April 4, 2007

Amanta Nagayeva 

Amanta Nagayeva was known to her family, affectionately it would seem, as Amnat. She was last seen with her roommate, Satsita Dzhebirkhanova, in Khasavyurt two days before they each strapped bombs to their bodies and brought down two Russian airliners, killing 90 people.

Amanta and Satsita were young Chechens, both in their mid-20s. Until shortly before they left for the Russian airport, they had worked in the central market in the capital of Chechnya, Grozny.

A week later a woman believed to be Amnat’s sister, Roza, wearing a bomb stuffed with metal bolts, set off a blast outside a Moscow subway station, killing at least 10 people and injuring 51.

The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, was quoted as saying that Roza stopped short of the subway station because she saw two police officers on duty outside the station. “She was frightened,’’ he said, “turned around and decided to destroy herself in the thick of a crowd.’’

She appeared to be frightened, he said, shortly before she blew herself up.

Although it was Satsita and Amnat and her sister Roza who performed the acts of terrorism and murder in Russia that fall, a group called the Islambouli Brigade took responsibility for both bombings on behalf of Chechen Muslims.

In the span of about a year dating from July of 2003, about 159 people died in suicide bombings carried out in Russia by female bombers.

A few weeks after the two Nagayeva sisters committed fraternal suicide, a group of Chechen terrorists took a whole country hostage on the first day of the school year in a move that sullied the Chechen independence movement with the blood of more than 170 innocent children at Middle School Number 1 in the town of Beslan.

Chechen terrorists especially the women terrorists known as black widows, were rudely trying to capture the world’s attention. Their country had been bombed to literal rubble by Russian artillery and aircraft.

As many as 250,000 Chechens were living in refugee camps across the border in Ingushetia, now in the middle of a Caucasus winter. Those remaining in Chechnya were at the mercy of marauding, rapacious Russian soldiers.

The Russian military in Chechnya was out of control and it seemed the Chechen resistance was not in control of their senses.

In Beslan, the cause of Chechen independence had taken a giant step backwards. The murder of schoolchildren, the televised images of weeping, distraught parents, did nothing to further the Chechen cause.

The world may never have looked so bleak as it does from the heights of the Caucasus.

Arthur Tsutsiev was at home that day in the Caucasian republic of North Ossetia when he received a call from his uncle, asking if it were true that a gang of Chechen terrorists had taken over a school in Beslan, located about 20 minutes away.

Tsutsiev is a mild looking man, a social scientist who is also employed as the national security adviser to the president of North Ossetia. Dressed calmly in a blue sweater with a white shirt underneath, black jeans and what looked like Beatle boots, Tsutsiev presented an academic paper Feb. 4 at Northwestern University’s Harris Hall on the Ossetian-Ingush and Ossetian-Georgian conflicts in the Caucasus. His English is competent if not superb but at times he had to lapse into Russian to make himself understood at a meeting in which Russian speakers outnumbered English speakers four to one.

After Tsutsiev confirmed what was happening in Beslan, he raced to the scene with a friend and watched the tragedy unfold from the perimeter set up by Russian security forces.

“It is our September 11^th,’’ Tsutsiev said as he gazed on the student traffic along Sheridan Road on a mild winter day in February. There was a basketball game that day at Northwestern’s McGaw Hall, and downtown shoppers skirted the muddy puddles left by an unseasonable February day in the Midwest. The foreign academicians had just dined on Chinese food, and were in the business of digesting their meals as well as several ponderous papers by their colleagues from the Caucasus.

Evanston is far from the small town where the terrorists eventually set off their  bombs in reaction to a sudden attack by the Russian security forces, incinerating many of the children who had been held in the school’s gymnasium for three days.

“This event was just one of a whole chain of events of the same kind,’’ Tsutsiev said. “There was an explosion in the marketplace in 1998 and then an attack on a hospital two years ago. I’m not saying it’s routine but the general mood is frustration at the inability to do anything to protect the children and it’s frustrating not having anything concrete to stop it. There were many people gathered by the school to discuss what could be done. At that time we understood what could happen but, still, what did happen was hard to understand.’’

Georgi Derluguian, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, was one of the organizers of the conference that Tsutsiev attended. The conference bore the awkward title of “Identifying Self-Repairing Dynamics in Post-Conflict Societies,’’ which was put together to address problems in the post-Soviet Caucasus region of southeastern Europe and Central Asia.

Among the presenters were Nona Shahnazaryan, the first woman scholar of Nagorno-Karbakh, Alla Aslitdinova from Tajikistan and Barasbi Bgazhnokov, from the Kabardino-Balkarian Institute off Humanity Research, who had to have his presentation translated from Russian by Sergei Alexandrovich Arutyunov, who spoke on corruption in Uzbekistan.

Kabardino, Balkaria, Abkhazia, Karabagh, Kyrgyzstan, Ossetia, Ingushetia. Where the hell are these countries? Beslan is not even in Russia proper but in North Ossetia. There is a separate country of South Ossetia.

Many people have heard of Chechnya but few would be able to find it on a map.

If Josef Stalin hadn’t come from the Soviet state of Georgia it would still be just a state in the American south. And does anyone in Atlanta know of the war between the Georgians and the Abkhaz or the war between the Ossetians and the Ingush?

Or why new American secretary of state Condoleeza Rice berated Russia for human rights violations in Georgia?

Why should Americans care about what the hell goes on over there anyway?

“That’s a question for Americans,’’ says Tsutiev. “I just can’t imagine that we won’t become an important issue for them. Our region is very close to Iran and the Caspian Sea, which is a very important source of oil.’’

Derluguian is a native of the Caucasus, an ethnic Armenian from Krasnodar, about 300 miles northwest of Grozny. His father was Armenian and his mother a Cossack. He dresses like an Armenian Mr. Chips with a thick Russian accent and patches on the elbows of his collegiate suitcoat and he can hold forth at will with a voluminous knowledge of the world in general and the Caucasus in particular.

Derluguian spoke at the conference on the situation of disappearing villages. He is a scientist, a social scientist who looks at the war in Chechnya from the perspective of the people still surviving, remarkably, in the Chechen streets and villages and the political struggles that still control and exploit them. He is an expert on guerilla warfare but his dissertation on the mobilization of guerilla peasants in Mozambique wasn’t accepted, he said, for political reasons so he migrated to a university in New York state.

Financed by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Derluguian took his tape recorder to Grozny in 1994 to document the people of Chechnya and war broke out.

“I realized that it was tense situation but I never thought it would turn out so ghastly,’’ he said. “I never ever believed it would turn out the way it did.’’

According to Chechen foreign affairs minister Ilyas Akhmadov, some 250,000 people, mostly Chechen civilians, have died from the constant warfare in Chechnya since 1994. Ten percent of the entire Chechen population perished from 1994 to 1996. Many more may have since died from war-related injuries including wounds and serious diseases.

It has been estimated that the Russian army has assaulted, with artillery, troops and aircraft, 50 Chechen villages and within those villages, 70 percent of everything needed for life, was destroyed.

“Without exaggeration, the entire Chechen nation is rapidly becoming a nation of cripples and disabled people,’’ said Akhmadov, who was recently awarded political asylum in the U.S.

An estimated 28,500 Russian soldiers have died fighting the Chechens. The true figure may be much higher.

Chechnya, Derluguian said, was a peaceful province of Russia when rapacious politicians on both sides of the conflict took advantage of a politically expedient moment in time to wreak havoc and destruction in the name, on one hand, of Chechen independence and on the other, of  Chechen dependence on what’s left of the  Soviet Union, now known as the Russia Federation.

