Death Is the Only Victor as Chechen War Drags On
Death Is the Only Victor as Chechen War Drags On
Caucasus: Analysts say Russia faces a long-term conflict. The only question is how intense the fighting will be.
By Maura Reynolds, LA Times Staff Writer
MOSCOW--From a
distance, it looks like a stalemate. And so Russia's war against Chechen
separatists has largely fallen out of the news, off TV screens and to the
bottom of political agendas, even in Russia.
But the war in
Chechnya rages on quietly. And danger is growing that it could spread--inside
and outside Russia.
It has been nine
months since Moscow regained control of the vast majority of Chechen
territory. Declarations of victory notwithstanding, at least 200 Russian
troops still die each month--and 14 were killed Friday alone.
The Russians respond
by rounding up the local population in arbitrary document checks, with
hundreds, if not thousands, of Chechen men disappearing afterward. Sometimes
the men bribe their way out of illegal detention. Sometimes their corpses
turn up weeks or months later.
"The resistance
is not diminishing," Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer says.
"Ever more Chechen men join the rebel ranks, and Russian military
reprisals and punitive operations produce nothing but more hatred and staunch
resistance."
In fact, in recent
months, military analysts have stopped asking whether Russia can
"win" the war--it has become clear that it can't, if
"winning" means a cessation of hostilities.
Instead, analysts
accept that Russia is facing a long-term guerrilla war in Chechnya, with the
rebels preparing for an extended campaign of terrorism. The only question is
whether the insurgency will be low or high intensity--in other words, whether
it will look more like Spain's quiet battle against Basque separatists, or
the high-profile terrorist attacks of Northern Ireland's Irish Republican
Army or those of the Palestine Liberation Organization of old.
"If the Chechens
want to go the PLO/IRA route, they have a whole number of options," says
Michael Orr, a senior lecturer with Britain's Conflict Studies Research
Center. "They have a diaspora outside Russia and could attack targets
outside of the country, like embassies. The Russians ought to be very worried
about this, because they don't have the doctrine or the resources to deal
with it."
Orr also offers a
warning about possible Russian action in the coming months.
"Frustrated by
their inability to finish the war, the military leadership may try to blame
others for their lack of success," Orr says. "There are already
indications that the generals would like to extend the war to strike at the
guerrilla bases that they claim are in Georgia and [the Russian republic of]
Ingushetia."
When Russia began the
war in earnest 15 months ago, military leaders were determined to avoid
repeating the mistakes of their ignominious first war against the rebel
republic, from 1994 to 1996. So they reduced the number of conscript soldiers
and spent months bombing the rebels out of villages using their superior
firepower, little bothered by the damage they wrought or the high number of
civilians they killed.
But although they
succeeded in learning the lessons of the first war, they seem to have
forgotten those of an earlier conflict--the Soviet Union's ill-fated invasion
of Afghanistan, which became a decade-long quagmire.
One of those lessons
is that it takes only a small number of guerrillas to paralyze a standing army.
Another is that the longer the war drags on, the more civilians turn against
an occupying army.
And finally, they
didn't learn that you cannot win a war unless you have a clear political
definition of "winning."
Since last spring,
generals have been declaring that the "military phase" of the
conflict is over, hinting openly that they've done all they can do in the
absence of a political settlement. But the Kremlin has spent so much time
depicting rebel leaders as "bandits" that it has painted itself
into a rhetorical corner--there's no one left with whom Moscow could
negotiate a peace, even if it wanted to.
Meanwhile, public
support for the war appears to have been quietly eroding. At the end of
November, a poll by the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research for the
first time showed a greater percentage of respondents favoring peace
talks--47% to the 44% who favored continuing military operations.
This month, civilian
officials began to show their first signs of frustration with the stalemate.
A group of lawmakers took the unpopular step of meeting with representatives
of the erstwhile Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov. They were roundly
denounced by the Kremlin.
Even so, President
Vladimir V. Putin has for the first time expressed dissatisfaction of his
own, acknowledging last week: "The main forces of the gunmen were
destroyed, but we have not done the most important thing--we have not carried
the operation through to the end."
Moreover, a number of
factors suggest that the current stalemate is not that "stale" and
may soon, in fact, deteriorate.
For instance, during
its blitzkrieg artillery attacks last year, Russia depleted its massive
reserves of ammunition, originally stockpiled to fight a full-scale war against
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe. It isn't clear whether
Moscow has the financial or production capacity to replace the reserves,
raising the question of whether it has adequate artillery to repeat the kind
of bombing campaigns conducted last winter.
More dangerous, a
severe manpower crunch looms within the Russian forces. Draft evasion has
been increasing, and conscripts who do serve get early release for serving in
the war zone. The result is that Russia is going through conscripts at an
accelerated pace and may be unable to replace their current numbers during
the next call-up.
The current forces
also rely heavily on contract soldiers, who sign up for short tours of duty
in return for hefty combat pay. But news reports that the bonuses have been
reduced or simply not paid are likely to reduce the number willing to serve,
as will general war weariness. The same applies to elite police forces.
All of this helps
explain why the Kremlin is eager to keep attention off the conflict. Chechnya
rarely tops the nightly news, except when the rebels stage a particularly
bloody attack.
For the most part,
the Kremlin exercises media control covertly. Early in the bombing campaign,
media spokesmen bombarded journalists with their versions of events. Now
these same spokesmen are rarely seen in public. Russian officials have also
stopped publicizing the military death toll. In fact, they haven't provided
an official count since October, when it was around 2,700, and they did not
respond to requests from The Times for an updated figure.
They also seem to be
trying to undermine criticism by accepting it. For instance, Russian
officials have stopped dismissing reports of atrocities and wrongdoing by
Russian servicemen. Still, progress in investigating such cases remains
halting.
Military
investigators have opened 35 investigations against Russian servicemen for
crimes committed against civilians--up from only 14 such cases in July,
according to Vladimir A. Kalamanov, the Kremlin's human rights commissioner
for Chechnya. Only eight servicemen have been indicted; in a letter to The
Times, Kalamanov didn't provide information on whether those were for serious
crimes.
Meanwhile, reports of
missing and mistreated Chechens have grown to the point where they cannot be
ignored. For instance, after denying last summer that a large number of
Chechens had disappeared while in Russian custody, Kalamanov has since
changed his stance, asking military investigators to account for 360 Chechens
whose cases his office has documented.
He also has
acknowledged that document checks by Russian forces are too severe and
arbitrary, citing the case of the town of Alkhan-Yurt, which has endured at
least 10 such roundups this year during which at least 100 residents were
detained "without any reason given."
But these issues
attract little attention from ordinary Russians, who prefer to focus on
troubles at home. And history has shown that they tend to tolerate higher
battlefield losses than Europeans or Americans and show less skepticism of
government pronouncements.
So the Kremlin faces
a dilemma: accept the stalemate and the likelihood that it will slowly become
more unstable and unpopular, or escalate the conflict to try to gain greater
short-term military advantage at the risk of international condemnation and
military failure.
Either way, the
passage of time is likely only to worsen the Russian position and strengthen
the rebels. That is, unless the Russians do what they have said is out of the
question: negotiate a peace.
"There's no
evidence that in August 1999, anyone in Moscow really considered what sort of
long-term political settlement in Chechnya would best serve Russia's
interests, or whether military action was the best way to promote stability
in the North Caucasus," Orr says. "In effect . . . they gambled
that they could break Chechen resistance before their own resources were
exhausted.
"The critical
stage of that gamble has now been reached.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times |
