A Critical Analysis of Western Realpolitik
The Case of Russia and Chechnya

Introduction

Background to the Chechen Conflict

On the political and social roots of the Russian-Chechen conflict

Some facts to be known

The Western Realpolitik on Chechnya

The financial Realpolitik: "business as usual"

The Western blindness against its own values abroad

No mercy: no right for self-determination

The Kossovo war connection

Other aspects of Western's "pragmatic realism"

The holy "anti-terrorism" alliance

The double standards policy

The approval to a genocidal policy by the "humanitarian" Europe

"The Chechnya issue has some analogies--I emphasize the word "some" because analogies don't mean identity. It has some analogies, some similarities--some--to the Algeria issue that once stood in the way of the modernization, democratization, and Europeanization of France. And just ask yourselves, Where would France be today if the Algeria issue had not been resolved, if it was still being repressed, if the French were still claiming that Algeria is France and that ultimately Algerians are Frenchmen?

It took a great man to resolve that issue, to cut the Gordian knot, to break with the past and to draw the conclusions that permitted France to be what it is. De Gaulle was a great man, figuratively and literally. Putin is not. He's a small man who's appealing to the worst instincts.

He's a small man who's appealing to the worst instincts in his country, not to the best instincts in his country. And there are good instincts in Russia. There are courageous Russians who have stood for principle in a manner that few of us probably would have the daring to emulate, and we owe them a great debt. And they represent the future of Russia. And you know their names-- "^[1d]

Moreover one must also keep in mind that a large part of the population lives in a desperate state of material misery. In the post-Soviet era no economic security is guaranteed and there is still no real historic and cultural background capable to reform an economy and its institutions in order to recreate a competitive and free but just commercial and financial system. True is that Russia has for several years now experienced an economic growth, inflation is under control, and the ruble is strong. But most of this new wealth is under the control of a tiny minority of oligarchs and concentrates prevalently in the great urban areas. Therefore frustration is mounting nevertheless, and the desire to find internal and external enemies to this state of affairs is easy. Terrorism does the rest. Al Qaeda, the Muslim and the Caucasian minorities are mixed together and are now blamed for everything. It is in this atmosphere where a set of power hungry political and military (frequently conflicting) leaderships promote themselves by keeping alive a permanent military state of alert, justifying their greed for an escalation in the political, military and economic power structures through warfare and the use of other violent authoritarian means. This political, military and gigantic secret service system that has never experienced in its history a real democratic process of reforms and that is far from being accustomed to solve problems through a peaceful dialogue and the adoption of libertarian principles, has now to come up with a disastrous economic, social and political situation, but falls instead much to easily into corruption and violence. A structure made up of a constellation of powers and forces, like the special services, the army, the oligarchs, the bureaucrats, the governors and a flourishing military industry (all more or less tied to criminal organizations), eagerly waiting to profit for personal and egoistic short term motives and that speculates and needs this war for its bloody business. Or as Michaela Pohl nicely summarizes: "every single document check, every arrest, every house search, every disappearance, every death is profitable to someone, and the war as a whole is profitable to Putin, to the Kremlin and the generals".[1c] Russia is not a single and homogenous entity, but on the contrary its dominated by an internal struggle for power among ferociously conflicting forces which try to preserve and amplify only their own interests, and totally ignore the collective Russian needs. All this behind the mask of "patriotism". Russia has lost the cold war, the war in Afghanistan and the first Chechen conflict. Instead of looking further to its future it looks back to its past and to its lost (forced) centralizing unity and its military superpower, and can't accept and understand how and why a tiny republic of only one million souls could lead it into a humiliating defeat in the first war and break away from its federation, which after almost ten years continues to escape to its control.

Special forces of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Chechnya (Assoreporters)

Of course Russia is fortunately not only this, but unfortunately at present it is also this. The true genuine side, the intelligentsia, the great cultural figures, its real inner Spirit, has been temporarily set aside in order to look back to the past with Putin's Russia which is preparing again an aggressive and nationalistic police state. And, as in the good old Soviet style (and as in every authoritarian state), everyone who does not agree with this suicide policy is banned as a "traitor of its motherland".

But the conflict has moreover its origin also in some erratic leading Chechen personalities who repeatedly showed to be unwilling in any form of compromise and who made strategic errors that other republics asking for independence carefully avoided, in mistakes and shortcomings of the Chechen leadership headed by Aslan Maskhadov, and more recently in the resort to terrorism by part of the Chechen resistance which alienated the sympathies for the Chechen cause for sovereignty and self-determination of part of the outside world. This could only exacerbated divisions and tension, leading finally to forms of extremism on both sides.

More generally, the war in Chechnya can be seen as a symbol. The symbol of the frustration of a society which still did not entirely accept that it has lost the cold war. The symbol of a collective aggregate that has lost the ideals dominating the October revolution and that actually finds itself surrounded not only by a material but also and especially by a psychological and spiritual emptiness. The slaughter in Chechnya is the expression of a generalized social desperation which doesn't know where to look forward and how to proceed further after the fall of Berlin's wall. A dissatisfaction leading to anger and desire of revenge which, especially after the chaotic Eltsin period, could only reinforce a nostalgic return to the good old ideal of the "strong man" who is supposed to bring law and order, an ideal which Putin's figure fits well, and that could lead towards a "great Russia" reestablishing justice for the humiliation it believes it has suffered in the past years. Naturally, loosing another piece of the former Soviet landscape and admitting the defeat of a country of almost 150 millions against a scarcely one million strong tiny republic goes exactly in the opposite direction and is inadmissible for a political and military power structure which instead can only exist if it keeps, through media control, censorship and the elimination of a dissenting opposition, precisely this ideal alive.

It is in this general frame one has to understand that the set of this material, political, social and psychological aspects combined itself to become an explosive mixture which led to the war and the humanitarian disaster we observe today. And in this light we believe the single facts, some of which we are now going to analyze shortly, must be seen.

Some facts to be known

Russia, eager for revenge for its withdrawal in 1996, decided to launch a full-scale invasion of Chechnya three years in advance already and, on the admission of its former interior Minster Sergei Stepashin,^[1a] certainly since March 1999 where Putin was head of the FSB ("Federal'naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti", Federal Security Agency, part of the former KGB). Russian public opinion is told that the war in Chechnya is on Islamic extremists. Entire electoral campaigns have been based on this. Putin, a nearly unknown FSB colonel, showed to be a master in seizing the opportunity to promote his personal political prestige by escalating the war reinforcing in the public opinion the hatred against Chechen minorities. When dealing with the Chechen conflict his jargon alone comments itself: "we will wipe them out in the toilet", "whoever offends us won't live 3 days", "a control shot in the head", etc. This kind of appeal to people's baser sentiments was apparently highly effective in ensuring him election and Putin became President on the crest of the war in Chechnya. However this same public opinion had not been informed that meanwhile the secret services, of which Putin was the highest head, financed and armed criminal bands, Islamic terrorists and mafia groups throughout Chechnya with the precise goal to destabilize and overthrow by force the legitimate and democratically elected government of Maskhadov. President Aslan Maskhadov, commander of the Chechen armed forces during the first war and author, with Russian general Aleksandr Lebed, of the peace agreements in the Khasaviurt Accords in August 1996, came to power with an overwhelming majority (59.3%) as the head of a regularly and democratically elected government in 1997 (the regularity of this election was monitored and confirmed by different international independent organization, among others the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE). Also the Russian government recognized Maskhadov as the legitimate President of Chechnya. But like in Afghanistan, where the Soviet Union had used the principles of "divide and rule", provocateurs, and "false flag" tactics, to break the internal relations of the Afghans, for example by supporting and training Islamist terrorist groups also in Chechnya, Russia only welcomed the activities of Islamist groups and gangsters (since the dissolution of the USSR, most Chechen gangs have been parts of a network based in Moscow and dominated by Russians).

This policy is summarized through some examples by Anssi Kullberg^[1b]:

"The most important radical Islamist - and the only one who might have had connections to international terrorism through his mysterious Arab ally Khattab - is Shamil Basayev, a former officer of the Russian OMON troops. As a young hothead, he went to Abkhazia to fight along with the Russian military intelligence (GRU) against Georgia, the only truly friendly state towards Chechnya. Another of the most notorious thug of Chechnya was Arbi Barayev, who led the kidnapping business. He was hated by Chechens, and Maskhadov's government issued a murder case against him in 1988, and ordered him to be imprisoned. When Russia started CW2, it did not issue warranty against Barayev, although he was the main suspect for most cruel crimes, including the kidnapping and murder of several Westerners. Barayev rose into rebellion against Maskhadov, and the Russian secret services backed him to raise his own paramilitary forces into rebellion against the Maskhadov government in summer 2000. When the local police arrested him in November 2000, the pro-Moscow puppet government ordered him to be released. Barayev was reportedly killed in uncertain circumstances in autumn 2001."

Also according to Vyacheslav Izmailov, a former army officer who fought in Chechnya and certainly doesn't have sympathies for the Chechen cause, admits that Arbi Barayev was known to have the protection of Chechen FSB agents and that his protectors remain close to the present Russian backed Chechen administration even now.^[2]

Indeed, the present Russian puppet administration in Chechnya is led by quite dusky persons. Akhmed Kadyrov, appointed today by the Kremlin as the nominal head of the administration, is a former chief mufti of Chechnya and Islamist who, during CW1, for the great harm of pro-independence Chechen leaders who were trying to find a peaceful way out in the frame of a secular reorganization of the republic, declared almost fanatically the jihad against Russia advocating the introduction of Sharia'h. Actually Kadyrov commands several thousands armed men, (officially 250 men but is said to be closer to 5,000 and the number is expected to grow) who might become a considerable threat to Russia's forces stationed in Chechnya itself once they turn their backs to the Kremlin. Besides relatives and friends, this "security force" comprises mostly former members of paramilitary criminal groups, who were involved in robberies and murders. According to human rights organizations Kadyrov’s security forces are responsible of several crimes against humanity (e.g. of kidnapping Chechen citizens in order to “sell” them back to their relatives). The present Chechen authorities, which are under the strict supervision of Russian authorities, deliberately stake on criminal groups.^[2b] Moreover the notorious Grozny (Djohar) mayor Beslan Gantamirov, who was serving a 6-year sentence for embezzlement in a Russian prison (he stole parts of the funds necessary to rebuilt the city after CW1), has been released by Vladimir Putin's administration to lead a rebellion against Maskhadov.

These are only few examples of what the Russian government considers the "warrants of stability" in Chechnya.

Maskhadov is a quite different figure than Dzhokhar Dudaev, the former Chechen president. CW1 broke out not only because of Boris Yeltsin's corrupt, violent and power-hungry attitude and that of the collaborators surrounding him (mostly hawks and few inactive or servile liberals), but also because Dudaev was indeed an illegitimate, undemocratic and intransigent extremist. The situation was dominated by the prickly egotism of both sides. Maskhadov instead always distanced himself from any terrorist or criminal formation as any form of religious extremism and envisages a democratic Chechnya based on libertarian values.

However he might be blamed either for his political indecisiveness, constantly seeking consensus with all the armed groups and for his inability to resist FSB's provocation, i.e. the pressure of his terrorist opponents that led him to adopt quite doubtful measures (e.g. to adopt Islamic Shariah law reducing his own power, despite his secularist convictions) and bears some responsibility, like his forerunner Dudaev, for his failure to keep firmly under control on its own territory an epidemic criminal activity which spread out all over the republic. Arms trade, narcotics business, hijackings and kidnappings became a quite usual mean for political and financial aims. The decisive moment came in the summer of 1998, when a group of Islamists rose in open rebellion against Maskhadov's government. Loyalists fought a pitched battle with them outside the town of Gudermes, and dozens of Chechens were killed. Maskhadov decided not to arrest the Islamists but instead let them go free. At the same time, he abandoned Dudayev's secular constitution and introduced nominal Shariah law. There is no evidence that Maskhadov was profiting from the kidnapping business, but some associates of him certainly did. After all it might suffice to recall as for instance Shamil Basayev, who organized in 1995 the hostage taking in Budennovsk, and despite having been defeated in the 1997 elections won by Maskhadov, became nevertheless the first deputy prime minister and shared responsibilities for oil production. Perhaps for sheer opportunism or simply because he thought that engineering an alliance with these radical figures might keep them under control, Maskhadov didn't or couldn't avoid such uneasy presence, his primary political adversaries.

