Discussion Article
Obstacles to Peace in Chechnya: What Scope
for International Involvement?
JOHN RUSSELL
Abstract
Recognising the failure of both internal and external parties to achieve a peaceful resolution of the
Russo – Chechen war, this article seeks to establish what scope remains for international involvement
to end the violence in Chechnya. By applying theories from the disciplines of conﬂict resolution and
counterinsurgency to the confrontation, distinctions are drawn between opportunities of peacekeeping,
peacemaking and peacebuilding, as well as between legitimate ‘need’ and exploitative ‘greed’ at a time
of ‘violent’ politics. Key ﬁndings include the scope for international assistance in addressing the root
contradictions of the conﬂict and for curtailing the inﬂuence of the ‘entrepreneurs of violence’.
IN THE WINTER OF 2004 – 2005, AS THE CURRENT VIOLENT STAGE of the centurieslong
Russo – Chechen confrontation entered its second decade, there appeared a
signiﬁcant number of analyses of the causes of the conﬂict and evaluations of the
policies followed thus far by the various parties involved.1
Less evident were
comprehensive assessments of the prospects for a genuine and lasting peace in this
region with or without international involvement.2
Such an examination is now
required urgently, not least because a conﬂict which has exceeded that in the former
Yugoslavia in intensity, longevity and civilian casualties, and which has produced
seemingly never-ending suﬀering for broad sections of both the Chechen and Russian
populations, has come to represent a blot on the conscience of concerned citizens as
well as an additional source of anger for disaﬀected Muslims throughout the world.3
Moreover, the conﬂict has created a black hole of criminality, impunity and arbitrary
1
For a comprehensive coverage of such articles, see Johnson’s Russia List, especially 8492 – 8504,
10 – 17 December 2004.
2
An exception was the study by Hill et al. (2005).
3
For its impact in the UK, see the correspondence of April – May 2004 between the Cabinet
Secretary and the Permanent Secretary at the Home Oﬃce on ‘Relations with the Muslim
Community’, leaked to The Sunday Times. The full text of the correspondence is available at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,2087-1688261,00.html, accessed 9 December 2005.
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 58, No. 6, September 2006, 941 – 964
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/06/060941-24 ª 2006 University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.1080/09668130600831225
violence that threatens to spread far beyond the borders of Russia, let alone
Chechnya.
With these considerations in mind, this article seeks to illustrate why a genuine
process of peacebuilding cannot be eﬀective unless the attitudes on all sides that beget,
condone and encourage the violent behaviour are addressed, preferably with outside
assistance. However, it is not in itself enough to apply conﬂict resolution theory to
the Russo – Chechen conﬂict in order to identify optimum strategies for assisting the
warring sides to extricate themselves from the impasse into which their policies and
interactions have driven them. Clearly, without the requisite goodwill of the conﬂicting
parties, including recognition that the ability to compromise is a strength
and not a weakness, there is little prospect of constructing a ‘win – win’ situation in
Chechnya. Moreover, without adequate pressure from leaders of the international
community, or from other inﬂuential representatives of world public opinion who are
suﬃciently aware of the complexities of this multi-layered conﬂict, there is little real
hope of doing much more than temporarily freezing the confrontation at a level of
violence ‘tolerable’ to all except those at the receiving end.4
For, while it might be assumed that the goal of peace is shared by all interested
parties in this conﬂict, the behaviour and attitudes of certain factions, on all sides, have
often been such as to question whether the Russo – Chechen wars have not been
instrumentalised to serve the political and economic interests of the ‘entrepreneurs
of violence’.5
The inaction, indiﬀerence, double standards and self interest of the
‘democratic’ world and the simplistic presentation of the conﬂict within the parameters
of a post-secular discourse of ‘good versus evil’ combine to distract attention
away from the fact that, in a corner of Europe, thousands of ordinary people are still
dying, if not from the violence itself, then from the resulting disease, poverty, ecological
degradation and severe psychological trauma. This plain fact is known well enough to
leaders in Russia, the West and throughout the world; at best they dismiss such
protestations, urging pragmatism and the need to ‘look at the bigger picture’, thus
emphasising the importance of ‘interests’ at the expense of ‘values’.
In analysing the conﬂict I will seek to avoid, where appropriate, generalising the
parties to the conﬂict as the ‘Russians’ or the ‘Chechens’, acknowledging both the
heterogeneity of views and aﬃliations on either side, and the fact that individuals
and groups, be they presidents, generals, warlords or leaders of a broad range of
institutions at all levels, have presumed to speak and act on behalf of ‘people’
without seeking either a genuine mandate or troubling to ﬁnd out what their
constituents really want. Moreover, there is disturbing evidence, which, by its nature,
is hard to either quantify or verify, of collusion at all levels between Russians and
Chechens. None the less, given the signiﬁcant role played in this conﬂict by mutual
stereotyping and demonisation, the ‘imagined communities’ of both Russians and
Chechens must be given due prominence (Russell 2005a, pp. 101 – 116).
4
For a detailed analysis of the layers of conﬂict, see Russell (2005b, pp. 239 – 264).
5
In employing this concept I acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Christoph Z}urcher (see
Z}urcher & Koehler 2001, p. 49). James Hughes prefers the term ‘conﬂict entrepreneurs’ in his article
‘Chechnya; the Causes of a Protracted Post-Soviet Conﬂict’ (Hughes 2001, p. 40).
942 JOHN RUSSELL
At the same time I am aware of the dangers of being seduced by overemphasising
what has been termed ‘ethnographic romanticism’ or ‘superﬁcial historicity’;6
in other
words attributing most of the causes of the Russo – Chechen conﬂict to historical and
cultural factors (Tishkov 1997, p. 186; Hughes 2001, p. 20). However, while recognising
the importance of both the time dynamic and the impact, for good or for ill, of
modernity on Russian and Chechen perceptions, it would be foolish to underplay the
role of history and cultural narrative in the current conﬂict, not least because of the
sometimes crude manipulation of these issues by those intent on continuing and even
exacerbating the war.
Identifying Galtung’s conﬂict triangle in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict
Johan Galtung, one of the founding fathers of conﬂict resolution, identiﬁed the three
components of this new discipline as peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding
(Galtung 1976, pp. 282 – 304). Although it is generally held that these represent
three consecutive stages of conﬂict resolution, there is some acknowledgement that
sometimes peacemaking, or even peace-enforcement, has to precede peacekeeping and
that there is, of necessity, a considerable overlap between all three stages (Miall et al.
1999, p. 22). Thus, the United Nations Organisation’s concept of peacemaking
is directed more at cessation of hostilities, whereas Jean Paul Lederach’s vision of
peacebuilding encompasses elements of both peacemaking and conﬂict prevention, in
an attempt to transform the conﬂict triangle into a circle of resolution (Lederach
1997).7
Galtung characterised the three stages as representing diﬀerent forms of
violence: direct, structural and cultural, indicating that the ﬁrst related to behaviour,
the second to attitudes and the third to contradictions (Galtung 1996, p. 112). Figure 1
provides salient examples of these categories in the context of Russo – Chechen
relations.
Even this small selection of examples illustrates how these factors, while each being
largely characteristic of only one of the parties to the conﬂict, constitute at the same
time something of a mirror image. For example, those perpetrating the sweeps (i.e. the
surrounding of a village, followed by house to house searches and reprisals) and
the acts of terrorism (e.g. Dubrovka, Beslan) have entirely diﬀerent perceptions of
and justiﬁcations for their actions from those of their victims, but in either case, the
arbitrariness of the violence, the disproportionality of means and ends, and the relative
impotence of both the direct and indirect victims indicate that the perpetrators of
violence have more in common with each other than either do with those on the
receiving end.
The prevalence of Caucasophobia (fear of ‘persons of Caucasian nationality’)—a
form of racism—amongst the Russian population in general, and the federal forces in
particular, helps to remove moral obstacles to the inhuman treatment of Chechens and
6
‘Superﬁcial historicity’ is a term also employed by Tishkov, see Hughes (2001, p. 20).