Corruption played a huge part in the conflict, from the generals running the war, down to the soldiers who take bribes at checkpoints and exchanged money and alcohol for the corpses of the fallen and at times murdered Chechens.

Unemployment was another factor, Derluguian said, as the young people who would have migrated to Siberia to work construction and sent their money back home were forced by a Russian economic depression to stay at home and make nothing but trouble.

Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of pestroika, agrees that at lot of factors went into the mess that became Chechnya.

“There were many guilty parties in this war, and history will put everything in its place,’’ said  Gorbachev in a foreword to a book on Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society, by Russian ethnologist Valery Tishkov.  “But the human lives lost cannot be brought back, and the destruction is difficult to reverse.’’

And we think we’ve made mistakes in Iraq.

In some ways the Russian war in Chechnya is a sort of road map for the Americans in Iraq. It’s a road we should definitely avoid.

The volatile situation in Chechnya was exacerbated by Gorbachev’s successor, the inimitable Boris Yeltsin, who took on his Chechen counterpart, Jokar Dudayev, a former Soviet general, a Chechen in name only. Dudayev took power in 1991.

Derluguian said Yeltsin and Dudayev were much alike. He labeled Dudayev as a buffoon, and of course Yeltsin was a buffoon, a drunken buffoon, supported by a cast of idiotic and often drunk Russian politicians and generals who made the Chechen situation worse by continually losing battles to a lesser foe while literally shooting at each other.

The Russian generals then sought to redeem themselves in the eyes of the nation by a brutal repression in the second Chechen war.

Derluguian wrote the forward to Anna Politkovskaya’s book “A Small Corner of Hell’’ which the Moscow correspondent wrote about the second war in Chechnya, which was even more violent and destructive than the first war, if that is at all possible.

Politkovskaya gave a talk Feb. 11 in New York City on the subject of  “Chechnya after Beslan,’’ as a guest of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya.

Read Politkovskaya’s book to get a taste of what is happening in the world today outside Iraq and the Middle East, where genocide is not something that can be captured by a definition but consists of continual murder, rape, starvation, of disappearances and missing persons, the distraught mothers and fathers of both sides in the conflict.

Russian mothers searching Chechnya for the remains of their sons.

Politkovskaya’s stark portrayal of life on the ground in Chechnya put her life in danger in both Chechnya and Russia. Truth is not a valued commodity in Moscow or Grozny. There’s too much going on there that some people would kill to prevent from reaching the outside world.

Hell, and the evil associated with hell on earth, can be found in Chechnya as it was in Bosnia.

In fact, see just how much you can read about Chechnya before your mind retreats to a dark hole where today’s Chechens live.

Chechens were originally called Nochchi, Chechen is what the Russians called them, taken from the name of a village, Chechen Aula, that was located near the Grozni fortress the Russians built in the Nochchi region around 1818.

The Nochchi people are said to be similar to the Ingush peoples and an ethnic classification called Vainach, which translates into “Our Nation.’’

The Russians started colonizing the Caucasus region around 1663, establishing Cossack communities on their southern border to anchor their conquests further south. The Russian Army suppressed numerous bids for independence by the people living in the region. They built Grozni to cut the Chechen route from the mountains and flatlands.

The most renowned of the rebel leaders was Imam Shamil, who, according to legend, pulled a Russian bayonet from his chest and vaulted a wall to escape from  Russian forces and then led a 30-year rebellion. When he was finally captured he was taken to St. Petersburg and displayed, somewhat like Geronimo, as a respected foe and allowed to retire in Russia in peace. He died on his way to Mecca and his picture in still prominently displayed in Chechen living rooms.

The Chechens survived deportations by the Tsar and deportations by Josef Stalin and they were finally allowed to return by Nikita Krushchev in the late 1950s.

Chechnya convened its first national assembly on Aug. 25, 1990, in the midst of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and created the Chechen Republic of Nochchi-Cho.

The Chechens held elections in September of 1991 and elected Dudayev as president. Three Ingush and two Cossack districts declined to participate and the results weren’t recognized by Moscow.

The Ingush eventually separated from the new country and created their own republic, one that was more subservient to the new Russian Federation. On Nov. 7 Yeltsin declared martial law in Chechnya and two days later the Russians committed their first blunder, flying in 1,000 troops, who were met at the airport by armed Chechen villagers and national guardsmen and were humiliated when they were forced to leave without even getting off the plane.

Dudayev’s popularity soared after his successful showdown with the Russians, which led to his making the first in a long line of mistakes, banning Russian political parties and newspapers. The noose around the Chechen people had begun to tighten.

Yeltsin next turned to the local opposition to Dudayev, which had surfaced in the flatland district of Nadterechno and he made his second major mistake by supporting an opposition assault on Grozny assisted by Russian troops and tanks. Only this assistance was meant to be clandestine, hidden from the eyes of the rest of the world. The Russian troops involved in the assault were given vacation leave and extra pay, with 130 million rubles to go to the families of those slain in the assault.

Dudayev’s forces were augmented by the equipment the Russians had left behind, including military bases, facilities, weapons and ammunition. Chechnya’s new air force had 250 planes but only 41 pilots.

The assault on Grozny failed miserably and 68 Russian soldiers were captured. When the Chechens threatened to execute their prisoners if the Russian government didn’t admit they were their own, the Russians refused.

The situation in Chechnya remained in limbo for two years while Yeltsin  stewed and Dudayev paraded until the Russian leaders made the fateful decision to invade in late 1994, allegedly after an all-night drinking party.

Derluguian is not sympathetic to the Chechen independence movement. He believes it was fomented and then manipulated by idiots and bandits who upset the common lives of Chechens. And he is critical of journalists who take the superficial view of the war in Chechnya as a battle between freedom fighters and the repressive former Soviet Union. It’s not that simple, he said, in fact nothing is that simple in today’s world.

“Whatever might be the fashionable opinion, the world situation is not reducible to a clear-cut conflict of backward fanatical terrorists assaulting the realm of civilized urbanity,’’ Derlugian says. “Fortunately the real world is more complex.’’

It’s hard to find immigrant Chechens in Chicago. There is what they call a Chechen diaspora in New York and some Chechens have emigrated to Europe but you don’t find the immigrant Chechens here like you do the Rumanians, the Polish or even the Russians.

That’s because, in part, the Chechens are irretrievably tied to their homeland, the mountains and the flatlands of Chechnya. It’s also because they are now, in the words of Derluguian, the damned of the world. No one wants them. Not now. Not after Beslan. Or after the Nord-Ost theater incident in Moscow. Having Chechen stamped on your passport identifies you as a potential terrorist, Derlugian says.“Nobody knows for sure what the actual situation in Chechnya is because today it is probably the single most dangerous place on earth to do research,’’ says Derluguian.

Nobody knows for sure what the actual situation in Chechnya is because today it is probably the single most dangerous place on earth to do research,’’ says Derluguian.

What happened to Chechnya? Do the Chechens have the right to independence from Russia, did they have a right to secede from the Russian Federation before they resorted to terrorism? Has the indiscriminate use of terror, especially the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, cut off Chechnya from any Western support? Or did they have any support in the first place? Were the Chechens the unfortunate pawns in the global game played for America’s eventual reconciliation with the old Soviet Union? Were they expendable in the quest for  liberty world-wide?

On a visit to Russia, former President Bill Clinton allegedly compared the situation in Chechnya to America’s Civil War and thereby Vladimir Putin to a kind of Abraham Lincoln.

