„I want to live in a new Russia, not in the Soviet Union.“
The interview with RFE/RL correspondent Andrei Babitsky was made on March 1, 2001 in Prague.
Prague Watchdog: You were charged with using a false passport when checking into a hotel. What stage are the proceedings of your case at?
Andrei Babitsky: The trial took place in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, in October last year. I was given a fine (about 1,000 dollars) equivalent to a hundred times the minimum wage. Then I appealed and was exempted from paying the fine due to an amnesty. However, the Supreme Court of Dagestan hasn’t changed the sentence. Roughly in a month* the case will be heard in the Russian Supreme Court. We’ll have to wait for its decision.
PW: You have taken legal action against those who detained you…
B: Yes. I have recently brought legal action. What I wanted to learn was whether the criminal case was initiated and any inspection was done. However, a public prosecutor told me that my detention was on legal grounds. I was told that the detention was realized according to a decree by the Russian President on vagrancy and mendicancy.
PW: Your colleague, the Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, was recently detained by Russian authorities in Chechnya. How can journalists work in Chechnya now? Are they allowed to enter the territory without any permission or do they need some accreditation?
B: There is a certain procedure that is more or less the same for everyone. Journalists are given from presidential aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky accreditation that is necessary for obtaining another accreditation from the federal forces’ press-centre. Any journalist coming to Chechnya must be registered at the press-centre. In fact, the journalists who are now in Chechnya do their job at the press-centre in Khankala, the federal forces’ headquarters. There are virtually no exceptions. Foreigners have no opportunity of getting to Chechnya, unless they do it illegally - or legally, but within a big group that is usually transported to Chechnya from Moscow by plane or helicopter. Such a group makes a trip around the sites of war glory and “Potemkin villages”, serving as window dressing.
Moving around the territory on one’s own in fact impossible. A journalist without registration in Khankala does not get permission to a number of inhabited places. And if you are registered in Khankala, you can travel around Chechnya only accompanied by the press-centre officers. As a result, the only way Russian journalists can do their job now is to publish in their reports the same information as officials do, i. e. copy the official view of reality. Foreign reporters are either prevented from doing their work, or they make their way to Chechnya illegally and at their own risk, which is really dangerous. If such a journalist is detained, his accreditation and visa are taken away, and he is exiled from the republic. But to be frank, I don’t think there are many reporters willing to do this. It can be said that there is a severe wartime and political censorship in the territory of Chechnya. The press-centre inspects all published materials, and only on the results of such inspections, it decides whether reporters are allowed to re-enter Chechnya, or more precisely, the territory of Khankala. As a matter of fact, what journalists do in the Khankala headquarters is just sit and wait in former maintenance carriages for weeks on end. From time to time, a press-centre officer, setting out, say, for a mopping-up operation with a special platoon, agrees to take a group of reporters or an individual in his armoured carriage or helicopter. This is how closed Chechnya is to journalists.
Anna Politkovskaya went to Chechnya on exceptionally liberal grounds. This was thanks to her exclusive relationship with the new Chechen government. After the scandal, I expect she won’t be allowed to visit Chechnya anymore; in addition, all parallel or roundabout ways of getting to Chechnya will be closed to her. Earlier she used the Ministry of Emergency Situations and, avoiding the soldiers, she was getting into Chechnya. She was among the few who continuously reported from Chechnya on their own, without the supervision of the military.
PW: Radio Free Europe is going to launch broadcasting in three Caucasian languages, including Chechen, and establish its office in the Northern Caucasus. Aren’t you worried that your reporters will be forbidden to move in the territory?
B: No. You see the federal authorities have neither enough power nor the legal grounds to establish a Chechnya-like regime in the adjacent republics. Our office is going to open in Vladikavkaz. It is a timely and highly necessary step to be taken. Since we feel there is an information deficit in Chechnya, we need additional sources of information in Chechen. The public should know what is really happening: an unjust and cruel war is continuing and people are dying. Obviously, the office will be able to do more in gathering information because Chechen themselves will work in the office. And what is crucial here, Chechen reporters, as inhabitants of Chechnya, can move around the territory, collecting and spreading information. Well, generally speaking, not one of our journalists has been in Chechnya in the last twelve months.
In my opinion, the prospects for Radio Liberty in Russia are rather gloomy. I cannot say if our branch-office in Russia will end in ruins, but it is clear that the station’s opportunities will be seriously limited.
