Ten Years of Undeclared War

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti, by Viktor Litovkin) - The first Chechen war began in early December ten years ago. Nobody officially called it a war then. At first, the hostilities in the rebel republic were described as "the restoration of the constitutional order." Later it was renamed "the counter-terrorist operation." And now we are speaking about "the struggle against international terrorism," though the State Duma and the Federation Council have not adopted a single law on this issue.

The official date of the beginning of this struggle is vague. Was it the failed tank raid by Umar Avturkhanov, head of northern Chechnya and an opponent of President Dzhokhar Dudayev, with tanks driven Russian commissioned and warrant officers hired by the FSB? Or the unsuccessful talks between Defense Minister Pavel Grachev with his former subordinate, General Dudayev, when the separatist leader refused to do the Kremlin's bidding? Or maybe the secret session of the Russian Security Council, which decided to launch full-scale hostilities in the self-proclaimed Republic of Ichkeria?

Anyway, the date of the conflict between Moscow, the center of a federative state, and Grozny, capital of one of its constituent members, will not change its essence. The roots of this conflict run much deeper than a confrontation between the leaders of the self-proclaimed republic, and between them and the Russia leadership. The reasons are not limited to "the self-determination of the Chechen nation" or the right to "religious self-identification."

It is true that the conflict is rooted in history, in particular, the hundred-year war which the Russian Empire waged for the undivided domination of the Caucasus in the 19th century, and Stalin's nationalities policy, when whole ethnic groups - hundreds of thousands of women, children and old people - were deported to the barren steppes of Kazakhstan for the pro-Hitler sympathies of certain representatives of the Caucasian peoples. No mountain nation will forget this, no matter how many new generations have been born since then.

After WWII, the Soviet Union's nationalities policy was far from deep or far-reaching. It laid the foundations of corruption and clan rule, which flourished in the North Caucasus and came to fruition during perestroika. At that time, the central authorities lost the ability to influence Chechnya, where everything became permissible, in particular, the sway of banditry, mass kidnappings for ransom and slavery, raids on freight and passenger trains, attacks on military units and posts to seize their weapons, the murder of the non-Vainakh population, members of whom were driven form their flats, the poison of Wahabbism and semiliterate imams. All of this was kept secret from the people of Russia, and the rare press reports about this were interpreted as individual cases.

The situation came to a head when President Boris Yeltsin promised to the autonomous republics "as much sovereignty as they can swallow." The rebellious Chechnya, officially led by a former Soviet general, Dzhokhar Dudayev, and de facto ruled by bandit chieftains, proved to be insatiable. They admitted the Russian ruble (and the US dollar) in the republic but denied any - political, economic, legal, military, religious, or even customs - control by Moscow. Planes from Grozny flew to all countries of the world but mostly to the Middle East, carrying weapons, hard currency, gold and drugs, without any regard for customs or legal norms.

After proclaiming its independence from Moscow, Chechnya demanded control of the Russian heavy weaponry and munitions kept in the republic's arsenal in case a large-scale war broke out. And it got it, because it was impossible to remove these weapons without launching a special operation that would involve major bloody battles. These weapons are still being used in the mountains and settlements of Chechnya, while land mines and other munitions blow up civilian and combat vehicles travelling by republican roads.

We must admit that the decision by President Yeltsin and the Security Council of Russia to launch hostilities against the rebel republic was a grave mistake. By that time, Moscow had not exhausted all the political and diplomatic arguments for returning Grozny and its official leadership to the legal space of Moscow. Worse still, the Russian army was not ready for a large-scale counter-terrorist operation.

The statement by Pavel Grachev, who said one airborne regiment would take Grozny within two hours, was mere bragging. Even the elite airborne troops could not deal with the Chechen separatists, who mobilized every male adult. General of the Army Pyotr Deinekin, chief commander of the Russian Air Force, conducted the only successful operation in December 1994, when his troops used precision guided missiles to destroy all Chechen passenger and training planes in Grozny airport. If it had not been for this, Moscow would have had its own 9/11 tragedy, and much sooner than what happened in Washington and New York.

Dzhokhar Dudayev sent a telegram to General Deinekin: "Congratulations on winning air superiority. Meet you on the ground." But that never happened: in summer 1996, the Chechen general was killed by a precision guided air-to-surface missile launched from a Russian assault plane.

The inability of the Russian troops to wage a large-scale army operation in Chechnya turned into a major crisis that split the defense leadership. In a gesture of refusal to accept the actions of Minister Grachev, his deputies Boris Gromov, Valery Mironov and Georgy Kondratyev, colonel generals who had fought in the Afghan war, resigned. General of the Army Vladimir Semenov and his first deputy Colonel General Eduard Vorobyov refused to command the Chechen operation. The catastrophic storming of Grozny on the New Year's eve, when over a thousand Russian servicemen died and 200 tanks, APCs and self-propelled guns were destroyed, became one further proof of the failed boastful tactic of "the best defense minister," as President Yeltsin called Grachev.

Ten years of war in Chechnya brought many other troubles to the Chechen and Russian people. The victims of Budennovsk and Buinaksk raids, the bombings of residential blocks in Volgodonsk and Moscow, the explosion in Kaspiisk, the Nord-Ost hostage standoff, and the tragedies in Kizlyar and Beslan are mourned by the entire Russian nation. Hundreds of dead and thousands of maimed civilians, hundreds of thousands of refugees, Chechen towns and villages razed to the ground, a ruined economy and mass unemployment, which gives birth to new terrorists, thousands of dead men and officers, and the unbalanced psyche of those who have returned from this war outwardly healthy, have created problems which will not be cured for a long time.

The only positive lesson is that the authorities and society have admitted that the Chechen problem cannot be solved through the use of military force. President Vladimir Putin openly said this in his address to the nation. The normalization of life in Chechnya and the North Caucasus as a whole, the return of the republic to the legal lap of Russia, and the reconstruction of its economy add up to a comprehensive problem whose solution will take years of persistence and restraint and a wise policy of creating favorable and fair conditions for all ethnic groups in southern Russia.