he September 3rd tragedy involving the terrorist massacre of a school in the North Ossetian city of Beslan was the culmination of a summer of terrorist tragedies in Russia that have included the hijacking of two airplanes and the bombing of a Moscow subway station. Orchestrated by militant Chechen separtatists, approximately 30 militants stormed into School No. 1 on the first day of the new school year, forcing 1,200 students and parents into the gym for a stand-off that lasted two days; when the siege ended 326 hostages were dead and 727 wounded. The incident in Beslan underscores the need for a change in Russian policy regarding Chechnya, hopefully ending in a framework that will either give the Chechens their independence, or at the very least end the bloody cycle of violence that has lasted more than a century. A predominantly Muslim region in Southwestern Russia, Chechnya is home to a long-standing, violent separatist movement, now with suspected ties to al-Qaeda, but with historical roots that date back to the Russian imperial army’s conquest of the North Caucusus in the mid 1800s.Vladimir Putin has employed a hard line stance towards the Chechen rebels since the beginning of his presidency, but his reaction to the events in Beslan is somewhat misguided. On September 8th, one of Russia’s top military commanders, Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky declared “as for carrying out preventive strikes against terrorist bases, . . . we will take all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world.” A bold statement for a government that has thus far been unable to prevent terrorist attacks within its own borders. Since September 11, 2001, the Russian government has been a ally in the United States’s War on Terror, claiming that some rebel Chechen groups have ties to al-Qaeda exist. However, the Putin government’s handling of the terrorists has been far from stellar. In an interview with The News Hour, Toby Gati, former United States assistant Secretary of State under President Clinton described a meeting President Putin had with western journalists and academics on September 7th, where he acknowledged past Russian mistakes concerning the situation. Ms. Gati told The News Hour:
“I got the sense that…he knew mistakes had been made. He went back as far as the first Chechen war and said maybe he wouldn't have done it that way. He… went on to say, "you in the West should understand there's a domino theory here in the Caucasus, and if Chechnya goes and the Caucasus go, your security is at threat not just Russia; Russia is on the front line… And you could get a sense of frustration and perhaps anger at the people he had appointed who really had not handled this situation well.” Among the mistakes The News Hour report detailed was the mishandling of the October 2002 Moscow theater siege, in which government forces and police pumped nerve gas into the theater in an attempt to end the stand-off, a move that caused almost all of the 129 hostage deaths. Dating back to the 1996 cease-fire, all Chechen leaders have been Kremlin cronies, which has done little to enact real reform in the poverty-stricken state. Facing a stagnant economy with little hope for help from Moscow, Chechen terrorists often demand money along with their calls for an independent state. According to the Economist, government mistakes result from a long-standing policy that alternates between aggression and avoidance:
“Russia has tried to wipe out Chechnya's separatists, first through direct military force, and more recently through “Chechenisation”—ie, foisting the problem on to a local strongman (the latest luckless candidate, Alu Alkhanov, was put in place in rigged elections only two weeks ago). But the result has been to breed an anarchy in which soldiers and separatists alike kidnap and murder the innocent with impunity.” According to Emil Payin and Arkady Popov, writing for the RAND Corporation, the earliest conflict between the Russian government and Chechnya occurred in the 1840s when the imperial Russian army sought to control the Caucusus. Fighting between the majority-Muslim armies of the north Caucusus, including Chechnya lasted until 1864, with the region under Russian control. After the Bolshevik revolution, however, Chechens were split, and though a majority fought for the Red Army, some sided with the Tsarist forces.
Eventually the Bolsheviks prevailed, but even then, peace was not at hand as Chechens resisted Communist control as well. Fighting continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s intermittently, but during World War II, perhaps the most tragic event in Chechen history occurred when Josef Stalin exiled Chechens (along with the Ingush) to Kazakhstan. On February 23, 1944, nearly 400,000 Chechens were exiled, and those who were fortunate enough to survive were not permitted to return to their homeland until 1957, according to the BBC. Yuri Maslev, senior fellow at the Mises Institute, described the migration of refugees to Kazakhstan as: “people crowded into cattle cars without food, water, or sanitary facilities for several days, corpses traveling with children, killings of innocent protesters at the railway stations by KGB guards.” Nearly half died in the migration or the ensuing exile, and according to TIME Europe, it was “one of the most devastating incidents of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century. Yet, amid the turbulence of the war, the episode went largely unnoticed outside the region.”
Soviet occupation continued until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, when Chechnya declared its independence with the election of President Dzhokhar Dudayev. Despite its weakened position, Russia continued to make life difficult for the Chechens, enacting an economic blockade on the new republic. By 1994 the Russian government was aiding Dudayev opponents, and in December of that year President Yeltsin ordered an invasion of Grozny, which marked the beginning of yet another war between the Kremlin and Chechnya. President Dudayev died, reportedly in a Russian missile strike, and in 1996 a cease-fire was agreed upon, which delayed a final settlement until 2001, FreedomHouse.com reports.
Aslan Maskhadov succeeded Dudayev as President, and in 1997, he and Boris Yeltsin signed an accord recognizing Maskhadov’s legitimacy as leader, and calling for the Kremlin to assist the republic in getting on its feet, FreedomHouse.org reported. Unfortunately, resistance among some Chechen groups, as well as Yeltsin’s exit from power, doomed the accord.
In 1999, Vladimir Putin took over as President of Russia, and instituted a hard line stance in negotiating with the Chechens. The new president invaded the republic after Chechen rebels launched attacks in Dagestan, a neighboring province in southwestern Russia, and repealed its recognition of Maskhadov’s authority in October 1999.Turmoil ensued after Maskhadov’s ousting; he went to work with militant groups while the Kremlin installed a series of leaders in rigged elections, the most recent of which, Akhmad Kadyrov, was the so-called “iron man in the region,” according to Reuters.
Following Kadyrov’s assassination in May, the Kremlin needed a new leader, and on August 30th, just four days before the Beslan crisis, Alu Alkhanov declared victory in the presidential election, despite claims from opponents that the contest was fixed, the International Herald Tribune reported. Reaffirming Moscow’s hard line stance, Alkhanov declared after his victory that his government would not negotiate with terrorists, while Chechen rebels led by former president Maskhanov asserted that the new leader and his advisers are assassination targets.
There seems to be no end in sight to the conflict in Chechnya. Terrorists will continue to harm citizens, Chechen and Russian, Muslim and Christian, without remorse unless the Putin government begins to implement more effective policies in dealing with the problem. Unfortunately for the approximately one million citizens living in Chechnya, moderate factions willing to negotiate rather than intimidate are in short supply. President Putin’s government has made errors in the past, and their new policies seem to be a reiteration of the aggression stance Moscow has historically favored. Sadly, it will take more than just strong words to resolve this crisis, and hopefully President Putin will back up his words with strategic and effective action, instead of tightening his already formidable grip on civil liberties and hoping that will dissuade opposition.
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