7
See also, United Nations Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Brieﬁng (revised 17
February 2004), available at: http://www.una-uk.org/UN&C/peacemaking.html, accessed 22 July
2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 943
their neighbours.8
Paradoxically, this conﬁrms the perceptions of the Caucasian
peoples within the Russian Federation that they are regarded, none the less, as
outsiders. This, in turn, fuels anti-Russian sentiments amongst all Caucasian peoples.9
The Chechen cultural narrative,10
of which most Russians are ignorant, but which
commemorates both heroic defence against a vastly more numerous foe and the
ethnocidal11
policies adopted against the Chechens by successive Russian and Soviet
regimes, justiﬁes, if not legitimises, in the eyes of many Chechens (and indeed, some
Western observers) acts that the Russians routinely term ‘terrorist’.12
As regards the fundamental cultural contradictions, the Russian colonisation of
Chechnya in the nineteenth century clearly failed to either co-opt or coerce the
Chechens into becoming fully-ﬂedged Russians or even Rossiyans [non-ethnic
Russian citizens of the Empire; for an explanation of this term see Bowring (2002,
pp. 229 – 250)]. It would not be surprising if the average ethnic Russian, inﬂuenced,
perhaps, by the impressions created in both classical Russian literature and Soviet
history books, still regarded the original conquest of the Caucasus as a civilising
mission that brought progress to the mountain tribes and, consequently, perceived
manifestations of anti-Russian sentiment as evidence of how ungrateful these peoples
were. That such a view is shared neither by Chechens nor their neighbours will
be apparent to anyone who has spent any time in the region. These attitudes
FIGURE 1. INDICATIVE SCHEME ILLUSTRATING THE APPLICATION OF THE CONFLICT TRIANGLE TO
CHECHNYA AND TYPE OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION APPROPRIATE TO EACH STAGE
8
Z. Sikevich (2002) ‘The Caucasus and ‘‘Caucasus Phobia’’’, translated by Robin Jones for Rosbalt
News Agency, 18 December, available at: http://www.rosbaltnews.com/2003/02/07/60777.html,
accessed 22 July. The term in Russian is ‘kavkazofobia’, see also Sikevich (1999, pp. 99 – 112).
9
Y. Soshin (2005) ‘Papakha s ushami’ [‘Papapkha—the traditional Caucasian headwear—with earﬂaps’],
12 July, available at: http://www.globalrus.ru/opinions/778113/, accessed 22 July 2005.
10
For a description of cultural narrative, in this case Armenian, see Tololyan (1987, pp. 218 – 233).
11
In distinguishing ‘ethnocide’ from ‘genocide’, Steven T. Katz, citing the Stalinist deportations of
World War II, claims that the ‘intent was to destroy a variety of minority cultures and ambitions built
on them, rather than to murder all the members of a speciﬁc people’ (Katz 1999, p. 280).
12
See S. Pankratova (2004) ‘Rossiya i PACE po-raznomu smotryat na bor’bu s terrorizmom’
[‘Russia and PACE do not see Eye-to-Eye on the Battle against Terrorism’], 7 October, available at:
http://www.izvestia.ru/politic/490012, accessed 7 October 2004.
944 JOHN RUSSELL
notwithstanding, a recent opinion poll indicates that a signiﬁcant proportion of
Russians now wishes the Russian Federation to divest itself of its rebellious southern
republic.13
The Caucasian peoples, in common with the Balts, generally accept the asymmetry
of their relationship with Russia as a fact of life and one that has to be accommodated
and, at times, just tolerated. Thus, Chechnya’s neighbours have all more or
less resigned themselves to the fact that, however they might yearn for selfdetermination,
if not independence, it really is not worth the suﬀering that would be
required to achieve this. In Chechnya’s case the brutality of periodic Russian
attempts to crush their distinctive way of life appears to have pushed the Chechens
almost uniquely towards choosing the path of resistance rather than that of
resignation.14
The ﬁrst Russo – Chechen war (1994 – 1996) and the de facto independence of
Chechnya – Ichkeria from 1996 until 1999, culminating in the ill-judged ‘Wahhabi’
incursion into Dagestan, actually reinforced this preference for peaceful coexistence
with the Russians amongst the North Caucasian peoples. Paradoxically, it is the eﬀects
of Caucasophobia on all Caucasians during the second war (1999 to date) and
the extension of sweeps into neighbouring territories (Dagestan and Ingushetia)
that appear to have radicalised the opposition to Russian rule across the North
Caucasus.
However, elements of the Chechen resistance (from Akhmad Kadyrov to Aslan
Maskhadov) came to the realisation that an accommodation with the Russians short
of independence had to be made in order to save the Chechen people from further
suﬀering and, perhaps, themselves from annihilation. This was a fully pragmatic
choice in the circumstances (although both, in the event, were assassinated within a
year of each other). Yet, because the Kremlin was unwilling to recognise even
moderate Chechen oppositionists as anything other than terrorists, those who took a
pragmatic line were caught potentially between a rock and a hard place; the Russians
would target them if they did not cooperate, just as surely as would the ‘irreconcilable’
Chechen opposition, led by Shamil Basaev, if they did. The policy of Chechenisation
of the conﬂict in Chechnya, begun in June 2000 with the appointment of Kadyrov as
Putin’s representative in the republic, oﬀered a way out of this impasse for both
the Kremlin and their Chechen allies: pro-Russian Chechens would now conduct the
‘anti-terrorist’ campaign (and control their share of the illicit economy that ﬂourishes
in Chechnya) and Putin would be spared much of the unwelcome, albeit half-hearted,
13
In a poll published by Moscow’s Levada Centre in July 2005, 37% stated that they would either be
pleased to be rid of Chechnya (or considered they already were) and a further 17% were indiﬀerent to
the prospect of losing it (available at: http://www.levada.ru/press/2005070410.html, accessed 22 July
2005). A poll by the same organisation in September 2005 found that only 20% of Russians favoured
continuing military operations in Chechnya against 68% opting for peace negotiations, 61% (against
28%) indicating that they thought the war in Chechnya was still going on (available at: http://
www.levada.ru/press/2005100506.html, accessed 9 December 2005). See also Volkova (2004).
14
Thus, of those polled recently in Chechnya, 66% thought that Chechen men and women had taken
up arms to resist the violent actions of Russian forces, against only 14% who identiﬁed the struggle for
independence: see Basnukhayev and Iriskhanov (2004), also available at: http://www.levada.ru/
vestnik78.html, accessed 8 March 2006.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 945
international condemnation of the inhuman treatment of Chechen civilians by Russian
troops.
That the pro-Russian Chechen forces under Ramzan Kadyrov and Sulim
Yamadaev continue to terrorise the Chechen population with intensiﬁed sweeps of
their own, extrajudicial killings, torturing and intimidation, kidnapping relatives of
known opponents, would appear to argue against Galtung’s theory of structural
violence.15
Clearly these Chechens are not imbued with the same Caucasophobia that
aﬄicts their ethnic Russian allies (many of whom, indeed, continue to look down on
them) (see Muradov 2003).16
However, insofar as these Chechens shared with their
Russian allies an arrogance of power, greed to use that power to enrich themselves,
and a carte blanche of means to achieve their ends, they could be seen to be reacting to
the asymmetry in Russo – Chechen relations pragmatically by working on the side, and
adopting some of the values and attitudes, of those whom they consider the more
powerful against those (a signiﬁcant proportion of the Chechen people) that they
claim to represent.
At the same time, even these pro-Kremlin Chechens continue to share with their coethnics
deep misgivings about the behaviour of Russian federal forces in Chechnya.
Ramzan Kadyrov has spoken out forcefully against any release of Colonel Yury
Budanov and, in order to survive as an eﬀective ﬁghting force, his kadyrovtsy have
been obliged to swell their ranks with former Chechen boeviki (ﬁghters), the loyalty of
whom is suspect.17
Some of Kadyrov’s former boeviki are rumoured to have
participated in Shamil Basaev’s arms raid in Ingushetia in June 2004, which left more
than 100 federal employees dead (Blandy 2004, p. 4).18
Some correlation has been established between the excesses of the federal side
(now characterised by sweeps, but formerly by indiscriminate heavy artillery attacks
and carpet bombing of inhabited areas) and those of the insurgents (characterised
by acts of terror). While world leaders and the media are not inclined to equate the
two, it has long been established in theories of terrorism that such repressive measures
by government forces tend to provoke extreme responses from insurgents. As long
ago as 1988, Alex Schmid set out the options available to state and non-state actors in
a time of ‘violent’ politics; if the state resorted to such forms of violent repression for
control of state power as assassination, state-terrorism (torture, death squads,
15
For an account of the main pro-Russian Chechen forces, see A. Makarkin (2004) ‘Alu Alkhanov—
novy chechenskii vybor Kremlya’ [‘Alu Alkhanov—the Kremlin’s New Chechen Choice’], available at:
http://www.politcom.ru/2004/analit139.php, accessed 22 July, 2005.
