11.11.1999
Hands off Chechnya
Putin steps up colonial war
If war, as Clausewitz tells us, is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means, then what kind of politics lies behind Russia’s invasion of Chechnya?
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the Russian prime minister and heir apparent to Boris Yeltsin, would have us believe that his forces are engaged in a crusade against the scourge of Islamic terrorism. The name of Osama bin Laden is invoked as justification for a campaign that, by implication, is not merely in Russia’s interest but that of the entire ‘international community’.
The truth is very different. You do not need an entire army - the 58th, based in Vladikavkaz - with 200 aircraft, 400 tanks, thousands of armoured personnel carriers in a force comprising tens of thousands in order to liquidate a few hundred “bandits”. What we are dealing with here is a dirty colonial war, the strategic political objective of which is to destroy Chechnya’s three-year-old de facto independence, subjugate the country and bring it back under Russian domination. Control of the Caucasus, which has been a powder keg ever since the implosion of the USSR, is vital to Russia’s geopolitical goals. Economic factors also come into play, since Chechnya was one of Russia’s biggest oil refining centres, with pipelines to Makhachkala on the Caspian and Tuapse on the Black Sea.
From the outset this has been Putin’s war. In his first speech to the duma he pledged to strengthen the military and warned that “Russia’s territorial integrity cannot be an object of discussion” (The Independent August 17). Incursions by Islamic Wahhabi fighters - allegedly based in Chechnya - and under the leadership of the Chechen ‘warlord’ Shamil Basayev, into the territory of Dagestan back in August, were a godsend to Putin. Terrorist atrocities that left more than 300 people dead in Moscow and Volgodonsk the following month created the perfect climate of popular hysteria, anger and the thirst for vengeance. Putin blamed these horrific bombings on Chechen separatists, but to date there is not a shred of evidence to substantiate the claim. The four men named in the Russian media as being wanted in connection with the bombings are not Chechens, but Karachai - another Caucasian people with grievances against Moscow dating back to the 1940s, when, like the natives of the Chechen-Ingush republic, the Karachai were deported en masse to central Asia on Stalin’s orders, because of their alleged collaboration with the Germans.
Putin has evidently learned the lessons of Russia’s humiliating debacle in the Chechen war of 1994-96, when more than 6,000 Russian soldiers, many of them young conscripts, returned to Russia in coffins. This time there has been no frontal infantry assault but a seven-week campaign of relentless and totally indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardment. A defining moment came on October 22, when a dozen short-range missiles struck the main market in the Chechen capital Grozny. The attack left 163 civilians dead and more than 400 wounded. Putin immediately denied responsibility. Colonel-general Valery Manilov, deputy chief of the general staff, claimed that the explosions were the result of a “clash between two bandit formations” (The Independent October 25). Yet on the same day the chief press officer of the North Caucasus military district, Alexander Veklich, told the media that “our intelligence discovered a market ... where arms and ammunition were sold to terrorists. The market was destroyed in a special operation” (The Guardian October 23).
Current estimates suggest that more than 200,000 Chechens - nearly a quarter of the entire population of the country - have fled their homes and sought refuge in neighbouring Ingushetia. Refugees have been attacked by Russian aircraft. On October 29, for example, some 50 civilians were killed and hundreds injured when a Russian plane fired missiles at their convoy near the town of Samashki. In another incident, a red cross convoy was bombed at Shami-Yurt, west of Grozny, resulting in 25 deaths and more than 70 wounded. The Russian official response is again a blunt denial, or the claim that the vehicles involved contained “bandits”.