But these very common universal political maneuvers, based on alliances with criminal elements, reveal itself on the long run counterproductive over and over again. Maskahdov soon broke up relations with Basayev but, because of the tremendous brutality of the Russian repression during CW2, he had no other choice than joining Basayev in a military alliance five years later. After the October 2002 theater siege this strategy showed all its weaknesses and he distanced himself from this fanatical nationalist again. Maskhadov not only fired Basaev from his government positions but also opened a criminal case against him. But it was to late: this alliance became counterproductive among other things also because it gave the pretext to US President G.W. Bush - who, while already planning his war in Iraq was apparently unsatisfied that Chechens undergoing a genocide don't remain saints behaving as Gandhi-like figures - to declare moderate forces open to a political solution, but self-defending their country with a guerrilla campaign, like Maskahdov, as "unreliable", aligning de facto his policy with Putin's brutal means in Chechnya. Perhaps this strategy made part of Bush's plan to convince Putin to join the strategic alliance against Iraq: a wrong move again, as it turned out short after.

Sure is that the decent members of Maskhadov's government were threatened or even shot and when Maskhadov asked for Russia's support for his effort to fight criminal gangs and radical Islamist in 1998-1999, and for this he sent Turpal Atgeriyev, the Chechen security minister, as his special envoy to Moscow, Russia answered by having Atgeriyev arrested and by refusing from all cooperation with Maskhadov's government. He asked the Kremlin for assistance in suppressing several Wahabi militant formations based in Urus-Martan and the mountains of southeastern Chechnya. Far from assisting the beleaguered moderate president in expelling such radical elements as the Arab jihadi leader Amir Khattab, the Russians worked to undermine Maskhadov's secularist-national government.

Key to the understanding of this quite bewildering policy of the Kremlin is that the present military-political regime bases its existence and force on constructing and encouraging a constant internal and external threat. The FSB regained power on deliberately constructing the "Chechen threat". It survives and lives from constantly refreshing and extending this "threat". In retrospect, at least part of the kidnapping business appeared to have a political purpose as an instrument in the struggle against Maskhadov by his opponents inside and outside Chechnya. Many terrorist acts have been planned and realized by those criminal gangs or by those who had once (and continue to have?) direct connections with the Russian secret services.

The distinction between Chechen terror acts and deviated activities of secret services is frequently indistinguishable. Most notably one should be reminded about the explosions in 1996 in Moscow's subway, five days before President Boris Yeltsin was to stand re-election, and in the apartment-buildings - two in Moscow and one in the southern city of Volgodonsk - in 1999 and that caused more than 300 deaths. Still after several years any evidence linking Chechen terrorism to the bombings is lacking. However, certain is that Russian authorities immediately blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists, and used the explosions as the reason for launching a media and electoral campaign to sustain the military intervention in the breakaway republic. Later the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovskii has claimed publicly that the FSB actually organized the bombings in order to create a pretext to invade Chechnya. General Alexander Lebed, one of the author's of the Khasavyurt agreements, which led to termination of the first war, made similar statements. The former prime minister Evgenij Primakov declared that "the rebels use exclusively Russian arms".^[3] Unsolved remains the mystery of the Ryazan incident where the FSB was caught red-handed placing explosives in a multi-storey civilian apartment building. The FSB has denied these allegations. But more recently also Lieutenant Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB Colonel who fled to UK in Autumn 2000, makes the same allegation: the bombing was directed from the Russian FSB. Meanwhile State Duma deputy and human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov went to court to demand Russia's chief prosecutor to let him see the documents relating the apartment-building bombings as the Ryazan case and that led to suspicions of government involvement. Why has his request been denied? Why is the FSB, that at those times was headed by Putin, so unwilling to investigate the facts related to the explosions in Moscow? Finally, Sergei Yushenkov, one of Russia's leading liberal lawmakers and one of the founders of Russia's first post-Soviet democratic movement, a staunch supporter of human rights, critical on the policy in Chechnya, actively engaged in investigation into the Moscow blasts and a rare vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead in an apparent contract killing outside his apartment in Moscow on 17 April, 2003.

That Moscow's authorities had other priorities than fighting extremism became already clear in many other occasions. For instance, in neighboring Ingushetia, President Ruslan Aushev recognized the threat of Islamic extremism and pursued a vast political and social agenda in fighting supposed al-Qaeda elements since the onset of CW1 in 1994: his government investigated for suspect money pouring in from foreign Arab countries and tried to elevate the poorer Muslim community to a higher material and social condition. And nevertheless Putin did his best to undermine Ausev's credibility and finally faced him with a government-inspired court challenge that forced him to resign in late 2001. Was Aushev's fault that to criticize the crude militarism of Moscow and that to not allow Chechnya to be bombed or shelled from the territory of Ingushetia?

And what about the the famous attack on the Dubrovka theater in Moscow of October 23, 2002, where the Russian musical "Nord-Ost" was being staged?

This was led by Barayev's nephew Movsar, and Basayev is the man who has taken responsibility for this terrorist attack, two figures who, as we have already seen, are widely reported to have maintained shadowy ties to both the FSB and Russian Military Intelligence (GRU). A lot of strange facts happened and many questions remain unanswered. For instance, the GRU, had already announced two months earlier Barayev's arrest. Why did they release him? Anne Nivat^[4], who met at Assinovsski, a village close to the border with Ingushetia, the mothers of two of the unit’s women of the Duborvka siege, claims that they had been arrested and taken to an unknown destination at the end of September. Their mothers recognized them on television and said that they could not understand how their daughters could have gone from a Russian camp to Dubrovka. Independently, in the Novaya gazeta (20 January 2003 issue), Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy and deputy editor tells a similar story about another female terrorist. Why did so many embark in a terrorist act immediately after their release from Russian prisons? According to the already mentioned Litvinenko and an article of Anna Politkovskaya, a certain Khanpasha Terkibayev, who was a Chechen FSB agent for many years, was situated at the Nord-Ost together with the terrorists and then left building not long before the assault^[4b]. Two facts about Terkibaev seem indisputable. First, his name appeared on published lists naming the hostage-takers (his name appeared officially as one of the terrorists in the Izvestia journal) who had seized control of a Moscow theater. Second, just as Barayev and the two female terrorists mentioned, Terkibaev vanished in early March 2002 after being arrested by pro-Russian Chechen militiamen at his home in the village of Mesker-Urt, in the Shali region, too^[4c] but suddenly appeared in a travel to Strasbourg on the 31st of March 2003 as an adviser to the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. How was it possible that a terrorist of the Dubrovka theater was presented as a special-representative of the President of Russia Dmitry Rogozin during the PACE session in Strasbourg ? And why did Politkovskaya, short after the appearance of her article, receive a telephone call from an official of the U.S. embassy in Moscow who urged her to drop the subject?^[4d] Litvinenko asserts that he passed to Yushenkov, in the beginning of April 2003, established data on Terkibayev, and he was supposed to verify this information on his the return to Moscow. A couple of weeks later Yushenkov was shot to death. And on December 2003 Terkibayev died also in what the official version depicts as a "car accident". Mere coincidences?

Other mysteries surround the Dubrovka theater. A central question to be resolved by future researchers is whether or not the Russian special forces planning an assault on the theater building at Dubrovka were aware that virtually all of the bombs located there -- including all of the powerful and deadly bombs -- were in fact incapable of detonating. If the special forces were aware of this, then there was clearly no need to employ a potentially lethal gas, which, it turned out, caused the deaths of a large number of the hostages. The special forces could have relatively easily and rapidly overwhelmed the lightly armed terrorists. Moreover, if they were in fact aware that the bombs were "dummies," then the special forces obviously had no need to kill all of the terrorists, especially those who were asleep from the effects of the gas. It would, one would think, have made more sense to take some of them alive. If they were not aware of this, then they must have known that the terrorists had more than enough time to detonate their explosives if they had wanted to. But about fifty minutes passed between the introduction of the gas and the storming of the building, so the attackers must have known that a long period was needed for the gas to take effect.

Among the terrorist leaders at Dubrovka had been an Arab named "Yasir," a "subject of Saudi Arabia" and leader of Al-Qaeda (utro.ru, 30 October 2002). It soon emerged, however, that "Yasir" was but another name for "Abubakar" (real name: Ruslan Elmurzaev), an ethnic Chechen and the de facto leader of the hostage takers. According to an article by Aleksandr Khinshtein in the May 23 issue of Moskovsky komsomolets this mysterious figure had managed, somehow, to leave the theater before it was stormed by Russian commandos--and that the authorities have shown a striking lack of zeal in pursuing him. Russian procurators proved unable to show Elmurzaev's corpse and, during a visit to Chechnya in October 2003, Russian intelligence officers there confirmed to film director Sergei Govorukhin (son of a well-known Duma deputy and filmmaker), who served as one of the volunteer negotiators at Dubrovka where he met Elmurzaev and whom he identified as an FSB agent, that Elmurzaev is alive and living in Chechnya (ruskur.ru, 23 October 2003). This Elmurzaev was said to be the key figure behind several other terrorist attacks in Moscow as well. Among other things, according to informations supplied to Khinshtein by investigators, the name "Abubakar" emerges also in relation with a car-bomb attack on a McDonald's restaurant in southwestern Moscow only few days earlier to the Dubrovka siege. The "main hero" among these investigators was Yevgeny Taratorin who however was removed from his position by the procuracy which opened a criminal investigation against him for allegedly revealing secrets from the investigation.^[4e] Elmurzaev was reported by a former FSB lieutenant colonel turned lawyer, Mikhail Trepashkin. Trepashkin recalled that he had alerted the FSB in the period of late July and early August 2002 to the activities of Elmurzaev and others but had been informed that the FSB "was aware of the information" (chechenpress.com, 21 and 31 July 2003). Moreover, as a member of public inquiry committee into explosions in Moscow in 1999, Trepashkin found evidences of the ties between the FSB and the authors of this terrorist act.^[4eb] At this point Trepashkin was immediately arrested by the FSB on 22 October 2003. A trial for "revealing a state secret," is now getting under way in the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court.^[4f] Trepashkin was asked by an independent State Duma commission to investigate the bombings in the summer of 2002. The commission was formed by then-deputies Yuly Rybakov, Sergei Yushenkov, Sergei Kovalyov, Yury Shchekochikhin and Otto Latsis. Today Trepashkin has been arrested, Yushenkov was shot dead, Shchekochikhin died in unclear circumstances because of a food poisoning and Latsis (also editor of the newspaper Russky Kurer) was beaten unconscious in his apartment building's elevator. Kovalyov and Rybakov are still in circulation but have been accurately expunged from politics by the state media and failed to win re-election to the Duma in the December 2003 parliamentarian elections.

And what role did Arman Menkeev, a retired officer from a GRU spetsnaz commando unit, play in last year's hostage episode at Moscow's Dubrovka theater? Menkeev, apparently another double agent of the Russian secret services as Khampasha Terkibayev, was arrested about a month after the theater episode in connection with several terrorist attacks in Moscow, including the one at Dubrovka. Curiously, however, it appears that he is not being formally charged in the criminal case. According to an article by Aleksandr Yelisov in the October 24 issue of Moskovsky komsomolets "several sources" still consider Menkeev to be "one of the main suspects" in the Dubrovka atrocity. "The investigation suggests that it was precisely he who prepared...explosive devices and home-made grenades for Movsar Baraev's group," wrote Yelisov. Menkeev undoubtedly had skills that would have made him attractive either as a bomb expert for the terrorists or as a double agent for the government (or both?) and was described as "loyal to the government" and somoenoe who "knows how to keep military and state secrets" in an official memo written during his stay in Moscow's Lefortovo prison.^[4g]

The federal authorities in Moscow have continued to avoid any public comment. Khinshtein questions: "Who benefits if terrorists stroll about in freedom while detectives take their places on prison bunks? Who benefits if criminal investigations fall apart? I ask myself that question, but I cannot find an answer--or more precisely, I dare not speak that answer aloud, even to myself."