16
The Russian journalist, Vadim Rechkalov, claims that ‘in the many times I have been to Chechnya
over the past several years I have never met a single Russian soldier or FSB oﬃcial who knew the
Chechen language’: ‘Budet lokal’nye stychki s zhertvami do 100 chelovek, a voiny ne budet’ [‘There
will be Local Skirmishes with up to 100 Victims, but there will be No War’], Izvestiya, 2 August 2004.
17
See Y. Belous (2004) ‘Pomiluyet li Putin Budanova?’ [‘Will Putin Pardon Budanov?’], 20
September, available at: http://politics.pravda.ru/politics/2004/1/1/1/18068_BUDANOVPOMIL.html,
accessed 22 July 2005.
18
In October 2005, Alu Alkhanov admitted that 7,000 former boeviki made up almost half of the
forces of law and order in Chechnya: ‘Pochti polovina sotrudnikov militsii Chechnyi byvshiye boeviki:
7 tysyach chelovek’ [‘Almost Half of Those Serving in Chechnya’s Police Force are Former Fighters: 7
Thousand Persons’], available at: http://www.newsru.com/russia/21oct2005/chechnya.html, accessed 9
December 2005.
946 JOHN RUSSELL
disappearances, concentration camps) massacres, internal war or genocide one
might expect the non-state actor to use violence to contest state power by means
of terrorism, massacres, guerrilla warfare and insurgency.19
Insofar as Russian
behaviour in Chechnya may be perceived as falling within the parameters as deﬁned
by Schmid of ‘state-terrorism’, one might anticipate that the response from their
Chechen opponents might include terrorism. Disassociating herself from the
consistently expressed view of the Putin administration that all armed Chechen
oppositionists are ‘international terrorists’, Ekaterina Stepanova has drawn a
clear distinction between ‘conﬂict-related’ terrorism (such as that practised by
the Chechens) and the ‘super-terrorism’ or ‘mega-terrorism’ of groups such as
Al Qaeda (Stepanova 2003, p. 4).
A feature of the ‘Chechenisation’ phase of the conﬂict is that outside inﬂuences have
conspired to prompt both the pro-Russian pragmatists and their ‘irreconcilable’
opponents to break deep-seated Chechen cultural taboos. For example, the former,
inﬂuenced by Russian norms, are increasing the incidence of Chechen killing Chechen
and the latter, inﬂuenced by Wahhabite ideology, in resorting to female suicide
bombers. Through cognitive consonance and dissonance, each side only perceives the
‘war crimes’ of the other, thus intensifying the structural violence embedded in their
respective attitudes.20
This, in turn, makes it all the more diﬃcult to dispassionately
assess the fundamental contradictions in the current relationship between Chechens
and Russians, and leads to the irrational prominence of such uncompromising and
maximalist positions as ‘freedom or death’ (for the Chechens) and ‘victory at all costs’
(for the Russians).
Thus, identifying Galtung’s conﬂict triangle in the context of the Russo – Chechen
conﬂict is not diﬃcult. Given the heterogeneity of Russian and Chechen attitudes to
this war and the widespread indiﬀerence to it both inside and outside of Russia, it is
proving the applicability of his theory to this confrontation that represents the
more diﬃcult task. The real challenge for the international community, however,
lies in producing pragmatic proposals aimed at resolving the conﬂict that are
acceptable to the broadest spectrum of those involved. This has by no means been easy
given an environment in which the Chechen resistance has sought a degree of international
intervention that currently is neither practical, nor forthcoming, and successive
Russian administrations have actively tried to restrict international involvement to the
spheres of ﬁnancial and logistic assistance in post-conﬂict reconstruction.
Applying Galtung’s conﬂict triangle to the Russo – Chechen conﬂict
According to Galtung, contradictions can be seen as ‘invariants’, the structural
violence emanating from them as ‘processes’ and violent behaviour as ‘events’
(Galtung 1976, pp. 282 – 304; Galtung 1996, p. 112), as comprehensively illustrated in
Figure 2). Whereas many of the contradictions on both the Russian and Chechen sides
are manifestly not invariants (e.g. colonisation, territorial integrity, occupied
19
Originally published in Schmid (1988, pp. 58 – 59) and reproduced in Schmid (2004, p. 201).
20
J. Galtung (2001) ‘Crafting Peace: on the Psychology of the TRANSCEND Approach’, available
at: http://www.transcend.org/t_database/articles.php?ida¼221, accessed 22 July 2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 947
homeland and underdevelopment) their persistence over time allows all parties
concerned to regard them as permanent. Whereas the behaviour on the Russian
federal side bears many of the hallmarks of ‘state terrorism’ and that on the Chechen
rebel side those of ‘insurgent terrorism’, the patterns of behaviour which both sides
share might be characterised as a ‘rule of terror’ by the entrepreneurs of violence.21
Clearly this represents a dangerous, destabilising situation that could potentially
spread well beyond Chechnya.
FIGURE 2. COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF FACTORS ILLUSTRATING THE APPLICATION OF GALTUNG’S
CONFLICT TRIANGLE TO CHECHNYA THAT RELATE TO EITHER THE RUSSIAN OR CHECHEN SIDE,
OR TO BOTH
21
I am using these terms as generally understood in the literature on terrorism. For a good analysis
of both, see Wilkinson (2001), especially ‘Insurgency and Terrorism’ (pp. 1 – 18) and ‘State Terror’
(pp. 40 – 45).
948 JOHN RUSSELL
That the representatives of the warring sides manifestly cannot reach a satisfactory
resolution of their diﬀerences after more than 10 years of the most brutal conﬂict
illustrates the need for a degree of outside involvement if the human rights violations
are to end and the present danger of overspill is to be averted. However, there is
currently little likelihood either of the Putin administration allowing any outside
involvement that might be construed as interference in the internal aﬀairs of the
Russian Federation, or of the leaders of democratic societies in the West risking their
respective interests (including energy supplies) by taking a values-based stand on the
issue of Chechnya.
Here a key role could be played by European, rather than international, institutions,
particularly by the Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), both of
which count Russia as a member. Like the European Union, these organisations
are based on principles to which most countries and people can aspire: a pluralist liberal
democracy with a free market economy and a concern for the rights of all citizens.
These are principles to which the Russian Federation, through its membership, has
consented. Other member countries of these institutions not only have extensive
experience of dealing with many of the problems that beset the Russians and the
Chechens (e.g. the UK and Spain in combating separatist or irredentist movements) but
also of mediating successfully in analogous conﬂict situations (e.g. in the former
Yugoslavia). Of course, the Europeanisation of conﬂict situations on the ‘periphery’ of
Europe (Cyprus, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia & Montenegro) is not a recipe for success
in itself; the current marked preference for the maintenance of territorial integrity can
lead to unintended consequences (Coppetiers et al. 2004, pp. 237 – 242).
Such involvement is likely to be most productive if outside agencies, oﬀering
experience gained in comparable conﬂicts, focus on those cultural contradictions that
can be resolved without resort to violence. For if the violence generated by unresolved
cultural contradictions creates structural violence in the form of attitudes, institutions,
norms and laws, and the latter produces violent behaviour, then it would appear to be
putting the cart before the horse to try to prevent direct violence without addressing
the attitudes that lay at its roots. By the same token, any attempt to change violent
attitudes depends upon a comprehensive understanding of the cultural contradictions
that underpin them.
There is a need, therefore, to identify the cultural contradictions in order to
see where outside involvement could help construct mechanisms to accommodate
and, where necessary, resolve these contradictions. Only then will it be possible to
demonstrate how those obstructing this process are, in eﬀect, the entrepreneurs of
violence, exploiting these contradictions for their own narrow ends, to identify where
action, advice or pressure could be brought by internal agencies, and, assuming that
the latter are genuinely interested in a peaceful outcome, to address not only the
violent behaviour of these parties, but also the attitudes that legitimise and prolong
such violence. Outside involvement, therefore, can be proposed not only in
implementing a multi-track approach to monitor the behaviour, address the attitudes
and understand the contradictions but also in helping to expose and counter the
inﬂuence of the entrepreneurs of violence.
Of course, this would rely heavily on a level of media independence and a capability
in Russia for civic society to inﬂuence politicians that currently are manifestly
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 949
absent.22
European involvement, therefore, might be aimed at creating a more
transparent and pluralistic political process, improving press freedom and consolidating
Russian civic society. Not because Europe seeks to ‘interfere’ in Russia’s internal
aﬀairs but because it understands Russia’s (and Chechnya’s) predicament and
genuinely believes that the experience of Council of Europe members shows that the
presence of these factors oﬀer the best guarantee of marginalising the entrepreneurs of
violence and making it possible to explore ways of resolving conﬂicts by non-violent
means (Trenin 2005, pp. 1 – 11).
