The spectacle of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the hostage beheaded in revenge seem to complete the unflattering parallels between the Russian war in Chechnya and the American invasion of Iraq.
Their emotional impact aside, how serious are such parallels? Gravely so, it seems. But let us investigate systematically the social mechanisms that produce similarities in what was promised to be a completely different affair.
After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988 and the first Chechen war of 1994-96, which was televised in ghastly detail, the Russian public and the military themselves developed their version of what Americans called the Vietnam syndrome.
This changed abruptly in August 1999 when a combined force of Chechen and Arab jihadies brazenly attacked the Russian territory, and soon hundreds of unsuspecting Muscovites were murdered in the random bombings of apartment blocks.
Many questions regarding these terrorist acts remain unanswered. Yet, as happens in moments of public danger, the Russian citizenry banded together behind the new tough-speaking president, Vladimir Putin, whose popularity surged overnight, climbing from dubious to overwhelming.
Putin’s “anti-terror operation” appeared in every respect a just war.
Chechnya appeared to be a patently failed state recognized only by the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Its lawless territory became a den of smugglers, hostage traders, and international terrorists. Many Chechens themselves, especially those who had once belonged to the educated elite, at first greeted the Russian troops as the restorers of modern order if not liberators.
The Western governments took an understanding position too. Even the intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia reportedly traveled to Moscow with apologies for having once sponsored the anti-Russian Islamist fighters in Afghanistan.
The Russian special forces, supported by air power and armor, swiftly moved across the enemy territory. In a few months, Putin himself dashingly flew to Chechnya aboard a fighter jet, congratulated the troops and proclaimed victory. This impression was surely helped by Moscow’s learning from the American example: If smart weapons still remained too expensive for the Russian army, the practice of selecting journalists and embedding them with the military units proved affordable and effective.
The few journalists who still pursued their own stories (such as Anna Politkovskaya, whose unsparing book, “A Small Corner of Hell,” was recently published by the University of Chicago Press) were branded unpatriotic. Citing “terrorist sources” in the Russian press became a punishable offense.
Moscow’s plan for postwar Chechnya looked no less astute. The Russian taxpayers were promised that, after a brief initial recovery, Chechnya’s oil revenues would pay for the area’s reconstruction. (A few brave entrepreneurs rushed to explore the emergent market opportunities in Chechnya, and not all of them escaped alive.)
The worried mothers of conscript soldiers were told that their sons would stay out of harm’s way this time because, in a long-awaited reform, the Russian army was switching to hiring seasoned veterans who would serve on a contract basis.
Moreover, the postwar security operations in Chechnya were to be transferred to the loyal Chechen forces and soon to the newly elected Chechen government. On this road, Moscow scored a major coup by recruiting Akhmad Kadyrov, who had served as Chechnya’s presiding Islamic cleric, along with his several-thousand-strong private militia.
It was Kadyrov who in 1995, during the previous war, declared jihad on Russia and himself fought. But in the late ’90s the unabashedly ambitious and ruthless Kadyrov quarreled with both wings of Chechen anti-Russian resistance: the secular nationalists still obeying the separatist President Aslan Maskhadov and especially with the firebrand Islamist fighters led by the guerrilla hero Shamil Basayev, who has reputedly allied himself with Al Qaeda.
By the simple logic of “the enemy of my enemies is my friend,” Kadyrov defected with the onset of new war and became Chechnya’s pro-Russian president.
Best laid plans
Moscow’s plan for the pacification of Chechnya went awry soon after Putin had declared victory in his war on terrorism. The oil installations, already in poor shape after the years of economic blockade and war, proved very vulnerable to sabotage.
The still-functioning wells and refineries were claimed by the murky local militias or corrupt Russian generals as sources of private income. The money Moscow sent to Chechnya for the restoration of normal life often disappeared without trace.
Luring Chechen warlords to its side, which the Russian command once considered a strong tactic, almost entirely eliminated the political prospects of more civilized Chechen politicians. It also opened the way to gangster-style infighting and uncontrollable pillage of state coffers.
In the meantime, the conscript soldiers kept on dying almost daily in bombings along roads, the new tactic of choice of the Chechen insurgents.
The new brand of hired soldiers, called kontraktniki in Russian, often relied on their experience to prudently stay behind and collect their combat wages without excessive risk.
Yet the same kontraktniki were also widely accused of torturing captured Chechens in the numerous “filtration facilities” where many of these professionals were assigned to sort out the suspected terrorists from the ordinary unlucky civilians.
The interrogators feel pressed by the superiors to produce results yet overwhelmed by the conveyor-belt stream of detainees. At the same time they feel free to use the euphemistically called “acceleration methods” of interrogation in the absence of oversight.
The Russians enjoyed technological and organizational superiority over the Chechen separatist “army” but proved woefully unprepared to fight politicized peasants and kids with explosives.
Unpredictable results
Evidently, the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s hierarchy induced among the Iraqis a sense of liberation from despotic subordination, albeit not at all of the kind that the United States expected.
How many insurgents are there in Chechnya now–or in Iraq, for that matter? This is an impossible question. The only answer might be: Perhaps as many as there are personal and community grievances and as many as there are weapons in the hands of civilians, which is, as we know, a lot.
Politkovskaya and other courageous journalists who still dare to report independently from Chechnya identified a totally new “third force” that was not there at the outset of the war. They are the avengers who, in this traditionally Muslim highlander society, pursue private vendettas against those whom they suspect or know had tortured, raped and executed their relatives.
Drawing parallels is always fraught with danger.
America is a very rich and still democratic country, in the ways that Russia could not match. Yet it seems that the American and Russian wars on terrorism might differ only as a Humvee differs from the Soviet-made BTR: Both are combat motor vehicles that can break down on bumpy roads.
And perhaps, these roads are not for combat vehicles to take in the first place.