A spokesman for George Bush said the Chechens need to cut any ties to Al Queda before they can expect any support from the U.S. But the Chechens alleged ties to Al Queda may have the same amount of validity as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The Chechens are notoriously independent and don’t take kindly to interference from foreigners such as likes of Al Queda. 

With all that’s going on in the world today, few people seem to care about Chechnya, about the tens of thousands of Chechen refugees living away from their homes in tents, their communities bombed into the Ice Age. And why should they?In his inauguration address President Bush said we need to expand freedom throughout the world to safeguard our own liberties.“All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore oppression or excuse your oppressors,’’ he said. “When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’’

Obviously Bush meant an American form of freedom for countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe even the Ukraine, but no one in any position of authority in the world today, even in the U.N., ever mentions the need for freedom in Chechnya.Despite the fact that several of Bush’s foreign policy advisors, including Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and Elliott Abrams, are members of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, no one in any position of authority in the American or British or even French government is championing freedom for Chechens.

When America’s new secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, took time on a tour of European capitals to upbraid the Russians for their incompetent execution of the American concept of democracy, she mentioned abuses of human freedom within the Russian state and she referred to Russian interference in the Ukraine but she never mentioned Chechnya.  Human rights is a myth in Chechnya. And we’re not interested.  Like many earnest statements from politicians around the world, Bush’s forthright plea for universal liberty, now being touted as something close to a Jeffersonian declaration of independence, has a caveat.“To me that type of vocabulary is very important to build a stable vision in the world and as a way to move human beings in the right direction but it’s constantly mis-used to impress all the people at all times and people know it’s essentially not true,’’ said Emma Gilligan, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago who worked for five years in Moscow and now is charting human rights violations in Chechnya. “When it’s used in an evangelical sense by a politician like Bush, it’s disappointing.’’Gilligan may be the reigning local authority on the lack of human freedoms in Chechnya. A native of Australia now living in Hyde Park, Gilligan is working on a book on the plight of Chechen refugees. Photos of Chechnya litter the wall behind her desk and documents on the status of Chechnya fill the tables nearby. The sad photos show the lonely hard-fought mountains of the Caucasus and the battle-worn people who look like they come from another world, that of one of the oldest people on earth. Gilligan lived in Moscow for four years during the height of the first Chechen conflict. She agrees with Derluguian on how the war started, she said, but once it started, Russia ceded its rights to Chechnya by bombing, killing and murdering what it claimed was its own people, especially the civilian population of Chechnya.“When the Russian started dropping bombs, they helped fuel the independence movement beyond what it had been up till then,’’ she said.  Whether one side or the other wants to negotiate, Gilligan said, something needs to happen in Chechnya, someone needs to intervene, before it’s too late and a fascinating people with a most romantic and desperate history, will be eliminated.

You can call it genocide.“There’s a political situation going on in Chechnya and we have to address it with a sense of wisdom and intelligence,’’ Gilligan. “If we continue to ignore it, it will become an extremely dangerous situation for everyone.’’ In a world with limited, or let’s say no, tolerance for acts of terrorism, both Gilligan and Derluguian care about Chechnya and its peoples but in slightly different ways. Gilligan is a hopeless liberal, from Australia of all places and Derluguian is a Russian.Derluguian believes the Chechens would have been better of staying within the Russian Federation because the war obliterated the people and their communities for the spectre of an independence they didn’t really need. Gilligan believes that once the war started, the Russian government revealed its true nature through its wanton misconduct.

The following words were allegedly written on the tombstone of Dzhochar Dudajev, the first president of the free republic of Chechnya. Dudajev was a former Russian general who ascended to the presidency of his ancestral home and was assassinated by Russian security forces in Chechnya on April 22, 1996. “Dudajev never lived in Chechnya, he was born in Kazakhstan and then joined the Russian army,’’ Gilligan said. “His Chechen was extremely minimal.’’  The manner of his death, like much that is alleged in Chechnya, is unsure but many believe that Russian aircraft honed in on the general’s satellite telephone to guide a missile that blew Dudajev and his car into a ravine so deep it had to be dug out. The Russians had allegedly been briefed on this method of assassination by the Israelis, who used this science on Palestinian terrorists who liked to drive. Where Dudajev is buried is apparently known only to his closest associates but his tombstone inscription allegedly tells of the Chechen love of liberty.“Oh, son! If you shall live to the next century

And standing on the high Caucasus

will gaze about you,

Think that here to were men

who had raised up the nation  And gone out to defend freedom and  the most holy ideals!

Some of the most poignant writings on democracy come from publications written by eastern Europeans who have recently been freed from the yoke of the Soviet Union. Lithuanians Tasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas, in their book, The War in Chechnya, written in 1999, trace the progress of a new nation from the idealism of its beginnings as a republic grounded in democratic principles to its descent to a sort of middle democracy where the interests of the nation come first, and principles trail somewhere behind. Knezys was a colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air Defense Forces and oversaw the withdrawal of the Russian army from Lithuania and Selickas is a retired U.S. Air Force major who returned to Lithuania in 1991 to help the country get back on its feet.  Countries like Lithuania are still wary of the former Soviets, now Russians, and what the Russians still consider their sphere of influence. They believe that Chechnya could very well have been Lithuania.“Undeniably, at least through Eastern European eyes, Russia’s recent actions in Chechnya have an uncanny resemblance to the colonial practices of the Soviet Union,’’ said the two Lithuanian authors. “It is understandably hard for a reader from another world to fathom this sensibility. It is equally hard for him to understand the motivations behind an independence movement of a nation whose existence was not even known to him until this war began to appear in the world’s headlines.“Westerners for some reason, find it easier to speak of war crimes in Bosnia but cannot bring themselves to confront the same issue in Chechnya.’’The war in Chechnya was only the second war on the continent of Europe, after the one Finland fought against the Soviets in 1940, where a small country successfully resisted a much larger and more powerful country. In both cases, the more powerful country had great advantages in manpower and firepower and equipment and yet were still unable to defeat the smaller country, which was not supported by the rest of the world at large.  “Thus the question necessarily arises as to whether a powerful country, after attacking a much smaller country, can actually win a war,’’ they wrote. “The driving force for the Chechens was self-sacrifice for the national good. This massive outpouring of valor, duty, courage, and perseverance in the face of almost insurmountable odds has rarely been seen in any conflict.’’

 I have to admit I started thinking about Chechnya only as a response to their alleged, terrorist activities, first when Chechens, including several black widows, took over a Moscow theater named Nord-Ost and held the audience hostage, only to be killed by uber-efficient  Russian authorities, along with many of the hostages, when the police poured a heavy concentration of toxic gases into the theater. Russian troops finished off the sleeping black widows with a shot to the head.

The whole situation was Russian theater at its grimmest. Hostages held in Russia no longer have any immunity to perishing with their captors.

Then came the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, a story so horrifying that even American audiences inured to the news of suicide bombings in the Middle East were appalled. But my lack of knowledge about the situation and the country and its people were appalling. Hell, Beslan wasn’t even in Russia, it was located in North Ossetia. I must admit I had never heard of Ossetia and I didn’t know why there was a North and a South version of it. The Chechens were reaching out to commit terrorist activities not in Russia itself, but in a neighboring Moslem republic.  Gilligan said the rebel leader Shamil Basayev may have picked Beslan for many reasons: to spread terror and spur resistance throughout the Caucasus region and because Beslan was close to Chechnya, where the terrorists could escape afterwards. They may have even had associates in Beslan because apparently someone stored the explosives later used to kill children underneath the floorboards of the school during a reconstruction project. Some Chechen terrorists even escaped from the conflagration that ended the hostage crisis.

