Source: International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON The vile massacre in the Russian town of Beslan should bring a number of points home to Western governments, and lead them to adopt a new and more useful approach to the conflict in Chechnya.First, the strategy adopted by President Vladimir Putin has utterly failed to limit terrorism. The Chechens he has chosen to run the republic have failed to establish any real authority, and the abuses committed by Russian troops have contributed greatly to undermining Russia's goals in Chechnya.
This recognition alone, however, is insufficient as a basis for understanding the Chechen conflict, let alone helping to ameliorate it. We must also recognize that there can be no negotiation or compromise with the terrorists who carried out this atrocity, with their commanders like Shamil Basayev, or with their allies in the world of international Islamist extremism.
Nor can the West encourage any political process which could lead to these extremists once again gaining an ascendancy in Chechnya, as they did during the period of its de facto independence from 1996 to 1999.
After the Russian withdrawal in 1996, these radical forces revolted against the democratically elected government of President Aslan Maskhadov and turned Chechnya into a base for a monstrous wave of kidnapping and murder against Russians, Westerners and fello Caucasians.
In alliance with radical Arab Islamists linked to Al Qaeda, they launched a campaign to drive Russia from the whole of the Northern Caucasus and unite it with Chechnya in one Islamic republic. President Maskhadov failed completely to suppress these groups. Indeed, senior Russian envoys were kidnapped and murdered while under his personal protection. According to Western officials, the criminal and Islamist group headed by the commander Arbi Barayev, which was responsible in 1998 for the kidnapping and beheading of four British telecom engineers, was under the protection of Maskhadov's then vice president, Vaqa Arsanov.
In other words, when we advocate a political settlement in Chechnya, we should be quite clear that what we are advocating is not an end to the struggle against the Chechen extremists, but a way of reducing their support in the Chechen population in order to fight against them more successfully.
A new Western strategy for Chechnya should have three main components.
The first would be directed towards Moscow, and would echo our approach to Turkey, India and other countries which have fought similar conflicts against secessionist and terrorist forces. It would express unqualified support for Russia's territorial integrity and for its struggle against the terrorists.
However, it would combine this with demands that the Russian state take much stronger action against abuses by the military, that international observers be allowed into Chechnya and that the Russian government launch a much more broadly based and democratic political initiative. This would include both the holding of democratic parliamentary elections in Chechnya and an offer of talks with Maskhadov and his followers.
The second Western approach should be to Maskhadov and his representatives in the West, like Ahmed Zakayev, who has been given political asylum in Britain. They should be reminded firmly that when they formed a Chechen government in 1996 to 99, they failed utterly to foster even minimal elements of a state in Chechnya, to protect foreign citizens there or to prevent Chechnya being used as a base by anti-Western extremists. Their credibility as would-be rulers of an independent Chechnya is zero.
Any thought of Chechen independence must therefore be deferred until a solid basis for Chechen statehood has been created. In return for Western support for Chechen democracy and their own amnesty and participation in the Chechen political process, Maskhadov and his followers must accept autonomy for Chechnya within the Russian Federation as a short-to-medium-term solution and promise to struggle for long-term independence by exclusively peaceful and political means.
They must also commit themselves not only to break absolutely with the terrorists, but to fight against them alongside Russian forces. If they fail to make this commitment, they should be treated by the West as terrorist supporters.
Finally, the West should back such a settlement with the promise of a really serious aid package for Chechnya's reconstruction, calibrated so as to reward supporters of peace, and of Western special forces to help Russia in the fight against the terrorists.
It may be argued of course that such a commitment is utterly unrealistic, given the contemptible failure of Western countries even to meet their formal obligations to liberated Afghanistan. But then again, if Western governments and societies are not prepared to give real help to Chechnya, how much is their moralizing talk about the situation there really worth?