Washington Post - 06.11.2001

 

 

The Washington Post

Chechnya Discounted

By Jackson Diehl

A group of Russian human rights activists, intellectuals and artists opposed to the war in Chechnya held a press conference 10 days ago in Moscow in an effort to call attention to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the republic and to a statement they had obtained from Chechnya's fugitive president, Aslan Maskhadov, agreeing to unconditional negotiations with the Russian government. Not surprisingly, they were almost ignored by Moscow's increasingly docile media.

Then a couple of members of the organization traveled to Washington, seeking to spread the same message. They were in for a depressing surprise. Yelena Bonner, the widow of Soviet human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, managed one appearance before an obscure congressional committee, the U.S. Helsinki Commission. But overall there was no more interest in the latest horrors of Chechnya here than there was in Moscow. "We have the impression that few people here know that an antiwar movement in Russia exists," said Lev Ponomarev, one of the leaders of the group.

What officialdom in Moscow and Washington alike don't want to hear is that the campaign by the Russian military and police against Chechnya's separatists has degenerated into a full-fledged dirty war, complete with disappearances, mass graves, systematic torture and summary execution of civilians. In its scale and ferocity, it far exceeds the campaign Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic waged against the Albanians of Kosovo before NATO intervention; in the stunning impunity of its state-sponsored brutality, it is like the Latin American dirty wars of the 1970s.

In the past month, any one of three major developments in Chechnya ought to have galvanized Western opinion about the war. First, Human Rights Watch and the Russian group Memorial released meticulously documented reports showing that a body dump found across a highway from Russia's principal military base in Chechnya contained the remains of civilians who had been tortured and shot with their hands bound behind them -- and who had been seen last in Russian custody. Faced with this powerful evidence of atrocities that, in the Balkans or Africa, surely would get the attention of a war crimes tribunal, Western governments were silent. Russian spokesmen sneeringly stonewalled, improbably claiming that the Chechens themselves were responsible.

Next, Russian commanders announced that President Vladimir Putin's promise last January to reduce Russian forces from 80,000 to 20,000 had been canceled -- that the drawdown had been stopped after 5,000 troops and that these had been mostly replaced. There was no reaction. So several emboldened Russian officials disclosed another startling change, this time in the official timetable: Instead of the months Putin had promised the campaign would last, Chechnya is now defined as a war that will drag on for many years, or even decades -- a conflict comparable, the spokesmen said, to Soviet campaigns against partisans in Eastern Europe, which stretched from 1945 well into the 1950s.

Some officials in Washington seem to understand what all this means. John Beyrle, the State Department's special adviser for the states of the former Soviet Union, framed the issue well at the hearing Bonner addressed last week. "What kind of long-term relationship can we pursue," he asked, "with a government that wages a brutal and seemingly endless war against its own people on its own territory?"

Yet two days later, Condoleezza Rice supplied the Bush administration's answer. "This is now becoming a normal relationship with Russia," the national security adviser told reporters. First on the agenda of this week's Bush-Putin summit at Ljubljana, she explained, was "the new security framework" Bush would like to retail to the Russians -- also known as missile defense. Next, U.S.-Russian cooperation on regional conflicts. Next, U.S. support for the Russian economy, including Moscow's acceptance into the World Trade Organization. Next, a problem the administration cares about: Russian weapons sales to Iran.

Then -- if they get to it -- Chechnya. "It's on the agenda," said one senior official. "But I can't absolutely predict what [Bush] will do."

How is it that a Republican administration that started by expelling 50 of Moscow's spies and promising a tough realism about Russia now assigns so little value to its "brutal and seemingly endless war against its own people"? Because in the past four months, the White House has realized that without Putin's acquiescence to "the new security framework" -- whatever that turns out to mean -- missile defense may never be accepted by NATO governments or a Democratic-led Senate. The politics of missile defense demand that Putin's government be recognized as worthy of a long-term partnership with the United States -- and not a regime that leaves heaps of tortured bodies outside its military bases.

President Bush probably will say again this week, as he did last month, that he wants to break with "the legacy of the Cold War" in relations with Russia. In fact, by making nuclear security and weapons deals, rather than Chechnya, the center of the summit, he will be doing just the opposite. During the past decade the United States judged Russia mostly by its success, or lack of it, in building free markets and democracy. This week Bush will restore the central tenet of Cold War diplomacy: that it is Moscow's strategic cooperation, and not its treatment of its own people, that really matters.