But what really started me thinking of Chechnya was the story of the two sisters who strapped bombs to their bodies while one took down an airplane and another commuters gathered outside a Moscow subway station.

 New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers has described how the two wars in Chechnya had left the Nagayeva sisters destitute and divorced. Amanta lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the Street of Peace in Grozny, with three other women, Taburova and her mother and aunt. Their rent collectively was $30 a month and they rented a stall in the central marketplace in Grozny for 30 cents a day. Marketplaces were often used as a central meeting place for resistance and criminal elements in both Chechnya and Russia. The central marketplace in Grozny stood but a few blocks from the presidential palace. Besides fruit, vegetables and cheap clothing, in Chechnya outdoor markets sold AK-47s, ammunition and hand-held missile launchers. Even in Moscow, Chechens allegedly used outdoor markets to consolidate their hold on black market sales and other illegal activities. Approximately one million Chechens lived within Russia proper. In fact, soon after the Chechen terrorist campaign spread to Russia, the authorities there threw all the Chechens out of the outdoor markets.

By working in Grozny’s central marketplace the sisters would certainly have had the means to come in contact with criminal or revolutionary elements even in the seemingly untroubled air of an outdoor market.

Gilligan said the sisters’ foul mood may have stemmed from their lives amid more than 10 years of conflict and poverty in the rubble of Grozny. Afterall, she said, they probably were just entering their teens when the Russians started bombing the city in response to the Chechen call for independence and they had spent the last 10 years of their lives in war-torn poverty. Their adult lives, apparently, were no improvement. The bedroom windows in the apartment Amanta and the other women rented, Myers said, were covered with plastic sheeting, the beds just blankets spread over boxes. The top floor “is open to the sky,’’ he wrote, its walls and roof destroyed by Russian shells. “Their apartment faces a cratered courtyard that is fetid, strewn with trash,’’ Myers wrote, home to a muddy waterpipe that fed the entire block.

Apparently the women were not only war victims but were prosecuted by their own sterility. Both Amanta and her sister, aged 26 and 24 respectively, as well as Ms. Dzhbirkhanova, were divorced, according to Myers, because they couldn’t bear children, “something deeply stigmatized in Chechen life.’’So the two sisters and Ms. Dzhbirkhanova were not technically black widows, although Amanta and Roza allegedly lost a brother to the Russian forces. Uvays Nagayev had been beaten by Russian soldiers on April 27, 2001, and escaped only to be recaptured five days later at his home by Russian soldiers. He was never heard from again.  Another theory for the fanaticsm of the Chechen black widows was that these women were raped by Russian soldiers during the invasions and occupations.

In a recent article in the New Left review, Tony Wood makes “the Case For Chechnya,’’ noting that in the wake of 9/11 Russian president Vladimir Putin wasted no time linking the situation in Chechnya to the war against terrorism and labeling Chechen freedom fighters as Islamic terrorists. In exchange for American acquiescence in repressing Chechnya, Wood said Putin allowed American use of military air bases in central Asia for our own war on terrorism. The Chechens had unfortunately played into Putin’s hands by descending into pure unbridled terrorism, strengthening Putin’s assertions of Chechen religious instability and furthering the argument that a stable Russia depends upon a dependent Chechnya.  When Putin first approached the European Union with his tale of Chechen terrorism, Wood said, they treated his words with contempt. They’re listening now. “The most shameful aspect of both Russian and Western reactions to Chechnya….is the consistent refusal to countenance the Chechens’ legitimate aspirations to independence,’’ Wood says. “The Chechens are engaged in an anti-colonial struggle comparable to those waged by Europe’s other colonies in Africa or Asia in the last century….The starting point for any discussion should be the fact that they are entitled to their independence as any other nation.’’

Chechnya has come a long way since it first declared independence in 1991 but that road has led nowhere. Iraq has probably come a ways since the American invasion but that road is littered with car bombs.“The Chechens have defeated the Russian army, crippled the Yeltsin presidency, provided the springboard for Putin’s ascent to power, and now present the principal threat to Russia’s stability,’’ Wood said.

You could easily say the Viet Namese defeated the American Army, crippled the Johnson presidency and provided a springboard for Nixon’s ascent to power.

The lessons the Russians learned in Chechnya are easily translated to the American involvement in Iraq.Chechnya became the Moslem thorn in Russia’s hindquarters. It has been called Yeltsin’s Viet Nam or Putin’s Algeria.

A small committed cadre in a little country, like Chechnya, Islamic in nature, fighting a vast military superpower, with each side triumphant in their own tactics, the superpower with the technical expertise and overwhelmingly firepower, the underdog using car bombs, ideology and partisan actions to great effect.

Russia’s experience in Chechnya included a decided tendency toward repressive measures by the occupying forces, the disconnect between those running the war and those fighting it, and the eventual alienation of the occupying forces, through alcoholism, drug abuse and post-traumatic stress. 

Beslan is just down the road from Grozny. It’s not located in Russia proper. To get there you have to go through Nasran, the capital of Ingushetia. Beslan is actually a city in North Ossetia, a country the Chechens had once threatened to invade, a neighboring country historically known for its cooperation with Russian governments. Although the Chechens come from the same stock as the Ingush of Ingushetia, the government there has no wish to secede from Mother Russia. It was a raid by Chechens against another neighbor, mountainous Dagestan, that provoked Russia into its second and most deadly war in Chechnya. The Caucasus region is an obscure spot on the world map, south of Russia, east of Turkey and west of—what? Many mapmakers, to save specificity, lump Chechnya in with Russia and while the capital Grozny may be marked on some maps, Chechnya is not. People also tend to lump the semi-autonomous republics of the Caucasus together politically, in the same grab bag as Palestinian agitators, the Taliban, and Al Queda, fundamental Moslem terrorists. It’s somewhere near Afghanistan, they say, and its people are crazy Muslims like the Taliban and terrorists like the Palestinians. But while the Chechens have certainly employed terrorism to in an attempt to achieve their ends, and may have pioneered the tactical kidnapping of foreign workers, their history for now almost 200 years is one of an almost constant armed struggle against occupation, intimidation, exploitation and eventually deportation by the neighboring Russians. And the Chechens are nothing if not dangerous. Their mind-set toward waging war go back centuries. They have employed cunning and retribution to an extreme. During the war, the Chechens bribed Russian military officers to learn the names of the pilots who were bombing their communities and the identities of those Russian soldiers who raped their women, to send an implied message that they would not be forgotten by the Chechen tradition of retribution.Even the Russian generals in charge of operations in the North Caucasus region were scared to use their real names in fear that the Chechens would seek out their families at home in Russia. Anatoli Romanov, commander of the 100^th Internal Affairs Army in Chechnya, became simply Antonov. Few people knew who he really was.  

 The Caucasus peoples have a long history of kidnapping and hostage-taking. It’s a Caucasus tradition dating back long before the 20^th Century. In fact, one form of traditional courtship called for the prospective groom to kidnap his bride and ride off with her. During the war against the Russians, the ever-inventive Chechens expended their net of hostages, at one point grabbing construction workers and employees at a local power plant.  In the hostage-taking frenzy of the last decade in the Caucasus, North Ossetia officials arrested five Chechens, apparently to trade for the release of Ossetian citizens kidnapped and held hostage in Chechnya.  When Ichkeria vice president Vakha Arsanov threatened to invade Vladikavkaz, the capitol of North Ossetia, its president Akhsarbek Galazov, ordered the Chechens to be released.