In one of the most detailed reconstructions of the Dubrovka events, John Dunlop senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, concludes that in his opinion "the original plan for the terrorist action at and around Dubrovka bears a strong similarity to the campaign of terror bombings unleashed upon Moscow and other Russian urban centers (Buinaksk, Volgodonsk) in September of 1999. In both cases there is strong evidence of official involvement in, and manipulation of, key actions." He suggests that "in view of the suspicious connections and motivations of the perpetrators of this incident, as well as the contradictory nature of the actions of the authorities, it would seem appropriate to envisage this operation as representing a kind of 'joint venture' (on, for example, the model of the August 1999 incursion into Dagestan [see next]) involving elements of the Russian special services and also radical Chechen leaders such as Shamil Basaev and Movladi Udugov." In the final analysis, concludes Dunlop, "elements among both the Russian leadership and the power ministries and among the Chechen extremists obtained their principal goals in the assault on the theater at Dubrovka: namely, an end was put to the negotiation process while Aslan Maskhadov's reputation was besmirched, and the terrorists, for their part, had an opportunity to stage a grandiose fund-raiser. The Russian authorities, moreover, were now able to demonstrate to the entire world that Moscow, too, had been a victim of an Al-Qaeda-style Chechen terrorist act. As in 1999, the chief victims of these terrorist acts were the average citizens of Moscow. The bulk of the evidence, as we have seen, points to significant collusion having occurred on the part of the Chechen extremists and elements of the Russian leadership in the carrying out of the Dubrovka events."^[4g2]

Whatever the truth is, keeping this in mind might give a somewhat different perception of the "war on terrorism" in Chechnya. In the end, both the Russian leadership and the Chechen extremists obtained their principal goals in the Dubrovka events: namely, talk of negotiations ended and Maskhadov's reputation was besmirched. The hostility toward Chechens among Russians increased and especially for the Kremlin, just as after the apartments bombings in 1999, the support for the war in Chechnya found a new and fresh support. In the aftermath of the Nord-Ost hostage-taking in Moscow, the Russian government has sought aggressively the extradition of Akhmad Zakayev, President Aslan Maskhadov's representative in Europe (but has not requested, until March 2003, the extradition from Qatar of the radical ideologue, Movladi Udugov). Also the entire Western world and press, who was timidly but slowly becoming aware of the disaster in Chechnya and increasingly critical about the conflict, returned faithfully to its usual cynicism. It suffice to say how, in the days immediately after the Dubrovka siege, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen labeled the Chechens as a "gang of fanatic criminals" and "a people that doesn't have any legitimate claim to independence."^[4h]

Returning to the times prior to the beginning of CW2, certain is that also the political initiatives emanating from Moscow seemed designated to undermine Chechnya's stability. In December 1998 Yeltsin suddenly and apparently without reason, withdraw his intention to negotiate a treaty with Chechnya on the mutual delegations of powers similar to the treaties already signed with other independent Republics. And the promised Russian economic aid to reconstruct the Chechen economy and infrastructure destroyed by the first war, never arrived. In retrospect this seems to be no coincidence, it was part of a plan either: that to keep the population in a permanent state of misery in order to increase the destabilizing effects. In the conditions of the hardest economic situation banditism became massive in Chechnya, total anarchy followed. In February 1999, in a desperate attempt to reestablish order Maskhadov suspended the Chechen parliament and under pressure of Basayev, and against the Chechen constitution that declares Chechnya as a secular republic, introduced Shariah law.

But concessions to thugs do only enforce them. Maskadov failed in guaranteeing law and order: many weapons ended up in the hands of rival gangs, Russian authorities were kidnapped and the situation spiraled out of control. The Russian devastating "divide et impera" policy, the Chechen corrupt and criminal internal politics with its greed for oil and ransom money and backed by Moscow, together with the incapacity of the Chechen government to stay firm under its opponents pressure, climaxed in the attack on Dagestan. 1,000-1,200 illegal guerrilla troops, which were under the command of Basayev and Khattab, launched an attack in the summer of 1999 on the Dagestani borders. Despite Maskhadov's repeated attempts to counteract this political and social situation, asking frequently for Russia's help without receiving it, the Kremlin cynically accused him of being behind the invasion.

But how can someone be so unwise to attack Russia with an army of not more than 1,200 soldiers? And why? To do what?

The dream of these radical Islamists was to spread the doctrine of Wahhabism and form an Islamic state encompassing Chechnya and Dagestan (which means also a state on the Caspian Sea and its oil resources). A dream that had no real sympathy among the majority of the Muslim people. But this is almost certainly not the whole story and widespread are again the rumors that the invasion was prepared in a secret cooperation of Basayev with Berezovsky -the already mentioned oligarch nowadays in exile in GB- and the Russian "hawks". And if, according to Stepashin, the CW2 planning was under way since March 1999, the Dagestan attack, which took place in August 1999, could not be the cause of the war. Strange is the coincidence that for some obscure reason the Russian forces were withdrawn from the border area just before the incursion as if someone was trying to lure the Chechen commanders into attack. And strange too is what French intelligence sources report, via the Russian press^[5] : according to these source Basayev met in summer 1999 in France with Aleksandr Voloshin, chief of staff for then- president Yeltsin (and later Putin), and Anton Surikov, a former Soviet military intelligence officer who worked with Basyev when he was leading the Abkhaz separatist movement in Georgia, with Moscow's blessing. Voloshin is claimed to have provided $10 million to Basayev in order to fund the invasion in Dagestan. Interesting is also the coincidence that the Chechen forces invaded Dagestan two days after Yeltsin appointed Putin as prime minister. The attack on Dagestan has also some similarities with the outbreak of CW1 which followed short after an incident in late July 1994, when four Chechen hijackers seized a bus near Mineral'nye Vody, in southern Russia, and that turned out to be a catalyst for the Russian move towards the first war. According to Anatol Lieven also this terrorist attack "might have been deliberately planned by Russian agents to provide an excuse for intervention."^[6]

No verdict is so far possible, and the conspiracy theory remains a theory, and will so perhaps forever. But too many details don't fit, too many inconsistencies emerge and much too evident is Russian's authorities unwillingness to solve and clraify it. And there is the undeniable fact that the war fed the rise of Putin. The media propaganda didn't miss the occasion to take advantage from these events demonizing the Chechen government and preparing the public opinion to war. The Basayev and Khattab led attack of 1999 was certainly what the Russian army was waiting for. For Russia it was the pretext to begin its second attempt to conquest Chechnya back. In September 29, 1999, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Italy (Hubert Védriene, Joschka Fischer and Lamberto Dini) expressed "great concern" about the situation in Chechnya, but were very careful in not condemning Yeltsin's regime: this could only give a green light for war. What followed under the name of "the war on terrorism and bandits" was the continuation of the genocide of the first war rising the death toll to a number comparable to the extermination of about 15% of the Chechen population.* As CW1, where a short and victorious war should have raised Yeltsin's Presidential ratings in the face of his flagging popularity, also CW2 was supposed to last only few weeks but turned out to be instead a yearlong terrible human drama. It was the consequence of selfish electoral, political and personal ambitions. And not only from the side of Russian or Chechen political figures.

With Putin coming to power, the mistakes of the first war will not be repeated. The greatest victory of the Russian authorities is clearly its mediatic triumph at home and especially among the Western professional media. The borders of Chechnya became and still are of-limits for everyone reporting something different than the Kremlin's truth. No one will be allowed to report and film anything in Chechnya if not under strict control of the Russian forces, i.e. under the supervision of Sergei Yastrzhembsky, head of the Russian information department for Chechnya. Putin's Russia is a master in a propaganda which criminalizes an entire population convincing the entire world that the real conflict in Chechnya is about the fight on terrorism and bandits. Refugees become sympathizers for terrorists, their tent camps abroad a nest for Al Qaeda, the Russian forces those who are trying to "restore law and order in Chechnya" and the nazi-Stalinist emerging regime of Putin a "rising democracy". Professional analysts, experts, cremlinologist and the overall community of journalists from the USA to Europe throughout all the democratic countries acritically accepted for years this version of "facts" as the final truth. While hundreds of innocent civilians are kidnaped, raped, tortured to death and thrown into mass graves every year without anyone taking notice of them, the whole international community faithfully reacts like Pavlov's dog to the Russian propaganda which claims to be victim of dozens of terrorist acts whose real authors remain totally unknown till today. The government controlled Russian Press agencies as Interfax, RIA-Novosti or Itar-Tass become the only source of information about Chechnya and are taken as the point of reference for the official truth by Western press agencies which, already blinded by this propaganda, only and exclusively take these for their understanding of facts without comparing the information with other sources like those coming from the humanitarian NGO or the Chechen information services. Bush, Blair, Schroeder, Chirac, Berlusconi, etc. could finally find the gates open to declare themselves as great friends of a fascist regime without anyone noticing something strange in this.

The Western Realpolitik on Chechnya

Just to span some parallel, what happened could be compared to a hypothetic British invasion of Northern Ireland which, after having razed it to the ground, killing 100,000 civilians, detaining 20,000 in concentration camps and filling it with death squads, presents a Tony Blair who tells us that all this was necessary in order to conduct a war against the Irish Republican Army. This is in its essence how Yeltsin and Putin are justifying their war in Chechnya against "bandits".

Is this credible?

According to many Western "analysts", it is. Fine tuning to this belief, no attention came from leaders as Bush, Blair, Schroeder, Chirac, Aznar, Berlusconi, etc., about the human rights violations in Chechnya. In the past years the repeated attempts of those Chechen representatives, as President Maskhadov, open to a political and peaceful solution, and searching for a support among the European Union (EU) member states or the USA, met substantially on disinterest and had been ignored. Nothing has been done in the direction of a peaceful solution because that could evidently meet with Kremlin's anger. Noteworthy is how during CW1, President Bill Clinton did not even try to get in contact with Yeltsin until two months into the conflict. Despite the blatant violations Warren Christopher, the US secretary of state, explained that "Russia is operating in a democratic context" and that the United States "should not rush to judgment"^[7]. Russia asked for Europe's and America's complicity. And received it.

The financial Realpolitik: "business as usual".

It received it together with huge financial aids: the West financed indirectly at least CW1 through its donations to Russia through the International Monetary Fund (the second war found instead adequate funds because of the rise of oil prices). In 1995 Moscow received a $6.8 billion loan, already six months into the war, in order to strengthen the Ruble and its economical stability. Further $10.2 billion followed in early 1996. Later also the old Soviet debt of $13 billions has been canceled. This is as such not particularly appalling would it not be for the fact that these credits came just in the middle of CW1. Estimates indicate that the first two loans combined are comparable to the cost of CW1. It replenished the powers of destruction and repression in the whole Russian federation and almost no one felt it necessary to submit these financial aids to some conditions on a process of democratization, liberal reforms and the respect for human rights. The West did therefore not simply look the other way, but also actively offered to relieve the financial pressure which was the main constrain on Moscow's continuation of the first war.

In the name of a "free market" the Clinton administration and its European allies approved blindly, from the Yeltsin era on, their partecipation in a huge and intrinsically corrupt program of Russian privatization which turned out to be nothing else than a gigantic reselling of the pubblic patrimony in the hands of an extremely tiny (probably not more than twenty) powerful oligarcs, while the vast majority Russians poverty remained unaltered or even worsened. The living standard has so far improved only for certain categories of people and a blatant contradiction of the modern social and economic situation in Russia persists, the visible improvement of economic indexes did not affect the social situation, while the state has virtually stepped aside from the social restructuring of business. No real principles of interaction between local authorities, corporations and social responsibility and morality guides the laws and minds in Russia.

On the other side, major independent business owners in Russia have been put out of business by the strong-arm tactics of the special prosecutor or the FSB. The arrest of the powerful oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos Oil, by the Russian new regime of former KGB officers headed by Putin (and which occured few days after President Bush declared his "respect [for] President Putin's vision for Russia . . . a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive"), was the best example in this sense. Khodorkovsky made the fatal mistake of expressing political opinions and having the temerity to provide financial support to opposition parties. The FSB attack on Russian business is an inalterable constant in Putin's conception of "economy". All that has obviously nothing to do with Adam Smith's theories and such a country is certainly not heading towards any variety of capitalism: there is no free market in Russia. Wealth is coming only by courtesy of the head of the Government (actually Putin) and a centralized nomenklatura, and not through a genuine and transparent economic competitive system. Like under a fascist rule, where property is not owned by the state but at the whim of the state's rulers and few extremely rich individuals, the final goal is the power of the state rulers and not the welfare of its people. Among other things, between the same Russian citizens there is also a growing resentment against the Western society and values also because in the administration councils of the industries guided by this oligarchic and authoritarian system many Western representatives have their seat. But it is unlikely that on the long run foreign investors will continue to play such a game. And nevertheless there are also cases of western academics, like the case of the university of Rome "La Sapienza", which on October 2003, had the marvelous idea to confer on Putin a doctorate honoris causa in economy.