As far as Chechen reporters are concerned, it is highly important to seek people who can report without taking sides in the conflict. This is quite difficult because we deal with Chechens as native speakers. The fact is that even the language itself has altered. It has become the language of conflict: there are some elements, very frequent ones, which cause taking sides by means of the language itself. Nevertheless, I think this won’t be tackled over a long time – it is a technical problem.
PW: What are the most difficult aspects of being a war correspondent or a journalist in Russia?
B: A war correspondent has a hard time in today’s Russia, though there is a lot to be curious about. The majority of journalists have accepted completely voluntarily, i. e. without any pressure from the authorities, the official point of view. It can even be said that it is not voluntariness but sincerity that is behind their attitude. The authorities have declared that what is being defended in Chechnya are the national interests of Russia and the future of the Russian Federation and that the government is running the military campaign in order to prevent the real danger. And many people came to believe it because they were shocked by the explosions in Moscow one and a half year ago. The Chechens quickly became for many the ones behind the blasts, although as far as I know, there has been no reliable evidence of this so far. Journalism is a profession that reflects to a great extent the fears, anxieties and hopes of the people and how the society appears to itself. So journalism could not remain aloof to the public mood concerning the conflict. And I think that many of my colleagues in Russia now consider the issue of human rights to be marginal. This is because they believe that there is a more important task ahead: they have to fight together with the authorities and soldiers for the preservation of their country and to defend the principle of the integrity of the Russian Federation.
To my mind, a journalist should always keep a certain distance from the authorities, there should be a sort of ”time-out” relationship between them. The state authority is a limited functional mechanism which is expected to protect people’s interests, and if it does so, a journalist doesn’t need to object. However, there are certain basic principles which, in my opinion, everybody should comply with. Human rights are inalienable and superior to the rights of a state, even the right of a state to protect itself. So what I consider essential in the conflict is the point of view concerning human rights. It seems to me that a state cannot be strong if it considers the integrity of its territory more important than the value of a single citizen or the value of the life and democratic rights of one citizen. I mean that I consider human rights to be above the abstract and variable right of a state to sovereignty or falsely formulated aims to defend itself against a false threat which is enormously overestimated.
PW: What positive and negative things has Russian President Vladimir Putin managed to do?
B: You see, this is a difficult question because today the negative elements outweigh the positives in the Putin debate. I will talk about Putin’s positives, which cannot even be called measures, for Putin has not formed and defined himself as a political figure yet. There are lots of alarming tendencies in his activities, but we cannot say whether they will lead to a logical conclusion or not. I think, to certain extent, he has managed to reestablish control over the state machinery, but he has used counter-constitutional methods, particularly in forming the presidential vertical, the vertical of authorities as well as in rendering the Federation Council powerless. All these measures were counter-constitutional, though necessary and maybe justifiable, because they have triggered no serious conflicts in society. There has been no violation of human rights rising directly from these measures. Putin’s soft counter-constitutional revolution can be discussed in a positive tone, although there are a lot of negative aspects to it. In other words, the percentage of positive and negative elements in his activity can vary according to what Putin will do in the future. Obviously, his biggest problem is the negativism in his power. It is absolutely clear that among his basic aims is a fight against dissidence. For some reason, Putin feels enormously irritated particularly by the fact that the reality in Chechnya differs from the official point of view. He feels angry facing up to the facts that things there are not going the way the official propaganda is trying to portray. I worry that if he takes this tendency to its logical conclusion, the situation in Russia may take a serious turn for the worse. Then it is possible that Russia will see a kind of soft dictatorship with revived and updated soviet-like methods, i. e. authoritarian. Actually, this has been happening to a certain extent already. Although such methods are not used to the full, the case of the NTV television station* shows how strict Vladimimir Putin is in defending principles he himself set out, such as the principle of removing oligarchs from power.
Having formed my views in the dissident environment of the Soviet era, I will never have enough reasons to like him: he is proud of his career in the KGB. For me he is a man resembling our past, but what I try to see in our country is the future. I want to live in a new Russia, not in the Soviet Union.
So, to summarize, if Putin will not bring these elements of a soviet-like administrative and ideological system to a logical conclusion, from the technical point of view, he may be a leader whose activities will have certain positive aspects. The probability for this exists but we will have to wait and see the reality.
PW: Let’s turn back to the conflict in Chechnya. Does it have any influence on the character and spirits of the Russian people? Is there a Chechen syndrome?