Cultural contradictions
As events in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement have demonstrated,
no matter how deep the cultural contradictions and how bitter conﬂicting attitudes
might be, the popular attraction of an outcome that appears to oﬀer peace after
decades of the most arbitrary violence is not to be underestimated. There is evidence
that both the Russian and Chechen populations would welcome precisely such an
outcome.23
It should be emphasised that not all cultural contradictions are in themselves
violent; most, however, do call for mechanisms of conﬂict avoidance and resolution,
many of which appear to be absent in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict. For example,
although many peoples have been more or less successfully colonised, sometimes by
the most violent of means, the Chechens appear to have never accepted the ﬁnality of
either the Russian occupation of their territory or the supremacy of Russian over
Chechen values (Russell 2002a, pp. 73 – 96). The key, it seems to me, is the extent to
which the peoples thus colonised are able to adapt to, ﬂourish in, and even to some
extent control their lives within the new political entity. In the Chechen case, Russian
Imperial and Soviet rule did bring some beneﬁts of modernity such as education,
health care, literacy, and access to the wider world of scientiﬁc advance. However, the
suppression of the distinct Caucasian way of life, the Chechen’s cult of ‘freedom’ and
the brutality that accompanied ﬁrst Russian then Soviet occupation have left an open
wound in Russo – Chechen relations, felt most keenly by the ‘recipients’, but almost
totally disregarded by the ‘donors’ of Russia’s civilising mission.
Historically, Russia has sought to impose internal stability throughout its territory
by means of prescriptive ideologies: in the nineteenth century, through the three main
principles of the Russian Empire (autocracy, orthodoxy and narodnost’—the national
22
For an up-to-date insight into levels of press and NGO freedom in Russia, see M. Gabowitsch
(2006) ‘Inside the Looking Glass: A Reply to Nicolai N. Petro’, 17 February, available at: http://
www.opendemocracy.net, accessed 8 March 2006.
23
In December 2005, more than two-thirds (69%) of those polled would prefer peace talks with the
Chechens against 21% favouring Putin’s policy of continuing the war (see http://www.levada.ru/press/
2005122901.html, accessed 8 March 2006); it was reported by Interfax on 2 February 2006, that 86% of
Chechens ‘link the achievement of peace, stability, justice and order’ with the activities of the current
(pro-Russian) Chechen authorities. In an earlier survey of Russian and Chechen public opinion, it was
found that, although 78% of Chechens polled wished to remain part of Russia, 61% of these believed
that Chechnya should have a greater degree of autonomy than any other part of the Russian
Federation: see Trenin (2003, p. 4).
950 JOHN RUSSELL
principle); replaced in the USSR by the one-party rule of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, Marxist – Leninist orthodoxy and Soviet patriotism. In both cases,
however, this stability proved to be illusory and both belief systems produced instead
severe repression (the Tsarist ‘prison of nationalities’ and Stalinist terror) and,
eventually, collapse.
In the Putin era, it would appear that orthodoxy (in the sense of an intolerance of
diverse opinion) has been largely restored and that the gosurdarstvennost’ of the ruling
siloviki has become the new ‘autocracy’. The national principle appears to have been
superseded, perhaps temporarily, by derzhavnost’.24
Again, the aim appears to be
internal stability, whereas the likely outcome will be repression, which serves the
interests of neither the Russian people nor the wider international community. While
Russia has every right to consider itself a world power and its enormous energy
resources alone will probably ensure that it remains one, it should be discouraged, for
example, from playing the ‘energy’ card in an attempt to regain its former hegemony
over the ‘Near Abroad’. More importantly, it should not be allowed to sign up to the
principles of European institutions if it has no intention of observing them.
Similarly, a strong, centralised state with highly-personalised power invested in an
executive leader may be held to have served well in the past the world’s largest country
and may be the optimum way of maintaining the territorial integrity of the Russian
homeland. Yet the imposition of a Russian-style vertikal’ of power is bound to
provoke conﬂict in a Chechen society traditionally preferring horizontal power
structures based on clan and territory.25
It is, ﬁrst and foremost, Russia’s intolerance
of diversity, stemming perhaps from a strict interpretation of its understanding of
orthodoxy, which leads to an insistence on imposing its values—if necessary by brute
force—that is preventing a lasting solution being found to the conﬂict in Chechnya.26
The dilution of narodnost’ is well illustrated in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict.
Imposed throughout the Russian Empire and, under the guise of ‘Soviet patriotism’
and ‘Friendship of the Peoples’, this concept has fallen foul of the ‘Russia for the
Russians’ syndrome in the post-Soviet period.27
Indeed, many Russians feel much
24
The siloviki refer to elite leaders in the Russian ministries of law and order (FSB, MVD, MOD,
SVR etc.). Putin (a former head of the FSB) has a high proportion of former security chiefs in key
positions. See G. Feifer (2003) ‘Russia: President Boosts Power of Security Services’, Center for
Defense Information Weekly, 248, available at: http://www.cdi.org/russia/248-16.cfm, accessed 22 July
2005; Kryshtanovskaya and White (2003, pp. 289 – 306).
25
In July 2000 President Putin claimed that authority ‘should rely on the law and a single, vertical
line of executive power’: The Guardian, 12 July 2000.
26
It is instructive to note that neither Russian Orthodoxy under the Tsars nor Marxism – Leninism
under the Soviets could accommodate the ‘heretical’ views of, respectively, Lev Tolstoi and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, arguably the most quintessentially Russian writers at either end of the twentieth century.
27
In July 2005, 58% were moderately or decisively for the concept of ‘Russia for the Russians’ and
32% against. See http://www.levada.ru/press/2005070410.html, accessed 22 July 2005. A poll
conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Centre for the Study of Xenophobia shortly after
the Beslan siege found that 55.8% of those polled regarded ‘non-Russian nationalities’ as a threat to
the security of Russia; see report of 22 July 2005 for the ‘Memorial’ organisation’s ‘Migration and
Law’ network by S. A. Gannushkina (ed.) ‘Polozhenie zhitelei Chechnyi v Rossiiskoi Federatsii, iyun’
2004g.—iyun’ 2005g’ [‘The Situation of Residents of Chechnya in the Russian Federation, June 2004 –
June 2005’], p. 8, available at: http://www.memo.ru/hr/news/5gannush7.htm, accessed 9 December
2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 951
closer to the 25 million ethnic Russians living in the ‘Near Abroad’ than they do to
the half as numerous non-Russian citizens of the Russian Federation. Given the
Chechen cultural narrative, Russian chauvinism, Caucasophobia and the attendant
demonisation of the Chechens, there is little prospect of the average Chechen sharing a
sense of narodnost’ with the Russians.28
Finally, Russia’s geopolitical view of the world must be taken into account. Clearly
it is in Russia’s national interest to remain the dominant player in the ‘Near Abroad’
and maintain an inﬂuence over Caspian energy reserves and transit routes. The events
along Russia’s southern border—from Abkhazia to Afghanistan—must provoke the
Russians to question US strategy in the region. Having already endured Western
intervention in Georgia, Tajikistan and Ukraine, President Putin must be painfully
aware that a military and political victory in Chechnya is necessary to prevent similar
occurrences in the Northern Caucasus. However, the brutal means by which this
victory is being sought has ensured that any genuinely free and fair election in
Chechnya would result in the defeat of the Kremlin’s choice, a situation reminiscent of
that pertaining in the Peoples’ Democracies during the Cold War era.29
This creates a
window of opportunity for outside inﬂuence in the region. As was the case during
periods of heightened tension in East – West relations during the Cold War, if they
seek to bring an element of stability and predictability into their relations with Russia,
Europe, the USA and NATO would be well advised to be more open and frank about
the scope and limits of their interests in the Caucasus region. For its part, Russia needs
to be reminded that internal repression not only tarnishes its reputation internationally,
but also stokes up the likelihood of future domestic conﬂict.
