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CHECHNYA
Putins’s dirty war
THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT is in daily
breach of every single international law and treaty on the conduct of
war and the treatment of refugees. It has caused untold suffering and
destruction and the deaths of tens of thousands of Chechens.
This is Putin’s very own war. He
has built his meteoric rise from obscure head of the Federal Security
Bureau (the old KGB) to Russian President, on the rubble of Chechen
towns and villages.
Living in the ruins - Grosny today
The first Chechen war began in 1994
when Russian troops were sent to the republic to repress the independence
movement, which had declared a separate state and set up a provisional
government. The pro-capitalist, IMF-backed Russian government of Boris
Yeltsin was determined not to lose control of this oil rich state which
is part of the route of the main oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea.
In spite of superior numbers and
firepower, the Russians faced a series of humiliating defeats at the
hands of the Chechen independence fighters. There was consistent opposition
to the war inside Russia itself, not least from the mothers of the young
conscripts sent to perform national service in a country where they
were a hated occupying power. These troops were untrained, badly led
and facing death for reasons they neither understood nor supported.
The Russian army succeeded in inflicting
terrible damage on the Chechen people, reducing the capital Grozny to
rubble and leaving many of its civilian population heaped into mass
graves or eking out a miserable existence in the ruins or in refugee
camps. Civil society was destroyed.
By 1996 the Russians had had enough,
but the Chechens had been unable to win an outright victory. Finally
in August an agreement was reached whereby Russian federal troops withdrew
and a five-year moratorium was imposed on any discussion of independence.
The journalist Anna Politkovskaya
began writing for the news magazine Novaya Gazeta in 1999 as
Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin were plotting the second Russian
adventure in Chechnya. In that year there was an outbreak of fighting
in Daghestan, the republic adjoining Chechnya. A group of Chechen rebels
crossed the border declaring Daghestan and Chechnya one independent
state, a declaration that had little support in Daghestan.
These events were accompanied by
a series of terrorist bombings of housing estates in Russian cities.
Some said these sinster events, which seemed to come out of the blue,
were carried out by Chechen rebels. Others believed that the Federal
Security Service or their agents operating within the Chechen movement,
were responsible, the aim being to whip up Russian public opinion in
favour of a new assault on Chechnya. Indeed there were suggestions that
the whole Daghestan adventure was orchestrated by the Kremlin to justify
the subsequent military response.
A recently published collection of
Anna Politkovskaya’s articles* exposes the brutality of Russia’s second
intervention in Chechnya, where war is being made almost exclusively
on the civilian population.
Politkovskaya shows great courage
in continuing to expose the horrors behind the bland statements of Putin’s
ministers. Journalists in Russia who expose corruption of the state
or its friends in industry and finance (also known as the Russian Mafia)
are frequently threatened and sometimes killed. In July 2000 Igor Domnikov,
her colleague on Novaya Gazeta, died from injuries sustained
in a beating which was probably ordered by someone he had exposed or
offended.
As the second Chechen war began,
thousands of civilians fled to refugee camps over the border in Ingushetia
and Politkovskaya reports on their fate, shivering and starving through
the winter of 1999. She describes the Putin government’s decision to
place the notorious State Directorate for Penitentiaries in control
of the borders and refugee camps. As the department responsible for
containing one million prisoners in the appalling conditions of Russia’s
jails, the main qualities it instils in its employees are racist hatred
and the ability to brutally suppress outbreaks of dissent or rioting.
Chechen women and children must now negotiate their escape and their
lives in the camps with these monsters.
The role of the private sector in
newly-capitalist Russia is explored with an article about Military Commemoration
Ltd, an Orwellian business venture set up to identify the bodies of
solders and civilians killed in the Chechen wars. Formed in 1997, it
has received almost $4m to carry out this work on behalf of the armed
forces ministry. Whilst it spends wholesale on up-to-date equipment,
much of it unrelated to the task, every operation is dragged out for
months – not surprising when the very corpses of the dead have been
turned into commodities.
Politkovskaya also reports on the
fate of the Russian soldiers, brutalised by their experiences and by
the terrible conditions in which they live. She met doped up soldiers
who spoke of rape and murder with sadistic pleasure. They paid for the
dope and alcohol that fuel their psychosis with boxes of ammunition,
which are then sold on to the enemy to use against them.
She also reports on the rich oil
and gas industries of Chechnya, all now illegally owned and operated
by various criminal gangs protected by both the Chechen police force
and the federal army. The Russian official who is the head of the state
oil company has never actually visited Chechnya and the company controls
nothing.
She explains there are two types
of oil wells – those that work and those that burn. Those that work
belong to wealthy gangs who can afford their own security forces. Those
that burn are set on fire by their owners, who are unable to keep hold
of them by force but want to deter others from moving on to their patch.
When a fire is put out – a costly
and difficult enterprise – local people know the weak baron has succumbed
and one of the big boys has moved in and taken over. The environment,
the waste, the poisonous fumes destroying the health of those living
nearby do not feature in this war of primitive accumulation of capital.
All economic activity, from market stall to billion-dollar gas business,
functions only through the payment of substantial bribes to members
of various branches of the federal and local government who are using
the occupation to enrich themselves.
In December 2000, Politkovskaya wrote
from the capital: “As the second winter siege sets in, Grozny today
is a living hell. It is another world, some dreadful Hades... there
are no signs of civilisation among the ruins apart from the people themselves.”
Children starve and lose limbs from landmines buried amongst the rubble.
Old people in rags live in dark basements.
In January 2001, President Putin
took control of the occupation out of the hands of the Defence Ministry
and put it directly in the hands of the FSB. The decisive military victory
has been won, he claims, and what remains now is a war against “international
terrorism” which is more appropriately carried out by FSB officers and
troops.
The Council of Europe, which had
removed Russia’s voting rights over its actions in Chechnya, cynically
took this as a promising sign and brought them back into the fold.
But Politkovskaya found out what
it really means when in February 2001 she travelled to the southern
area of Chechnya in response to a cry for help from 90 families in Vedeno
district who had demanded to be resettled outside their home republic.
They were so desperate to escape the torture, murder and repression
being carried out against them in an area controlled by the FSB they
were prepared to leave their homes forever. When she arrived, she too
was arrested and faced abuse and threats of rape or worse. She told
a television station after her release: “After seeing how they treated
me, a journalist, I am convinced that all the complaints of local residents
are true.”
Some Western leaders have been critical
of Russia’s actions in Chechnya, but not so British Prime Minister Blair,
who has made a close ally of President Putin. On his recent visit to
Russia to strengthen the “war on terrorism”, Blair ate a hearty stew
with Putin at his country dacha and the two talked through the night
and into the early hours of the morning, it was reported. It is not
likely that the daily terror faced by the families of Vedeno was high
on the agenda, however, or the fate of hundreds of thousands of Chechens
now suffering as a result of Putin’s dirty war.
* A Dirty War, a Russian reporter
in Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya, The Harvill Press, £12.00.
This article first appeared in Socialist Future
