Russian officials said they considered every option before launching the commando raid that ended last month’s harrowing hostage crisis at a Moscow theater. But the one approach President Vladimir Putin never seriously considered in the standoff with Chechen militants is the one he refuses to entertain in Chechnya itself: negotiations.
Putin’s argument against striking a deal with the hostage takers was compelling: Giving in to terrorists only encourages more terrorism. No one should have expected the Kremlin to pull its troops out of Chechnya and end its 3-year-old war against Islamic separatists, as the Chechens captors demanded. Such a cave, inconceivable for Putin, would have been disastrous for Russia and bad for the rest of the world.
The Kremlin, however, showed little interest in seeking a peaceful resolution that could free the hostages but not reward the Chechen militants. Putin declined to send the Kremlin’s point man on Chechnya into the theater for even exploratory talks. And the one concrete offer the Russian authorities made to the Chechens was taken as an insult: Free the hostages and we promise not to kill you.
“There were other ways to make this decision,” said Georgi Vasilyev, the producer of “North East,” the play being performed when the Chechens took over the theater Oct. 23.
“Maybe they’ll say I didn’t know everything,” Vasilyev said last week after recovering from the effects of an anesthetic gas Russian commandos used to start the raid. “But knowledge is only a part of the necessary information needed to make a decision. There are also human values. Then there are things like political ambition, historical pride and public opinion. It was clear we were being weighed. What portion of us can be given up?”
At least 118 of the 800 or so hostages died from the gas poisoning. They joined in death two other civilians who had been shot by the Chechens, one on the first night of the standoff and one a few hours before the rescue operation. All but a few of the hostage-takers died too, most of them executed by the commandos as they lay unconscious from the gas, some still clutching their weapons, some rigged with explosives and detonators.
Hostages deeply mourned
The hostages were greatly mourned in Russia last week, but the toll was tolerated by a people with a high threshold of pain. The dead were victims of the kind of unintended consequences that often arise when men in suits order men in uniforms to solve their problems.
Chechnya is a land awash in unintended consequences. Among the most troubling is a rise in Islamic militancy, something that was rare before 1994, when Russia first sent its tanks and troops into the southern republic.
That war, which ended with Russia’s humiliating pullout in 1996, opened the door of Chechnya to Muslim extremists from the Arab world and elsewhere. They sent money, weapons and fighters, imbuing what was a nationalist rebellion with the spirit of Islamic jihad.
By the time Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of a de facto independent Chechnya in 1997, some Chechen warlords had embraced Islamic extremism. Others had decided to do the bidding of Muslim patrons from outside the former Soviet Union. And mixed among them all were criminal gangs that specialized in kidnappings, extortion and contraband and profited from the postwar lawlessness that had descended on Chechnya.
The deal that Maskhadov struck with the government of then-President Boris Yeltsin called for Moscow to help rebuild the devastated republic. But if the Kremlin ever really intended to make good on its promise, government officials did a fine job of spoiling it.
What little money Moscow did send got picked off along the way, if not in Russia then in Chechnya, before it reached the people Maskhadov was elected to lead. Despite being armed with a sweeping mandate from Chechen voters and the stated support of Yeltsin, Maskhadov soon found himself unable to get anything done.
Shamil Basayev and other powerful warlords could match Maskhadov’s presidential guard in men and weaponry. They also had the advantage of having money, either through their criminal enterprises or from outside backers.
As Chechnya slipped deeper into a violent and impoverished morass, Maskhadov spent his presidency appeasing his critics and trying to keep Chechnya out of civil war. Chechnya was renamed the Islamic state of Ichkeria, which hardly anyone outside of Grozny recognized, and instituted a court system based on Islamic Shariah law. When two grisly public executions in Grozny’s central square were aired on Russian television, even the hardiest of optimists saw trouble looming.
By most accounts, Maskhadov was powerless to stop Basayev and other militants when they launched raids into the neighboring republic of Dagestan in August 1999, claiming they wanted to unite the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus in a pan-Islamic state. Then a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere killed about 300 people, and the Kremlin blamed the Chechens.
Maskhadov denied any connection to the bombings or any wish for war. But within a few months, Russian troops ordered in by Putin were closing in on the Chechen capital. In a briefing at his presidential office in Grozny, as Russian artillery pounded away in the distance, Maskhadov made a point of reading the Koran before talking with reporters. He warned that the war would be long and bloody for both sides. He said the Russian invasion was playing into the hands of the extremists. He pleaded for talks with the Kremlin.
But Putin, newly named as Yeltsin’s prime minister, said there could be no negotiations with “bandits.” The word “terrorist” had yet to come into vogue.
Three years later, the quick war Putin promised has proved elusive.
Russian, rebel and Chechen casualties pile up. Many Chechens who were ready to welcome a Russian return if it meant the end to chaos and conflict have instead been embittered by the looting, the corruption and the human-rights abuses committed by Russian troops.
Many young Chechen men see their generation as doomed. They see themselves as destined to die at Russian hands, either fighting them or falling prey to the army’s infamous roundups of civilians.
Moscow shocked
And now the war has come to Moscow, shocking a capital city whose young men are far more likely to escape military duty in Chechnya than the young men of Russia’s provincial towns and cities.
Though a Maskhadov aide denied that the Chechen leader had anything to do with the Moscow hostage-taking, the Kremlin’s three-year campaign to isolate Maskhadov and portray him as an unfit partner for peace talks has succeeded. Maskhadov, described last week by a U.S. official as “damaged goods,” has been pushed to the margin. He can be found, though not by Russian forces, over there with Basayev.
With whom, then, the Kremlin might one day negotiate an end to the fighting in Chechnya is a mystery. But it is not a question that seems to trouble Putin. The hostage-taking, he said, only showed that Russia needs to widen the military’s powers to go after terrorists.
