September 1, 2004

www.rockfordinstitute.org

CHECHNYA: TIME FOR THE U.S. TO END AMBIGUITY

by Srdja Trifkovic

General Alu Alkhanov, Chechen leader who supports his republic's autonomy within Russia, won a presidential election held last Sunday with over 73 percent of ballots cast. He will succeed Akhmad Kadyrov, another Kremlin loyalist who was assassinated in May. Alkhanov's closest rival, Movsur Khamidov-who also opposes separatists-received just under 9 percent of the vote.

The government's claim that the turnout was 85 percent appeared exaggerated, but the fact that the election passed peacefully-in spite of earlier warnings by Islamist separatists that they would disrupt the proceedings-represents a success for President Vladimir Putin's policy of passing authority to trusted local officials and gradually withdrawing Russian security forces. He will now find it easier than before to resist calls from Russian nationalist circles and figures linked to the military to abolish Chechen autonomy and appoint a "governor-general" to run the province instead.

Chechen separatists predictably dismissed the election as fraudulent, but international monitors and independent analysts concede that there was no overt evidence of ballot rigging or voter intimidation. "It was not an election to make an EU country proud," a Moscow-based European diplomat commented, "but considering the climate of fear in this war-ravaged land, it was a success." The election was monitored by representatives from the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Alkhanov has promised to improve the republic's human rights record and suggested that he might consider a pardon for rebels who put down their arms and denounce the separatist cause. He made clear, however, that he is not negotiating with separatist rebels now and has no intention of doin so in the future: "We will finish the rebels," he said, "we will eradicate them forever." To their leader Aslan Maskhadov the message from Alkhanov was uncompromizing: he should "apologize to the people whom he plunged into war and face a court."

Alkhanov's confident tone reflects a major shift on the ground in Chechnya since Russian forces re-entered the republic five years ago, following a Chechen incursion into the neighboring republic of Dagestan and a series of bomb attacks on apartment buildings in Russia that killed 300 people. His position was strengthened recently when Moscow agreed to a key request Alkhanov had made before the election: to give the Chechen government control over oil extraction, enabling it to use substantial revenues to fund local economic development. Alkhanov says that within three to four years oil extraction will rise from today's two million tons per year to 5 million tons, which would increase the budget of the Grozny authorities by $100 million. In addition Russia's central government will allocate $200 million annually to boost Chechnya's development.

Alkhanov's life will be in danger, and separatists have pledged to kill him just as they had killed Khadyrov. This they may well achieve, but their increased reliance on terrorism as a substitute for military activity reflects the fact that the war in Chechnya is effectively over-and the Jihadist side has lost. The rebel movement has been split and turned against itself. Many former fighters have accepted amnesty and denounced their former comrades-in-arms. Russian forces are down to 75,000 and decreasing.

That a Jihadist-infested hotspot in a sensitive area is on the road to political solution should be considered good news for the U.S. administration. That observers from the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have accepted the Chechen election as legitimate should have been welcomed in Washington as a sign that they also see the war as effectively over. The Bush administration was nevertheless quick to criticize the election, claiming it had "serious flaws." State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington that it "did not meet international standards for a democratic election," and warned that "Mr. Alkhanov now faces the difficult task of broadening support among the people of Chechnya, of bringing pluralism into the political process." He also called for "an end to human rights abuses in Chechnya by all parties," and urged that "those who committed such abuses be held accountable."

The Bush administration's attitude is at odds with the realist position taken by our European allies. Meeting with Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Tuesday, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schræder voiced their support for his policies. Chechnya would always remain a part of Russia, Putin told his guests, and pointed out that the people have made their choice: "If the Chechen people came out to vote, that means they wanted to decide their republic's future. No one dragged them by the scruff of their necks or their hair to the voting stations." Schræder responded by saying that "the Chechen conflict must be resolved politically, the way that Putin has said it would." Chirac went even further by declaring that he supported Putin in seeking a political solution that will preserve Russia's territorial integrity.

The American attitude is flawed, bizarre, and detrimental to U.S. interests.Mr. Boucher's hint that greater "pluralism in the political process" demands the inclusion of those who pursue violence in that process is something the United States quite rightly refuses to allow in Iraq. His righteous insistence that all those who committed human rights abuses should be held accountable sounds hollow in the aftermath of the Iraqi prison scandal. If the Administration is so concerned about "serious flaws" in foreign elections and insists on "international standards for a democratic election," it should have declared invalid the referendum in April 2002 that gave Pakistan's ruler and self-appointed president, General Pervez Musharraf, an extension of his "mandate" for a further five years. If Washington thinks that 73 percent of votes for Alkhanov last Sunday was suspiciously high, it is curious that Musharraf's "victory" with over 97 percent of the vote was accepted at face value. (Of that referendum the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan declared that irregularities "exceeded its worst fears.")