Russia possesses 25% of the entire world low price gas. 16% of Europe's oil and 40% of its natural gas supplies comes from the Russian Federation countries. Its oil is identified as the driving force as its energy accounts for two-fifth of Russian exports and more than 10% of the country's real Gross Domestic Product. The US begun expanding Russia's role in the global energy markets, and is turning the vast Eurasian landmass into one of the major oil suppliers to the US - alongside Mexico, Nigeria, and other non-OPEC producers. These developments will no doubt reverberate beyond the bilateral US - Russian relations in the years to come. During a Bush-Putin summit in May 2002, a cooperation has been signed which focuses on prospecting for energy and developing resources - especially oil and gas - including the Caspian region. Russian and US companies will be encouraged to invest in Russian deep ports, transportation infrastructure such as railroads and pipelines, and the modernization of electircity-generation capabilities and natural gas and oil refineries. Creating a fleet of supertankers in the Pacific, as well as building modern ports and pipelines in Siberia and the Far East, will allow Russia to supply the US West Coast directly. The goal is to diminish US dependence from OPEC countries which are considered as unstable and politically unreliable. In this view the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of "diversifying energy supply" and in an effort to decrease its dependence on Saudi oil, the US seeks to control the Caspian oil resources and fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes. In the eyes of a short termed policy, all this reduces any ethics and human rights issue to a very secondary matter. The exchange of Chechen's blood for Russian's and the Caucasian gas and oil is seen quite obviously as the only meaningful policy. Or in L. Kleveman's words:

"The Russian government initially tolerated the intrusion into its former empire, hoping Washington would in turn ignore the atrocities in Chechnya. However, the much-hyped "new strategic partnership" against terror between the Kremlin and the White House has turned out to be more of a temporary tactical teaming-up. For the majority of the Russian establishment it is unthinkable to permanently cede its hegemonic claims on Central Asia."^[7a]

Therefore there is also another aspect of the whole matter: Moscow resents this as a form of arrogant imperialism. Kleveman continues with another interesting reflection on Western policy with regards to a what is going on in Uzbekistan:

"Besides raising the spectre of inter-state conflict, the Bush administration is wooing some of the region's most tyrannical dictators. One of them is Islam Karimov, the ex-communist ruler of Uzbekistan, whose regime brutally suppresses any opposition and Islamic groups. "Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I will shoot them myself," Karimov once told his rubber-stamp parliament. Although the US state department acknowledges that Uzbek security forces use "torture as a routine investigation technique", Washington last year gave the Karimov regime $500m in aid and rent payments for the US air base in Chanabad. The state department also quietly removed Uzbekistan from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat. The British government seems to support Washington's policy, as Whitehall recently recalled its ambassador Craig Murray from Tashkent after he openly decried Uzbekistan's abysmal human rights record.
Worse is to come: disgusted with the US's cynical alliances with their corrupt and despotic rulers, the region's impoverished populaces increasingly embrace virulent anti-Americanism and militant Islam. As in Iraq, America's brazen energy imperialism in Central Asia jeopardises the few successes in the war on terror because the resentment it causes makes it ever easier for terrorist groups to recruit angry young men. It is all very well to pursue oil interests, but is it worth mortgaging our security to do so?"

Uzbekistan, which most westerners even don't know where it is, doesn't scare anyone. But if moral issues don't bother us, we should at least ask ourselves if Russia itself will continue to stay a political stable and reliable partner of the West? Does this policy, blind on the democratization processes, not favor an opposite tendency? What if Russia will fall back to a violent dictatorship, as it will possibly do?

These questions didn't bother much neither politicians (Bush famously said after meeting Putin in June 2001 that he had gotten "a sense of his soul" ), nor most analysts, and despite the fact that Russia has neither a strong industrialized economy (and strongly tied to mafia organizations) nor a robust democracy and was perpetrating the worst war crimes and human rights violations (also all over the Russian federation itself) the West didn't hesitate to invite the new found "democracy" in the European Council, in the "G-7", which represented the worlds most industrialized countries, and which is now the "G-8", and foresees its membership in the World Trade Organization.

The western obsession of the 1990's to favor purely economic reforms in Russia, believing that this alone would have been sufficient to lead it to political reforms, democracy and stability, is another political equation which proved to be false. After all EU-based firms represent about half of all foreign investment in Russia. Indeed Putin has made Russia's progress toward a market economy almost irreversible, in part through a string of impressive economic reforms, like implementing a flat tax, and a range of other important changes to the country's economic infrastructure, such as land, pension, judicial, and labor reforms. But the theoretical premise that the introduction of the rules of the free and open market alone, would lead automatically to political democratic reforms were wrong (nothing new for anyone who doesn't suffer of historical amnesia). On the contrary, nowadays it becomes clear that it is just the failure to realize political reforms and that an economy based on authoritarian and corrupt methods prevailed, which are at the root of the widening disparities of income, of the widening gap between rich and poor regions, of the implosion of the banking system, of the many companies forced to pay bribes and protection money to criminal organizations, of the endemic corruption that governs almost any sector of society, of the 36 million of Russians which live under the poverty level, of the hundreds of billions of stolen dollars that have been taken abroad, and of the hundred thousand homeless which must survive on the streets of Moscow (many of them dying in Russia's well known extremely cold winter conditions). It is unlikely that, unless some fundamental changes are made to enhance the rule of law and the respect for human rights, the economy and its business environment will significantly improve.

In 2002, Transparency International announced that Russia was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Police corruption has became a systematic phenomenon and ruling clans feel comfortable with corrupt police officers and contract killings had become a common occurrence in Russia. Putin's Russia seems, in fact, to have become a sanctuary for criminals. It is not clear why Putin doesn't take any initiatives against the epidemic proportions of crime and corruption throughout the whole Russian society. One possible explanation might be that that the criminal activity has become an uncontrollable parallel state power against which an attempt of resistance can become dangerous even for the highest state heads.

Anyhow, Western governments, instead of trying to help Russia out of this spiral of corruption and crime, an attempt which after all would be in its own interest, decided to project its view not too far away, and only looked after immediate advantages. Radio Free Europe, synthesized this quite eloquently^[8]:

"The criminalization of Russia has not gone unnoticed by the West, but neither has the West done anything meaningful to help stem the tide. Western European governments, reliant on Russian natural gas (Russia supplies some 25 percent of Western Europe's natural gas) have kept silent about the charges being leveled at their Russian partners for fear of having their gas supplies cut off. Warnings of the dangers of Russian organized crime issued by Europol and other law-enforcement agencies are ignored and swept under the carpet in the hope that they will simply go away. Russia is being touted as a reliable partner in the war against terrorism, and thus has become seemingly immune to criticism for widespread criminality. Most Western policymakers are largely ignoring the dramatic increase of Afghan heroin flowing from Russia and Central Asia to Western Europe, for instance."

No mercy: no right for self-determination

When Chechens asked for self-determination and the recognition by the international community of the republic's sovereignty, no country in the world replied, with only one exception: the Russian government itself during a short period before CW2 broke out and the Afghan Taliban government (tough to late, on January 16^th 2000). And the West now wonders how it is possible that among some Chechens a sympathy for Islamic extremism surfaced! The leitmotiv is that Russia has the right to maintain its territorial integrity. Of course every country has this right. But should Chechnya be considered part of Russia's territory? History alone tells that Chechnya isn't part of Russian's territory, it is part of the Russian Federation - an invention of the Bolsheviks - which does not exist any more.

But here also the West had a clear opinion: it continued to consider the Caucasian tensions and wars as an exclusively Russian domestic affair. "Russia has the right to preserve its territorial integrity", is the Western typical leitmotiv.

It is also noteworthy that while Ukraine had been recognized by the US as an independent entity, they did not recognize Georgia and the southern Caucasus the same right to exist, because, so we are told, that might have determined a chain reaction, the so called "domino effect" of secessions among other republics and the dissolution of the Russian empire with a possible political and military destabilization. According to this theory a cruel and violent dominion of imperial subjugation of millions is more effective in producing stability and peace, than the dissolution of it and granting people the right for self-determination. On the long run however, facts (and one might say also the entire world history) seem to show quite the contrary. About hundred different ethnic groups exist in the Russian Federation. The attempt to impose any form of suppression on these ethnic identities can only lead to centrifugal tendencies. The dogma of a "united and integral Russia" is an obsession with everyone, and not only in Russia, but apparently worldwide.

In the 1990s the Georgian-Abkhazian and Armenian-Nagorni-Karabak conflicts broke out and terrible civil wars and bloodsheds followed. It is almost unknown to the Western public that in Abkhazia an ethnic cleansing killed 25.000 Georgians that were the majority (250.000) by the hands of a minority of Abkhazians (90.000). This could happen only thanks to a massive political and military support from Moscow, which as usual welcomes any ethnic destabilizing war. Similar data one finds also for the Armenian conflict (29.000 killed and 1.5 million refugees). Today the conflict settled down but these regions remain still a place of tension and uncertain future. The recognition of the Caucasian republics might have instead contributed to sustain Russian moderate political forces, avoid the electoral success of ultra-nationalistic quasi-fascist parties (e.g. Zhirinovsky electoral success in 1993 and again ten years later) and perhaps might have even controlled the renewed Russian expansionism.

But its too late now. This worldwide refusal to recognize Chechnya's independence did only enforce Islamic extremism demanding separation and finally led it to terrorism. But just for this reason, the insistence to deny self-determination finds now its new justification in turning upside down the whole logic which goes like: "we can't recognize now the independence of Chechnya because that would be a present to terrorists". But can we pretend a moderate behavior from side of those who have been completely abandoned from the international community and to those any hope for a better future is refused? At the same time its not entirely clear then why the very same people, after more than half a century of war and terrorism in the middle-east, now advance the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict can be solved only by building an independent Palestinian state. And they don't see in this a present to terrorism, but to the contrary, we are now told that it is the only way out to it. Parallels and comparisons of Chechnya with the middle-east conflict is always dangerous and frequently misplaced. However in this case we can not refrain from remembering how the entire international community pressured for an "autonomous" Palestine inside Israel. And when, at the end of the last millennium, there has been the agreement between Barak and Arafat, under the supervision of Clinton's administration, where Gaza and the West Bank became finally the "autonomous territories" of Israel, we could see how it ended. There is no reason to believe that a Chechen "autonomous territory" inside the Russian Federation will meet a different destiny. The hate and the desire for wrath from both sides is now so deeply engraved that it makes definitely the hope for a peaceful coexistence inside a Chechen republic, with whatever "vast autonomies", a vain chimera.

Indeed, the point is that we will have to accept sooner or later in the case of the Caucasian republic too, that there is no other way out. To believe that some peaceful solution might be found without Chechnya's independence will reveal itself an utopia. There was, and still is, no other choice than recognizing the goal of statehood and of a sovereign independent Chechnya. Chechnya's secession, eventually under a conditional independence under interim supervision of the UN or some other multinational force, can help also Russia to leave its past behind and hence step forward towards a new modern, stable and democratic Russia. The Western refusal to grant recognition to break away republics could instead only be interpreted by Russian generals as a signal of a quite acceptance by the West in case of invasion and a war in Chechnya or in every other Caucasian region.

Apparently it was not clear enough what anyone with a reasonable common sense knows: to suffocate the desire for liberty and oppose the logic of history which drives towards the self-determination of peoples who have been forced for generations to live under a repressive dominion, could only generate renewed violence.

