Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the Religion Report.
Yesterday morning on my way to work on a busy road that runs by Randwick Racecourse in Sydney, there was a huge message graffiti’d on a white wall: ‘Islam is the Manifestation of Evil’. This morning, it’s gone; the wall is white again as though nothing was ever there.
What has been especially notable in the international condemnation of the Beslan school massacre last weekend has been the reaction of the Arabic press in the Middle East. ‘Our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture’ said the newspaper, Asharq Al-Azwat. ‘Most perpetrators of suicide operations around the world for the past ten years have been Muslims’ said the TV station, Al Arabia. Meanwhile in France, the introduction of the headscarf ban suddenly went very smoothly.
We’re joined this week by Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. Anatol has written extensively about Russia and the Caucasian region, and in the interview you’re about to hear, he speculates about the possibility that continued atrocities by Islamic extremists in Russia or in Europe, might even lead to the terrible possibility of mass deportations of Chechens from Russia.
Have the horrifying pictures of naked schoolchildren covered in blood, brought the war on terror to a turning point? And has the massacre in northern Osetia re-focused our attention on a neglected but strategically important region in that war?
Anatol Lieven: Yes absolutely, and it’s a region which has been very determinedly colonised by Islamist radicals. Not al Qaeda itself, but close allies of al Qaeda. They’ve been trying to do this ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. What of course gave them a tremendous boost was the Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994 and the war that followed, because like other conflicts of this kind, like Palestine, like Afghanistan, like Kashmir, it sucked in these Arab and other international Islamist extremists and allowed them to form a military base in the region.
Stephen Crittenden: And I think we know, don’t we, that there were Arab fighters involved in this actual siege?
Anatol Lieven: Well we’re not sure of that yet. It’s been alleged both by the Russian authorities and by some of the surviving hostages, but a great deal about the exact composition of the group of terrorists is not clear. But we do know that there have been a fair number of Arab fighters in Chechnya and that they’ve played a leading role ever since 1995. And they’ve also played a leading role not so much in the fighting, as in radicalising much of the Chechen armed resistance and turning it in an Islamist and extremist direction.
Stephen Crittenden: You’ve written a lot about the Caucasus. Are we likely to see now ongoing ethnic violence, more bloodshed upon bloodshed, as a result of this attack?
Anatol Lieven: Well I think that that is undoubtedly what these terrorists hope to provoke. It would be very much to their advantage, for example, to spread the Chechen war by provoking an ethnic conflict between the Osetes and the Ingush, and therefore they’ve been recruiting as many Ingush as possible to take part in similar attacks. And most of the victims of this attack were not ethnic Russians as such, they were Osetes who are a minority people of the North Caucasus. Quite a number of whom, by the way, are Muslims, their fellow Muslims. And they have an ongoing ethnic dispute with the Ingush and clearly there is a terrible risk now that the Osete people will take up arms and attack their Ingush neighbours in revenge, and if so of course, that would effectively create a second front for the Chechens, and another enormous headache for Russia.
Stephen Crittenden: Nonetheless, I imagine it’s not a good time to be a Caucasian guest worker in Moscow for example.
Anatol Lieven: Well no, it isn’t, though one must say that although they have been harassed by the police and there are some pretty awful stories, there haven’t been pogroms or massacres as yet. After each attack of this kind, there has been fear that ordinary Russians in Moscow and elsewhere will just attack their North Caucasian neighbours, and this has not happened and the Russian government have acted very firmly to prevent this. The reason being, of course, amongst other things: A) that Putin’s entire strategy in Chechnya depends on trying to win over enough Chechens to support Russia’s allies in Chechnya and to support a Chechen government which will govern an autonomous Chechnya within the Russian Federation. Clearly, massacres of Chechens in Russia would act tremendously against that. Secondly of course, if you have pogroms of this kind, your average Russian chauvinist thug is completely incapable of distinguishing, not just between a Chechen and an Ingush, or a Chechen and a Dagastani, but he couldn’t even distinguish between a Chechen and an Osete. So you’d actually have close allies of the Russians in the Caucasus being massacred as well which of course is not something that any sane Russian leader wants to see.
Stephen Crittenden: Nonetheless, he’s now been drawn into declaring that Russia’s involved in all-out war.
Anatol Lieven: Well in one sense Russia has been involved in an all-out war for a number of years now. It’s not as if the Russian armed forces in Chechnya have been particularly restrained, unfortunately they’ve been notorious for their brutality and their atrocities. The question for the future is whether Russia will go much further than this because Russia has not yet for example, done everything that America did in Vietnam or France in Algeria in terms for example, of just clearing large areas of the countryside, and putting the populations in effectively concentration camps behind barbed wire. This is something the Americans did, they called it ‘protected hamlets’ if I remember rightly. The Russians haven’t done that yet, they could do that. In the last resort, if atrocities of this kind by the Chechens continue, and if there are similar atrocities in the West by Islamist extremists, one could find oneself living a much worse world in which actions like that of Stalin in 1944 in deporting the entire Chechen people, become possible again. I mean pray God that doesn’t happen, but one shouldn’t ignore the fact that if something of this kind happened in India, the reaction of Hindu radicals would be just absolutely savage, we’ve seen that before. I wouldn’t put that much money on a restrained response by the American population, or for that matter the French or the British.
