. Therefore, if I want to investigate, as a simple human being, a crime against humanity, I don't need to ask for an authorization by an allegedly criminal state. So, I just conducted my investigation without regard to what the authorities of this state might think. If crime has no borders, if the legal authority has no borders, then the investigative authority must have no borders. And this is what I asserted, as a philosopher, by spending more than a month on a territory populated by the Chechens.
G.A. Did you succeed in your investigation?
A.G. I find it absolutely dishonorable for the Western civilization, for Europe, that Mr.Dini [chief officer of the European Union] dares to announce, having spent three hours in the Russian army vehicles in Chechnya, that a cease-fire is being enforced. This is a shame, but also an enormous lie, for civilians there are being bombed day and night, shelled day and night, attacked by ground-to-ground missiles which, obviously, strike not upon a certain terrorist but upon a certain village, a certain region, a certain maternity house. The missiles don't choose their victims.
In contrast to Mr.Dini, I have seen missiles to fall, I have listened to bomb explosions. Sure, my investigation was incomplete, as any investigation would be. One sees certain things, collects certain testimonies, but not everything can be seen or collected. The work must continue. On the other hand, for the sake of the security of my hosts I cannot disclose details. I am grateful to those who enabled me to conduct this investigation, first of all the people from the resistance army who led me very well across the territory which the Russian army claims to hold. But I also want to say thanks to those Russians from the military and the Interior who transported me in their vehicles, which proved that they don't believe a single word about the anti-terrorist struggle. There are many Russians, including in the military, who have completely different ideas than Putin. Some transported me out of conviction and said thanks to me for having come there, others did this for money. But this proves that the situation o
n the ground is totally different from what is told by "experts" on the Russian TV.
These experts sitting in their chairs in Moscow have never had a discussion with a single Chechen. They never listened to Chechen women telling how they pass military posts, how their body is being searched by the Russian soldiery. In this country, women possess a lot of self-esteem, they are very reserved, and this is a daily humiliation for them. This experts never had a discussion even with the people from their own army. I certainly have acquired more knowledge about the morale of the Russian army than did Moscow strategists. When I see them enunciating that the war is finished and that there is only a handful of terrorists remaining, I tell myself that the errors committed by American strategists during the Vietnam war do not withstand comparison with this stupidity. As for myself, I visited Chechen villages where they had never been. In these villages, there are officials appointed by Moscow, usually old Soviet-era functionaries, and then there is real power, that of the fighters, that of the old vill
age chieftains. And in fact, official Russian representatives strike deals with the real representatives of the population.
The Chechens are deeply divided. They hold a wide range of opinions on Khattab and Basayev, but at the same time they are aware that they are fighting for their survival. This is what Russian experts who talk about international terrorism cannot grasp, which explains their failures. <...>
G.A. Having seen how things are on the ground, how would you evaluate Russian policies in Chechnya? Are they realistic?
A.G. Realistic? Yes and no. It is realistic to think that one asserts one' might by way of destruction. This is what Russia does. My great experience in Chechnya is not just the one of a popular resistance at all levels - armed resistance, but also spiritual and intellectual resistance. The other experience, considered from the point of view of those who suffer from it, is the destructive might of the Russian power. What I have seen in Chechnya is a bandit state, a bandit society, a bandit army. < ... > Military power is widely dispersed: there are regular troops, there are special interior units (OMON), there is spetsnaz, there are contract soldiers. And each of these entities acts on its own. < ... >
G.A. When I said "realistic", I meant another thing. At the beginning of this war, the Russian authorities proclaimed that this was an anti-terrorist operation and it was going to be brief. And now we see them mired in an endless conflict. Was it realistic to start this war?
A.G. I think that nobody except the idiots sitting in European governments (not even European deputies!) ever believed in this tale about fighting terrorism. As for the Russian top brass, I don't believe they really expected to win in a short time. From a realist standpoint, there is no reason for this war to be stopped. The military, especially contract soldiers, are making money. They are kidnapping people and then selling them back. Or they are selling bodies of their victims who had died from torture, because the Chechens want to buried among their fellow villagers.