The Kossovo war connection In 1991 this was the same mistake the West did in refusing to recognize the imminent dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. Western insistence to deny people's sacrosanct right of self-determination did certainly contribute to tensions which ended in the worst humanitarian disaster in the Balkans since World War II. Russia is one of the greatest arms suppliers to authoritarian regimes like Syria, the Iraq under Saddam Hussein, China, etc. It might be useful to remember that in 1995, Moscow financed with $1.5 billion Slobodan Milosevic's army which was already well known for its brutality (also Russian volunteers were present among Serbian troops). Russia's influence on the Serbian regime was well known too. The US had to hurry up to convince Yeltsin to other tactics. It is no secret that in the same year Clinton obtained the results that led to the Dayton compromise on Bosnia only because Yeltsin had been convinced to abandon Milosevic to his fate. While Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright was working hard to convince the international community in recognizing Milosevic as a war criminal, she didn't however hesitate in praising Putin as "one of the leading reformers" of Russia's history. What did Clinton and the allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) get in exchange? Despite the official Russian protests they got carte-blanche from Russia for the war in Kossovo. In April 1999, the NATO intervention in Kossovo took place. During the Kossovo campaign, the Caucasus was a chip in the international poker game. In order to buy Russia's passivity, it received another $4.5 billion and the extinction of at least a part of its debts (decided in the following G8 summit in June). In Brussels, NATO general secretary, Lord George Robertson, condemned the offensive in Chechnya but immediately underlined that it is Russia's domestic affair. The message was clear: NATO asked Russia to renounce to its political and especially military support of the Serbian regime and in exchange it got financial aid and the Western silence on Chechnya. CW2 broke out at the end of the same year.

Albright & Putin

The same strategy worked during NATO's enlargement to the former Warsaw Pact nations. Many observers advanced the hypothesis that during a summit in Moscow in 1995, Russia obtained from the US many concessions in exchange of its acceptance of this enlargement. One could also easily foresee that this could give Russia only a reason more to conduct an aggressive policy in the Caucasian region. Nowadays this hypothesis seems to be amply confirmed.^[9]

Today's Russia has many similarities with the former Serbian regime under Milosevic. And nevertheless, on May 28, 2002, Russia became a member of the NATO Council. This is actually only a structure of consultation and cooperation which has no real executive power, but a very shortsighted and blind policy is imposing itself again which advances the proposal, as several high ranking Western authorities do, to bring the Russian forces, as they are today, that is without any reform and the rule of law, effectively under the NATO umbrella. For example the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi wants Russia in the NATO and the EU. Romano Prodi, head of the European Commission, however criticized this proposal. Perhaps because of his concerns about human rights in the Russian Federation and in Chechnya? No, because of purely economical reasons.

Among other things this policy has indirectly favored the perception based on a widespread political cultural relativism, especially among pacifists, according to which NATO's violations of humanitarian laws in Kossovo, and we might also add those occurring later in the following US war in Afghanistan and during the war in Iraq led by the Anglo-American coalition four years later, were substantially comparable with the abuses committed by Russian forces in Chechnya. But whatever opinion one might have on these events it is undeniable that the number of civilian casualties, the level of destruction and the atrocities perpetrated in the first case, tough if present and deplorable, can not in the least be paralleled with what happened in Chechnya. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Kossovo, there was an attempt, even if perhaps not sufficient and certainly not always efficient, to avoid civilian casualties, to furnish a first humanitarian aid in form of provision of food and medicines, to win over the population, and the press was allowed to visit war zones and report worldwide what was going on. In the Chechen conflict instead nothing alike could be seen: the disregard for civilian casualties was amply evident, the deaths toll much higher, the bombardments indiscriminate and almost no help was offered to refugees while the media blackout was and still remains complete. Moreover US and NATO forces did not fill Kossovo, Afghanistan and Iraq with death squads, concentration camps and mass graves of thousands of innocent civilians tortured and killed. Russian forces in Chechnya did. The Chechen wars are not even remotely resembling these other conflicts. This of course does not justify as such these wars, but a lack of discrimination which tends to level everything on a common denominator leads usually to falsehood and disinformation, doing after all the interests of those who want war and not peace. In other words, Western societies still have the right and duty to be critical on the war in Chechnya. Its critique can not so simply be dismissed at once simply on the ground of its violations of the Geneva conventions it committed too in other conflicts.

Today Putin puts into action in Chechnya what Slobodan Milosevic accomplished in a rather botched way in Kossovo. And why does the latter face the war crimes court, while the former is allowed to be called a "friend" by Western realpoliticians? Of course Putin and Milosevic can't be compared - the former has many more deaths on his conscience. To put it in the words of the Danish expert on Chechnya, Norbert Strade:

"The persecution of war crimes is working well now with regard to former Yugoslavia. But the cases against Milosevic and his gang members are devaluated by the fact that other European leaders who have committed far worse acts - like Yeltsin, Putin and their many accomplices - enjoy a reputation as 'democrats' and 'friends'. This policy of screaming double standards makes the Hague trials a farce, since it reveals that Milosevic isn't persecuted because of the crimes he committed, but because of his political activities against Western interests. It shows that the Hague court isn't a legal, but a political instrument, just as Milosevic claims. It also shows that in today's Europe you can behave like Hitler and Stalin with total impunity, as long as you support the geopolitical interests of the bigger powers. Of course this doesn't mean that Milosevic, Milutinovic and the rest shouldn't be behind bars, but they should be there based exclusively on legal reasons, and they should be joined by everyone who committed similar or worse crimes."

Other aspects of Western's "pragmatic realism"

However, this was only the beginning of the cynical Realpolitik. What followed was the Chechen humanitarian disaster. The EU, especially in its representation under the flag of the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, Poul Nielson, was silent and inactive. In front of more than 100,000 refugees and the widespread atrocities, Nielson couldn't find in three years the time to visit Chechnya. The curious and sad fact that for some mysterious reason more than 70 % of the EU's humanitarian aid "disappears" in the Russian's and/or Chechen bureaucratic quagmire, is apparently of no concern for anyone.^[10]

Meanwhile the Western complicity seems to be not only passive but tends to become a deliberate policy of conscious direct and active involvement in a genocidal campaign against Chechens. According to Tilman Zülch, the general secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples, in March 2000, that is immediately after the complete destruction of Grozny, a delegation of the German intelligence agency (BND) met with Russian special services in the Chechen capital. Thousands corpses of dead Chechen civilians were still under the rubble and what was the subject of discussion? The threat of Chechen terrorism! In April Germans began providing Moscow with information delivering military intelligence for battlefield use to the Russian side. The material delivered consisted of information acquired through a German listening station in the Pamir mountains, Pakistan, close to Afghanistan and China, code-name "Lanze" (lancet), which was (or still is) able to scan the complete radio traffic from Afghanistan and all the way to the Caucasus, including Chechnya. Detailed information about the location of Chechen troops and their operational plans came through BND agents working in Ingushetian refugee camps who were (and still are?) systematically questioning refugees about these details. The Russian side has been able to target certain areas based on this information. After a secret session in the parliamentary committee, a lid was placed on the story, the political discussion stopped and the German press obediently didn't write about it anymore.^[11] Possibly the activities are continuing even today (and this seems to be indirectly confirmed by Germans renewed involvement on the Georgian side and emphasized by the recent visit to Tbilisi, on 4 March 2003, of the German interior minister Otto Schily who met with Georgian Border Service head Lieutenant General Valeri Chkheidze, Interior Minister Koba Narchemashvili, and President Shevardnadze. Topics discussed included closer cooperation between the two countries' interior ministries in the fight against international terrorism^[12]). German's secret services complicity with Russia's criminal activities seems not to stop here. J. Roth ^[12b], while detailing how German investigators uncovered a complex web of relationships and transactions that link the German company SPAG, a company set up ostensibly to invest in St. Petersburg real estate where Putin was once a member of the supervisory board, and his co-founder Rudolf Ritter in Liechtenstein to the Colombian cocaine and transcontinental money laundering for Russian criminal gangs, reports that a transcript of a taped conversation between Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his security chief Leonid Derkach on June 2 and June 4, 2000, survived a general attempt to destroy every information linking Putin to SPAG and trying to shove the whole affair under the carpet. The conversation, which was taped by former presidential bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko, who later fled to the U.S., had been judged to be authentic by a US leading company run by a leading former FBI specialist, including the conversation about Putin. If Putin's involvement in this criminal affair is highly suspect but still lacks of a firm ground of evidences, sure is that Russian secret services have done their utmost to buy up all the compromising documents from their colleagues throughout Europe. In particular according to Roth's transcript, the Germans sold them out materials which are said to contain "genuine facts", helping them in eliminating any possible evidence linking Putin to SPAG's illegal behaviors. The BND's protection of Putin with regards to his possible involvement in a cocaine cash laundering for the Cali cartel should come as no surprise. As Roth says: "[German Chancellor Gerhardt] Schroeder was very afraid that there were direct links between the Liechtenstein investigations and Putin. This was a time when Russia and Germany had good relations for the first time."

Almost certainly all this is only the typical "tip of an iceberg". One must remember, too, that everybody involved here keeps saying that "the others" (US, Britain, France) "have done much more".

Later, in April 2001 the EU not only ignored Maskhadov's appeals for help to reach an armistice without any preconditions in the view of a political solution, but even refused him a simple Shengen visa! And the last straw before the attack of September 11th, came during the July 2001 meeting between Bush and Putin. As it is well known the Bush administration has on its agenda a system of national missile defense. However on its way stood the modification or abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) which the Russian side still considered a valid agreement. In an extreme attempt to change Putin 's mind on the subject, Bush made extraordinary public endorsement of him, sympathizing with Putin's deep "concern about extremism and what extremism can meant to Russia". His public support and unwillingness to criticize Russian means in Chechnya, abdicating US authority to speak out about human rights in Russia, did however not convince the Russian President to follow him in the so called "star wars" project, and obtained only the result of reassuring him that he continues to have a free pass in Chechnya.

Aslan Alijewitsch Maskhadov

The alliance between the Western liberal and democratic nations with a rising illiberal criminal power nostalgic of its imperial past was already strong and an established fact. Only two months later Bush will have to confront with the most devastating terrorist attack in US history led by extremists once supported by the United States and inspired and financed by an Afghan Taliban regime which was after all the outcome of another Russian-Soviet senseless war: today one of the most cited and well known results of pragmatic realism.

The holy "anti-terorism" alliance

After the attacks on the Twin Towers, the West has deep concerns on Chechen's terrorism and its state heads don't miss a chance to express their condolescence to Putin when someone dies by the hands of Chechen terrorists. Immediate are the US' and EU' offers of logistic and intelligence support in sign of solidarity when Chechen terrorist stage an attack. This is obviously all fine and well: acts of terrorism must of course be unreservedly condemned. In different occasions they expressed their condolescence also when Russian soldiers died during military operations (typically when Russia suffers heavy casualties because of Chechen rebels shooting down military helicopters). This is fine too: every loss of life, be it of civilians or soldiers, is regrettable.

But not a word of condolescence came for the 150,000 civilians bombed, tortured, raped and killed by Russian forces. Not a single question came from Western state heads for the whereabouts of the 3000 "disappeared". And not a single offer of humanitarian aid for the hundreds of thousands of refugees has been heard from the side of Blair, Chirac, Bush, etc. With the war on Islamic terrorism the West found a reason more to continue with its deafening silence, almost never rising its voice against Russia's federal forces daily abuses. If on terrorism now it rages a war, on state terrorism at best it turns blind eye and frequently it even allies with it. US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage during a visit to Moscow said that the United States are working "very closely" with Russia and that "anyone who kills civilians for political aims is anathema to us". One should have asked him why then he was shaking the hands of those responsible of the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and why the administration he makes part of now considers the sufferance of those crippled, tortured and robbed only a little disturbing but quite normal necessity to establish a worldwide anti-terrorism alliance and "security" system.

