Obstacles to peace in Chechnya: What scope for international involvement?

Abstract

Recognising the failure of both internal and external parties to achieve a peaceful resolution of the Russo – Chechen war, this article seeks to establish what scope remains for international involvement to end the violence in Chechnya. By applying theories from the disciplines of conflict resolution and counterinsurgency to the confrontation, distinctions are drawn between opportunities of peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding, as well as between legitimate ‘need’ and exploitative ‘greed’ at a time of ‘violent’ politics. Key findings include the scope for international assistance in addressing the root contradictions of the conflict and for curtailing the influence of the ‘entrepreneurs of violence’.

Notes

¹For a comprehensive coverage of such articles, see Johnson's Russia List, especially 8492 – 8504, 10 – 17 December 2004.

²An exception was the study by Hill et al. (2005).

³For its impact in the UK, see the correspondence of April – May 2004 between the Cabinet Secretary and the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office on ‘Relations with the Muslim Community’, leaked to The Sunday Times. The full text of the correspondence is available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,2087-1688261,00.html, accessed 9 December 2005.

⁴For a detailed analysis of the layers of conflict, see Russell (2005b, pp. 239 – 264).

⁵In employing this concept I acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Christoph Zűrcher (see Zűrcher & Koehler 2001, p. 49). James Hughes prefers the term ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ in his article ‘Chechnya; the Causes of a Protracted Post-Soviet Conflict’ (Hughes 2001, p. 40).

⁶‘Superficial historicity’ is a term also employed by Tishkov, see Hughes (2001, p. 20).

⁷See also, United Nations Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Briefing (revised 17 February 2004), available at: http://www.una-uk.org/UN&C/peacemaking.html, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁸Z. Sikevich (2002) ‘The Caucasus and “Caucasus Phobia”’, translated by Robin Jones for Rosbalt News Agency, 18 December, available at: http://www.rosbaltnews.com/2003/02/07/60777.html, accessed 22 July. The term in Russian is ‘kavkazofobia’, see also Sikevich (1999, pp. 99 – 112).

⁹Y. Soshin (2005) ‘Papakha s ushami’[‘Papapkha—the traditional Caucasian headwear—with ear-flaps’], 12 July, available at: http://www.globalrus.ru/opinions/778113/, accessed 22 July 2005.

¹⁰For a description of cultural narrative, in this case Armenian, see Tololyan (1987, pp. 218 – 233).

¹¹In distinguishing ‘ethnocide’ from ‘genocide’, Steven T. Katz, citing the Stalinist deportations of World War II, claims that the ‘intent was to destroy a variety of minority cultures and ambitions built on them, rather than to murder all the members of a specific people’ (Katz 1999, p. 280).

¹²See S. Pankratova (2004) ‘Rossiya i PACE po-raznomu smotryat na bor'bu s terrorizmom’[‘Russia and PACE do not see Eye-to-Eye on the Battle against Terrorism’], 7 October, available at: http://www.izvestia.ru/politic/490012, accessed 7 October 2004.

¹³In a poll published by Moscow's Levada Centre in July 2005, 37% stated that they would either be pleased to be rid of Chechnya (or considered they already were) and a further 17% were indifferent to the prospect of losing it (available at: http://www.levada.ru/press/2005070410.html, accessed 22 July 2005). A poll by the same organisation in September 2005 found that only 20% of Russians favoured continuing military operations in Chechnya against 68% opting for peace negotiations, 61% (against 28%) indicating that they thought the war in Chechnya was still going on (available at: http://www.levada.ru/press/2005100506.html, accessed 9 December 2005). See also Volkova (2004).

¹⁴Thus, of those polled recently in Chechnya, 66% thought that Chechen men and women had taken up arms to resist the violent actions of Russian forces, against only 14% who identified the struggle for independence: see Basnukhayev and Iriskhanov (2004), also available at: http://www.levada.ru/vestnik78.html, accessed 8 March 2006.

¹⁵For an account of the main pro-Russian Chechen forces, see A. Makarkin (2004) ‘Alu Alkhanov—novy chechenskii vybor Kremlya’[‘Alu Alkhanov—the Kremlin's New Chechen Choice’], available at: http://www.politcom.ru/2004/analit139.php, accessed 22 July, 2005.

