A New End to the Cold War - interview with Strobe Talbott„What happened after September 11th [changed bilateral relations] in a very fundamental way … this time the [U.S. military target] was somebody that the Russians hated as much as we did, if not more“: Strobe Talbott
Excerpt from an interview by John Gould
Strobe Talbot, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 through 2000, and current Director of Yale University's Center for the Study of Globalization speaks with The Russian Observer in an exclusive interview on U.S. - Russian bilateral relations.
Gould: On the Russian perception of their own territorial integrity being at stake after the September 11 attacks - going into the summit, Putin made repeated parallels between the U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaida right now and the ongoing Russian campaign in Chechnya. What do you make of that parallel?
Talbott: Well, it's suspect and it's fundamentally invidious and invalid. Yes, Chechnya is teeming with people who have committed terrorism, there's no question about it. But they have been the vermin that breed on an ash heap that Russia made out of Chechnya going back a very long time. Russia created its own kind of Frankenstein monster in Chechnya. It's quite different from al-Qaida's and Osama bin Laden's grievances against the United States. Russia subjected Chechnya to years of essentially imperialistic over-lordship - and in the early post-Soviet period to not-so-benign neglect. And then as the situation deteriorated there, and there were real acts of criminality and terrorism, Russia came in with a degree of violence - including against innocent civilians – that radicalized the population.
So, I mean, there's no question that part of Putin's motive in wrapping himself in the flag of counter-terrorism was to get more of a license from the U.S. and from the international community for what he was pursuing in Chechnya, and he succeeded in doing so. But, I think, we the U.S. have to be very careful not to let our own new, understandable preoccupation with counter-terrorism or with terrorism lead us into excusing, justifying, or associating ourselves with Russian repression in Chechnya - or for that matter, Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
Gould: The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has come out with a report very recently indicating that Russian abuses seem to have worsened since the summit - that is, in Chechnya. And yet President Bush remarked that he welcomed the "progress" that was being made there, whatever he meant by that...
Talbott: Well, I think that there are conflicting views on that. I've talked to some people who think that in fact Putin is pursuing a kind of hard/soft simultaneous strategy, and that there has been some movement towards dialogue - if they can have anybody to have a dialogue with in Chechnya. I don't think it's starkly true that the situation in Chechnya has gotten a whole lot worse, but certainly it's still pretty bad.
Gould: So you don't fear that we're seeing a trade-off between Russian support for the war on terrorism and U.S. criticism of human rights transgressions in Chechnya?
Talbott: Oh, I not only fear it - or I wouldn't say I fear it, I think unmistakably that that is what Putin sought to do, and it is what Putin has succeeded in doing. Now the question is, what is he going to do with that additional license? Is he only going to pursue a brutal military solution, or is he going to combine fist with open hand in some fashion? And on that frankly there is conflicting evidence. My impression is that that he is trying to have it both ways - which is a move we should welcome, and we should push him towards putting more reliance on the political process.
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