B: The conflict has had a quite negative influence. There are two processes which go hand in hand. Firstly, there is a diffusion of certain norms of behaviour adopted by those who serve in the forces in Chechnya, which spill over into Russia. Members of the police and Federal Security Service (FSB) as well as soldiers from all over Russia, after a two or three-month stint in Chechnya, return home. These people not only suffer from posttraumatic syndrome, which itself provokes a certain degree of aggression, but they also accept different norms of behaviour: they think violence is a highly effective instrument for dealing with criminal offenders or people who seem to be criminal offenders. The spread of such norms will have serious and broad-scale consequences. The consequences have already begun to emerge, although the public is not much aware of them. But I suppose Russia will soon face huge problems in this regard.
A second aspect is possibly even more significant. Having started the war in Chechnya, Putin launched a quite successful propaganda campaign touching on people’s negative emotions. The Russian people have been fed racial propaganda: Putin has claimed that if the Chechens put bombs in houses, torture hostages and trade people, they should not be treated as human. According to the propaganda, the Chechens, their culture and tradition of social lifestyle are in contrast to the principles of European and Russian laws, and thus Chechen people should be treated the way they deserve.
Finally, as an uneducated KGB agent, Putin sticks to a very primitive eschatological idea of Russia being a buffer in the conflict between two civilizations, Christianity and Islam. The idea has become a part of the national culture in today’s Russia. Such forms of racism, which you can see not only in the streets but also in certain intelligentsia circles, were generally considered shameful two years ago. A member of the Russian intelligentsia can now talk about Chechens as people of a bad nation without fear. However, this cultural problem mustn’t be reflected in the legal arena, i.e. if Chechens have some peculiarities in their communal lifestyle which, if you like, do not correspond to the norms of contemporary European legal systems, it doesn’t mean that all Chechens are bandits. Although it’s for sure that bandits have been in the country, you simply cannot exclude Chechnya from the legal sphere and treat the people on principles in conflict with the law and the constitution. In other words, there is a shift in democratic norms in Russian minds these days. And the absence of an inalienable minimum of democratic freedoms stems to a significant degree from the Chechen war.
PW: What are the future prospects for Chechnya and Russia coexisting in a common state?
B: Now I think it’s impossible for Chechnya and Russia to exist in a single state. There are so many problems between the two countries. To be precise, the troubles are between the two societies, not among individuals. I believe Russians and Chechens will be able to associate with one another normally when the conflict eventually dies down. However, as I have said, we face a huge number of problems between the societies. There is only one way Russia can keep Chechnya within the structure of a single state: those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity will be punished. In this sense, as number one in the country, Putin would have to start with himself. As commander-in-chief, he assumes ultimate responsibility for the political measures that have paved the way for numerous crimes during the military campaign. You know, the memory of the dead, mass shootings and extra-judicial executions will never fade. Unless Russia feels obliged to launch needed legal proceedings, Chechens will never believe they are citizens of Russia enjoying full rights.
I think that if we continuously deprive them of the right to an impartial court and the punishment of criminals, their spite will survive for decades and they won’t be able to live in Russia. The Chechen people themselves are possibly not aware of this today. They are being tortured in a huge pressure-cooker: as a matter of fact, northern Chechnya is a kind of concentration camp. Chechens are making an effort to adjust to living with Russians, but I don’t think they will have any success. As soon as Russians remove their shield from the territory, Chechen society will again start seeking its identity, and as a civil society, it will feel increasingly its resistance to the human rights violations. The prospects of fair proceedings and the punishment of criminals in today’s Russia are bleak, for the next ten to fifteen years they are even worse. This time will be enough for Chechnya to realize that it cannot co-exist with Russia. Putin is confused by an illusion: he believes the problem can be handled by means of administrative pressure based on power. However, the opposite is true; hatred is growing stronger and new troubles are appearing. Today, say, an ordinary Chechen is tortured to death in a filtration camp, tomorrow a young man will be unaccounted for… - and these problems tend to increase. When Putin leaves politics, the Russian shield over Chechnya, like it or not, will have to be removed. The atmosphere of hatred we have been creating under the shield will then destroy everything what has been achieved there.
PW: Can the Chechens establish a nation state on their own?
