NEW YORK - Hundreds of `Islamic terrorists’ were killed in the Chechnya this week by `precision-guided’ Russian artillery and bombing, the Kremlin proudly announced.
Russian spokesmen claimed that `surgical strikes’ by long-ranged 240mm `Uragan’ and 300mm `Smerch’ unguided rockets, fired from 30 kms outside Grozny, delivering clouds of anti-personnel bomblets, were apparently able to pick off Chechen `terrorists.’ The heaps ensuing of shredded bodies of women and children produced by the rocket barrages were actually Chechen `terrorists’ in disguise, Moscow suggested.
Russian aircraft and heavy artillery pounded other `nests of Islamic terrorists:’ Chechen farm villages and residential parts of Grozny, which were being rebuilt after Russia virtually razed Chechnya in 1994-1996, killing 100,000 civilians.
As Russia intensified its savagery against tiny Chechnya, Madeleine Albright and Canada’s Lloyd Axworthy, who had previously backed Russia’s so-called campaign against `terrorism’ in the Caucasus, were left looking, as the KGB used to call western toadies, like useful fools.
And even more foolish and shamefaced when Moscow news sources revealed that undercover Russian security agents had been caught red-handed planting explosives in an apartment building. A wave of explosions in apartment buildings in Moscow and southern Russia that killed 300 people, blamed by the Russian government on `Islamic terrorists,’ was the justification cited by Moscow for its third invasion of the defiant Chechen Republic.
It’s clear the explosions were a classic Russian `provocation’ designed to justify a new war against the 1.5 million Chechen, a nation that has battled Russian colonial rule for 250 years. Hardliners in Moscow, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB man, cooked up this war to help win upcoming December elections and keep the Yeltsin faction in power. Predictably, Russians, who hate all Muslims and especially Chechen, rallied behind the government and, just as important, lost interest in the enormous series of money-laundering and theft scandals that have rocked the cosmically corrupt Yeltsin regime. Moscow’s red herring of an alleged Islamic terrorist threat, amplified by its KGB-controlled news agencies, also neatly silenced calls by the US Congress to cut off billions in American aid to the Yeltsin government.
Russian invasion forces in Chechnya have adopted a cautious strategy. Unlike 1994, when Russian mechanized troops and armor rushed headlong into Grozny and were slaughtered in ferocious close quarters combat, this time the Russians are using their enormous air and ground firepower to besiege the battered capital and numerous Chechen villages and pound them into rubble. Over 180,000 Chechen refugees have fled to neighboring Ingushetia, but now Russia, breaking all norms of international law and human decency, has closed Chechnya’s borders, blocking escape for any more civilian refugees and forcing them to return to the war zones.
Russia’s ferocity and massive violations of human rights in Chechnya come against a background of growing instability in the ethnically and tribally complex Caucasus, which is rightly called `Russia’s Mideast.’ This week, assassins murdered Armenia’s prime minister and shot up parliament. Armenia is on the verge of economic collapse after its long, stalemated war against Azerbaijan over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.
Georgia’s leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, has survived two recent assassination attempts, which he blamed on Russian agents. His unstable nation is being fought over by tribal gangs and continues to battle separatists in Abkhazia. Oil-rich Azerbaijan’s ailing leader, Gaider Aliev, is losing his grip on power. An anti-Russian uprising in Dagestan, aided by a handful of Chechen fighters, which Moscow’s disinformers convinced the western media was the work of `Islamic terrorists,’ was recently suppressed by massive Russian military intervention.
Russian troops and agents based in the Caucasus are stirring the pot, so preparing the way for Russia to reassert its domination of this strategic region which it lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Russia has secretly armed Armenia in its struggle against Azerbaijan, while aiding Muslim rebels in Abkhazia in order to pressure Georgia into rejoining the Russian Federation. Once the Chechen are eradicated, Russia will turn its attention on Azerbaijan and attempt to put its own men in power to succeed the ailing leader, Aliev.
The Chechen, however, may not cooperate with Moscow’s final solution. Though lightly armed and almost totally isolated from outside support and communications, they are probably the world’s most valiant fighters and certainly among the most skilled. The Russian Army may find itself bogged down in a long, debilitating guerrilla war in the mountainous south of Chechnya. Chechen commandos may be counted on to stage devastating raids against southern Russia, and even in Moscow. If the third Russian war against Chechnya fails, Yeltsin will again deny responsibility, lay the blame on Putin, and sack him.
But for now, the Kremlin believes it can commit any sort of crime in the Caucasus and still cash in on western aid by raising alarms about menacing Muslims. The notion that 1.5 million Chechen threaten 146 million Russians is a arrant, cruel nonsense only gullible, uninformed westerners believe.
What should the west do? Cut aid to Russia, which it is using our money to complete Stalin’s 1940’s genocide of the Chechen people. Cease helping Russia restore its rule over the Caucasus, whose people overwhelmingly want independence and reject return to Russian rule. Stop helping Russia reassemble the old Soviet Empire.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, told me last Friday that watching Russian forces shell Chechen urban areas, and Russian tanks move in for the kill, vividly reminded him of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 in Budapest. Once again, the world watches and does nothing while the Russians crush the life out of a small, valiant people.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999