“Real Caucasians,’’ Arsanov was alleged to have said at a rally at Dynamo stadium, “particularly Muslims, never forgive treachery. If the Ossetians were true people of the Caucasus, they wouldn’t have shot us in the back when we were fighting the Russian armada. They are low cowards and should be treated as such.’’ Large Russian army units with tanks were deployed in North Ossetia in 1992 during a conflict between the North Ossetians and the Ingush.The Chechens even employed terrorism and hostage-taking in a successful way to bring the Russians to the negotiating table in the first war.

 By 1995, after more than a year of struggle against the Chechen fighters, the Russians had finally taken the upper hand in the merciless battle for Grozny and the surrounding countryside. Their methods were simple, blast rebelling villages into rubble and then send in troops to mop-up.  In the village of Samashk, the Chechen resistance fighters had long retreated to the forests when the Russian soldiers entered and vented their frustration on the mostly elderly villagers who remained. Troops held journalists at bay outside the village while the invading Russians destroyed every other house in Samashk, throwing grenades into rooms and cellars occupied only by civilians

In the end 371 houses were burned, as many as 150 villagers killed and men between the age of 15 and 73 were taken to a form of Russian concentration camp called a filtration center. A group of people who fled the village to the forest were rocketed by helicopters.Some Chechen leaders felt they needed to expand the front of their war against the Russians, into Russia itself. That’s when Chechen commander Shamil Basajev entered onto the world’s stage. Basajev, who allegedly was inspired by the figure played by Mel Gibson in the movie Braveheart, had the audacity to invade Russia with two trucks full of Chechen fighters. The trucks were marked as “cargo 200,’’ used to transport Russian dead back home and were so well-known that Russian dead in the war came to be known as Cargo 200. The two trucks were led by a Russian automobile painted with militia markings and driven by Chechens who looked like Russians.Basajev is now an international pariah since he has been blamed for many of the terrorist atrocities since committed in the name of Chechnya in Russia such as Beslan. Journalists who interviewed him early in the Chechen conflict describe him as soft-spoken, intense and intelligent.The Chechen group led by Basajev allegedly bribed their way through several checkpoints on the their way north to Moscow with some 126 armed Chechens when they were stopped at the city of Budionovsk in Russia around noon on June 14, 1995. Because their  drivers didn’t have the proper transit permits, the trucks were escorted to a local militia building.The Chechens then retreated with their wounded to the local hospital, and added another 950 hostages to the 300 they brought with them. Forty civilians had already been killed along with six Chechens. Basajev’s brother Shervani was severely wounded. Shervani later received a blood transfusion from a local fire brigade commander who was being held hostage. Because of Chechen tradition, the major became Shervani’s blood brother and was given special consideration.

(Another story had it that Shervani came to Budionovsk from Chechnya to help negotiate the situation and was never wounded.) Eventually the Russians, in their inimitable style of hostage crisis resolution, assaulted the hospital even after the Chechens placed their hostages in the windows as human shields. Russian troops merely fired at the knees of the hostages in the windows and then shot the terrorist behind them, or so it was described. The attack eventually failed as did a second assault. Three soldiers and 30 hostages were killed.“Later, witnesses told journalists that the Chechen women snipers had been the most cold-blooded, calmly and professionally picking off their targets,’’ said Stasys Knezys and Romanas Sedlickas.  Basajev eventually released 154 hostages and executed 11 or 12. Seeking a reasonable way out, the Russians offered Basajev and his fighters transport by air to any country that would accept them. Basajev refused. His only condition for ending the crisis was an end to Russian aggression in Chechnya and the opening of Russian negotiations with the Chechen president, Dzhochar Dudajev..  Eventually Russian premier Cheromyrdin appealed to the terrorists to end the siege and agreed to begin negotiations on the end of what would be only the first war in Chechnya. And Basajev, 130 hostages and a group of journalists were transported back to Chechnya by bus.  The final tally of the terrorist attack on Budionovsk, the unfortunate site of a terrorist attack originally planned to take place somewhere else, was 124 Russian dead and 126 wounded.

“The Chechens met Shamil Basajev and the fighters of his group as heroes,’’ said Knezys. “Shamil Basajev’s name had rung around the world. Some condemned him, but others understood him as they finally began to appreciate the extremity of the conditions that had forced Basajev and his group to go the road of terrorism…a company of soldiers succeeded in stopping a vastly more powerful country’s savage war of annihilation against a much smaller nation whose forces were hovering on the brink of defeat.’’At the end of the operation, Basajev asked the people of Budionovsk for forgiveness and asked them to understand that they were forced to do what they did because of the liquidation of their people by the Russian military.“Basajev’s side used violence only to the degree necessary to achieve the operation’s purpose. But because of the sacrifice of civilians at Budionovsk, it was possible to stop, at least temporarily, the killing of many more thousands of people. A terrorist act stopped a much larger terrorist act.’’

Yes, Gilligan said, but unfortunately the war didn’t stop there. Thousands of more people were waiting to be killed, uprooted and terrorized.“Strategically I don’t think Budionovsk was a good move,’’ she said. “The consequences were good and the Russians were convinced to move out of Chechnya but when you attack a hospital, of course you could say they did it to us so were going to do it to them, but I think you have to first consider what other methods you could have used. When you take the war outside the territory you’re claiming and then attack a hospital filled with doctors and nurses and patients, that’s where they made a tragic mistake.’’ 

While most people are familiar with the story of the Palestinians, the rule of the Taliban and the world-wide role of Al Queda, few know the real story of Ichkeria and the historic resistance of the Chechen people, a story very similar, and in the same general time frame, as that of the American Indian. And about as many people care.  In the beginning Derluguian said, there were the villages but the villages were filled with the people, people who through the fate of nations came from widely different ethnic stock.In that part of the world where Europe meets Asia south of the former Soviet Union and east of Turkey, there were the Circassian tribes, with a fabled reputation for bravery, chivalry and comely women and beautiful men at the same time that Indian tribes lived on the North American continent, Cherokee, Apache, Sioux.

Tishkov quotes Leo Shternberg from a piece Shternberg wrote on Chechens for an encyclopedia article in 1903.“Chechens are tall and well-built. Their women are beautiful. …They are considered to be gay, witty (“the Frenchmen of the Caucasus’’) and impressionable, but they are less well-liked than the Circassians, owing to their suspicious, treacherous and harsh nature—probably resulting from ages of armed struggle. They are known for dauntless bravery, deftness, and hardiness, (and are) cool-headed in a fight—qualities long-recognized even by their enemies. In times of peace, they rob. Cattle rustling and abducting women and children—even if it be at the risk of their lives or having to crawl for miles—are their favorite occupations……The only element of inequality among them was (their habit of) making their captives into personal slaves.’’The tragic problems in the Caucasus region stems from two seemingly unrelated periods of the area’s dismal history, the rise of an imperial Russia in the 17^th and 18^th Century and the aberration of a Soviet communist state under Josef Stalin that executed numerous native intellectuals and nationalists and eventually yanked these people from their homeland.  Russia first began looking south after it had wrested Kiev and the Ukraine from Poland in 1660.  The Caucasus region is located across the Caspian Sea from the former Ottoman Empire but since the region is just south of Russia, and directly connected, sort of like Mexico and California, it was a natural object of Russian colonialism in the early 19^th Century.   But it was also a wild region full of romantic princes and kings and exotic tribes like the Tchetchens and Avars. For 30 years the Avar chieftain named Shamil defied the Russian army and the Czars before the region was finally pacified. His picture hangs in many Chechen living rooms.  Yo’av Karny, in his book “Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus,’’ compares the Chechens to the 14^th Century Swiss “peasant-rebels’’ of William Tell, “proverbial mutineers in Russian imperial history, an unhappy, angry, vindictive lot with few compunctions to their credit.’’  “Switzerland would be little more than somebody’s else’s backyard, if its medieval peasant-rebels had not striven for freedom, defied odds, discarded political realism, ignored geography—and successfully capitalized on landscape. The Swiss started early enough to be spared the need to wave nationalist banners, or produce ancestral licenses to deny their neighbors’ rights as they were asserting their own.’’