¹⁶The Russian journalist, Vadim Rechkalov, claims that ‘in the many times I have been to Chechnya over the past several years I have never met a single Russian soldier or FSB official who knew the Chechen language’: ‘Budet lokal'nye stychki s zhertvami do 100 chelovek, a voiny ne budet’[‘There will be Local Skirmishes with up to 100 Victims, but there will be No War’], Izvestiya, 2 August 2004.

¹⁷See Y. Belous (2004) ‘Pomiluyet li Putin Budanova?’[‘Will Putin Pardon Budanov?’], 20 September, available at: http://politics.pravda.ru/politics/2004/1/1/1/18068_BUDANOVPOMIL.html, accessed 22 July 2005.

¹⁸In October 2005, Alu Alkhanov admitted that 7,000 former boeviki made up almost half of the forces of law and order in Chechnya: ‘Pochti polovina sotrudnikov militsii Chechnyi byvshiye boeviki: 7 tysyach chelovek’[‘Almost Half of Those Serving in Chechnya's Police Force are Former Fighters: 7 Thousand Persons’], available at: http://www.newsru.com/russia/21oct2005/chechnya.html, accessed 9 December 2005.

¹⁹Originally published in Schmid (1988, pp. 58 – 59) and reproduced in Schmid (2004, p. 201).

²⁰J. Galtung (2001) ‘Crafting Peace: on the Psychology of the TRANSCEND Approach’, available at: http://www.transcend.org/t_database/articles.php?ida=221, accessed 22 July 2005.

²¹I am using these terms as generally understood in the literature on terrorism. For a good analysis of both, see Wilkinson (2001), especially ‘Insurgency and Terrorism’ (pp. 1 – 18) and ‘State Terror’ (pp. 40 – 45).

²²For an up-to-date insight into levels of press and NGO freedom in Russia, see M. Gabowitsch (2006) ‘Inside the Looking Glass: A Reply to Nicolai N. Petro’, 17 February, available at: http://www.opendemocracy.net, accessed 8 March 2006.

²³In December 2005, more than two-thirds (69%) of those polled would prefer peace talks with the Chechens against 21% favouring Putin's policy of continuing the war (see http://www.levada.ru/press/2005122901.html, accessed 8 March 2006); it was reported by Interfax on 2 February 2006, that 86% of Chechens ‘link the achievement of peace, stability, justice and order’ with the activities of the current (pro-Russian) Chechen authorities. In an earlier survey of Russian and Chechen public opinion, it was found that, although 78% of Chechens polled wished to remain part of Russia, 61% of these believed that Chechnya should have a greater degree of autonomy than any other part of the Russian Federation: see Trenin (2003, p. 4).

²⁴The siloviki refer to elite leaders in the Russian ministries of law and order (FSB, MVD, MOD, SVR etc.). Putin (a former head of the FSB) has a high proportion of former security chiefs in key positions. See G. Feifer (2003) ‘Russia: President Boosts Power of Security Services’, Center for Defense Information Weekly, 248, available at: http://www.cdi.org/russia/248-16.cfm, accessed 22 July 2005; Kryshtanovskaya and White (2003, pp. 289 – 306).

²⁵In July 2000 President Putin claimed that authority ‘should rely on the law and a single, vertical line of executive power’: The Guardian, 12 July 2000.

²⁶It is instructive to note that neither Russian Orthodoxy under the Tsars nor Marxism – Leninism under the Soviets could accommodate the ‘heretical’ views of, respectively, Lev Tolstoi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arguably the most quintessentially Russian writers at either end of the twentieth century.