Musharraf was forgiven because the United States still looks upon him as the ally in the war against terror. By any token Vladimir Putin should be seen as a much more important and reliable ally in the same struggle. His constant complaint that the U.S. is reluctant to call Chechen terrorists by their right name is valid and needs to be addressed in the spirit of appreciation of Russia's importance to the global struggle we all face. The problem has acquired new urgency with the terrorist bombing in Moscow on Tuesday evening and simultaneous crashes of two Russian airliners last week that Putin says is indicative of a connection between Chechen rebels and international terrorism.

Putin's complaint of American hypocrisy over Chechnya is not new. The Clinton Administration effectively supported the separatists in the late 1990s, even to the extent of blocking a proposed $500 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to a Russian oil company that was going to be used to purchase American-made equipment.

The proponents of a tough line on Moscow in Washington-notably Deputy Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld Paul Wolfowitz-were able to establish the continuity of such policy under Bush. They rejected any strategic paradigm shift in the light of terrorist attacks. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, stated that the U.S. has "long recognized that Osama bin Laden and other international networks have been fueling the flames in Chechnya." Only weeks later, however, he was instructed to declare that the U.S. would continue opposing Russian policies in Chechnya. The ubiquitous Mr. Boucher commented that "the lack of a political solution and the number of credible reports of massive human rights violations, we believe, contribute to an environment that is favorable toward terrorism."

Such rhetoric did abate towards the end of of 2001, while Moscow's full cooperation was needed in getting the Central Asian republics on board for the Afghan war. A diplomatic concession was made to Moscow with the State Department's public admission that Chechen "freedom fighters" were linked to the Osama's group. It seemed that the U.S. finally realized that it is impossible to fight Osama and be soft on Basayev. As soon as the first phase of the war in Afghanistan was over, however, the old ambiguity was back. Exactly four months after 9-11, the same Mr. Boucher accused the Russian forces in Chechnya of "disproportionate use of force against civilian facilities" and "further human rights violations." Furthermore, State Department officials received Ilyas Akhmadov, self-styled foreign minister in Chechnya's separatist leadership. The Russians expressed "amazement" that the officials would meet with the people "whose direct links with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are being proven with constantly emerging, irrefutable evidence," but to no avail.

When in November 2001 President Bush reiterated his call on European officials to help fight the "dark threat" represented by Al-Qaeda, Putin warned that "double standards" in the international fight against terrorism could split the global coalition and warned that "there cannot be good and bad terrorists, our terrorists and others."

Terrorist attacks in the U.S. have stopped after 9-11 but in Russia they have continued to claim a steady toll over the years. In May 2002 a bomb blast killed at least 41 people, including 17 children, in the southwestern town of Kaspiisk near the Chechen border. In October 2002 over 700 hostages were seized by Chechen attackers in a Moscow theater and 120 died in the rescue operation. In December 2002 a dual suicide bombing attack on the government building in the Chechen capital, Grozny, killed 83 people.

On May 14, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to Moscow was accompanied by a suicide bombing in the Chechen capital that killed 20 people, only days after a similar attack killed 59 in northern Chechnya. The parallel with three suicide bombings in Riyadh (May 12) that killed at least 29 people, including seven Americans, was obvious. "The signature in both places is absolutely identical," President Putin declared, but Mr. Powell refused to accept that Moscow was engaged in the same global anti-terror campaign as the U.S. Only weeks later, on August 1, 2003, a hospital in the city of Mozdok was destroyed in a suicide attack killing 42 people.

The Russians are particularly irritated by the willingness of the United States to offer asylum to top Chechen leaders thay accuse of masterminding terrorist attacks, most recently on August 5 of this year when the U.S. granted asylum to the aforementioned Mr. Akhmadov, foreign minister in the separatist government of Aslan Maskhadov from 1997 to 1999. Moscow reiterated its claim that Akhmadov is a terrorist and again accused the U.S. of "double standards." Akhmadov himself fled to the US two years earlier and was also granted asylum here.

People like Maskhadov and Akhmadov are a danger to the national security of this country. Under them and their ilk, gangsterism and radical Islam went arm-in-arm in Chechnya just as they did in Bosnia and Kosovo. While they were in power, following Russian withdrawal in 1996, hundreds of Westerners and Russians-including women and children-had been taken hostage. Ransom was extracted through the use of videos that record torture and dismemberment. The Chechen leaders, like their Bosnian Muslim and Kosovo Albanian counterparts, enjoyed the support of Islamic militants from abroad, including Osama bin Laden's network.

The harmful ambiguity of U.S. policy on Chechnya needs to be ended immediately. It compromizes the "war against terror," jeopardizes national security, and gains nothing at all-least of all any brownie points for the U.S. in the Muslim world. It is high time for the U.S. government to accept that people like Maskhadov, Akhmadov, and their supporters in Russia and abroad are not just "separatists" nor "militants." They are terrorists, and should be treated accordingly.

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