When he started his book on the mountain tribes of the Caucasus, Karny says of the Chechens that he was “barely aware of their existence but their tale,’’ he said, “inspired the writing of this book,’’ he said.

Karny notes that the Caucasus harbors Mount Kazbek, where Prometheus, “the first great rebel of all time,’’ was banished by the Greek gods. At about the same time the American Army was shooing Native Americans from their homeland, the Russians razed the forested habitat of the rebel Caucasus tribes and eventually conquered their mountain fortresses by sheer force of numbers of troops and cannon.

It’s an interesting exercise to compare the Russian colonists of the Caucasus to American pioneers and the Chechens to American Indians.

The one difference is that Native Americans living in what became the U.S. eventually gave up in the face of overwhelming military force and accepted life on the reservation while the Chechens apparently have not. Chechen resistance had never been completely vanquished, not by alcohol or invading armies, and like the fire that lies hidden in the ashes, the Chechens have always been flammable.  Karny quotes an American traveler in the Caucasus, George Leighton Ditson, who repeated a conversation he had with a Russian prince in the 1840s.“The Circassians are just like your American Indians—untamable and uncivilized…. (because of) their natural energy and character, extermination only would keep them quiet.

The lands of the Caucasus and the Circassians and Tatars Chechens and Ingushetiya weren’t of much interest to Russia’s early anthropologists. A Scottish source in 1817 described the land of the Kistins, whose tribe had three components: the Tschetchens, the Karabulaks and the Ingushes.The Tschetchens were considered the most troublesome of the three, thievish and desperate enemies of the Russians.   The Chechens have been called the Apaches of Europe, forced to live under a dominating foreign government for more than 170 years, dating back to the time when Andrew Jackson decided to expand America westward at the expense of the American Indian. “The Apache Chiricahua of the American Southwest offered perhaps the most ferocious of all Indian tribes to U.S. and Mexican occupation, and from their ranks rose the legendary chief Geronimo, who eluded thousands of federal troops with a handful of warriors.’’ says Karny. 

Fifty years after the Czar pacified the Caucasus, The Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks into the Russian territories and eventually Joseph Stalin as their minister of nationalities. At first the Communists courted the Caucasian tribes as the ultimate fighting forces of the anti-Czar in their struggle with the White armies but eventually even the Communists grew distrustful of the native peoples, who they had wished to become models of the multi-ethnic Soviet state.  The Chechens had other ideas, however, and they even made overtures to the Germans during World War II. In retribution, Stalin, a native Georgian of alleged Ossetian ancestry, eventually deported the entire population to Central Asia in boxcars.The Russians felt the Chechens had been disloyal and unappreciative and had welcomed the Nazis in a time of desperate struggle for the Soviet homeland. Those deported included the Tartars, who were considered another inappreciative race of incorrigibles. Among the Tartars three historians were executed as well as six Turkologists, three professors of medicine, six poets and the novelist Latifzade. It would be a dozen years before the Chechens were allowed home from Kazakhstan, to find even more Russians homesteading in their country.Russians would say that while the deportations were horrendous for the Chechens and criminal to boot, there were some hidden benefits. Once they had assimiliated in Kazakhstan, the Chechens, especially their children, were introduced into Soviet society and Soviet schools, especially higher education. But when the Chechens were finally allowed to return to their homeland, they found more Russians had moved in, as well as Dagestanis.

The Chechens, Tishkov said, had a habit of “turning to the abused past for arguments applicable to the present.’’ Well, why not? It would be easier to forget the past or not use the past as part of an argument for a different future, if the past was not so disagreeable and included not only repression but a forced deportation, with the eventual death of 25 percent of the population.  “The Chechens were not the only victims of Stalin’s repression, but only for them did this trauma of the past become one of the main motives for an armed conflict,’’ Gorbachev said. That’s the Chechens for you, you can count on them to hold a grudge.  Tishkov would, of course, rather concentrate on the present and put the past behind him. He criticizes the use of “historicsm’’ by other Russian social scientists, the explanation of the present through the past. He tries to divorce history from today’s problems and would rather use history as a tool for understanding a conflict, not the reason for that conflict. “Rather, these conflicts have contemporary actors who deal with contemporary problems and objectives,’’ he said.

Tishkov’s book seems to reflect the official Soviet take on the Chechen difficulties of the time.

The Soviet enthnographer tries to soften the blow by reminding his readers that just prior to the deportation of Chechens in 1944 the Russian government had encouraged Chechen culture and economic potential. Many Chechens learned valuable trades in Kazahstan, he says, and some went on to universities in Russia.  In the early years of Bolshevik rule, the emerging Communist state tried to incorporate the minority republics as part of a global Soviet Union where ethnic cultures were encouraged and promoted but not to the point where they felt they could secede from the union.

Tishkov says that in 1914 less than one percent of Chechens could read and schoolbooks were written in Arabic. Soviet cultural policy forced a change to the Latin alphabet in 1925 and the first Chechen newspaper appeared in 1927. Compulsory primary education was established in 1930.The Soviets established a National Theater of Folk Music and Dance in Chechnya, writer, artist and composer unions were formed and by World War II the country had 16 newspapers, five theaters and 248 libraries. The literacy rate had risen to 75 percent.

In 1938, however, the Soviets had decided to move to the Cyrillic alphabet, which threw the nascent Caucasus literacy movements into turmoil. Suddenly the Chechen language was being taught as a special subject and Russian became the main language. “It meant teaching a new alphabet, publishing new textbooks, producing new printers’ type, devising new spellings and terminology, and even devising new translations for words in the fields of science, medicine and architecture,’’ Tishkov said.

The Chechens fought Soviet collectivization of their farms and were allowed to maintain their rural settlements, sometimes next door to state-supported collective farms. “Before World War II, most ordinary Chechens and Ingush carried on their lives without actively supporting or opposing the Soviet regime; as in many other societies, they were busy just trying to get by,’’ Tishkov says.

Tishkov notes that the main instigators of the deportations, Stalin and Beria, were both ethnic Georgians.

Stalin, directed by the evil Beria, before and during World War II had deported Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush and 496,460 Chechens, according to Tishkov.