²⁷In July 2005, 58% were moderately or decisively for the concept of ‘Russia for the Russians’ and 32% against. See http://www.levada.ru/press/2005070410.html, accessed 22 July 2005. A poll conducted by the Russian Academy of Sciences' Centre for the Study of Xenophobia shortly after the Beslan siege found that 55.8% of those polled regarded ‘non-Russian nationalities’ as a threat to the security of Russia; see report of 22 July 2005 for the ‘Memorial’ organisation's ‘Migration and Law’ network by S. A. Gannushkina (ed.) ‘Polozhenie zhitelei Chechnyi v Rossiiskoi Federatsii, iyun’ 2004g.—iyun' 2005g'[‘The Situation of Residents of Chechnya in the Russian Federation, June 2004 – June 2005’], p. 8, available at: http://www.memo.ru/hr/news/5gannush7.htm, accessed 9 December 2005.

²⁸One of the more bizarre attempts by the Putin administration to make Chechens feel part of Russia was the official encouragement of the Terek soccer team from Grozny, which won the Russian Cup in 2004 and represented Russia in 2004 – 05 in the UEFA Cup. Rebel Chechen websites have likened the role of the club's patron, Ramzan Kadyrov, to that of Uday Hussein vis à vis the Iraqi soccer team: see Ruslan Isakov, ‘We'll Beat Swords into Soccer Balls …’ (swords and balls being a play on words in Russian), available at: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/print.php?id=3090, accessed 22 July 2005.

²⁹See the monitoring accounts of the 2003 Chechen presidential election by the Moscow Helsinki Group. For example, R. Umarov, ‘Otvety Akhmata Kadyrova na voprosy Internet-SMI “Kavkazskii Uzel”’[‘Akhmat Kadyrov's Answers to Questions of the “Caucasian Junction” Internet Site’], available at: http://www.mhg.ru/24957D5/26E7F5C, accessed 22 July 2005.

³⁰In the Freedom House ‘Nations in Transit’ Democracy Scores for 2005, Russia (5.61) was sandwiched between Kosovo (5.32) and Kyrgyzstan (5.64). Here 1 represents the highest and 7 the lowest level of democracy, available at: http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/nitransit/2005/addendum2005.pdf, accessed 8 March 2005.

³¹For an explanation of these concepts, see Galtung (1969, pp. 167 – 191).

³²For case studies in Northern Ireland, the Philippines and the Middle East, see Cragin and Chalk (2003); for links between narcotics and insurgency in Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia and Peru, see Cornell (2005, pp. 751 – 760).

³³The illusory nature of Russian territorial integrity is examined in Markedonov (2005).

³⁴For Dagestan see, ‘Djamaat “Shariat”: “The Territory of Jihad Extends!”’ (2005) 2 July, available at: http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2005/07/02/3918.shtml, accessed 22 July 2005; for Kabardino – Balkaria see, ‘Napadeniye na Nal'chik’[‘The Attack on Nalchik’], available at: http://www.rian.ru/actual/nalchik_attack_131005/, accessed 9 December 2005.

³⁵In 2005, Russia was rated 90th out of 146 countries for levels of corruption by Transparency International; see Moll and Gowan (2005, p. 24).

³⁶A feature of the Russo – Chechen conflict is the abuse directed at those Westerners who genuinely do try to involve themselves in processes of reconciliation. Two of the authors of the Carnegie Policy Brief (Hill et al.2005) have fallen foul of this syndrome; on 7 March 2005, Anatol Lieven from the Chechen side: see ‘Tsirkulyar po pravil'nomy osveshcheniyu sobytii v Chechne’[‘Circular on the Correct Illumination of Events in Chechnya’], available at: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/russ/article.php?id=31149, accessed 22 July 2005; and, on 21 June 2005, Tom de Waal, this time by a Russian website: see ‘Tomas de Vaal i biznes na krovi’[‘Thomas de Waal and Business in Blood’], available at: http://www.chechnya.ru/view_all.php?part=pub, accessed 22 July 2005.

³⁷‘The Economics of War: the Intersection of Need, Creed and Greed’, organised on 10 September 2001 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, available at: http://www.ipacademy.org/PDF_Reports/econofwar.pdf, accessed 22 July 2005.

³⁸The Kremlin recognition of the political wing of Hamas, while refusing to acknowledge the political legitimacy of any of the Chechen resistance, has not gone unnoticed in the West. See McGregor (2006).

