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Russia’s Chechen Harvest
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Chechen women fighters wrapped themselves with explosives, Oct. 24, 2002
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Chechnya
was once more thrown into the spotlight of global
attention, following a dramatic and ultimately bloody hostage-taking
in Moscow.
Some
fifty-odd Chechen fighters, a substantial number of them women,
occupied the Russian Palace of Culture theater Wednesday night,
taking an estimated 750 theatergoers hostage. Armed with a
formidable array of firepower and copious amounts of explosives,
they issued an ultimatum and a number of credible threats pertaining
to the destruction of the theater and all in it, themselves
included.
This
raid is not the first of its kind in the history of Chechen
resistance. It was arguably due to the astoundingly successful
hostage-taking operation staged in Budyonnovsk, Russia, by former
Chechen Premier-turned-Field Commander Shamil Basayev, that the
first Russo-Chechen war wound down to an eventual cessation of
hostilities, short lived though it turned out to be. That particular
operation involved the storming and holding of a hospital in Russia,
with thousands being taken hostages. Even then, the pattern was the
same, though the outcome was different: Russian forces attempting to
blunder into the hospital ended up killing many hostages. But back
then, the Chechens succeeded in withdrawing with minimal losses.
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Shamil Basayev during the Budyonnovsk raid in 1995 |
With
characteristic lack of regard for their own people, Russian Special
Forces burst into the Palace of Culture in the early hours of
Saturday, after pumping in a suspected hallucinogenic agent to
incapacitate the Chechen fighters. Photographs taken in the wake of
the bloody raid showed Chechen fighters slumped in their seats, some
with “precisely placed bullet holes in their heads,” to quote
the Associated Press, bringing to mind the Peruvian Special Forces
raid and subsequent extra-judicial execution of Tupac Amaru rebels
in the Japanese Embassy in 1997.
The
raid killed all but a handful of the Chechen fighters, and 118
hostages. The Russian government had originally gone to great pains
to assure people that none of the hostages died due to the gas, but
rather from preexisting medical conditions, shock, or a lack of
medicine. In other words, the public was meant to believe that the
hostages were merely waiting for the added stress of the Special
Forces raid to rapidly fold up and die from heart attacks and the
like.
Risible
as they may be, these allegations flew in the face of statements
made by some Russian doctors, who noted that a number of the dead
had choked to death on their vomit, an effect thought to have been
induced by inhaling gas fumes. Additionally, a Dutch Foreign
Ministry source confirmed that a Dutch national had been killed in
the raid due to gas inhalation.
It
is with some satisfaction that one now reads that the Russian
government has recanted its scandalously untenable allegations and
finally admitted that all but one of the 118 deaths were caused by
the gas.
At
the time of writing, anxious Russian families are still clustered
around hospitals, awaiting news of kin virtually under arrest by the
authorities. The Russian government is being pressured to reveal
details about the gas that wreaked so much havoc, perhaps most
notably by Amnesty International. Thus far, the government has
evaded such questions, referring to it only as “a special
substance.” Some have suggested the gas could be either BZ or
aerosolized Valium. The former is a hallucinogenic, inducing
drowsiness, confusion and delirium. The latter is a sedative that in
sufficient quantities can affect breathing. Whatever the substance
was, it was potent enough to prevent the Chechens from detonating
the explosives they had planted around the theater.
It
will be interesting and enlightening to watch how the Russian
authorities will deal with the families of the victims. One cannot
help but remember the infamous incident in the aftermath of the
Kursk incident, when an angry Russian mother in the middle of a
stream of invective against the government was quickly injected with
a sedative and dragged out of the hall after collapsing in front of
reporters and cameramen. Public relations, Soviet-style.
“As
a result of the terror act in Moscow, according to data at this
hour, 118 people who were in the hands of the terrorists died,’’
Interfax reported the Russian Ministry of Health as stating, laying
the death of the hostages squarely at the feet of the Chechens. This
naturally disregards the blatantly obvious and immediate cause of
the deaths: that the Russian Special Forces used excessive amounts
of a gas, originally intended for military usage, in an enclosed
space and ended up killing more than twice as many hostages as
hostage-takers due to their incompetence.
While
the stated aim of the hostage-taking was to force an end to the
Russian occupation of Chechnya, now in its third year, it also
served to focus attention on a region that has for too long been
consigned to the latter pages of the news.
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Mass graves of Chechens killed by Russian forces |
Chechnya
has been subject to a brutal “cleansing” campaign in the wake of
the Russian occupation of Grozny in 1999. The Russian campaign
against the small mountain nation can only be referred to as
genocidal. By the most conservative estimates, 120,000 Chechens were
killed in the course of the two Russo-Chechen wars between 1994 and
2000.
It
came as an ironic surprise to come across a recent Newsweek article
on Chechnya, describing in gruesome detail the brutality inflicted
upon the small population. Reports of murder, pillaging, rape, and
torture are commonplace. Chechnya is one of those unlucky places
that in the aftermath of September 11 had the status of their
resistance operations altered in the international media from
“rebellion/resistance” to “terrorism.”
Russia,
of course, was only too happy to exploit both the presence of Arab
volunteers in Chechen militias and the presence of Chechen
volunteers in Afghanistan to have the whole place branded as a hub
of international terrorism. Since then, global interest in the
ethnic cleansing being perpetrated there has waned noticeably. This
seems to have occurred in tandem with a renewed ferocity in the war,
with Russian tactics developing creatively to counter allegations of
abuse; for example, to avoid leaving evidence of torture or even of
killings, Russian troops will now blow up their victims with a
grenade or a stick of dynamite attached to the individual upon
release in the first case, or upon dumping the corpses in the
second.
The
raid has served, and will serve, a number of purposes. First and
foremost, it has irrevocably laid to rest Putin’s lies and the
official Russian stance that the war in Chechnya is over. Not that
one is under any illusions that Russian politicians, mythomaniacs
that they are, suffer from any sense of dignity or shame when it
comes to lying to their people. Still, the operation, combined with
the recent shooting down of another 118 helicopter-borne Russian
soldiers by Chechens, seems to have ended that particular myth.
The
war in Chechnya is far from over. It has never ended, from the 18th
century onwards. There have been lulls, but the Chechens have never
really acquiesced to the Russian occupation of their lands. And now,
contrary to that most skilled and Machiavellian of politicians
Putin’s statements, Chechnya is once again aflame, and the war has
been carried into the heart of Russia. For three exhilarating days,
Moscow was gripped by the terror it has inflicted on Chechens for so
long. And now, it is reeling in but a fraction of the pain it has
inflicted on the hardy Chechens.
Secondly,
the operation has returned Chechnya, even if temporarily, to the
center of attention of the extremely fickle Western media. It has
also brought the issue back to the attention of the Muslim world,
soon to be alight with the religious fervor Ramadan inevitably
breeds. Calls have already been made for a renewed political
engagement with the Chechen resistance. One must remember that it
was only after an extremely bloody and costly war that the Russians
were willing to negotiate in the mid-90s.
Put
simply, these have not been a good couple of months for Russia in
terms of image and military prestige. And while this might prompt a
vicious backlash in terms of the upping of military activities in
Chechnya, the Chechens have proved themselves more than capable of
striking back, and ultimately, the daring raid on the Palace of
Culture may turn out to have served as a catalyst in hastening an
inevitable Chechen victory.
Azizuddin
El-Kaissouni is Assistant Editor to the Views & Analyses
page of IslamOnline. A graduate of the American University in Cairo,
he holds a BA in Political Science with specialization in
International Law. He frequently writes about the status of Muslim
minorities around the world. You can reach him at azizuddin@islam-online.net
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