“No one author has offered persuasive answers to the question of why the Soviet regime embarked on this extraordinarily brutal policy,’’ he wrote. “Certainly, it was a paranoiac Joseph Stalin who was the key figure in executing such massive crimes against whole peoples without rational arguments or it making good political sense. For the Stalinist totalitarian machine, it was simply one episode among many other crimes.’’ The Chechens were sent to northern Kazakhstan to cultivate the Soviet “virgin lands.’’Tishkov also takes a conciliatory tone to this deportation, noting that many Chechens spent their childhood in Kazakhstan or Kirghizia and studied in Russian universities. Unfortunately, Tishhov says, Chechen literature tends to concentrate on the negatives of the deportations, “the painful journey in over-crowded cattle cars, where many Chechens died of cold, starvation, or disease, or were murdered by guards. “Photographs from this time in Chechen family albums suggest that things were not so bleak,’’ Tishkov says. Nearly all adult Chechens who survived the initial months of freezing cold and deprivations had jobs, for instance. The Kazakh markets soon had vegetables, fruit, meat and milk.In 1957, after 13 years of exile, 415,000 Chechens and Ingush lived in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia including 150,000 children who had been born during that time.  On Jan. 9, 1957, the USSR Supreme Soviet reestablished the Checheno-Ingush  Autonomous Soviet Socalist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist republic and allowed Chechens gradually to return to their homeland. Some 50,000 families returned in 1957 to find their homes and villages occupied by Russians, Avars, Darghins and Laks.By 1961 524,000 Chechens and Ingush who had lived in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia had resettled in Chechnya, with 28,000 moving to Dagestan and 8,000 Ingush to North Ossetia. Chechnya now had a population of 892,000, of which only 432,000 were Chechens and Ingush “The reasonable desire of the population of this former autonomous region of the Soviet Union to enjoy democratization and to correct the historical injustices done to Chechen and Ingush peoples-the Stalin-era deportations and subsequent discrimination—have been misused to fuel nationalist hysteria and anti-Russian feeling,’’ says Gorbachev.The one good thing to come out of the Russian domination of the Caucasus is the availability of the Russian language, which allowed all the visiting professors to communicate in one language even though they came from different countries. Most of them also knew English, but not as well.Derluguian downplays the legitimacy of the Chechens’ natural and historical calls for independence. He notes that Dagestan was also part of Shamil’s spirited 30-year rebellion against the Russian state but still the modern Dagestanis did not join the Chechen revolt against the Russian Federation. In fact, when Shamil Basayev tried to export the Chechen spirit to Dagestan with an invasion in 1998, the Dagestanis turned him away.The Chechen foreign minister Ilyas Akhmadov says that the Russians heavily subsidized the Dagestani mountain-dwellers as a way of keeping them under control and he noted that the historical unity between the two peoples were damaged in 1944 when the entire Chechen nation was deported by Stalin. “Thirteen years later the returning Chechens found much of their property and part of their land taken by their former allies in arms.’’ Basayev’s ill-fated expedition, acting somewhat like a Chechen Che Guevara, ended Chechnya’s period in limbo and brought back the Russian customs fee in Chechnya. Chechnya had become the black market capital of the region. There was more at stake in Chechnya winning its independence than a straight break from the Russian Federation.  So Yeltsin ordered tanks into Grozny, hoping to repeat, in a show of force, the superpower intimidation that had once cowed Czechoslovakia and Poland and broke Hungary.However the Chechens reacted much differently than the Czechs to the Soviet show of force. Like the Hungarians in 1951 they fought back, fiercely. On New Year’s Day of 1994 the Russians suffered the ultimate military disaster when the Chechens wiped out a force of 1,000 Russian soldiers and tanks hoping to take a stroll through Grozny.The cunning Chechens trapped the Russian tank column by blasting the first tank and the last tank in the column with hand-held grenade launchers. They wrapped napalm around the grenades and the resulting explosion sent fire into the tanks, setting off the ammunition. Then they attacked the tanks trapped in-between.  Russian intelligence had told them that Chechen resistance would be disorganized and ineffectual. They didn’t really know the Chechens. In fact the Russian forces were no Red Army either. Some of the Russian army troops who raised the red flag over Berlin in World War II were Chechens. They were immediately deported upon their return.

This was a different Red Army. This Red Army was disorganized, ineffectual, corrupt and manned by young, scared and untrained conscripts. At times the Chechen resistance was supported by the Russian’s corruption and incompetent military. The Russians were also prone to firing on their own troops.  One Chechen tactic was to find a position between two Russian forces and then open fire on both sides before withdrawing, leaving the Russians to fire at themselves, for hours.

Communication wasn’t the Russian Army’s strongpoint in Chechnya. Corruption, however, was rampant, as Russian soldiers accepted bottles of alcohol in lieu of passes at Russian checkpoints. Some Russian soldiers and officers made money by selling their own weapons.After their initial victory over the Russians in 1996, the Chechen government blundered again when a faction led by Shamil Basayev invaded neighboring Dagestan. The Russians, now under former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, reacted with another vicious invasion and once again the Chechen people were immersed in war against a superior foe hopelessly dictated by their own mis-guided leadership.

The Chechens had become an endangered species, said Jordanian Chechen Na’imah-Polla Daghestani, in Karney’s book on the Highlanders. The comparison between American Indian tribes and Chechnya and Caucasus has also been used as excuse by the Russians for their pursuit and eventual destruction of Chechnya. “To Russians, the Caucasus is at least as Russian as the Dakotas are American,’’ writes Karny in “Highlanders.’’

As a spokesman for Russia, Valery Tishkov questions the right to statehood for Russian national minorities. He wonders where else in the world such a phenomenon as Chechnya has occurred. There hasn’t been an equivalent issue in the U.S., he says.  In fact it was because of the Bolsheviks, he said, that the Soviet Union’s non-Russian ethnic groups “long ago had, and still possess today’’ governmental autonomy with their own constitutions, state symbols, languages, and representation in the federal power structure.  What about the Navajo, asks Tishkov, the Ojibwa, the Hawaiians. Not only don’t these groups have their own nation within the state, they are “just second-class minority citizens.’’  Gorbachev also believes that the Chechens would have been better off as Russians than as independent Chechens.In his foreword to Tishkov’s book, Gorbachev reflects the Soviet mentality that the Chechens really shouldn’t have felt so estranged from the federal institution of collected Soviet states because they weren’t really that different from the Russians. And why weren’t they different? Because Gorbachev says, “they grew up in the Soviet era with their own autonomous republic’’ and lived according to the same laws as the rest of the country and were allowed to preserve their cultural uniqueness. Gorbachev discounts the Soviet Union’s own checkered history with the Chechens as a reason for the revolt, he discounts social factors such as massive unemployment, and only reluctantly acknowledges cultural traditions such as the Chechen’s supposed legendary militant individualism. And he discounts Islam, the religion of the Chechens. “Islam contains a strong humanistic component, and religious leaders have never advocated a war with Russia,’’ he says. Instead, Gorbachev says, unsophisticated societies that have just emerged from totalitarian rule are inclined to follow the lead of ideas, slogans and propaganda formulated to urge them onward toward armed and unlawful behavior. Then the realities of war take over, Gorbachev says, homes are ruined, innocent ordinary people are killed and the thirst for vengeance takes over. Despair sets in.   Gorbachev notes that civilian casualties in the Chechen wars outnumbered those of the guerillas and Russian armed forces. Various internal and external forces took “unspeakable profits from the chaos and terror…..The conflict is thus driven out of control by the society immersed in it.’’ Gorbachev said the illegitimate regime of General Jokar Dudayev pushed the republic toward chaos and dangerous adventurism, in his words, as the non-Chechen population was pushed out, robbed and sometimes killed, fueled by those outsiders who wished the further the disintegration of the Soviet state.