B: It is a difficult question but I will try to be brief. They are able to do so, as any other nation is, but… Chechens have never had their own state. Theocracy, the state-system Imam Shamil tried to establish in the Chechen highlands in the first half of the 19th century, was quite alien to the people. Islam arrived in Chechnya through Dagestan and it hadn’t spread widely enough among Chechens at that time. So theocracy couldn’t be widely accepted in society. The Chechen commune lifestyle and its ethics regulates relationships between members of families as well as relations among clans. There has been no tradition of a state government, aristocracy or state structure. Shari’a, the law of Islam, that Aslam Maskhadov wanted to introduce in Chechnya, was to be a way-out because it is a system based on law with the potential to establish a state structure. However, Chechens didn’t accept Shari’a because their everyday social life is clearly satisfactory.
In the 18th and 19th centuries Islam in Chechnya was practised basically only in families, for the registration of weddings, deaths etc. As far as traditional law is concerned, it is used only among clans. And I think this leads to a number of problems. Shari’a asserts the rights of the individual but the inter-clan ethic admits only the rights of a commune, a group of people formed on the grounds of religious kinship or the unity of the territory where they live. And it seems to me, this is why there have been so many crimes against humanity in Chechnya. Even in Soviet times Chechnya, Dagestan and Karachay – Cherkessia had certain forms of slavery. Chechens brought tramps from Russia who worked for them without any pay. This could happen only in the northern Caucasus and Chechnya, and it was very popular. But the bitter experience of the wars of recent years has taught Chechens a lesson. If the situation in Chechnya develops out of such tragic and dramatic internal intentions like those that Dzhokhar Dudajev, the first Chechen President, and Aslam Maskhadov aimed to realize, the country will be plunged into a civil war as soon as the Russian forces are gone. It will face conflicts of a feudal as well as an inter-denominational nature. Chechens should take it as read that a civil war is very likely to be the result of any future conflict. The problem is that Chechens are not able to comply with laws and communicate respecting each other, a state or an individual. If Chechens cannot formulate these ideas on their own, I expect quite serious troubles in the future. I think this war and the spirit of the people in Chechnya come from their feeling of responsibility for the status quo. Chechens are aware that they themselves have dragged their country into misery: there were lots of people detained and traded in front of their homes, and the territory abounded with bandits who eventually invaded Dagestan. So only if this feeling of guilt in Chechen minds shifts towards a desire to avoid violence, there is a chance that peace will return to the country.
PW: Let’s touch on the question of other parties’ reactions to the conflict in Chechnya. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) returned the right to vote to Russia a month ago*. How do you feel about this and what do Chechens think of it?
B: I think my opinion on this coincides with the view of Chechens. I consider PACE’s decision to be shameful. I don’t see any significant improvement in human rights in Chechnya. The essential role of PACE is to defend human rights: it limits the membership of states and accepts the parliaments of various countries accordingly. You can see no significant improvement in Chechnya. There are some changes in numbers and amounts. To be fair, it is true that the civil courts have now started to work. Although civil legal proceedings are obviously necessary in the country, Chechens themselves do not need them so much. They are able to settle civil matters on their own. But what they really need is criminal proceedings that would bring an end to everyday scorn and ridicule that civilians are subjected to. Only eighteen out of fifty-two criminal complaints have resulted in criminal proceedings in the court over the past year and a half of war.
We can scarcely hope that our authorities change their attitude towards Chechens and the situation in Chechnya in the near future. The status quo in the country will continue.
What is quite important is that there is a new political climate, especially in Russia. A strong new leader has taken power and Europe doesn‘t want to argue with him. Europe has no interest in re-introducing the political mechanisms of a cold war, so Russia’s violent campaign in Chechnya is in fact a sort of blackmail. Thus I hope a lot can be done by the new US administration which, it seems, is ready to highlight the human rights question in Chechnya every time its members sit down with Russian officials.
PW: The role of security services in the Northern Caucasus is the subject of serious discussion. Do you think it is exaggerated? What is your view of Shamil Basayev?
B: The role of Russian security services is exaggerated in the sense that the efficiency of security services is extremely poor. We can see that security services are quickly being reformed at the moment. I’m afraid that professional skills of the members of the security services are not developing on the basis of today’s legislature but on the soviet experience that Vladimir Putin has rehabilitated. Generally, their skills are very bad, although Basayev’s invasion into Dagestan has shown that security services, sharing particular interests with politicians, are able to take certain steps. And it seems to me that Shamil Basayev has been used for securing the interests of new Russian politicians, those who eagerly wanted to win and gain the presidency for Vladimir Putin in the last elections.