Chechens separatism is now frequently linked with Al Qaeda. Interesting is that Putin has played a major role in changing the image of Chechens from "separatists" (early in his presidency in 1999-2000) to "international terrorists" (especially after September 11^th) to "Islamic terrorists with global ambitions" (after October 23, 2002). However, fact is that, so far, not a single Chechen was found among the Talibans in Afghanistan (but Americans and Australians have been found), nor has any Chechen been arrested in the worldwide sweeps against international terrorism after September 11^th. There was not a single Chechen in Guantanamo Bay, the US naval base in Cuba where suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants are being held (but there were eight people from Russia and another eight from Britain!). That stories about connections between al-Qaeda figures Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who supposedly trained in Chechnya, are not well-documented and came out long after the fact and in the context of the post-September 11 anti-terrorism efforts. There are a number of Arab fighters who were detained in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, an area not far from the border with Chechnya, where many Chechen militants are believed to shelter, but this is all one-way traffic: this might hint to extremist Arabs taking an interest in Chechnya but there are so far no confirmed reports of Chechens actually leaving Chechnya and fighting outside.^[13] Also during the war in Iraq, Chechens fighting for Saddam were reportedly arrested and detained. Considering that Saddam stood officially always on the side of Russia against the Chechen cause this sounds really strange and would require a better check. But in spite of all these statements, none of the Chechens were ever shown, whether dead or alive, and these rumors so far had not been confirmed officially. Thousands of western journalists visited Afghanistan and reported about every sort of findings among the Taliban sympathizers but not one journalist reported about an encounter with a single Chechen. Among the 3,500 al-Qaeda/Taliban prisoners of war held by the Northern Alliance at Shiberghan, not a single Chechen has been identified.^[13b] Finally it is also noteworthy that during the ten years long conflict, so far, not a single human being has been killed by chechen rebels beyond the Russia-Chechen borders.

Indeed strange coincidences occur which might in fact suggest links with international terror organizations. A terrible suicide bombing in Chechnya on May 12, 2003, against the police and FSB headquarters in Znamenskoye, which killed 55, was followed by explosions that devastated Western compounds in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, 14 hours later. Russian officials immediately sought to link the two events. President Vladimir Putin said the attacks 1,300 miles apart followed an "absolutely identical" scheme and caused "absolutely comparable" devastation. Alexander Yakovenko, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said, "The blasts in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and other places -- these are links in the same chain." However, again officials didn't offer any evidence beyond mere speculations for their claims. Also this hypothesis remains so far only a part of a great Chechen-Al Qaeda unproved conspiracy theory.

Summarizing, If there is an Al Qaeda link it can't be that great and extensive as it is continuously suggested. After all its not difficult to understand how all this can be. Actually Chechens have much more serious things to worry about than fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere outside Chechnya! And if there is any Al-Qaeda's embrace of Chechnya or some Al-Qaeda website featuring scenes from the Chechnya war in order to motivate their own sympathizers, this does not necessarily mean that Chechens have embraced Al-Qaeda. It is not unlikely that the Russian FSB works hard to exaggerate and manipulate such stories because of Russia's interest in positioning its war as part of the wider fight against terrorism (like for instance to stage a farcical attempt to kill Putin by chechen snipers, as it turned out on October 2003 in London). Moreover there is definitely a difference between an Al Qaeda and the Chechen separatists demanding self-determination: with the former there is no chance of any possible negotiation, whereas the latter are only waiting the Kremlin for a political talk which however refuses to engage in any negotiations. But the central point remains that Chechen terrorism, with or without having any sort of links with international terror organizations, has its source in a frustrated and brutalized generation compelled to live in a territory without rights in which laws and international conventions are suspended. Things can not be simplified by a mere ideological embrace of Islamic fundamentalism. The origins of terrorism in Chechnya have noting in common with what induced the well educated and well-off Saudi Arabian kamikaze to fly into the Twin Towers. Chechen terrorists simply don't need Al Qaeda. The basic human rights violations against their families is amply sufficient to motivate them and it is easy to predict that unfortunately suicide attacks will remain commonplace if nothing changes for the better in the little break away Chechen Republic.

And the West approves. The already extremely reluctant and inactive Western policy with regards to human rights is now definitively fading away as, after September 11^th, Putin asked free hand to abuse without criticism combatants and civilians in Chechnya, in exchange of his active engagement in the holy alliance against the global war on terrorism. The US blind eye on Russia's genocidal activities, abusing the concept of a "war on terrorism", increased also because of its desperate search for allies in an attack on Iraq (just during the Iraq crisis the US State Department declared three Chechen organizations to be terrorists: two of which apparently don't exist and one isn't even considered a terrorist organization by Russia itself! ^[14]). This led the Bush administration more than ever into complicity with the most bloody regime in Europe since World War 2. This did however not lead to the hoped results: Russia finally opposed the intervention in Iraq.

Anyhow, even if Al Qaeda is or will be present in Chechnya this should not surprise: Chechens, devastated by the Russian onslaught and by western cynicism, might now take help from wherever they could get it. Or, to put it in Jessica Stern's words, an expert on terrorism at Harvard University: "The conflict in Chechnya is about independence, it has nothing to do with Islam, but this is a good example of a group of rebels who recognize that if they describe themselves as mujahedeen, money will come pouring in." Vain seem to be the appeals of Elena Bonner (widow of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet physicist and Peace Nobel laureate), who, when asked about the roots of terrorism in Chechnya, replies: "It comes from a decade of war, chaos and corruption in the Russian army, marauding, robbery, endless cleansings of civilian population, the disappearance of people, torture, execution without trial of civilians, and secret mass graves that have been discovered in almost every region of Chechnya."

Most Chechen are Sufi Muslims, i.e. belong to the mystic and more peaceful stream of Islam, and have no sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism. However, the brutality of the conflict is forcing them towards the extremism of the Wahhabi Muslims - exponents of one of Islam's most belligerent movements. Wahhabi militants had until recently almost none support among the Chechen population. Even now, Chechen human rights workers estimate that only around one tenth of the population is sympathetic to the Wahhabis. The term "jihad" and the notion of a holy war was practically unknown in a secularized chechen society. Still in the 1997 presidential elections, a candidate as Movladi Udougov, who placed the Islamic rhetoric at the center of his electoral campaign, could not score higher than a 0.9% of preferences.

Unfortunately some Chechen warlords, Russia and the international community seem to do their best so that this might change with time passing by. The danger is that just this realpolitical international "anti-terrorism" policy, which leaves a desperate population alone, will instead definitely open the gates of Chechnya to international Islamic extremism. Because it is this what might now appear, in the mind of many Chechens, left alone and confronting with a genocide, the only possible solution left.

There seem to be also other interests behind American's anti-terror policy which are less known. In the Pankisi Gorge, which is populated by Georgianized Chechens and many Chechen refugees, is officially considered by the US administration as an al-Qaeda terrorist hangout. Colin Powell told to the world about al-Qaeda agents located in the Pankisi Gorge during his speech before the UN over Iraq. But again, so far no convincing and tangible evidence has been found and at no time before September 11, 2001 did anyone credibly propose that al-Qaeda terrorists were present in Pankisi. Also several journalists, looking high and low through Pankisi, staying with the Chechen guerrillas and refugees, tried to find evidence for al-Qaeda's existence. Turks, Azerbaijanis, Afghans and according to M. Irkali, even one Japanese fighter was found, but no al-Qaeda. And, apart from these sporadic guerrilla, generally the situation appears to be calm: even President Shevardnadze invited French Interior Minister Daniel Vaillant to Pankisi gorge to get him familiar with the current situation there and "to make him sure that there is no danger there", he declared during a briefing held in the State Chancellery on May 12, 2003.^[15]

Perhaps one key to understand US insistence on the al-Qaeda presence in Pankisi is to recall that the American army is already in Georgia and the forces stationed there will soon - without any enemy - be much larger. A US-Georgian military agreement is opening up the country to an undetermined number of American bases: it provides without visa the entry into the republic of US soldiers, positioning on its territory of American military technology, armaments and their free movement. Officially to train Georgian armed forces in the fight against al-Qaeda terrorists. Russian and the U.S. security agencies take part in the "normalization" of the situation in Pankisi. Then one should also not forget that the US are building the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which will be operational by 2005. Georgia, eager to move out of the shadow of its huge neighbor Russia, has aggressively pursued ties with the United States and offered use of Georgian air bases for the war in Iraq. In summary the al-Qaeda/Pankisi theory is at least partially a fabricated myth. It looks much more as a pretext to justify US growing military presence in Georgia and to guard future military, strategic and commercial interests which are still in Russia's sphere of influence.

The «Chechen terrorist trace» seems to have been fabricated for political purposes or, if it really exists, it has been greatly exaggerated. The frequency and continuity of these unconfirmed reports seems to hint at the conclusion that it is supposed to leave a trace in the minds of the Western public in order to weaken the opposition against Russian abuses and crimes in Chechnya.

However it is, the main point is that political, strategic and economical interests are put forth on the back of Chechen refugees who are now continuously accused of protecting al-Qaeda members in their community and the Chechen cause is criminalized worldwide, because this turns out to be a convenient and easy strategy to achieve some precise goals. Especially in Georgia and Ingushetia arrests of refugees as "members of terrorist organizations and gangs" in the context of a general anti-terror campaign does not have to be based on convincing evidence. Illegal detentions, improper behavior towards people, and looting in the course of a sweep-up in the region are an everyday occurrence. There seem to be cases of refugees disappeared without trace after being arrested by Georgian police. Refugees complain that the activities of the Georgian security forces are no different from the barbaric tactics employed by the Russian occupying forces in Chechnya. Russia then asks for them to be handed over, accusing them of terrorism and other serious crimes. For a Chechen to be extradited to Russian prisons frequently means that he will have to go through the torture chamber and die. Moreover, the indirect effect of this criminalization is that humanitarian support and medical assistance (many of them are chronically ill, and struggled to survive the winter) is absolutely insufficient with an international community that remains almost completely indifferent. As Ozerskaya writes^{[15b] : "}The precarious situation of Chechen refugees in Georgia may deteriorate even further in response to world events. Moscow's disapproval of the military agreement between Georgia and the USA may force Tbilisi to reach some compromise with Russia, for example in resolving the painful question of the Chechen refugees. They may become pawns in the great political game being played out by states in conflict. What will become of them, desperate to find shelter no matter where, yet kicked under the carpet by Moscow's military policies, the inhumanity of Georgia's security forces, and the apathy of the whole world?"

In the Arabic world and also in Turkey every sober man on the street knows very well that the Chechen fight for freedom and independence from the Russian repression is justified on every ground. One has not to be a fanatic follower of the Jihad or devotee to an Islamist sect to have this view. If the Western society will continue to allow only Al Qaeda to be the only helper of the Chechen cause, the war on terrorism might take the wrong way. The former Israeli Defense Minster, David Levy, who declared that "Russia has no other way... than to fight against terrorism with all available means"^[15c] underlines only how he has no understanding of the situation. The idea that Russia's "war on terrorism" might be a guarantee against the proliferation of Islamic extremism in Asia and abroad sounds as an irony. And it seems that Russia, Europe and the USA did not learn the lesson of Afghanistan. The Taliban government came to power as a direct consequence of the yearlong Russian invasion that bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age reducing the population to desperation, misery and illiteracy. In this material, social and political environment Al Qaeda found a fertile ground to grow up. Will Chechnya meet the same destiny?

The double standards policy

Only recently, fortunately, after the constant pressure of human rights NGO's and the rare but sometimes effective media reports about the atrocities in Chechnya, it became clear that the Chechen problem is also a political one and can not be solved only by military means. Now the West conducts a double standard policy: it expresses pity for civilian victims and pleads for a vague "political solution" but, at the same time, it never forgets to add its "understanding" for the difficult situation the Russian authorities have to confront with. An unambiguous message does however not emerge. And so far, to these declarations, did not follow a clear pressure on Russia. The West continues to be far away from taking any necessary initiative. A resolute condemnation of Russia's war crimes and crimes against humanity from the side of its state heads, as they do with Chechen terrorism, is not contemplated. This typical attitude, full of carefully modulated statements of "alarm", "concern" and "humanitarian" declarations seems directed much more towards its own human rights groups, which after all can't be totally ignored in a liberal system, than really aiming towards a change of mind in Moscow's authorities. Because the same statements are frequently mixed with an "understanding" for the perpetrators of the crimes they denounce.

But Chechnya serves also as a reminder of the double standards that persist in the international public opinion and in the so called "antiwar movements". If an Israeli army colonel abducted, raped, and strangled a Palestinian woman, the case would likely send shock waves around the world and we would see mass demonstrations all over Europe. Yet we don't see almost no Western "intellectuals" comparing the Russian military to the Nazis or that are somehow engaged for a peaceful resolution of the Chechen case (there are however notable exceptions as for instance the French philosopher André Gluksmann or British Oscar winning actress Vanessa Redgrave). No one is calling on universities to divest themselves from companies that trade with Russia or for boycotts, as it is frequently the case with the state of Israel. And nevertheless the human rights violations in Israel are incomparably less than those occurring in Chechnya. Double standards appear also among pacifists: the violations of the Geneva Conventions to Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba inflamed European public opinion. However the fact that thousands are illegally detained, tortured, raped and killed in Chechny's filtration camps seems to be of no concern for anyone of them.