“In the end the ambitions, haughtiness, and arrogance of leaders-primarily Yeltsin and Dudayev- overpowered feelings of responsibility for the fates and lives of the citizens,’’ he said.  It isn’t, however, true that the Chechens and other peoples of the Caucasus don’t have a bone to pick with the Russians.   While Chechnya had become, predictably, a source for processing the oil and gas extracted from the North Caucasus and Grozny became a principal supplier of high-quality motor fuel for use in aviation and other industrial machinery, few of the most highly paid workers were Chechens. Chechnya also became a center for the production of knitwear, shoes, and clothing with Russians apparently taking the vast majority of the top jobs but of the 50,000 workers and engineers employed at the largest petrochemical companies in Chechnya in the 1980s, Tishkov notes, only a few hundred were Chechen or Ingush while a labor surplus in the agricultural trades left as many as 200,000 workers unemployed and disaffected and ready for revolt.

And what Stalin did to the Chechens and the Tartars during World War II has been called genocide. Chechens say what Russia has done to them since 1836 is strictly ethnic cleansing of the type seen in Hitler’s Germany and Milosevic’s Serbia.

Tiskhkov believes that the answers found by truth-seeking commissions should lead to an end of hostilities and a start toward universal reconciliation. The truth needs to be known, Tishkov says, or the Chechens will start acting like the Armenians. “If no external arbitration or internal judgment is undertaken to establish the truth, the unmet need for an accounting may yield an idée fixe, as was true of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians in 1915,’’ Tishkov said. “Generations of Armenians have been seeking a formal recognition of Turkey’s role in the slaughter. Why such enduring persistence? It is not only about uncovering the facts or the true role of historical actors. It is also a ritual that seeks to legitimize the victim’s status as a victim and to brand the guilty party as villain before the whole world.’’Tishkov referred to what he called the professional victims, those oppressed minorities who use injustices fomented against them in their past to serve as models for their conduct in the future. According to Tishkov, the Armenians used their experience of Turkish genocide to label themselves as professional victims forever. According to Tishkov these experiences should lose meaning over time  “Similarily, the Chechens made a major effort to create a memorial saga of suffering and sacrifice so as to build up group images that would call forth sympathy from outsiders.’’ Tishkov sees such freedom movements like the Chechens as projects by elite and armed sects seeking to determine for themselves what is and what is not ethnically correct. He notes that “on the whole, modern Chechens’ historical memories convey the impression that their great-grandfathers were loyal subjects of Russia.’’ He says that many Chechens supported the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and served in the Red Army. It was only later, Tishkov said, that Chechen revolutionaries traced their heroes to those “abreks,’’ or Robin Hoods, who resisted the Tsar and the Soviets, who never obeyed any authority. “The thirst for power among those at the center and the lack of attention to what was happening at the periphery, as well as the ambitions of some Russian national leaders who came from the region, allowed a series of dangerous manipulations to unfold in Checheno-Ingushetia,’’ said Gorbachev.   Tishkov says the version of the Chechens and the Western public is that the Russian federal authorities attacked and invaded Chechnya while the Russian view is that an armed revolt in Chechnya resulted in the rise of “an aggressive paramilitary force that challenged both the Russian state and its armed forces.’’

New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers calls it “a war that began as a separatist struggle but has turned increasingly nihilistic.’’ “In Afghanistan and Chechnya, wars that began as genuine national uprisings against foreign occupation have degenerated into vicious fights for territory, resources, drugs and arms among militias who are often no different than criminal gangs,’’ wrote Michael Ignatieff.Many people have come to believe that the Chechen independence movement was not only hijacked by criminal elements but by Islamic terrorists. Because of Basayev’s terrorist activities, in the name not only of Chechnya but of Islam, the struggle for Chechen independence from Russia has also been tied in the eyes of the world as one of Islamic rebellion, of Al Queda and an expansion of those forces who led to the American 9/11 into the Russian sphere of influence. The valiant fight for freedom by many Chechens has been co-opted again by forces beyond their control, leaving them penniless, homeless and bombed, strafed and raped.

And while the Chechens must certainly seem like terrorists to the people of Beslan and the Western world at large, they consider themselves holy warriors out of a fabled Caucasian past and they have historically resented the influence of all outsiders, not only Russians but the Wahhabi extremeists who have come to Chechnya from the Middle East.

Tishkov claims that professional fighters from Arab countries have launched their own personal jihads in this part of Russia and Chechnya was the first war conducted by the Wahhabi Islamist jihad now underway in Afghanistan, central Asia and Kashmir. But Myers says that the Chechens “have not embraced a cult of religious martydom’’ like the Palestinian suicide bombers or Iraqi insurgents.  Karny feels the Chechen independence movement was hijacked by non-Chechen Islam militants. “Independence for an obscure Lilliput called Chechnya was never their cause, even if they pretended otherwise, ” Karny said.

Unfortunately the Chechens have made their share of mistakes, in North Ossetia, Dagestan and Ingushetkia. Karney said the “hapless Chechens had begun to disappear into a black hole’’ in 1999.

Arthur Tsutsiev and his family live right next door to that black hole called Chechnya. He has a 22-year-old son studying law in Moscow and a 13-year-old daughter at home in Vladkazkaz. His family is his primary concern. He would like to build a new home in his old hometown and life goes on despite the political motives of those who would destroy him. He firmly supports President Bush’s war on terror.“The terrorist attacks in general could not destroy the whole social structure,’’ Tsutsiev said. “It was a challenge but it couldn’t destroy us as a people. These challenges had to be met and the pursuit of ordinary aims such as work and study was a form of answer to these challenges. People didn’t stop working studying, or sending their children to school. These terrorists will be defeated by human routine.’’

Of course it’s just that human routine which has been upset by the constant warfare in Chechnya, the loss of work and subsistence, the loss of homes, daughters, brothers, mothers and fathers to a senseless war in another part of the world.   “People have different opinions in societies and committing terrorist attacks shouldn’t be a method of solving questions of independence,’’ Tsutsiev said. “The movement itself is an apparent crime against humanity and I’d say that the majority of the population perceives the attacks as not part of a political movement but criminal excess.’’  In this case, terrorism begets terrorism and some would say that the attacks started when a sovereign state decided that the best way of reaching conciliation with the rebellious Chechens was to send in tanks. And then more tanks, and airplanes as the violence escalated beyond control.Gilligan believes it’s the responsibility of the world-at-large, and the international bodies commissioned to bring peace to the world to intervene in Chechnya. Things couldn’t get worse. They certainly could get better.“If there was a call for independence in 1991, the Chechens had the opportunity and the right to discuss the process just like every other republic did,’’ she said. “I’m not sure that the Chechens are the damned of the world but they’re certainly lost and marginalized and their voice is fading in international discourse. I believe the only solution is for an international body to go in there and talk to both sides and for Basayev to be arrested. I think the situation will remain the same until there is a change in government. I certainly don’t see the Chechen resistance giving up.’’

Derluguian ended his introduction to Politkovskaya’s book by saying “Now it is up to us to take our position in the global field.’’If America wants to be a world leader, he says, then it has to take responsibility for every part of the world where its influence can be felt, not just those areas that reflect its own narrow interests. And Americans, if they truly value liberty, have to exert those rights of democratic citizenship that require them to be well-informed at election time and conscious of the decisions its government is making in their name.“You should be able to say, “I trust my government,’’’ Derluguian said. “If America wants to be an empire, it should care about what happens in that empire.“In the end, it’s up to you.’’ In the end, if there ever really is an end in sight for Chechnya, the real lesson of Chechnya for Americans may be that a government elected without the intelligent investment needed to make an educated and humanistic choice, can result in real misery for a vast portion of the world. People want to live their lives in peace, with their friends and families, and government should reflect that desire above all else. Just ask a Chechen.