Chechnya: Time for an International Role?

By Thomas de Waal in London (CRS No. 238, 16-Jun-04)

Over the last decade, the mountainous territory of Chechnya in the North Caucasus – no larger than Wales but with a smaller population – has endured incessant violence. Kosovo and Bosnia are now seeing more peaceful days, but the Chechen conflict goes on and on, all too often ignored by the outside world. The politics have changed over time, but the killing continues.

The wheel of politics and violence turned again on May 9 with the assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov, Moscow’s anointed leader in Chechnya, at the Victory Day parade in Grozny’s central stadium. He was the third man bearing the title “president of Chechnya” to meet a violent death in the last eight years.

This time things may be different. Suddenly, not only does Chechnya look leaderless, but Moscow also seems clueless.

Kadyrov’s death marks the start of a new period for Chechnya. But is it an opportunity for positive change, or just a drift into more chaos?

The Kremlin had spent four years building Kadyrov up. At first, he seemed an unlikely candidate to be Moscow’s man in Chechnya. As the republic’s mufti, or religious leader, he initially kept out of politics. In the first conflict of 1994-96, Kadyrov fought against the Russians and was close both to Jokhar Dudayev, Chechnya’s first pro-independence president and to Aslan Maskhadov, its subsequent leader.

After Maskhadov was elected president in 1997 and Chechnya became de facto independent once again, Kadyrov won a reputation for being a leading opponent of radical Islam.

That pre-figured his split from his former comrades in 1999, when he switched allegiance to Moscow as the second conflict began. Slowly he built up a power-base and won the personal trust of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Last spring’s “constitutional referendum” asserting that Chechnya was part of Russia, followed by the autumn presidential election, reinforced his position.

But it was a position founded above all on force. Kadyrov’s younger son Ramzan made his name as the brutal enforcer at the head of a “presidential security service” estimated to have as many as 12,000 men under arms.

Putin’s policy, termed “Chechenisation”, amounted to subcontracting Kadyrov to do the dirty work of enforcing Moscow’s writ in return for broad political and economic powers. The tactic was reminiscent of Moscow’s behaviour in the latter years of the war in Afghanistan, when it handed over responsibility to President Najibullah.

Russia’s reliance on Kadyrov proved to be very fragile indeed. It was unpopular with the Russian armed forces, who were edged aside – to the extent that there are conspiracy theories in Chechnya that they, rather than the rebels, were behind the assassination.

As one Chechen, Makka Hamidova, told IWPR in our recent bulletin from Chechnya (Caucasus Reporting Service No. 237, June 9 2004), "The Russian security services have used the killing of Kadyrov as an excuse to step up the terror against us."

Above all, the policy was based around one man who may prove irreplaceable. As Timur Aliev and Sanobar Shermatova have made clear in articles written for IWPR, none of the members of Kadyrov’s team who are tipped to replace him – including the favourite, interior minister Alu Alkhanov – has either the standing or clout that he enjoyed, let alone the time and indulgence accorded to him.

The vacuum that follows Kadyrov’s death presents many dangers – but some opportunities, too.

There is clearly a threat that the Russian military will try to step into the gap left by Kadyrov and revive the cruel “clean-up operations” they used against Chechen civilians in 1999-2002 – terrorising entire villages with house-to-house searches, extortion and arbitrary arrests.

The military clearly believes that it is prevailing in its struggle against the rebels. The resistance is certainly less intense than it used to be – nowadays the insurgents mount ambushes and small raids rather than large-scale attacks. Yet the two main rebel leaders, moderate nationalist Maskhadov and Islamic radical Shamil Basayev, are still at large. Suicide bombings, for which Basayev generally claims responsibility, remain a real threat.

In the end, there is no reason to believe that the Russian army in Chechnya can ever achieve a “final victory” on the basis of its performance so far.

Yet there are opportunities, too.

The men in Moscow could throw up their hands and admit that they have failed and that – after ten years with tens of thousands of fatalities and millions of lives blighted – that they do not have a coherent policy for Chechnya. That could open the way to interventions by others, using the broad consensus that exists on some basic issues.

The Chechen tragedy has reached a point where there is agreement on several key points.

First, the issue of sovereignty and independence has assumed secondary importance, and resolving it can be deferred until some future date. Most Chechens, when asked, do not appear to care about independence any more. The experience of de facto independence in 1991-94 and 1997-99 was disastrous for them, and Chechnya is now so devastated that any real statehood is decades away. Besides, the Kadyrov experience shows that Moscow is prepared to delegate substantial powers to any Chechen leader who does not seek full independence.

So if the Chechen conflict is no longer really about sovereignty, what is at stake? Put simply, security and human rights. Russia now has a dangerous and violent security problem on its southern border, with a region capable of producing suicide bombers who can strike at Moscow itself. Hundreds of civilians have died in bombings perpetrated over the last two years. That the problem is almost entirely of Russia’s own making does not lessen its gravity. Moscow cannot just let Chechnya go, and it needs to see the security threat diminish.

For the majority of Chechens, there are even more fundamental problems. For a decade now, no one has protected them from extreme violence and no one has been punished for perpetrating it, whether it be mass aerial bombardment, arbitrary torture and detention, rape or extortion. Several hundred thousand Russian soldiers have passed through Chechnya and tens of thousands of innocent Chechens have died, but the number of successful war crimes prosecutions in Russian courts can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Two constituencies have consistently been left out of the equation. One of these is the ordinary Chechens, whose opinions have barely been heeded over all this time. Elections have been rigged and decisions taken in their name, but their voices have not been heard.

The Chechens do in fact have long-standing traditions of collective decision-making and consensus politics, even if they have been trampled on in the past decade. A “Loya Jirga” for Chechnya or some kind of parliamentary system might well be the best way to try to arrive at a common view amongst Chechens – but the Russians would have to brace themselves for some very uncomfortable conclusions that might emerge.

The other constituency that has not been given a role is the international community. In 1995-96 a small mission from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe played a positive role in negotiating an end to the first Chechen conflict. In the current conflict the Council of Europe has acted as Europe’s conscience in Chechnya in a way that far exceeds its relative power as an institution.

But these have been the exceptions. Intimidated by President Putin’s emotional outbursts on the subject, preoccupied by other issues on the bilateral agenda with Moscow, and no doubt praying that Chechnya will simply go away as a problem, Western governments have chosen to look the other way – even as evidence mounts of the extent and gravity of human rights abuses.

Even in Russia’s own terms, this strange silence does not make sense. After all, Moscow now insists that Chechnya is an international problem, as one of the fronts of the “war on terror”, yet it still asserts that no other external actors need get involved in its own “domestic problem.”

This position is unsustainable. Chechnya is so wounded and damaged, and Russia is so imprisoned within the conflict, that others must surely get involved.

But who will take up the challenge, and how?

Thomas de Waal, IWPR’s Caucasus Editor, has reported on Chechnya since 1994.