What lacks is a psychological identification with the Caucasian culture, story and history. Most Europeans and Americans even don't know where Chechnya is and almost no one perceives it as a part of Europe. It simply doesn't resonate with peoples psychology, imagination, feeling and perception. A lack of oneness with its culture is the missing link. But this has no justification and is based only on ignorance. Chechens are far more likely to dress in leather jackets or traditional headscarves than chadors.

The approval to a genocidal policy by the "humanitarian" Europe

It is quite clear that the commercial and political consequences, in case of criticism, might be unpredictable for most politicians with weak ideals. The fear to irritate the Russian bear is strong in almost any politician, diplomat and bureaucrat who are not accustomed to manage truth. The grip of the powerful forces of fear play with their shortsightedness and their empty moral status, controlling almost entirely their political actions to such a degree that even the structures originally conceived for humanitarian purposes became instead just the voice of those they were supposed to resist. Putin can conduct his bloody war in almost perfect tranquillity.

Among other things the Council of Europe (CoE), its parliamentary assembly (PACE) and especially the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have been conceived for monitoring and controlling the respect of human rights throughout 55 European states. The OSCE mandate spelled out that it had a duty to "promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the establishment of facts concerning their violations." But its far too mild criticism against human rights violations has been so far its distinctive sign.

The aims of the CoE are among other things those "to protect human rights, pluralist democracy and the rule of law and to help consolidate democratic stability in Europe by backing political, legislative and constitutional reform". The statute of the CoE states that every "European state can become a member of the Council of Europe provided it accepts the principle of the rule of law and guarantees human rights and fundamental freedoms to everyone under its jurisdiction".

Russia's accession to the CoE required that it prosecutes crimes from CW1, but nevertheless its failure to do so has never seriously jeopardized its membership. How could Russia, despite its gross human rights violations, become a member? The facts are well described by Ib Faurby^[16]:

"In May 1992, Russia had applied for membership of the CoE, which had initiated the procedure for evaluating the Russian application. In early February 1995, however, PACE suspended the procedure due to the war in Chechnya. [...] Despite reports from its sub-committee on Human Rights, which documented continued violations of international humanitarian law, the CoE resumed deliberations on the Russian application for membership. As late as January 1996, the subcommittee delivered yet another report, strongly critical of the general legal situation in Russia. Regarding Chechnya it stated that the war had intensified and that the Russian forces were committing severe human rights violations, contrary to the promises given to the Council of Europe. Nevertheless, a week later the Parliamentary Assembly voted in favour of admitting Russia to the Council of Europe. The original demand that the war in Chechnya should be brought to an end before Russia could become a member was dropped. And this was precisely at a time where the war was escalating with large scale attacks on undefended villages and towns - notably the atrocious attacks on Sernovodsk and - for the second time - Samaski in March 1996."

After all Russia pays $25 million a year to PACE. No peanuts!

Miriam Kosmehl recalls how it was just Rudolf Bindig, a German European parliamentarian and a PACE member of the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, who justified admitting Russia to the council by saying that council members should differentiate between the "human rights situation" and a "political evaluation of the chances and perspectives for an improvement [of the situation]."

"Bindig admitted that Russia had not fulfilled the conditions for admission, but argued that the key question was whether Russia's entry could prompt it to move closer to the standards of the Council of Europe. The majority of members gave Russia the benefit of the doubt, and accepted Russia as a full member, assigning it 18 seats in the council's parliamentary assembly and making Russia one of the five largest national delegations alongside France, Italy, Britain and Germany."^[16a]

The former dissident Sergei Kovalyov, Russia's best-known human rights defender, has recounted a sharp exchange he had with Ernst Muehlemann, the Swiss chairman of the Council of Europe's committee on Chechnya during the 1996 presidential election campaign. Kovalyov complained that the council was being soft in its criticism of Russian war crimes. He says that Muehlemann responded by saying, "What do you want? For [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov and not Yeltsin to be chosen at the elections?"^[16b] This reflected what would have become a quite normal state of affairs.

During CW2 in fact the same policy continued. While the refugees crises was becoming increasingly unsustainable (200.000 living in the worst material, sanitary and hygienic conditions in tent camps) no country which signed the Geneva convention was willing to pretend an application of the international humanitarian law. Russia bombed schools, hospitals and market places with no regard for the civilian population, and those who survived were forced to flee. Meanwhile, on May 5, 1998, Russia ratified the European human rights convention and the convention for the prevention of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. At the end of July 1998 it passed a law on the suppression of terrorism which far from offering protection from human rights abuses, encourages them: article 21 states that those involved in counterterrorist operations cannot be held legally liable for injury to the life or health and damage to the property of terrorists. On October 20,1999, Russian Scud missiles stroke on an open market place killing 137 civilians and injuring 260. The images went throughout the world media. On October 25, the Italian foreign Minister Lamberto Dini said that the EU is discussing eventual "restrictive measures" against Moscow. Obviously nothing concrete followed, and Europe's infinite patience towards Russian's war crimes continued more than ever. And also the public opinion did not feel it necessary to manifest against the "collateral effects" of a war, as it is usually accustomed to do. On November 17 Médecins Sans Frontiéres sent an open letter to all the presidents and prime ministers of the OSCE asking to intervene and help with humanitarian supplies. A couple of days later the OSCE member states in Istanbul call for a political solution and on December 6 Moscow launches its ultimatum to the population of Grozny: they have to surrender or will face a massive and fast extermination. This was perhaps a little bit too much and on December 10, at a summit of the EU heads in Helsinki, a clear condemnation of Russia with the request of an immediate ceasefire was voiced otherwise the threat to cut some financial aids could become an option. This had some effect: the ultimatum was suspended. At this point Moscow realized what kind of strategy would have been the best: not a massive bombardment which could penetrate the heavy censorship curtain, but a silent terrorizing action of kidnappings, torture and extrajudiocal killings by Russian death squads on the civil population was the key. A slow genocide. And indeed, from that point on no European authority felt that it had any longer to take any new concrete action against the war in Chechnya. When the Spanish diplomat and Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Mr Alvaro Gil-Robles, visits on February 24, 2000, the capital city of Chechnya, Grozny, which is completely razed to the ground, he apparently didn't feel any shame in declaring his satisfaction about how Moscow is doing great efforts in helping civilians. Independently, in an issue of the same month of the German quarterly "Der Spiegel", Lord Robertson added that the West must "understand" the Kremlin's intervention in Chechnya, because NATO possesses evidences that "without doubts prove how there are terrorist" in Chechnya.

PACE suspended on April 6, 2000 the voting rights of the Russian delegation. But the real exclusion of Russia could have followed only through a meeting of European foreign ministers. Obviously no European foreign minister or member state wanted to break with Russia on account of human rights violations. On September 29, 2000, the CoE adopts a resolution that condemns Russia for its "indiscriminate attacks and bombardments", but magically begins to talk again about how "encouraging progresses have been made". Therefore on January 25, 2001 the 18 Russian representatives triumph striking back: their rights have been reinstated. The official justification forwarded by president Lord Russel-Johnston was again that the CoE sees "a change of attitude by the Duma [Russia's lower house of parliament] and in the Russian delegation".

The magical wand of the right for a "humanitarian interference", so insistently advocated for Kossovo and later for Irak, suddenly disappears for the Caucasian crises. Article 8 of CoE status, which governs expulsions from the CoE, has so far shown to be meaningless.

On 16 April 2002 the Russian President's special representative for human rights in Chechnya, Vladimir Kalamanov, who received more than 2,000 applications from Chechen inhabitants complaining about the actions of Russian servicemen and who declared that "no crime will be left unpunished", while until today almost none of these found any resolution, received from CoE's Secretary General Walter Schwimmer a Pro Merito medal in recognition of his efforts to protect fundamental rights and freedoms of individual citizens in the Chechen republic! And at the end of 2002, Schwimmer felt free again to state that "in six years Russia [...] has adopted its legislation to the necessities of the European Convention on human rights" because "it abolished de facto the application of death penalty". Not a word came in this statement about the fact that this legislation was only a piece of paper of no value in the true Russian and that summary extrajudical executions were a daily reality in Chechnya^[16c].

Finally the CoE submitted itself to the Russian criminal regime again and in fact became its obedient puppet.

Another typical and frequent diplomatic strategy aimed at downplaying Russian's responsibilities by overemphasizing the abuses of Chechen militants placing them at the same level of devastation and terror of federal troops during their cleansing operations, so called "zachistkas", or even equalizing the aggressor with the victim. This is again another symptom of the international unwillingness to tackle with the problem seriously. Using Zakayev's words^[17]: "It is not Russia, but Chechnya that is ablaze today. Mass graves of people tortured to death are not in Russia, but in Chechnya. It is not residents of Russian, but Chechen cities and villages who completely disappear at night. It is not one third of Russia's, but Chechnya's population that is living in tents and wandering around the world without accommodation and the right to self-defence. [And we might add that it is not 15% of Russia's, but of Chechnya's population that has been exterminated.] For this reason, it is hardly correct both from a legal and moral point of view to equalize the actions of butchers and victims - the Russian military grouping and Chechen resistance fighters."

The CoE was and remains substantially passive. For three years, especially through the voice of the former mandate of the CoE for Chechnya, Lord Judd, it boasted about the "progresses being made" and the "gradual improvements of the situation". Judd declared candidly to Politkovskaya that he will never take any steps and do nothing to break the impenetrable information ring which surrounds him and filters his work in Chechnya, simply because it is more peaceful for him. This incredible confession was complemented by Mr. Jorma Inki, a Finnish diplomat, head of the permanent mission of OSCE observers in the Chechen Republic up to 1 January 2003, who went on about his being "just an old Finnish man" and about "a pension soon". He wants to live until he reaches it and he is just about to get it.[17a] Iits now almost ten years that we hear uncountable declarations which announced a positive change but it still remains a mystery where all these encouraging progresses, improvements and changes of attitude have taken place. Facts showed that truth is different. And true seems to be also that a sort of unconscious fear hampering any real action against Russia favored unrealistic views according to which a long and painstaking quite diplomatic work should lead to some betterment. The common belief of the European diplomats was that talks and cautious, indulgent and long private diplomatic efforts, mixed with a tendency to excuse Russia's crimes, would sooner or later produce better results than clear public criticism. And while the CoE seems more interested in passing (sometimes very ambiguous) resolutions, in holding seminars and meetings, its weakness in actively bringing humanitarian relief to refugees who are starving and freezing in tent camps or forcibly returned to the war zones, remains amply evident: doing otherwise would entail an indirect recognition of Russia's responsibilities.

Lord Judd

It was easily predictable that this cynical policy could not change anything. Quite the contrary, while Europe was talking and writing with tact, Moscow showed to be quick to seize on its self-serving motives or double standards as an excuse to ignore its advice. The adoption of an obsessing political correctness and indulgence with regards to Russia's war crimes is obtaining the opposite results: now the CoE is used by Russian media to suggest that in Chechnya things have changed substantially, that schools are being filled, houses are being built and that jobs are available. Just that organization originally conceived to monitor on human rights violations is now used to shield it.

One example of the Council's ineffectiveness might be clarified by observing its attitude to a recent referendum held in Chechnya. Let us focus in detail particularly on this event.

