After nearly 50 years of seeing Russians as the enemies, most ill-informed Americans old enough to remember the Soviet Union have ingrained a variety of negative stereotypes about the residents of the former "Empire of Evil." Supposedly, the Russians "care more about vodka than human life." Supposedly, they are "gruesome." Supposedly they like "to use their most advanced weapons to bring hell" to places out of "sheer hatred." A recent editorial in The Dartmouth, titled "Chechnya " The Forgotten War," by Adil Ahmad tried to invoke all these stereotypes in order to malign Russia for exercising its legitimate right to self defense and territorial integrity. Ahmad hopes to exploit the ignorance of the average American about the nature of the conflict. He would like to spin the reality of the war into a heart-wrenching story of the noble little nation valiantly and honorably fighting a war of liberation against the evil oppressive occupying power. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately for all parties involved, this centuries-old conflict is anything but honorable for either side. As its power grew in the eighteenth century, tsarist Russia began a massive territorial expansion under Peter the Great. In 1818, Russia started the conquest of the Caucasus. During this time the Chechens put up the fiercest opposition to the conquest and became legendary in Russia as fierce fighters and devout practitioners of Islam. In the ninteenth century Leo Tolstoy described the Chechens and the Caucasus War in his short story, "A Prisoner in the Caucasus." He documented the horrors of the war, the harsh attitudes of the two peoples toward each other (although expressing hope for cooperation), and the role religion played in the conflict. And, of course, Tolstoy documented a major source of income that Chechens continue to employ to this day -- kidnapping foreigners for ransom.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chechnya was a battlefield for the Russian Civil War and after the Bolshevik victory became a part of the autonomous Chechen-Ingush Region of the Soviet Union in 1936. During World War II, Stalin deported much of the Region's population to Central Asia. However, Chechens were deported not in an effort to "weaken their nationalism", but as a consequence of their extensive collaboration with Hitler's Nazi forces, an alliance strengthened by their mutual hatred of Russians and Jews. Collaboration with the Nazis does not justify ethnic cleansing, but very few of Stalin's actions were justified. All willing Chechens were repatriated in 1956, three years after Stalin's death.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the Chechens declared independence, and as the Russians attempted to assert control, the first phase of the Chechen War began. Crippled and demoralized by the collapse of its government, the Russian Army could not sustain a protracted war against guerillas and pulled out of Chechnya in 1996 for "a brief period of respite," as the other editorial calls it. However, Ahmad failed to mention that Chechnya became an independent country, as Russia gave up on regaining its territory due to severe internal economic and social crisis. Aslan Maskhadov, a separatist leader, became the president in 1997, and Islamic Sharia law was instituted in 1999.
So why is Chechnya no longer independent? Not knowing much else besides how to fight and kill, Chechnya's rulers plunged the war-torn country into further chaos. The "freedom fighters" began to harass and oppress the very people they claimed to have liberated from Russian oppression. About this time is when experts estimate Al Qaeda began to infiltrate Chechnya. With no means or skill to make money, some Chechens began to cross over into Russian territory and kidnap Russians, foreign journalists and humanitarian workers for ransom. Bolstered by a sense of pride in their victory and prodded by Al Qaeda's Wahhabi brand of Islamic ideology, the Chechens decided to carve out more Russian territory to form an Islamic state called Greater Abkhazia. To garner attention to their cause they orchestrated a series of terror attacks deep inside Russian territory, the most spectacular and deadly of which were the Moscow residential apartment bombings, one of which alone, on Sept. 9, 1999, killed 94 people and injured 150.
The last straw was when Chechen forces invaded the neighboring Russian autonomous republic of Dagestan. The militants were quickly routed by the Russian Army, and Vladimir Putin was soon elected as the Russian president by an overwhelming majority of terrorized Russians on the promise that he was going to take decisive action against Chechnya.
The Chechens blew their opportunity for independence. Their country is now re-occupied. The Russians are back, angry and without most of the humanitarian concerns which Western nations usually take into account when waging battle. Russian forces commit atrocities against Chechens and Chechen terrorists commit atrocities against both Russians and their own people, who have come to despise them as much as they do the Russians. Suicide bombings are common within Russia and all but one have been carried out by women who are purportedly beaten, raped and dosed with drugs by "freedom fighters" in order to achieve the depredation of psyche necessary to carry out such an act. It's a sordid state of affairs indeed.
The main lesson to be learned from all this, and the lesson that Ahmad fails to perceive, is that terrorism against democratic countries is the surest way to lose your sovereignty and the worst way to try to gain independence. By killing them, you lose any speck of legitimacy in front of the very people who have your independence in their hands at the ballot box -- the citizens of these democratic countries. It wasn't Hindu extremists that won India its independence, it was Gandhi. It wasn't Menachem Begin's Jewish militia that got Jews their state, it was David Ben-Gurion's diplomacy. It wasn't the Black Panther militants that got African Americans their civil rights, it was Martin Luther King. And whether it's Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao or Palestine, there can be no independence and no peace until leaders arise that are brave enough to take the path of non-violence and give their lives, instead of the lives of others, for the freedom of their people.