The response of the west has been predictably muted. Just as in 1994-96, the Chechen war is seen as Russia’s internal affair, a view which echoes the stance taken by the Russian government itself. US secretary of state Albright describes the situation as “deplorable and ominous”; Clinton speaks of his “deep concern”; deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbot expresses the pious hope that Russia will “turn to political levers as soon as possible” and “find a way to minimise civilian casualties” (The Guardian October 30). In reality, there is little that the imperialist powers can do, even if they wanted to. Military intervention is out of the question for obvious reasons. Economic pressure - such as the suspension of negotiations to reschedule the next tranche of debt repayment - could easily provoke a politically motivated Russian default, which would have an immensely destabilising effect on global markets. Even routine diplomatic pressure - which would be seen in Russia as ‘bullying’ by the west - would only serve to strengthen the rightwing and official ‘communist’ parties in next month’s parliamentary elections.
Grozny, still little more than a heap of ruins since the last war, is now surrounded, lacking basic utilities and suffering a severe food and water shortage. It looks like a soft target, but the Chechen army has not yet been deployed and the Russian general staff no doubt remember the heavy casualties they suffered in house-to-house fighting when they took Grozny in 1996. The logic of Putin’s position is that he must not only take the capital itself, but occupy and subdue the whole country for an indefinite period. Public opinion in Russia is firmly behind him at the moment, but that would change in the event of serious losses among ground forces.
In the eyes of Russia’s military leadership, their defeat in the last Chechen war was the result of a stab in the back by politicians, and the mere suggestion of a possible negotiated political settlement to the present conflict was enough to bring about a crisis in relations between the Russian government and military last week. General Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the general staff, apparently threatened to resign in the event of a political solution, and rumours suggested that many senior officers were ready to follow him. Kvashnin’s deputy, Manilov, issued a statement saying that “Chechnya is our territory and we must not give it away. Losing Chechnya would lead to a dangerous disintegration of Russia ... Without Russia Chechnya will become a terrorist state.” Vladimir Shamanov, a top military official with Russian forces in Chechnya warned that “Many officers, including some generals, are ready to resign if military operations are stopped” (The Sunday Times November 7).
It is significant that Yeltsin himself flew back to Moscow from his dacha in Sochi for urgent consultations with Putin. The outcome was a remarkable joint statement from Kvashnin and the Russian defence minister Igor Sergeyev, stating that “with the help of lies, slander and disinformation, attempts are being made to cause a rift between the state and military leaderships” (ibid). Against this background of heavy and public pressure from the military, it would seem that Putin has little room for political manoeuvre. His future is entirely dependent on success in the Chechen campaign and he cannot afford to forfeit the support of the military leadership in the middle of a war.
Principled communists must resist any temptation to comfort themselves with the illusion that the events in Chechnya are merely a reflection of post-Soviet Russia’s capitulation to bourgeois ideology and its return to a pre-Soviet, tsarist policy of empire-building and colonialism. Painful as it may be for some of us to acknowledge, the truth is more complicated and centres on the fact that for much of the Soviet period, from Stalin onwards, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in theory committed to socialist internationalism, was in fact suffused with that Great Russian chauvinism which Marx, Engels and Lenin so violently detested.
The history of Chechnya is a good example. In the great days after the Bolshevik revolution, the territory of the Chechen and Ingush peoples was accorded the status of autonomous regions. “Soviet Russia,” said Stalin in 1920 as commissar of nationalities, “is a torch which lights the path to liberation from the yoke of the oppressors for all the peoples of the world” (JV Stalin SW Vol 4, Moscow 1953, p408). It was. However, by 1936 Soviet Russia had become its opposite and Chechnya and Ingushetia were merged from above to form the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. With the mass deportations of 1944, referred to above, the republic was dissolved and not re-established until 1957, when Khrushchev allowed those exiles who had survived to return to their homeland.
Like the USSR’s other supposedly ‘autonomous’ republics under bureaucratic socialism, the Chechen-Ingush Republic had no real autonomy whatever. They were, in essence, colonial possessions of the Soviet state. Any aspirations they may have had to really autonomous self-government, let alone self-determination, were denied.
