he four Russian special forces officers opened fire on the vehicle carrying six civilians on a quiet road in southern Chechnya. They killed the driver, then realized they had netted not a carload of "terrorists," but a couple of village teachers, a farmer and a mother of seven children. To cover up their blunder, the Spetsnaz commandos executed all five survivors, doused the vehicle in gasoline and set
it alight to pretend that it hit a landmine.
Another routine atrocity
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
in Russian President Vladimir Putin's dirty war, a war he pretends is long over, long won since
there are no political dividends
in it any more. The murder of
the six took place two years ago.
On April 30 in Rostov, southern Russia, the headquarters for Russia's creaking Chechnya war machine, a court acquitted the four officers of the killings. They were just following orders.
If the acquittals scandalized Chechens, the trial itself was
a rarity. It was only the second time in a decade of conflict
in Chechnya that any Russian
officers had been called to judicial account for their brutality towards its civilians.
While the US, Britain and the Arab world grow increasingly outraged at the torture of Iraqi prisoners, Putin's forces have carte blanche to ravage Chechnya on a daily basis with impunity.
The Russian leader need not concern himself with the Russian equivalent of CBS TV airing any footage of humiliation. No need to lean on the editors of 60 Minutes. There no longer is an equivalent.
Russian TV used to be a problem for the Kremlin and Chechnya. Former president Boris Yeltsin's 1994-96 war there withered as Russian TV bloomed, a late flowering of glasnost. Putin solved the problem by taking control of all national television.
That control also helps Putin to pretend the war is over. He rode to power almost five years ago by launching Russia's second war in Chechnya within weeks of becoming prime minister. Last week, being inaugurated for a second term as Russian president amid Kremlin pomp, he did not once mention Chechnya by name in his big speech.
While he was speaking, Russian forces were "rounding up" another 160 men in Chechnya for the beatings and detentions that are a daily occurrence. At the same time,
four Russian troops were killed
in Chechnya, also a daily fixture. Running at around 30 deaths a week, plus dozens more maimed and ultimately dying, the Russian death toll now runs into the thousands.
And still Putin pretends there is no war, until a "terrorist" bomb explodes on one of the holiest days in the Russian calendar, May 9, the day that Russia marks its greatest victory, over Nazi Germany.
Sunday's attack, the boldest Chechen guerrilla strike since the Moscow theater siege of October 2002, deprived Putin of his self-appointed loyal Chechen leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, and, more importantly from the military's point of view, of General Valery Baranov, the Russian commander in Chechnya.
In Chechnya itself, there are no more prestigious targets for the guerrillas than these two. The retribution will be terrifying. And guaranteed to perpetuate the long spiral of violence in what Putin insists ad nauseum is Russia's own war on terror.
That is the tacit deal struck between Moscow and Washington since the Sept. 11 attacks. He gets a green light for his Chechen campaign in return for sharing intelligence with the US and not resisting US bases in post-Soviet central Asia.
And his spin doctors constantly equate the Chechen guerrillas with al-Qaeda. There are inarguably links in the Islamist international, and increasingly so as the conflict becomes more embittered and radicalized. But the parallel between Russia in Chechnya and the US in Afghanistan or Iraq is also specious.
Chechnya is a 200-year-old story of Russian empire and expansion, conquest and co-existence, rebellion and retribution. You can read about it in Tolstoy and Lermontov. Stalin put the entire Chechen population
on cattle wagons to central Asia, killing tens of thousands, in retaliation for collaboration during World War II.
Russia is not dispatching an expeditionary force thousands of kilometers overseas. It is fighting a homegrown war in its own backyard, one of the last battles of Russian colonialism.
But if Putin really did win, the victory could also embolden the Kremlin to flex its muscles in the post-Soviet territories it has lost.
Complaining about EU protests at Russian human-rights abuses
in Chechnya recently, a Russian commentator typically described Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen guerrilla leader, as Russia's Osama bin Laden.
The comparison is absurd. Maskhadov is a legitimate leader, elected president of Chechnya in 1997 in a reasonably fair election. Had there been any Russian will to negotiate a settlement, Maskhadov would have obliged. Instead, Putin's tactics have marginalized and radicalized him, trying to turn him into a bin Laden of the Caucasus.
Eschewing politics, seeking a showdown and violence, the Kremlin has opted instead for self-fulfilling prophecy. That may be the one area where Putin has been successful.
He should not be surprised, then, to be confronting fundamentalist Islamists, black-widow female suicide bombers, and a jihad.
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