These military men make money by thousand ways: they lend their vehicles to Chechen fighters, they sell IDs, they demand IDs that cannot be found in order to be entitled for a bribe, and so on. They are doing what all Russian bureaucrats are doing, and the concurrence of bureaucracies serves the consolidation of this looting system. In the bazaars of the area, the price of gold has gone 30% upward, because the military men are buying golden chains with the money looted from those people that they are killing. For a contract soldier, it is fashionable to wear a golden chain around his neck. But his salary is not enough to buy it, so he just steals money. Thus, we speak of a profitable economic activity. <...>
It is true that among the Chechens there is a wide-ranging debate about their military commanders. Basayev and Khattab are criticized very often. Sometimes it is said that they are traitors paid by Berezovsky and by the FSB. Sometimes it is said that they are idiots who had been engaged into a venture organized by Berezovsky or by the FSB. Sometimes it is said that they may be committing mistakes, but they are on the right side because they resist the Russians. So, there is a diversity of opinion. < ... >
And yet, behind these discussions, there is a sense of a Chechen identity which is more of a historical than of an ethnic nature (the Chechens easily accepted mixed marriages), or of a religious nature. Traditionally, the Chechens are Soufis [mistake: Soufis are religious orders within Islam] and not at all Wahhabis, but many of them have received an atheistic Soviet education, and are really not that religious. Today, it is the history that forms the basis of the Chechen identity. They did not create any great epic about their martyrdom under Stalin, but there are songs, there are recollections of the elders. < ... > They are proud of their history because they are conscious of knowing what had happened, and they feel that the Russians don't know it. They have their history which is the history of the Soviet Union, a genuine history, while the Russians have forgotten it or never wanted to learn it. The Chechens perceive the Russians with a fantastic sense of humor. < ... > A Chechen does not view a Russian
as a devil, but rather as a less civilized being than himself. And I believe that in sum, with a fantastic exception made for the Russian culture, this is rather true.
G.A. You mentioned the name of Boris Berezovsky, a rather controversial person. What do the Chechens think of this character?
A.G. They view him rather badly. Some condemn him because they believe that he had influenced Basayev, Udugov and others and that he is in part a godfather of Islamic terrorism, by way of his financial support and his advice. Others believe that he plays a very big role in Putin's ascendancy to power, and that this latter is due to his creating a pile of dead bodies in Chechnya, that he had filled the ballot box with blood to forge an image of a gangsterous little Napoleon for himself. In fact, there are interviews given by Berezovsky that show that already from 1997 onward he foresaw the usefulness of a large-scale war in Chechnya for the 2000 election campaign, and that such a war could rescue all those thugs that had looted the Soviet Union's heritage, those who had come in the place of the thugs of the Brezhnev era. So, the Chechens are fully informed about Berezovsky's role, though it is difficult for them to understand how this mechanism works.
In this regard, they have as much of a problem as we do: what is happenning in Russia is a new phenomenon. What we see is not a seclusion with regard to the West, as before, but an aggressive attitude which consists of a desire to corrupt the West. Russia is listed among the fifteen pariah states in the world where dirty money laundering has achieved exorbitant levels. I think that, in Berezovsky's character, we deal with something that we fail to understand at the moment and that begs for the genius of another Dostoyevsky. This is a contemporary version of the possessed [allusion to Dostoyevsky's novel]. Lenin had tried to influence intelligentsia worldwide, and he partly succeeded in doing so. Berezovsky is different. He exercises his influence, his destructive and corrupting powers upon the financiers, the business world. There is an effort to corrupt the West, not through the intellectuals any more, but through businessmen. < ... >
G.A. But what would be the point of Berezovsky's game with the Wahhabites? Doesn't this contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism in Chechnya?
A.G. It does, but so what? Berezovsky's game is exactly to add fuel to the fire, to push the developments toward an explosion of conflict, because he hopes to drive people crazy. They can be driven crazy in various ways, toward anti-Semitism, Wahhabism, Islamic terrorism, or toward Christian Orthodoxy which would be carrying a Judaeo-Christian crusade against Islam. The more the opposing camps behave as idiots, the greater is the confrontation, and the easier it is for Berezovsky to play on both tables while both camps pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him. He revels in the game of a sorcerer's apprentice. I had seen testimonies to this effect on the Russian television which I was watching while in Chechnya, as everybody else. On one side, Berezovsky gave support to the most radical Islamists and their journals which were denouncing the Freemasonic and Jewish conspiracy in the terms of the Tsarist era Black Hundreds. And on the other part Berezovsky also played a role in the case of Sharon Jr., who was
freed by the FSB at the right time and transferred to the Israeli authorities. I followed the TV coverage which, within several hours, transformed this simple and minor story into an Islamicist conspiracy against the Jews.
Berezovsky's game is to foment wars of religion and use them as a tool to strengthen Putin's grip on power. And, by the way, Putin plays the same game. During his trips to Madrid and to Berlin, he proposed to create a nuclear shield against terrorists. My God! What does it mean! Shall we fight against Ben Laden with a nuclear shield?
I believe that it is dangerous to let people like Berezovsky and Putin to do whatever they want, to make them believe that anything goes once they are in power in the Kremlin. The Kremlin masters need some education. This was a problem under Stalin, under Brezhnev, and these days it remains as such. Not everything is allowed to the leadership of a country that has a global role. And if they are allowed to do whatever they want, this creates situations that could go out of control. Chechnya is the first example, and the last one would simply be a worldwide explosion. Because if you really aspire to a Judaeo-Christian crusade against Islam, against a billion of Muslims who have every right to be Muslims and deserve respect, you create preconditions for the very conflict of civilizations that is being debated by American experts. And if there will be a conflict of civilizations, no civilization will come out of it without losses. < ... >
