"The war on terror" and our friends in barbarity
Tony Wood (NLR 2004): What has been the international response to the ongoing assault on Chechen statehood? As the Chechen foreign ministry official Roman Khalilov dryly notes, ‘the international community’s record of timely, painless recognition of secession is extremely poor’. [51] Here Chechnya has been a casualty of the basest Realpolitik. Western governments gave the nod to Yeltsin’s war as a regrettable side-effect of a presidency that had at all costs to be prolonged, if capitalism was to be successful in Russia. Putin has benefited from a similarly craven consensus. Yet for all the column inches expended on the harm done to Russia’s fragile democracy by the imprisonment of YUKOS chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it is in Chechnya that the face of Putin’s regime is truly revealed, and it is above all by its sponsorship of wanton brutality there that it should be judged.
The few early criticisms of Putin’s campaign from such bodies as the OSCE and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe were soon toned down, and dismissed by European governments as counter-productive amid attempts to welcome Putin to the European fold. In September 2001, while state-sanctioned murders were being committed with impunity in Chechnya, Putin received a standing ovation in the Bundestag; in the summer of 2002, Chirac endorsed the Russian view of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’, and he and Schroeder reiterated their support at Sochi in August 2004. Collective EU efforts have been limited to humanitarian aid for the refugee camps in Ingushetia. [52]
Despite repeated approaches from Maskhadov’s envoys, the UN has, for its part, refused to meet with Chechnya’s legitimately elected leaders—though Kofi Annan was quick to express his grief at the assassination of the puppet Kadyrov earlier this year. On a visit to Moscow in 2002, Annan even praised Putin’s efforts at conflict resolution—doubtless appreciative of the latter’s prior backing for his bid to secure a second term as Secretary General. Questions about Russia’s actions in Chechnya have routinely been sidestepped at meetings of the UN’s Human Rights Committee.Nor has support been forthcoming from elsewhere. Arab governments have emphasized their support for Russia’s territorial integrity, while in 1999 the Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi insisted the Russo-Chechen war was strictly an internal affair. China has seen in Yeltsin’s and now Putin’s suppression of Chechen aspirations for independence a useful precedent for its own dealings with Tibet and Xinjiang. [53]
Official reaction in the US, of course, has been conditioned by the needs of the ‘war on terror’. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, Putin wasted no time in linking Chechnya to the wider battle against Islamic extremism, and gave the US permission to plant forward bases across Central Asia, its former sphere of influence, as a quid pro quo for Washington’s approval for war in Chechnya. The Bush administration has responded with the requisite silence—though this is a marked change of tack for many of the neo-cons, whose hostility to Russia has meant support for Chechen independence from unlikely quarters. Members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya include Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Decter and James Woolsey. Outside official circles, right-wingers such as Richard Pipes have also argued the Chechens’ case, pointing out that authoritarianism is in Russians’ DNAand that Putin would do well to learn the lessons de Gaulle drew from Algeria. [54]
Liberals, by contrast, have been divided between those who accept the devastation visited on Chechnya as a regrettable bump in Russia’s difficult road to a stable democracy, and those who actively endorse Putin’s war. Despite the constitutional propriety of the Chechens’ demands, there is almost universal agreement on the unacceptability of Chechen independence. ‘The first requirement is the exclusion of formal independence as a subject for negotiation’, concludes Jonathan Steele, on the grounds that Putin will simply not accept secession. [55] Anatol Lieven describes Russia’s right to wage war on Chechnya as ‘incontestable’, at the same time urging ‘more nuanced’ assessments of Russian war crimes. More recently, he has insisted that the West take a tougher line with Maskhadov, pressing him not only to break with the ‘terrorists’ but to fight them ‘alongside Russian forces’. [56] Blair’s fulsome support for Putin, meanwhile, only underscores the hypocritical selectivity of his ‘humanitarian interventionism’.
The few early criticisms of Putin’s campaign from such bodies as the OSCE and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe were soon toned down, and dismissed by European governments as counter-productive amid attempts to welcome Putin to the European fold. In September 2001, while state-sanctioned murders were being committed with impunity in Chechnya, Putin received a standing ovation in the Bundestag; in the summer of 2002, Chirac endorsed the Russian view of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’, and he and Schroeder reiterated their support at Sochi in August 2004. Collective EU efforts have been limited to humanitarian aid for the refugee camps in Ingushetia. [52]
Despite repeated approaches from Maskhadov’s envoys, the UN has, for its part, refused to meet with Chechnya’s legitimately elected leaders—though Kofi Annan was quick to express his grief at the assassination of the puppet Kadyrov earlier this year. On a visit to Moscow in 2002, Annan even praised Putin’s efforts at conflict resolution—doubtless appreciative of the latter’s prior backing for his bid to secure a second term as Secretary General. Questions about Russia’s actions in Chechnya have routinely been sidestepped at meetings of the UN’s Human Rights Committee.Nor has support been forthcoming from elsewhere. Arab governments have emphasized their support for Russia’s territorial integrity, while in 1999 the Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi insisted the Russo-Chechen war was strictly an internal affair. China has seen in Yeltsin’s and now Putin’s suppression of Chechen aspirations for independence a useful precedent for its own dealings with Tibet and Xinjiang. [53]
Official reaction in the US, of course, has been conditioned by the needs of the ‘war on terror’. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, Putin wasted no time in linking Chechnya to the wider battle against Islamic extremism, and gave the US permission to plant forward bases across Central Asia, its former sphere of influence, as a quid pro quo for Washington’s approval for war in Chechnya. The Bush administration has responded with the requisite silence—though this is a marked change of tack for many of the neo-cons, whose hostility to Russia has meant support for Chechen independence from unlikely quarters. Members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya include Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Decter and James Woolsey. Outside official circles, right-wingers such as Richard Pipes have also argued the Chechens’ case, pointing out that authoritarianism is in Russians’ DNAand that Putin would do well to learn the lessons de Gaulle drew from Algeria. [54]
Liberals, by contrast, have been divided between those who accept the devastation visited on Chechnya as a regrettable bump in Russia’s difficult road to a stable democracy, and those who actively endorse Putin’s war. Despite the constitutional propriety of the Chechens’ demands, there is almost universal agreement on the unacceptability of Chechen independence. ‘The first requirement is the exclusion of formal independence as a subject for negotiation’, concludes Jonathan Steele, on the grounds that Putin will simply not accept secession. [55] Anatol Lieven describes Russia’s right to wage war on Chechnya as ‘incontestable’, at the same time urging ‘more nuanced’ assessments of Russian war crimes. More recently, he has insisted that the West take a tougher line with Maskhadov, pressing him not only to break with the ‘terrorists’ but to fight them ‘alongside Russian forces’. [56] Blair’s fulsome support for Putin, meanwhile, only underscores the hypocritical selectivity of his ‘humanitarian interventionism’.
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