Of the cultural contradictions emanating from the Chechen side many stem from the
very asymmetry of their confrontation with the Russians. For example, greater
clariﬁcation is required from the United Nations as to the exact trade-oﬀ in rights
between the territorial integrity of existing states and the self-determination of
indigenous peoples perceiving themselves to be ﬁghting for their very survival against a
more powerful occupying force. (The experiences of East Timor, Kosovo, Kurdistan,
Kuwait, Palestine, Taiwan and Tibet tend to confuse rather than clarify what
constitutes acceptable defence.) Moreover, it is by no means clear, in the current
international system, to what extent aboriginal, nomadic and mountain-dwelling
peoples are obliged to embrace unquestioningly the ‘beneﬁts’ of modernisation and to
what lengths they might legitimately go to defend their traditional ways of life.
28
One of the more bizarre attempts by the Putin administration to make Chechens feel part of
Russia was the oﬃcial encouragement of the Terek soccer team from Grozny, which won the Russian
Cup in 2004 and represented Russia in 2004 – 05 in the UEFA Cup. Rebel Chechen websites have
likened the role of the club’s patron, Ramzan Kadyrov, to that of Uday Hussein vis a` vis the Iraqi
soccer team: see Ruslan Isakov, ‘We’ll Beat Swords into Soccer Balls . . .’ (swords and balls being a play
on words in Russian), available at: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/print.php?id¼3090, accessed 22 July
2005.
29
See the monitoring accounts of the 2003 Chechen presidential election by the Moscow Helsinki
Group. For example, R. Umarov, ‘Otvety Akhmata Kadyrova na voprosy Internet-SMI ‘‘Kavkazskii
Uzel’’’ [‘Akhmat Kadyrov’s Answers to Questions of the ‘‘Caucasian Junction’’ Internet Site’],
available at: http://www.mhg.ru/24957D5/26E7F5C, accessed 22 July 2005.
952 JOHN RUSSELL
At the same time the existence of a relatively successful and thriving Chechen
diaspora indicates that the Chechens can survive and ﬂourish in modernising societies.
As has been the case with the Baltic States, Armenia, Lebanon and elsewhere,
successful academics, business men and women, politicians and sporting celebrities
in the Chechen diaspora can provide important alternative models for aspiring
youngsters to the gun-toting warlords of the Chechen resistance. However, it must be
said that far too many Russians still tend to stereotype successful Chechens as criminal
Maﬁosi.
Of course, since 9/11 the deﬁning cultural contradiction between the Chechens and
the Russians has been the former’s adherence to Islam. Primarily manifested before
the current round of the conﬂict in Suﬁsm, a popularist and grass-roots pathway
within Islam ideally suited to survival in an authoritarian system, it has been attacked
both by Russian intransigence and by an uncompromising form of authoritarian
Islam—Wahhabism. On an ideocratic, ﬁnancial and military level, the latter has been
more successful than Suﬁsm in countering the kind of aggression unleashed on
Chechnya by the Russian federal forces, a fact which has been exploited both by
outside sponsors and mercenaries and by the more extremist Chechen warlords
(Vachagaev 2005; Wilhelmsen 2005, pp. 35 – 39). The failure to re-establish Suﬁsm at
the expense of Wahhabism as the preferred form of Islam amongst Chechens
represents another major obstacle in the path of peace in Chechnya.
Since 9/11, the ‘Islamic factor’ as a cultural contradiction has played a disproportional
role in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict and is portrayed by the Putin
administration as the single most important contributory factor to the violence in
Chechnya (Russell 2002b, pp. 96 – 109). In this the Russian President is aided by the
fact that, in three of the cultural contradictions that aﬀect both sides (globalisation,
the post-secular discourse of ‘good versus evil’ and the war on terror) Russia ﬁnds
itself on the ‘right’, and Chechnya on the ‘wrong’ side. Arguably, however, it is the
shared experience of both Russia and Chechnya of the lack of a law-governed state,
a smoothly functioning market economy and a robust civil society that place both
on the ‘wrong’ side.30
Clearly, any signiﬁcant improvement in Russia of any of these
three factors would considerably increase the chance of changing attitudes
in order to achieve peace in Chechnya. To the extent that Putin appears to be
obstructing progress in these areas, he, too, could be portrayed as an entrepreneur of
violence.
The entrepreneurs of violence in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict
As the peace process in Northern Ireland has demonstrated, in order to meet the
popular demand for a cessation of violence, what is required is a vision of an
alternative future to one plagued by violence, complemented by genuine hope that,
over time, peaceful relations (positive peace) will replace a mere cessation of violence
30
In the Freedom House ‘Nations in Transit’ Democracy Scores for 2005, Russia (5.61) was
sandwiched between Kosovo (5.32) and Kyrgyzstan (5.64). Here 1 represents the highest and 7 the
lowest level of democracy, available at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/nitransit/2005/
addendum2005.pdf, accessed 8 March 2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 953
(negative peace).31
In order to transform this aspiration into a reality, the need for
leadership at all levels and, preferably, representing all sides of the conﬂict, is
paramount. In comparison with the situation in Northern Ireland, such leadership has
been conspicuous by its absence not only in Russia and Chechnya but, in its response
to the Russo – Chechen conﬂict, by the international community as a whole.
Lacking this leadership, such cultural contradictions as the absence of a Rechstaat
(law-governed state) in either Russia or Chechnya, combined with extremely weak
institutions of civil society operating within an underdeveloped economy inevitably
increase the likelihood that entrepreneurs of violence will dominate the political scene,
enabling them to perpetuate and intensify the negative attitudes that give rise to
violent behaviour.
Such an outcome is less likely in a democratic state in which civil society has
strong foundations than in a system in which highly personalised executive power is
exercised virtually unchecked through a vertical structure, be it at the national or local
level. The danger in the latter system is that the popular yearning for peace is likely to
be ignored by the so-called ‘entrepreneurs of violence’, at all levels, who have a vested
interest in prolonging the conﬂict. These ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ may be arms
contractors, bureaucrats, businessmen, criminals, military personnel, politicians,
religious leaders or warlords. What unites them is that directly or indirectly they
proﬁt—politically, economically or socially—from a prolongation of the conﬂict and
are prepared to exploit cultural and structural violence to maintain their privileged
position. Should this be threatened by the checks and balances (‘right’ as represented
by a system of justice) designed to prevent or resolve conﬂict, they are prepared to
bypass such structures by resorting to direct violence (‘might’). Moreover, as
experience from Afghanistan to Colombia to Northern Ireland has shown, the
absence of perceived alternative economic opportunities for former combatants
increases the likelihood of a reliance on criminality and/or a return to terrorism as a
prime source of income.32
This certainly applies to Chechnya today. Here, as
elsewhere, a degree of outside assistance would appear to be essential in countering
these trends and remedying such situations.
The entrepreneurs of structural violence
We have already noted in the analysis of cultural contradictions that, in practice,
certain Russian principles have given rise to some of the most negative attitudes in the
Russo – Chechen confrontation. Thus, colonisation has given rise to Caucasophobia
and the demonisation of the Chechens, Orthodoxy to an intolerance of diversity,
derzhavnost’ to (Great) Russian chauvinism, gosudarstvennost’ to the imposition in
Chechnya of a vertikal’ of power and the tendency to suppress rather than
accommodate opposition. That these attitudes weaken rather than strengthen both
the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation and her geopolitical interests would
31
For an explanation of these concepts, see Galtung (1969, pp. 167 – 191).
32
For case studies in Northern Ireland, the Philippines and the Middle East, see Cragin and Chalk
(2003); for links between narcotics and insurgency in Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia and Peru, see
Cornell (2005, pp. 751 – 760).
954 JOHN RUSSELL
be more apparent to all were the Putin administration to be held to account more
consistently by other world leaders.33
These attitudes, in turn, feed into and give further substance to the Chechen cultural
narrative and stiﬀen such Chechen attitudes as self-determination, articulated as no
more than a desire to be free from Russian violence and a longing for what they
perceive as ‘freedom’. At the same time they consolidate the militarised clans and raise
the determination amongst Chechens to restore their traditional code of customs
(adat). Here the clash within Chechen Islam between Suﬁsm and Wahhabism comes to
the fore, as the former promotes adat, whereas the latter advocates the strictest
application of shari’a. The growing inﬂuence of the Wahhabites is manifested both in
the failure of an intrinsic component of adat—blood vengeance—to deter Chechen
killing Chechen and by the militarisation of the djamaat (a traditional political entity
with a membership drawn usually from neighbouring villages).
These two trends have come together with the recent activisation of ‘Shariat’ (the
Islamic Djamaat of Dagestan) which is responsible for an increasing number of
terrorist attacks and ‘Yarmuk’ (its equivalent in Kabardino – Balkaria) which carried
out the attack on Nalchik in October 2005.34
While these trends might be more
eﬀective in countering Russian violence than the more traditional forms, they
represent a greater obstacle to peace. It remains to be seen whether the new Islamic
militancy has been hitherto merely a tactical response to Russian aggression or
whether it has already become a part of the broader anti-Western strategy of jihad.