Basayev and those Chechen politicians who led him into Dagestan have become the victims of their own ambitions. They believed it was possible to push their ideas through to Dagestan and then to the whole Northern Caucasus and that they would successfully start a rebellion. They used the idea of Muslim radicalism, although I believe neither Movladi Udugov, nor Basayev is a religious fanatic, they just followed a utilitarian aim. But such an approach was shortsighted and lacked originality. I was on friendly terms with Basayev and I used to consider him a much more careful and intelligent man. In this case, having chosen marginal politics, he just made a terrible miscalculation. If you look at the matter using your common sence, you see it was very unlikely that Basayev would succeed. Chechen people are hated not only in Dagestan but also in other territories of the region for considering themselves leaders of the Northern Caucasus. They are the biggest ethnic group in the region and so they feel they have the right to define both political manners and the rules of lifestyle. This is obviously not very popular among other ethnic groups in the Northern Caucasus.
In my opinion, Russian security services are repeatedly unable to catch Basayev because their professional capabilities are extremely poor. Let’s consider the fact that if you exclude the three years between the two campaigns in Chechnya, the country has been at war for four years. Throughout this time, Chechens’ abilities to do their best for their own security as well as what is required for a real rebellion have become considerable. In this sense, they have left the Russian authorities far behind. Chechen bandits keep moving and take advantage of the civil war: nowadays an overwhelming majority of the population supports them. This wasn’t so at the beginning of the war. Within that year and a half the Russian forces haven’t managed to gain the Chechens’ respect. They have made the Chechen people pin their hopes on rebellion. And that is why Chechen fighters can easily move around Chechnya and hide from Russian soldiers. I don’t believe the propagandist statements of FSB officials that the noose around Khattab and Basayev is tightening. On the other hand, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that in time Basayev and Khattab might be defeated and arrested. I know it is possible because this is just a technical problem. It is probable that the FSB will manage to improve the professional capabilities of its members so they will be able to catch a few people in a small swathe of territory. But this won’t solve the problem of Chechen and Russian relations. You can make away with Basayev, Khattab and Maskhadov but this won’t mean an end to the guerrilla war.
PW: What is the role of vakhabism and extreme Islamic movements? The official authorities claim it is crucial. Do you agree?
B: I don’t consider the fundamentalism which has spread in Chechnya and Dagestan as vakhabism. Nowadays vakhabism is defined clearly and in detail as the national religion of Saudi Arabia. Ideological forms of extremism in Dagestan and Chechnya differ entirely from it. Regardless of its name, the movement has the most terrible influence because the radicals have used fundamentalism to justify the necessity of continuing with the jihad (holy war), invading neighbouring countries, seizing and trading people. There has been an organic fusion of the holy war ideology and crimes against non-believers, in the concrete form of a criminal business. Vakhabists have ruthlessly oppressed Chechnya and terrorised its people. To my mind, they were in fact accomplices of the people who led Soviet security officer Vladimir Putin to power. As a matter of fact, they have considerable responsibility for today’s situation in Chechnya. But it seems that the military campaign and the war itself have undermined vakhabism: there is no breeding-ground for it any more. Nowadays Chechens accuse vakhabists of bringing the Russian army to Chechnya when they invaded Dagestan. So the social background of vakhabism is quite shaky in Chechnya. Vakhabists kept people in fear because they had arms and enough means for attracting the youth. Today this social basis has been destroyed not only in Chechnya but also in Dagestan where the invasion was declared in the name of Islamic radicalism. Surprisingly this may be one of positive aspects of the war. It holds the possibility of a new future in Chechnya, although it is a very low possibility. I don’t suppose we can expect any improvement, but the possibility does exist.
PW: You have been working for Radio Liberty in Prague for several months already but you are not likely to stay here forever. What are your plans for the future?
B: I’ll go back to Russia in time. I think that such a valuable experience as staying in Europe gives me a different view of myself, the world and events in Russia. To tell the truth, what I would like to do is combine living journalism, the activities I used to do earlier - travelling to Russia, making reports - and a more analytical approach. I hope I’ll manage to do this. It will require some effort because my bosses claim that there are serious security risks in my situation and that they should be somehow responsible. Anyway, I think I’m able to ensure my safety on my own. I hope I’ll manage to find a form of work that is more adequate and acceptable for the situation, although some problems obviously remain.
PW: Thank you very much for the interview.
B: You are welcome.
* The interview was made on March 1, 2001 in Prague.
Translated by Prague Watchdog.
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