Stephen Crittenden: No indeed. I mean what about the reaction to this massacre on the part of Europeans for example who’ve already had the Madrid bombing to deal with. We’ve seen just in the last few days, we’ve seen the introduction of the hijab ban in France go comparatively quietly; we’ve seen the Middle Eastern press very blunt in their expressions of disgust, one newspaper describing ‘Our terrorist sons as the end product of our corrupted culture’. You know, is this in a sense a turning point?
Anatol Lieven: Well one would hope so. That’s what one always hopes after incidents of this kind. There’s enough Muslims, enough Chechens will conclusively repudiate terrorism, but of course you don’t need a very large minority of radicalised, infuriated people to carry out attacks of this kind. It’s not as if al Qa’eda represents in any sense a majority of Muslims, but it does have enough support in the Muslim world to go on recruiting to raise money, and of course there are all these issues, you know, Russian oppression of the Chechens, Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, Indian repression of the Kashmiris, in all of these issues go on fuelling enough anger, enough resentment, and of course enough desire for revenge, to go on contributing to these terrorist movements. So unfortunately, a repudiation by a moderate majority in itself is not enough. But it would be a help, certainly.
Stephen Crittenden: Anatole, you recently said that the Chechen conflict had the potential to go on indefinitely. I remember reading a comment by one historians who described the problem that Russia had to face of a kind of magma of Islamic power towards its southern extremities. Given that this is such a vulnerable area, what does this massacre mean for the stability of the wider region? And I’m thinking that this is a part of the world that Turkey would also count as part of its sphere of influence.
Anatol Lieven: Yes, although as long as Turkey retains a secular state structure and a moderate Muslim political movement, I don’t think that you’re going to see the Turkish state wanting to get involved on the side of the Chechens, it would be just too dangerous for them, and it would also of course raise tremendous suspicions in Washington. I think the greater danger is, that eventually, some Russian government supported by public opinion, will just throw up its hands and quit the whole region, because there’s no point, from Russia’s point of view, in just leaving Chechnya, then you just repeat what happened from ’96 to ’99 when radicals based in Chechnya continued the war against Russia. If you’re going to quit, you have to quit the whole of the Muslim north-east Caucuses, including Dagestan and Ingushetia and basically fortify the line of the Tarak River as a security frontier, and by the way, kick all the Chechens and Dagestanis out of Russia. The problem is that that would lead to a genuine magma, I mean a big, out-of-control area wracked by ethnic conflict, I mean really like Afghanistan in the 1990s, and which would inevitably become in part, a safe haven for terrorists and not just terrorists against Russia, but anti-Western terrorists as well. So one of the threats is that this war will go on indefinitely in Chechnya, one of the threats is that Russia will ultimately adopt policies amounting if not to genocide, then certainly to mass deportation. The third is that Russia will quit and the whole place will just spiral into complete chaos.
Stephen Crittenden: May I suggest one other possibility, and maybe a possibility that Washington might prefer? Washington has wanted for the past year or more, for Russia to have a greater involvement in the Iraq conflict; is this the kind of event that might concentrate Russia’s mind and bring it into that conflict in any way?
Anatol Lieven: Well only if Russia were persuaded that as a result, America would give massive and useful help to Russia in fighting the Chechens or in supporting Russia in other areas. The problem is that up to now, the Americans, not just from Russia, have demanded help in Iraq, but have not actually offered anything in return. Well obviously there’s no reason for Russia to participate on those terms, particularly when after all, the other major powers of the world, most of them, are not doing so.
Stephen Crittenden: And are we equally unlikely to see Washington become involved in Chechnya?
Anatol Lieven: Well militarily, not at all, unless at some point in the very far future, Russia pulled out completely, and it does become a new Afghanistan in which America might then at some stage have no choice but to step in. But no, America won’t do anything of that sort for the moment. What I would like to see would be in place of a lot of this empty language, a much more concentrated political strategy on the part of the West towards Chechnya, which would involve bringing heavy pressure on the more moderate Chechen independence fighters, led by Maskhadov, to do a deal with Russia accepting autonomy within the Russian Federation, in return for Russia gradually withdrawing its troops from Chechnya. But the problem is, that wouldn’t end the war, Maskhadov does not control Asayev, and most of the Chechen fighters. What it would do hopefully would be to create more Chechen allies of the Russians. But unfortunately Russia isn’t prepared for that, Maskhadov isn’t prepared for that, and one must say that no Western government has been actually willing to make the kind of diplomatic or financial commitment required either.
Stephen Crittenden: Thank you for talking to us, it’s much appreciated.
Anatol Lieven: Not at all, it was a pleasure.
Stephen Crittenden: Anatol Lieven.
This text is copyrighted and republished here with the permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