So long as the Soviet Union existed, it served to suppress, though not to eradicate, nationalism and separatism in its empire. The break-up of the USSR inevitably unleashed these forces in Chechnya as elsewhere. Dzhozkhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general carried out a coup against the Soviet administration in Chechnya in August 1991. In October of that year his election to the presidency was followed by the voluntary separation of the Chechen-Ingush republic into two separate states. When Dudayev’s aggressive anti-Russian nationalism and mismanagement led to Chechnya’s increasing isolation and impoverishment, he dealt with the growing opposition by dissolving parliament. Repeated attempts by armed opposition groups, funded and supplied by Russia, were made to depose Dudayev, who was eventually killed by a Russian missile.
Post-Soviet Chechnya, like some other Caucasian states, has been bedevilled by corruption and banditry in the form of hostage-taking and the like, but the fact remains that the current president, Aslan Maskhadov, another former Soviet officer, who led Chechen resistance to the Russians in the 1994-96 war, was elected in polls that western observers described as fair. He therefore has a democratic mandate to maintain the country’s de facto independence. Maskhadov himself is no lover of Islamic militancy or separatism, but the refusal of Moscow to engage in any negotiations with the Chechen government has left him isolated and powerless.
The repercussions of the Chechen war on Caucasian nationals living in Russia have been serious. More than 2,000 have been arrested and deported from Moscow since the start of the fighting. With the duma elections now only a few weeks away, most mainstream politicians seem to be vying with each other not just in terms of Russian jingoistic chauvinism but in expressions of outright racism. Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, whose Fatherland-All-Russia looks to be the likely victor in the elections, has given his backing to deportations, stating that Muscovites need to “cleanse” their city of these “guests”. The increasingly strident xenophobia and racism in Russian politics is exemplified by the leading newspaper Izvestia, owned by the powerful Unexim business and banking group. In the wake of the September bombings in Moscow, the paper reported with approval the fact that the mood of ordinary Russians was “changing from fear to hatred. The slogan ‘For each house in Moscow - a village in Chechnya’ is becoming popular.”
Viktor Ilyukhin, a leading member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and head of the duma security committee, has accused the authorities of loosening control over the influx of Caucasian nationals into the capital and expressed his party’s support for the deportations and the war. Ilyukhin came to notice some months ago for his virulently anti-semitic views. For all its pretensions to represent all nationalities living in Russia, the CPRF itself has become more and more openly racist. Readers will recall that last December, the party’s leader, Gennady Zyuganov blamed “Zionists” for Russia’s desperate economic plight, and demanded that the country’s Jews should decide where their loyalties lay - with Zionist Israel or mother Russia. This kind of lurid and disgusting anti-semitic claptrap, totally alien to anyone calling themselves communist, is what characterises the principal ‘communist’ party in Russia today.
It should, of course, be condemned outright and in this connection we are left to wonder what our own ‘official communists’ in the CPB have to say about a party with whom they still maintain fraternal links. A few months ago, we noted interesting signs in the CPB’s journal Communist Review that at least some members might be engaging in serious thinking on the subject of the USSR (Weekly Worker August 26). A glance at the Morning Star, however, is enough to confirm that old habits die hard. Comrade Brian Denny, that inveterate fan of Slobodan Milosevic during the Balkan war, merely restates Moscow’s pretext for the “advance” into Chechnya and lards his report with repeated references to “rebels”, “separatists”, “bandits” and “terrorists”. While hundreds of innocent civilians are being killed and maimed in Grozny and right across the country, Denny relays Putin’s facile assurance that Russia’s only purpose is “to create peace and to re-establish order in Chechnya as quickly as possible” (November 2).
Communists must unreservedly condemn the vicious, colonial war being waged against Chechnya. We also have no truck with the reactionary aims of the small and unrepresentative bunch of Islamic fundamentalists who may come to exercise growing influence as the Russian offensive intensifies. The Chechen people must have the right to self-determination. In view of Putin’s murderous assault, that today can only mean the right to independence
Michael Malkin