For all the importance of speciﬁcally Russian and Chechen attitudes and the
institutions and laws upon which they are based, it is where attitudes are shared by
both sides that most blatant examples of structural violence are to be found. As noted
the combination of a weak civil society, a poorly developed market economy and
the absence of a law-governed state combine to produce the triumph of ‘might’ over
‘right’, widespread corruption, clientelism rather than market-led relations, and
impunity for those that break the law.35
If to this volatile mix is added the xenophobia
experienced by both Russians and Chechens as a result of globalisation and extremism
emanating from the war on terror and the post-secular discourse of the ‘clash of
civilisations’, then we can see what fertile ground is provided for the entrepreneurs of
violence on both sides.36
33
The illusory nature of Russian territorial integrity is examined in Markedonov (2005).
34
For Dagestan see, ‘Djamaat ‘‘Shariat’’: ‘‘The Territory of Jihad Extends!’’’ (2005) 2 July, available
at: http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2005/07/02/3918.shtml, accessed 22 July 2005; for
Kabardino – Balkaria see, ‘Napadeniye na Nal’chik’ [‘The Attack on Nalchik’], available at: http://
www.rian.ru/actual/nalchik_attack_131005/, accessed 9 December 2005.
35
In 2005, Russia was rated 90th out of 146 countries for levels of corruption by Transparency
International; see Moll and Gowan (2005, p. 24).
36
A feature of the Russo – Chechen conﬂict is the abuse directed at those Westerners who genuinely
do try to involve themselves in processes of reconciliation. Two of the authors of the Carnegie Policy
Brief (Hill et al. 2005) have fallen foul of this syndrome; on 7 March 2005, Anatol Lieven from the
Chechen side: see ‘Tsirkulyar po pravil’nomy osveshcheniyu sobytii v Chechne’ [‘Circular on the
Correct Illumination of Events in Chechnya’], available at: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/russ/
article.php?id¼31149, accessed 22 July 2005; and, on 21 June 2005, Tom de Waal, this time by a
Russian website: see ‘Tomas de Vaal i biznes na krovi’ [‘Thomas de Waal and Business in Blood’],
available at: http://www.chechnya.ru/view_all.php?part¼pub, accessed 22 July 2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 955
A feature of the current conﬂict has been degree of collusion between warring
factions, be it at the level of federal troops selling weapons and ammunition to their
opponents or accepting bribes in order to let Chechen ﬁghters through control posts,
or Russian oﬃcers and Chechen warlords dividing the spoils of the illicit economy in
Chechnya (see, for example Alexseev 2004). Allowing for the lack of viable economic
alternatives in the region, this would appear to be a case of ‘greed’ (private/criminal
power) overriding ‘creed’ (ethnic/religious power) as the major means of achieving
‘need’ (economic/political/social power).37
Unsurprisingly, the declared motivations of the entrepreneurs of violence are
invariably expressed in terms of ‘need’ and ‘creed’, rather than ‘greed’. Moreover,
insofar as competition for economic, political and social power is recognised generally
as a legitimate ‘need’, those eﬀectively excluded from this process are likely to attempt
to achieve their goals through means perceived by their opponents, but crucially not
by their own supporters, to be illegitimate. The recent rise in popularity amongst
Palestinians of Hamas, despite its advocacy of suicide bombing, is a case in point.38
International institutions could assist the peacemakers on both sides by establishing
consistent and clear parameters of legitimate ‘need’ (e.g. allowing albeit some role
for factions advocating Chechen independence), thereby exposing the real motives
of entrepreneurs of violence on all sides. In the absence of any meaningful role
in the peace process for the Chechen resistance, an ‘Islamic’ outcome, in the
form of a jihad across the Northern Caucasus, appears to be replacing a ‘European’
scenario, Chechen national self-determination, as the major objective of the
‘irreconcilables’.39
While it would appear self-evident that those responsible for perpetuating and
exploiting these attitudes need to be held to account, neither the outside world in
general nor the West in particular is currently in a particularly strong position to do
so. The composite picture that emerges from the war on terror (especially the war in
Iraq), globalisation and the post-secular discourse of ‘good versus evil’, the relative
weakness of global civil society vis-a`-vis the most powerful states, the absence of a
genuinely independent and enforceable international legal framework, and the lip
service given to notions of equality and fair trade with the less developed world,
might lead one to conclude that the present international system, too, has its
entrepreneurs of violence who are exploiting these contradictions for their own
narrower interests.
37
‘The Economics of War: the Intersection of Need, Creed and Greed’, organised on 10 September
2001 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, available at:
http://www.ipacademy.org/PDF_Reports/econofwar.pdf, accessed 22 July 2005.
38
The Kremlin recognition of the political wing of Hamas, while refusing to acknowledge the
political legitimacy of any of the Chechen resistance, has not gone unnoticed in the West.
See McGregor (2006).
39
This interpretation has been strongly rejected by Akhmed Zakayev, whose role in the Chechen
resistance was downgraded in the recent reshuﬄe; see ‘Zapad dal sanktsiyu na dolguyu voinu v
Chechne’ [‘The West has Sanctioned a Long War in Chechnya’], an interview on 6 February 2006,
with Radio Svoboda’s Andrei Babitsky, published by Chechen Press: available at: http://www.
chechenpress.info/events/2006/02/09/01.shtml17936, accessed 8 March 2006. For an account of the
reshuﬄe, see Smirnov (2006).
956 JOHN RUSSELL
Yet in order to resolve the Russo – Chechen conﬂict, it is precisely in this, the
holding to account of those responsible for this state of aﬀairs, that the outside world,
at public if not at state level, has a right and a duty to become involved. For example,
PACE’s recommendation 1479 of 25 January 2006, on the ‘Human rights violations
in the Chechen Republic: the Committee of Ministers’ responsibility vis-a`-vis the
Assembly’s concerns’ opens by reaﬃrming that ‘the Parliamentary Assembly stresses
that the protection of human rights is the core task of all Council of Europe bodies’
and closes with the complaint that ‘the Assembly fears that the lack of eﬀective
reaction by the Council’s executive body in the face of the most serious human rights
issue in any of the Council of Europe’s member states undermines the credibility of the
Organisation’.40
Yet, despite these violations, Russia has been invited not only to be
chair of G8 but, in the near future, of the Council of Europe itself!41
The entrepreneurs of direct violence
Insofar as the entrepreneurs of violence exploit attitudes that are manifested in
structural violence, it is in the sphere of behaviour (direct violence) that they really
come into their own. The ghastly catalogue of brutal violence has been documented
suﬃciently by respected human rights groups and other NGOs to avoid repeating the
detail here.42
It is worth mentioning, none the less, that it is the Chechen terrorist
spectaculars (notably Dubrovka in October 2002 and Beslan in September 2004) that
grab the world’s attention rather than the daily diet of ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial
killings and torture, let alone such ‘hidden’ violence as the Chechen syndrome,
which has aﬀected a considerable proportion of the million plus Russian soldiers who
have fought in this discredited and unpopular war.43
As noted, the behaviour
of both sides might be characterised as constituting diﬀering forms of terrorism.
Undoubtedly, war crimes have been committed on both sides by those who continue
to proﬁt from its continuation. In such circumstances, one can only look to
40
Available at: http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link¼/Documents/AdoptedText/ta06/ERES1479.
htm, accessed 8 March 2006.
41
See A. Kuchins (2006) ‘Russian Democracy and Civil Society: Back to the Future’, Testimony
Prepared for US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 8 February, available at:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa¼view&id¼18007&prog¼zru, accessed
8 March 2006, Russia will chair the Council’s Committee of Ministers in 2006.
42
See, for example, The Norwegian Helsinki Committee (2002) and Amnesty International’s report
of 23 June 2004, ‘‘‘Normalization’’ in Whose Eyes?’, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/print/
ENGEUR460272004, accessed 22 July 2006; in March 2005, Human Rights Watch published a
brieﬁng paper entitled ‘Worse than a War: ‘‘Disappearances’’ in Chechnya—a Crime Against
Humanity’, available at: http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/chechnya0305/, accessed 22 July; the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) also reported in 2004 on ‘The Political
Situation in the Chechen Republic: Measures to Increase Democratic Stability in Accordance with
Council of Europe Standards’, available at: http://assembly.coe.int/documents/WorkingDocs/doc04/
EDOC10276.htm, accessed 22 July 2005.
