Why would they do it? Why would Chechen militants or international terrorists–or whoever they were–choose a school in a backward part of southern Russia, the town of Beslan in North Ossetia, and blow up innocent children? What could it possibly gain them?
The interesting thing about this Chechen-related attack, as opposed to other recent ones–the June insurgent raid on government buildings in Ingushetia, the August rebel attacks in the Chechen capital of Grozny, the Aug. 24 downing of two airliners, and the Aug. 31 suicide bombings in Moscow, with at least 500 dead in only 10 carefully scripted and terrifying days–is that, even in the absence of any supportable evidence, this time the analysts pretty much know what is going on.
Immediately after the Beslan attacks just before the Labor Day weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a rare address to the nation (which until now he thought he controlled with his “vertical” and “managed” democracy), said the school siege marked the beginning of “a total and full-scale war.” And he was probably right.
But then he said the siege was “a challenge to all of Russia … an attack against all of us.” And there he was very wrong.
This series of attacks–deliberately sprinkled over many different regions so that Russians would believe the insurgents could strike anywhere, at any time–was aimed against Putin and his proud, secretive and rigid security state. Its weakness was being revealed–a state too closed and inflexible, empty of civic substance or mechanisms for truth-telling and self-correction, to deal with such civilly disruptive forces. Suddenly this modern-day czar really did not have any clothes.
What can we guess at this point about the purposes of the attackers, who apparently are a sophisticated mixture of traditional Chechen anti-Soviet-era fighters and ruthless Arab Al Qaeda types?
“This is the beginning of a new political-military force joining the war against Russia,” Sergei Markov, a respected analyst close to the Kremlin, remarked in some awe.
“It is unclear what the force is,” he said, but added that the old-timer “instigators,” fugitive Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and radical separatist Shamil Basayev, are now little more than bystanders.
This mysterious force seems to be aiming to show that Putin is not in control of Russia, rather than to win concessions from the Kremlin for the limited and purely Chechen complaints against it. If this is true, the siege marks one of those dangerous moments in history when fanatics with huge goals swallow up movements with originally legitimate complaints.
Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, like many of the analysts, saw Putin’s Russian state failing. “This is the moment of truth for the country,” she said, noting that Putin at first refused to go to Beslan and virtually disappeared during the siege. “The Duma is afraid to convene an emergency meeting … The president is hiding. The government is hiding. This is the end of politics, when no one wants to take responsibility.”
One has to pause to remember that it was Joseph Stalin who ravaged and deported the Chechen people during World War II; that it was Boris Yeltsin, in the middle of days of drunkenness in 1992, who sent Russian soldiers to decimate the Chechens, who wanted only respect from Moscow; and that it was Vladimir Putin who, when he came to power five years ago, cynically used defeating the Chechens as proof of the effectiveness of his security state. In fact, he has stated constantly, as he installed Russian quisling after Russian quisling, that Chechnya was “stable and peaceful.”
But after the events of August, those easier early days, when localized complaints could have been addressed from Moscow, are clearly past. Now, radical Islamist demands have entered the picture in the persons of Arab fighters, and the purpose toward Russia is probably similar to that against Europe, Israel and the U.S.: to show that these Christian and Jewish infidels cannot stand up against them.
As Paul Goble, the legendary former Radio Free Europe analyst, e-mailed me from the Baltics: “First, I think that the Islamists in the North Caucasus believe they have Putin on the run. He simply does not know what to do. And they believe that they can push him to do something outrageous. Second, they hope to put Russia and the Muslim world at odds. That will divide Russia–it has more than 25 million Muslims–and weaken Russian influence in the Middle East.”
Nevertheless, there are steps that could be taken to stop these events. Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechens’ traditional political leader, immediately distanced himself from the schoolhouse killings. The Chechen separatists’ foreign minister, Ilyas Akhmadov, who recently won asylum in the United States, said the Chechens have been “surrounded by the industry of death,” but indicated that his presence in the West might facilitate a mediation of aims.
Perhaps Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the Institute for Research in the Caucasus in Armenia, quoted in the Financial Times, put it best: “You have to work with the Chechens politically, economically, socially and religiously. You need to sit down and talk with the fighters, offer amnesties, hold normal elections and provide money.” In fact, that is how such insurgencies–whether in Kenya, Malaysia, Oman or Turkey–have ended. It is the only way–unless, of course, you want to enlarge them and their aims to terrifying and eternal dimensions.
Instead, Putin has followed his rigid old line. He immediately sent some of his representatives to Israel to study their methods against insurgents. (And they have done the most super job–of turning militants with local aims into bloody insurgents with infinite aims.)
Unfortunately, Putin also has the support, given long ago, of the Bush administration against any negotiated Chechen solution. So the United States is now involved, at least in moral support of Putin, in what could possibly become a Russian civil war–right next to Iraq, Afghanistan and God only knows who else–as Moscow makes many of the same mistakes in the war on terrorism that Washington has been so abundantly making.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com