Putin's stratagem was to stage in March 23, 2003, a referendum in which Chechen voters were asked to approve a constitution that, according to the propaganda, purports to give Chechnya a "large degree of autonomy", including its own president and parliament. It will be followed by elections by the end of the year. This might sound interesting and be welcomed by everyone who hopes for a political, democratic and peaceful solution of the conflict. However, looking behind the scenes, things acquire a very different aspect and it becomes clear that everything points exactly in the opposite direction. Those having the skills to understand the intricate bureaucratic and legal language of the constitution proposed in this referendum realized that Chechnya will remain part of the Russian federation and the right for independence isn't contemplated. The President of PACE, Mr Peter Schieder, asked a Commission to draw up an opinion on the draft Constitution of the Chechen Republic on January 17^th 2003. On March 14-15 (only a week before the voting!), without expressing an opinion whether it is opportune to hold the referendum, they however clearly outlined how such Constitution doesn't meet in many regards the standards requested for a democratic country: it reiterates Chechnya's status as part of Russia (the word "sovereignty" mentioned in the constitutions of other ethnic republics like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan isn't mentioned), the Chechen citizenship is abolished while other national republics of the Russian Federation have their own citizenship, only the Russian language, which is a mother tongue of less than 5% of the Chechen population, is established as the only official language, any candidate for presidency who espoused an independent republic was not allowed to register and run in the election campaign, the Chechen president can be deposed by the Russian president (and the Chechen president needs not to be an ethnic Chechen or a person who has had any connection to Chechnya), contrary to any international standards the Chechen president can appoint half of the members of the Central Electoral Commission, the Chechen parliament can be dissolved by the Russian parliament, there is no mention of Chechen institutions belonging to education and culture (i.e. the Kremlin can impose its desires even on this aspect), the federal procuracy will have complete control over the Chechen procuracy, including appointments, and determining the duties and responsibilities of the republican procuracy officials, the judges "answer to" Federal law but are only "guided by" Republican law, contrary to other federal constitutions there are no human rights that can not be restricted in case of emergency, the exploitation of Chechnya's resources by federal institutions without Chechens consent remains possible, and if Chechen political organizations are not branches of all-Russian political organizations their right to participate in the elections as independent entities is denied.^[18] This is what Putin calls a "broad autonomy" for Chechnya.

In any case, this referendum has been held despite that there was a lack of any public security, there were no free pluralist media (many families in the war-torn republic do not even have a television), there was no freedom of political parties, no public debate, that those who were allowed to compete for office have been handpicked in advance by the Kremlin and are unlikely to raise objections to Russian forces' repressive behavior in Chechnya, that there was no participation of the earlier elected representatives (e.g. Maskhadov), Chechens had no opportunity to oversee the vote counting and apparently no organization dared to present itself as a political opponent: no groups have registered to campaign against the referendum. "Improper results" of the referendum in any city or village could at any moment be punished by a punitive raid – a so called ‘zachistka’. In Chechnya the population was facing a dilemma whether to go to a «polling station» or disappear in filtration camps and, just to add some more humiliation, the 36,000 Russian permanently stationed soldiers (23,000 of the Russian Defense Ministry, 9,000 of the Russian Interior Ministry, and 4,000 border guards) were allowed to vote, while most of the displaced people were not. Last but not least, it goes beyond satire that, because of an outdated census held in Chechnya in 1989, and another ridiculous one of October 2002 (where, despite the war and refugees, the residing population has grown!) it seems that hundreds of thousands dead were allowed to participate: there is no guarantee that those dead souls have not been "resurrected" into pro-Moscow voters!

During the last weeks before the vote, authorities were using threats to pressure people into voting. Chechen refugees were requested to fill out a consent form to taking part in the referendum. Those who refused to fill out the form were automatically denied their bread by the Ingushetia Migration Service. Officials have struck off the bread lists a large number of refugees. Authorities silently warned that if a street, region or village won't vote as it suppose to, problems might begin - there will be no electricity, gas and pensions will arrive late.

Was this a fair and democratic referendum? Does a referendum held under gun barrels shoved to people's heads and in such social and political conditions mean anything? Is it sensible to expect that this Soviet-style maneuver, executed under the bayonet, might act as a magic wand and bring peace? Or to put it in Olivier Dupuis words, a European parliamentarian of the Transnational Radical Party, isn't this a "farce of democracy in which tens of thousands of Russian soldiers will vote in place of the very people they murder, imprison and torture every day, in place of the hundreds and thousands of Chechens who have been driven into exile"? Or, as Ilyas Akhmadov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic of Ickheria says, isn't this apparently democratic referendum not instead a "crime against democracy", a "travesty of free will" itself?

But perhaps the most important and urgent question we should ask ourselves is why after all Moscow's authorities were so anxious to held as quickly as possible a referendum and elections which, according to international law and any democratic rules, have clearly no value?

After the terrorist attack on the Dubrovka theater, which showed clearly and worldwide that, contrary to official statements, the situation in Chechnya is far from normal, Russia' strategy is now that to use this referendum and election in order to reach some precise goals:

1) Setting up an apparently democratic process that should "save the appearances", to give the impression to its own internal public opinion, but also and perhaps especially to Western governments, how Chechnya is returning to normality.

2) To put everyone in front of the given fact: the Russian backed government has to rule over Chechnya and that Chechens must forget about self-determination. After having been slaughtered, tortured, crippled, raped and robbed for centuries this "referendum" should show how Chechens still agree to be part of the Russian federation and want to be guided by a government which is after all only the Kremlin's voice.

3) Convince everyone that, having this new government, a political solution between Russia and those moderate forces struggling for democracy and human rights is no longer needed.

In other words: Moscow was trying to sell, especially to the West, its policy in Chechnya.

And what was Europe's answer?

Continues --->>

[1] From "North Caucasus Conflict: a day by day timeline", http://www.cdi.org/issues/Europe/feb.html.

[1a] From an Interview with Sergei Stepashin in the Nezavisimaja Gaseta, 14th January, 2000. & NBC interview with Stepashin - NBC exclusive: "Former prime minister held secret meetings to discuss assault", by Dana Lewis, NBC News correspindent, Moscow, Feb. 2, 200.

[1b] The Russian Politician: War in Chechnya - honourable resistance or terroirism? by Anssi Kullberg- pubblished in Finnish in Turun Sanoma, 8^th Nov. 2002.

[1c] "Against deadly silence, the truth", by Michaela Pohl/Vassar College. Review of Anna Politkovskaia, "Tschetschenien: Die Wahrheit ueber den Krieg", The Chechen Times, http://www.chda.nl/details.php?id=561〈=eng.

[1d] From a speech of Zbigniew Brzezinski at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., December 10, 2003.

[2] "The Drama Behind 'Nord-Ost'", by Vyacheslav Izmailov. Perspective, Volume XIII, Number 2 (November - December 2002).

[2b] "The Big Boss Runs for President", by Usman Dikayev, August 24th 2003. The Prague Watchdog.

[3] AFP September 26, 1999.

[4] Anne Nivat, the Moscow correspondent of the Le Nouvel Observateur, "Chechnya: Brutality and Indifference", January 6, 2003. Nivat is one of the most experienced Western journalists covering Chechnya. Her reporting is based on months of living in wartime Chechnya. She is also author of the book: "Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of War in Chechnya".

[4b] http://www.lenta.ru/russia/2003/04/25/litvinenko/ & from an Anna Politkovskaya article on Novaya Gazeta of May 5, 2003.

[4c] "Russia - Annual Report 2003", Reporters without Borders. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6529.

[4d] Chechnya Weekly: News and analysis on the crisis in Chechnya, 26 September 2003, Volume IV, Issue 34.

[4e] "Where is Abubakar?", Chechnya Weekly Volume 4, Issue 19 May 29, 2003.

[4eb] "FSB never forgets insults", 3.11.2003, PRIMA News Agency & "Real Moscow apartment blocks explosions organiser named", 14.11.2003, PRIMA News Agency.

[4f] "The Moscow Hostage Taking: One Year Later", by John B. Dunlop, Regional Analysis, RFE/RL, 27 October 2003.

[4g] "Role of one Dubrovka hostage taker is questioned...", Checnhya Weekly: News and analysis on the crisis in Chechnya, 30 October 2003, Volume IV, Issue 39. The Jamestown Foundation.

[4g2] John Dunlop, a three-part series by the "Organized Crime and Terrorism Watch" of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from December 18, 2003, to January 15, 2004. (Part 1: http://www.rferl.org/reports/corruptionwatch/2003/12/42-181203.asp / Part 2: http://www.rferl.org/reports/corruptionwatch/2004/01/1-080104.asp / Part 3: http://www.rferl.org/reports/corruptionwatch/2004/01/2-150104.asp).

[4h] From M. Ulveman's book "I spidsen for Europa" (At the peak of Europe) and the Danish public service TV station DR1 in "The Sunday Magazine", 26.10.03.

[5] "The Second Russo-Chechen War Two Years On", John B. Dunlop, Matthew Evangelista. http://www.peaceinchechnya.org/paper1.htm

[6] "Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power", Anatol Lieven, Yale University Press, 1998, p.86.

[7] "Administration Sees No Choiche but to Support Yeltsin", Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, January 7, 1995.

[7a] "The new Great Game - The 'war on terror' is being used as an excuse to further US energy interests in the Caspian", by Lutz Kleveman, The Guardian, October 20, 2003

[8] RFE/RL Vol.3, no. 6 Feb20, 2003: Crime in Putin's Russia

[9] For an interesting account (in Italian) on the connections between the Yugoslavian and Caucasian conflict see : "Caucaso, Iugoslavia: geurre dimenticate e paci precarie", Nodar Gabashvili, Antonio Stango Editore.

[10] From a statement of Olivier Dupuis at the European Parliament sitting of Wednesday, 10 April 2002.

[11] From the German ARD tv's political magazine "Monitor" of the 13 April 2002 as referred by Norbert Strade to the author.

[12] "German Interior Minister visits Georgia", RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 7, No. 42, Part I, 5 March 2003.

[12b] "Die Gangster aus dem Osten", by Juergen Roth, Europa Verlag. & "New book links Putin to underworld", by Catherine Belton, The Moscow Times, October 2, 2003.

[13] "Chechnya: Experts Play Down Links With International Terrorism", Valentinas Mite - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc. (5 Feb. 2003 )

[13b] "Shattering the al Qaeda-Chechen myth", by Brian Glyn Williams. Chechnya Weekly Volume 4, Issue 35 October 2, 2003. The Jamestown Foundation.

[14] "The US list of Chechen terrorist organizations", Department of State [Public Notice 4286] [FR Doc. 03-4781 Filed 2-27-03; 5:00 pm] BILLING CODE 4710-10-P
- Interesting is the somewhat sarcastic answer of Akhmed Zakayev saying that the "List is incomplete", referring to the fact that the US Department "forgot" to mention the Russian occupation forces as a terrorist organization. Grani.ru/CP: Ahmed Zakayev: "The list of terrorist organizations is incomplete". [http://www.chechenpress.com/news/03_2003/6_01_03.shtml] - Another source of useful information might be S.Akhmadov's account on: http://www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/article.php?id=4419.

[15] "Georgia : Welcome to America's new El Salvador", by M. Irkali, Diacritica, March 12, 2003 & "President Shevardnadze invited French Interior Minister to Pankisi", Gerogian Times News, May 12, 2003.

[15b] "Fallen between two millstones", by Albina Ozerskaya, 22.April, 2003. MSK PRIMA News Agency.

[15c] Itar-Tass press release of December 2, 2000.

[16] "The Failure of Conflict Prevention and Management: The Case of Chechnya." Part II: "International Reactions to the War. By Ib Faurby [From: Tom Trier & Lars Funch Hansen (eds.), Conflict and Forced Displacement in the Caucasus. Perspectives, Challenges and Responses. Copenhagen: Danish Refugee Council, 1999, pp. 72-81. Copyright: Danish Refugee Council and the author] (Found on the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention website - http://www.dwcw.org/).

[16a] "Suspend Russia From the Council of Europe", by Miriam Kosmehl, The Moscow Times Wednesday, Sep. 17, 2003.

[16b] The Chechen Conflict outside world, by Thomas de Waal, The Crimes of War Project. http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-waal.html

[16c] Le Monde, 26 November 2002 (as cited in "Tchètchènie: dix clès pour comprendre", Editions La Dècouverte, 2003)

[17] "Joint address by Zakayev and Khasbulatov", London BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom; Mar 8, 2003. http://www.chechenpress.com/news/03_2003/16_08_03.shtml

[17a] "The profanation of Europe. The OSCE mission has left Chechnya" by Anna Politkovskaya, Novaya Gazeta, No 1, 9 Jan 2003.

[18] Council of Europe - Venice Commission - Opinion on the draft Constitution of the Chechen Republic, Venice, 14-15 March 2003. See also a letter by Ruslan Badalov, Chairman of the Chechen National Salvation Committee, to PACE. March, 21, 2003. http://www.chechenpress.com/news/03_2003/5_21_03.shtml (in Russian) & NIS OBSERVED Volume VIII, No. 7, 23 April 2003, Chechnya part.

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