³⁹This interpretation has been strongly rejected by Akhmed Zakayev, whose role in the Chechen resistance was downgraded in the recent reshuffle; see ‘Zapad dal sanktsiyu na dolguyu voinu v Chechne’[‘The West has Sanctioned a Long War in Chechnya’], an interview on 6 February 2006, with Radio Svoboda's Andrei Babitsky, published by Chechen Press: available at: http://www.chechenpress.info/events/2006/02/09/01.shtml17936, accessed 8 March 2006. For an account of the reshuffle, see Smirnov (2006).

⁴⁰Available at: http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/AdoptedText/ta06/ERES1479.htm, accessed 8 March 2006.

⁴¹See A. Kuchins (2006) ‘Russian Democracy and Civil Society: Back to the Future’, Testimony Prepared for US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 8 February, available at: http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=18007&prog=zru, accessed 8 March 2006, Russia will chair the Council's Committee of Ministers in 2006.

⁴²See, for example, The Norwegian Helsinki Committee (2002) and Amnesty International's report of 23 June 2004, ‘“Normalization” in Whose Eyes?’, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/print/ENGEUR460272004, accessed 22 July 2006; in March 2005, Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper entitled ‘Worse than a War: “Disappearances” in Chechnya—a Crime Against Humanity’, available at: http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/chechnya0305/, accessed 22 July; the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) also reported in 2004 on ‘The Political Situation in the Chechen Republic: Measures to Increase Democratic Stability in Accordance with Council of Europe Standards’, available at: http://assembly.coe.int/documents/WorkingDocs/doc04/EDOC10276.htm, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁴³For the ‘Chechen syndrome’, see Y. Zarakhovich (2003) ‘Chechnya's Walking Wounded’, Time Europe, 28 September, available at: http://www.time.com/time/europe/html/031006/syndrome.html, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁴⁴The vote fell just 17 short of the two-thirds majority (300) needed to impeach the President; see BBC News (1999) 16 May, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/344805.stm, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁴⁵Sergei Stepashin, Yel'tsin's FSB chief in 1994, is one of the few to reject this scenario, placing the blame for the impasse squarely on Dudayev's intransigence. See his interview of 11 May 2002, in L. Telen (2002) ‘Last but One Hero’, available at: http://english.mn.ru/english/issue.php?2002-50-11, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁴⁶Articulated, for example, by Robert Parsons, the former BBC correspondent covering the Chechen conflict, in the film Chechen Lullaby by Nino Kirtadze (Arte, Paris, 2000).

⁴⁷For the lack of idealism in the search for peace in either the United Nations or the European Union, see Lloyd (2005, p. 8); for Western leaders, see Glucksmann (2005).

⁴⁸For an application of this debate to the Iraq War, see K. Burgess-Jackson (2003) ‘Bush's Critics as Repeat Offenders’, TCS Daily, 3 July, available at: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=070303A, accessed 8 March 2006.

⁴⁹See Spiegel Online (2004) ‘Moscow Mon Amour: Gerhard Schroeder's Dangerous Liaison’, 1 December, available at: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,330461,00.html, accessed 22 July 2005. In December 2005, the former German Chancellor was appointed Chairman of Gazprom's Baltic pipeline subsidiary; see http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/12/10/gerschr.shtml, accessed 8 March 2006.

⁵⁰This claim was made by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in his article ‘Crisis of Russian Liberalism’, 29 March 2004, available at: http://www.mosnews.com/column/2004/03/29/khodorkovsky.shtml, accessed 9 December 2005.

⁵¹See Channel 4 Dispatches, Chechnya: the Dirty War, screened 25 July 2005; Dubnov (2005, pp. 6 – 10); and for Maskhadov's last interview, published on the day before his death, see L. Fuller (2005) ‘Chechen Leader Gives Exclusive Interview to RFE/RL’, available at: http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/03/C8BF5CC0-D91F-4DAC-9185-A451B1124B1D.html, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁵²A poll conducted on 24 March 2005 indicated that 62% of Russians felt that Maskhadov's body should be returned to his relatives; see http://www.levada/ru/press/2005032402.html, accessed 22 July 2005.

⁵³For example, an estimated 500,000 landmines have been deployed in Chechnya; see Kramer (2004/5, p. 26).