43
For the ‘Chechen syndrome’, see Y. Zarakhovich (2003) ‘Chechnya’s Walking Wounded’, Time
Europe, 28 September, available at: http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/031006/syndrome.html,
accessed 22 July 2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 957
enlightened leaders who are prepared to represent the interests of the many rather than
those of the few.
In this respect neither Russia nor Chechnya has been blessed with individuals
possessing the qualities needed to achieve peace. In May 1999, a simple majority of the
Russian Duma voted to impeach President Boris Yel’tsin for launching an illegitimate
war on Chechnya in 1994.44
Although falling short of an admission that the Russian
leader had committed war crimes (not least the air and heavy artillery bombardment
of Grozny at the beginning of the ﬁrst war that left up to 25,000 mostly Chechen and
Russian civilians dead), this vote did recognise that Yel’tsin had blundered into an
unnecessarily bloody conﬂict (Kovalev 1995). He and Chechen President Dzokhar
Dudayev never met; although most observers noted that a face-to-face meeting would
probably have averted or stopped the war.45
Although, arguably, the inﬂated ego of
each was equally to blame for this (vanity, arguably, being another form of ‘greed’),
the very asymmetry of the confrontation surely placed more responsibility on the
Russian President.46
Yel’tsin himself has agreed with both his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev and his
successor Vladimir Putin that the ﬁrst war was a mistake (Eismont 1995). None the
less, there was no major Western leader at that time prepared to put suﬃcient pressure
on Yel’tsin to stop his forces destroying one of their own cities with a population the
size of Edinburgh’s. The ‘bigger picture’ then was the need for Yel’tsin to defeat
the communists in the Russian presidential elections of 1996 and thus prevent
any going back on the privatisation of Russian industry. The cost of the means
employed—the lives of thousands of Russian soldiers and tens of thousands of mainly
Chechen civilians—to achieve this end appears to have been perceived by many world
leaders as regrettable, but unavoidable, collateral damage.47
This might be held to represent a triumph in contemporary international politics of
the ‘consequentialist’ approach (arguing that the consequences of an action determine
whether it is moral) over the ‘deontologist’ approach (based on fundamental moral
principles).48
As the insensitive (by Western standards) Russian response to both the
Dubrovka and Beslan hostage situations demonstrates, Putin, too, evidently believes
ﬁrmly that in dealing with Chechnya the ends justify the means. The fact that current
44
The vote fell just 17 short of the two-thirds majority (300) needed to impeach the President; see
BBC News (1999) 16 May, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/344805.stm, accessed
22 July 2005.
45
Sergei Stepashin, Yel’tsin’s FSB chief in 1994, is one of the few to reject this scenario, placing the
blame for the impasse squarely on Dudayev’s intransigence. See his interview of 11 May 2002, in
L. Telen (2002) ‘Last but One Hero’, available at: http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2002-50-11,
accessed 22 July 2005.
46
Articulated, for example, by Robert Parsons, the former BBC correspondent covering the Chechen
conﬂict, in the ﬁlm Chechen Lullaby by Nino Kirtadze (Arte, Paris, 2000).
47
For the lack of idealism in the search for peace in either the United Nations or the European
Union, see Lloyd (2005, p. 8); for Western leaders, see Glucksmann (2005).
48
For an application of this debate to the Iraq War, see K. Burgess-Jackson (2003) ‘Bush’s Critics as
Repeat Oﬀenders’, TCS Daily, 3 July, available at: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id¼070303A,
accessed 8 March 2006.
958 JOHN RUSSELL
Western leaders, and to some extent the civic societies that they represent, have
demonstrably shifted signiﬁcantly towards this viewpoint since 9/11 seriously
undermines the chances of success of any values-based approach to the Russo –
Chechen conﬂict.
The paradox of Vladimir Putin is that, although no liberal himself (despite being
called a ‘ﬂawless democrat’ by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder),49
he is
reputedly more of a liberal and a democrat than at least 70% of his population.50
Insofar as the population of Russia, since the Moscow apartment bombings of 1999,
like that of Israel and the USA after their ‘Black Septembers’, appears to be
suﬃciently ‘traumatised’ that a substantial proportion of the voters tend to adopt
more hard-line attitudes than their leaders, Putin is faced with a genuine political
dilemma.
However, despite being the one leader who could end the violence, he appears
reluctant to do so except on terms of total surrender by the entire opposition,
reminiscent of the questionable approach adopted towards the Palestinians under
Yasser Arafat by successive Israeli governments under Ariel Sharon. Putin’s failure to
engage with any of the Chechen opposition, from the late rebel leader Abdul-Salim
Sadulayev to the Moscow-based businessman Malik Saidullayev, and to stake instead
his entire policy of Chechenisation on a Russian-style vertikal’ of power represents the
single greatest ﬂaw of his Chechen policy. Thus, the federal forces’ response to
Maskhadov’s ﬁnal appeal for a ceaseﬁre (and just 30 minutes with the Russian
president in order to halt the war) was to assassinate the rebel Chechen leader, an act
that even some Russian journalists characterised as a ‘political murder’.51
That Putin
exacerbated the fall-out from this killing by refusing to release Maskhadov’s body for
a proper Muslim burial demonstrates the cultural arrogance and insensitivity of his
administration.52
The ‘bigger picture’ nowadays is the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ and the vast natural
energy resources controlled by Russia at a time of uncertainty in areas of traditional
supply. Not only has no major Western leader put any serious pressure on Putin to
make peace in Chechnya, but, despite his unsatisfactory handling of the Dubrovka
and Beslan hostage sieges and the immoderate attacks of his spokespersons on both
the US and UK justice systems for granting political asylum to so-called Chechen
49
See Spiegel Online (2004) ‘Moscow Mon Amour: Gerhard Schroeder’s Dangerous Liaison’,
1 December, available at: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,330461,00.html, accessed
22 July 2005. In December 2005, the former German Chancellor was appointed Chairman of
Gazprom’s Baltic pipeline subsidiary; see http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/12/10/gerschr.shtml,
accessed 8 March 2006.
50
This claim was made by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in his article ‘Crisis of Russian Liberalism’,
29 March 2004, available at: http://www.mosnews.com/column/2004/03/29/khodorkovsky.shtml,
accessed 9 December 2005.
51
See Channel 4 Dispatches, Chechnya: the Dirty War, screened 25 July 2005; Dubnov (2005,
pp. 6 – 10); and for Maskhadov’s last interview, published on the day before his death, see L. Fuller
(2005) ‘Chechen Leader Gives Exclusive Interview to RFE/RL’, available at: http://www.rferl.org/
featuresarticle/2005/03/C8BF5CC0-D91F-4DAC-9185-A451B1124B1D.html, accessed 22 July 2005.
52
A poll conducted on 24 March 2005 indicated that 62% of Russians felt that Maskhadov’s body
should be returned to his relatives; see http://www.levada/ru/press/2005032402.html, accessed 22 July
2005.
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 959
‘terrorists’, he has been feted as being in the forefront of the battle between ‘good’
and ‘evil’ in the post-9/11 world. Such gestures increase Putin’s standing domestically,
deﬂecting the attention of the Russian public from the shortcomings of his
administration.
Given the asymmetry of the conﬂicting sides and the character of the Russian
leadership, it is hard to imagine what extraordinary qualities would be required by
their Chechen equivalents in order for peace to be achieved. Yet even here, there has
been a disappointing lack of vision, a lack of realism and an inﬂated sense of selfimportance.
As with the Viet Cong in Vietnam and the mujahideen in Afghanistan,
there was inevitable euphoria at the defeat of a superpower, even one in such dire
straits as post-Soviet Russia. Yet, far from pulling their country up by the bootstraps
as the Vietnamese had done, far too many Chechen leaders took Afghanistan as their
example and saw their future in terms of warlordism and criminality, controlling
economic resources, territory and even ideology for their own enrichment and political
gain. If one adds to this the ideologically driven impact of the Wahhabis on post-war
Chechnya then one can see any prospect of a new Islamic state appearing in the
Caucasus was regarded, particularly in the West, more with alarm and caution than
with open arms.
Thus, even the legitimacy that Aslan Maskhadov gained upon winning the
Chechen – Ichkerian presidential election in January 1997 was diluted not only by the
refusal of states (except the Taliban in Afghanistan) to recognise the newly independent
country, but also by the criminal and anti-Western behaviour of some of the
most powerful warlords in Chechnya. We will never know how things would have
turned out (a) if Maskhadov had won the support of Western powers; (b) if Russia
had been less obstructive in the crucial ﬁrst few years of Chechen independence; and
(c) had the Chechen factions united behind their newly-elected leader. Whatever his
well-documented shortcomings as a political leader, the blame for the failure to
negotiate peace in Chechnya, clearly, was not Maskhadov’s alone.
It remains to be seen whether a leader can be found in Chechnya or in the Chechen
diaspora who could unite these factions and be accepted by the current Russian
administration. The record thus far indicates that this is virtually impossible without
outside involvement. Instead the Kremlin will insist on imposing a leader on Chechnya
through rigged Soviet-style elections. In the absence of any pressure from without, it is
diﬃcult to ascertain whether this is simply because the Putin administration knows
that any independent candidate would defeat his nominee and that, for regional and
domestic geopolitical and economic reasons, this is an outcome to be avoided as long
as he is able. As for Russia, it is not impossible that Putin will have the Constitution
amended to allow him to run for a third time in 2008, thus ensuring the continuation
in power of the siloviki attitudes, institutions and modes of behaviour that have
allowed entrepreneurs of violence to ﬂourish in Chechnya.
Conclusions
I have sought to demonstrate in this article that, however many well-intentioned peace
plans are put forward in order to stop the violence in Chechnya, all will founder as
long as the situation is controlled by the entrepreneurs of violence on all sides.
960 JOHN RUSSELL
However much the United Nations, the OSCE, PACE, the European Court of Human
Rights, NGOs and human rights organisations call for this or that international norm
or convention to be observed, in order to stop the manifestations of direct violence
occurring, unless real sanctions are threatened they are likely to be ignored. For as
long as sanctions can only be imposed with the agreement of major world powers, then
the ‘need to look at the big picture’ (the war on terror, globalisation, and ‘good versus
evil’) will prevail every time.
The scope for international involvement in such circumstances is, therefore,
extremely limited. Although this is due, primarily, to Russian intransigence, the
situation is undoubtedly exacerbated by the passivity of Western governments.
The latter, unlike the former, however, can still be held to account by those that elect
them. There appears to be such a lack of leadership favouring compromise rather than
strength in the international community at present that one could be forgiven for
identifying most current leaders of major powers as entrepreneurs of violence on a
global scale.
Yet the danger presented by the indiﬀerence to such a tragedy as that unfolding in
Chechnya is that relatively healthy, hitherto secure societies, with a law-governed
state, independent media and a strong civil society, appear unwilling to hold leaders to
account for their passivity. The insecurity bred by the war on terror and discourse of
‘good versus evil’ seems to have dissuaded the general public from engaging with the
complex processes and unresolved cultural contradictions involved, basing their
perceptions exclusively on events involving direct violence, and usually only those
perpetrated by the ‘other’ side.
However, as the war in Iraq has demonstrated, ‘violent politics’ have a nasty habit
of boomeranging back on the initiators and it might not be until the situation in
Chechnya spills over throughout the Northern Caucasus that the world will sit up and
pay attention. The sad truth of the matter is that, in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict, too
many of the powerful are the immediate beneﬁciaries of the continuing conﬂict, the
victims of which have neither the might nor the voice to counter the power of the
entrepreneurs of violence.
For the reasons stated above, therefore, a greater degree of outside involvement
than hitherto found in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict would appear to be essential.
Rather than concentrating initially on direct violence alone, a multi-track approach is
required that places the behaviour of all sides involved in the context of the attitudes,
institutions and processes that create structural violence. At the same time, a clear
analysis should be made of how the cultural contradictions that give rise to these
attitudes can be managed so as to avoid or resolve the conﬂicts contained therein.
Some of these may be medium to long-term initiatives; others may lend themselves to
more immediate measures.
A key role could be played by European institutions. As has been demonstrated
by the accession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, it is possible to move from an
authoritarian to a democratic system with outside assistance within a relatively short
time frame. It would not be surprising if the people of Georgia and the Ukraine were
also to see their future increasingly as within the European family of nations. Russia,
meanwhile, appears to be heading in the opposite direction, her traditional emphasis
on executive power producing a perception of its national interest that is closer to that
OBSTACLES TO PEACE IN CHECHNYA 961
of China’s; perhaps currently even closer to that, in foreign policy at least, of the USA,
than it is to those of European states. At the institutional level it is within Europe’s
reach, preferably with American support, to encourage Russia to see that, in terms of
stability, prosperity and progress, both her best interests and those of the wider world
community are served by rejecting her authoritarian past. If Russia’s traditional
concerns about following the European path prove too much of an obstacle, Japan
might oﬀer an alternative role model.
Where, then, does this leave the Northern Caucasus in general and Chechnya in
particular? Russia’s move away from federalism, in eﬀect, seems to torpedo the one
immediately possible compromise of an autonomous Chechnya within a genuine
Russian Federation. After all, it is hard to imagine the rebellious Chechens being
aﬀorded this distinction, while the more compliant Dagestanis, Ossetians and Tatars
are not.
Moreover, as has been stated above, the Kremlin is not about to allow, any time
soon, a genuinely free and fair election in Chechnya for they are bound to be saddled
with a less amenable leader than one they pick for themselves. This in turn is hardly
surprising, given that as many as one-ﬁfth of Chechens have been eliminated or
displaced by the conﬂict and that the territory of Chechnya has been transformed into
a ruined ecological disaster zone.53
However, the Chechens are not the only victims of this conﬂict; Russian civilians
have suﬀered too, not only in acts of terrorism, nor even due to the aforementioned
Chechen syndrome. Instead, under ﬁrst Yel’tsin then Putin, the Russians have suﬀered
a setback in their dreams of prosperity and progress and appear to have abandoned
this for the delusion of great power status and a Russia for the Russians. Although
such nationalistic sentiments are understandable in a people traumatised by their
recent history, it is worth pointing out to Russian leaders and their public alike that
this runs contrary to their own best interests. While painfully slow and imperfect, the
moves towards a resolution of such long-running conﬂicts as those in Northern
Ireland and the Middle East do highlight both the central and positive role of outside
mediation and the absolute necessity for compromise.
In the ﬁnal analysis, outside involvement (I have avoided deliberately the use of the
word ‘intervention’) to change attitudes in the Russo – Chechen conﬂict, can work
only if the advisors, donors and mediators are fully aware of the cultural contradictions
between Russia, Chechnya and the outside world and are conﬁdent that
their own attitudes not only reﬂect a genuine desire to reconcile and assist rather than
an attempt to further their self interest, but are perceived as such by the conﬂicting
parties.
The elaboration of a step-by-step programme for the resolution of the conﬂict in
Chechnya could be based therefore on: (a) a recognition of the heterogeneity of views
on both the Russian and Chechen ‘sides’ to this conﬂict against a background of an
overwhelming desire for an end to the violence; (b) an identiﬁcation of those cultural
contradictions between Russia and Chechnya, as well as between both and the outside
world, which can be resolved without resort to violence; and (c) diﬀerentiating
53
For example, an estimated 500,000 landmines have been deployed in Chechnya; see Kramer
(2004/5, p. 26).
962 JOHN RUSSELL
between the ‘need’ and ‘greed’ of the parties involved and thus recognising that the
role of the ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ is to serve their own private interests rather than
those of the people they claim to represent.
For, neither Putin’s ‘military victory at all costs’ nor Basayev’s ‘freedom or death’ is
likely to reconcile the Russian and Chechen peoples, who fate has decreed must live as
neighbours. One senses that Putin has realised already that his primary political
objective of keeping Chechnya part of Russian territory can be achieved only by
allowing his chosen Chechen entrepreneur of violence, Ramzan Kadyrov, to pacify its
recalcitrant population—a decision virtually guaranteed to perpetuate the conﬂict,
prolong the human rights violations and spread resistance throughout the Northern
Caucasus.
Paradoxically, in terms of the triumph of might over right, more of Russia is
in danger of becoming like Chechnya, just as, through indiﬀerence and excessive
caution, civic societies in the West run the risk of becoming as ineﬀectual as ordinary
Russian citizens in restraining their own entrepreneurs of violence. Perhaps, as
in Iraq, ‘violent’ politics need to be tried and seen to fail in Chechnya before it
becomes apparent that a comprehensive internationally backed programme of
peacebuilding really does represent the best way to assist both Russians and Chechens
to extricate themselves from the impasse in which they currently ﬁnd themselves
entrenched.
University of Bradford
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