The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  IV

  During the 1980s, policy makers in Washington DC, had watched the Soviet Union’s military difficulties in Afghanistan with ill-concealed glee. They saw the Soviet withdrawal as a Cold War victory for the forces of Communist containment. The Islamic world saw it differently and took heart, drawing the lesson that Islamic warriors could defeat the technologically superior forces of foreign imperialism (albeit when armed and bankrolled by the United States and Saudi Arabia). Afghanistan had other legacies. Resisting the Soviet invader not only proved a useful military training ground for the native tribesmen but also for the thousands of co-religionists who joined the jihad against the infidel.

  The collapse of Soviet Communism only sharpened the fault line between the Orthodox and Muslim peoples of the Caucasus. In 1992, Moscow intervened to shore up the forces of its embattled satellite government in Tajikistan, retaking the capital, Dushanbe, and driving the state’s Islamic insurgents back to the Afghan border where their cause was kept alive with arms and money from friendly Arab states. In Northern Ossetia and Chechnya, ethnic sensitivities continued to be tense between the Russian settlers and the native Muslims. The latter had been deported by Stalin and had returned, after the dictator’s death, to find their land and status much diminished. In 1992, Muslims from Ingushetia fought Orthodox Ossetians for control over disputed property. Russian ‘peacekeeping’ forces assisted the Ossetian destruction of Ingush villages in Northern Ossetia.

  In Chechnya, the regime of Dzhokhar Dudayev was a byword for corruption. Market day in the capital, Grozny, more closely resembled an arms bazaar. In 1994 Dudayev responded to the increasingly militant Islamism of the Caucasus by proposing to make Chechnya an Islamic state operating Sharia law. Moscow looked on with alarm, concerned that Chechnya was becoming – like the West Bank was to Israel – a safe haven for terrorist operatives. In 1994, a mismanaged coup led by Russian troops posing as mercenaries ended in disaster. A formal invasion followed. Grozny was shelled. Armoured columns were lost in its streets as locals took it in turns to destroy the ill-conceived Russian advance with the private arsenal at their disposal. Anatole Leiven had been in Grozny reporting the attack for The Times and was joined by Richard Beeston. In January 1995, Beeston was relieved in turn by Anthony Loyd. ‘The Russian gunners are operating with total disregard for humanitarian principles and killing their own people en masse as a result, in salvoes on a scale I have never seen before,’ Loyd reported from his vantage point on the ground floor of a stone building. ‘For the wounded lying in the ruins there is no place of safety, no morphine, and very few bandages. The dead are just left to rot.’51 Appalled by the Russian army’s indiscriminate actions, he was also staggered by its ‘blinding incompetence.’ Conscripts and tanks were dispatched into urban areas where they were easily blown up by rocket-propelled grenades.

  The Chechens’ problem, as Loyd pointed out, was that ‘successful guerrilla campaigns rely on superpower backing: the Chechens have none’.52 America might have been happy to pay for the Soviet Union to be embarrassed in Afghanistan, but helping Chechens destabilize Boris Yeltsin was a different proposition entirely. While London and Washington felt they had the motive and the firepower to protect the Muslims of Kosovo against Milosevic, safeguarding the Muslims of Chechnya by preventing the Kremlin from suppressing revolt in its backyard was neither possible nor desirable. The new wars for human rights, however trumpeted in lofty rhetoric, did not have universal application. Realpolitik remained the ultimate break on action. The Chechens took assistance from Islam’s itinerant guerrillas instead, a fact that further muted Western interest in their cause. Loyd interviewed the Chechen commander, General Aslan Maskhadov, in his bunker as well as his fighters, one of whom took pride in the fact that his capital had held out for thirty-seven days before being overrun by the Russians while Berlin in 1945 had lasted only a fortnight.53 Despite hoisting the Russian flag over the ruins of the presidential palace, the occupiers soon discovered the cost of attempting to hold the city.

  Comparing it to his experiences in Bosnia, Kosovo or (in 2001) Afghanistan, Loyd found being on the front line in Chechyna ‘by far the most terrifying experience of my life’. He was familiar with death, barbarism and mutilation, but in Grozny ‘the intensity of violence was much greater’. Covering the other conflicts, his main concern had been ‘the normal things like being shot by a sniper or stepping on a mine’, but crouching in central Grozny while the Russians blasted the city into concrete shards involved witnessing hundreds of humans being killed and wounded in minutes. What was more, he found himself in this situation for hours at a time.54 In April 1996, Dudayev was killed by a missile that tapped onto his mobile phone signal. In July 1996, the Chechens took back Grozny. Yeltsin tried to get out of the mess, and Chechyna was granted autonomy. It proved in no position to exercise the freedom wisely. Real power had long since switched to its warlords and assorted criminals. Money from Muslim sources in the Middle East, where the struggle was seen as another jihad, helped ensure that terrorism continued to flourish. Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, met fire with fire. In 1999, Russia reinvaded. Ten years after the first attempt to seize Grozny, half of Chechnya’s one million population was assumed dead or exiled. The Russian army was suffering higher losses than it had endured in Afghanistan. While much of the British public paid fleeting attention to the disorders in the Caucasus, The Times continued its mission to gather what information it could from a part of the world that had become inaccessible to all but the most intrepid and cunning reporters. The leader-writing team was bolstered by the arrival of Vanora Bennett, a journalist with extensive Russian experience and the author of Crying Wolf, a study of Chechnya’s woes. Loyd returned to the country in October 1999 in time to catch the worst of Putin’s onslaught. Russian bombing had intensified the previous month. There had been more than three thousand kidnappings there since August 1996 and the Chechens, reinforced by Islamic fundamentalists, had produced gruesome videos showing the victims being tortured to death. It was estimated that of the fifty foreigners who entered Chechnya in 1998, thirty-eight were taken hostage. These were not good odds. Loyd decided to hire some gunmen to protect him. Even that was a gamble and he conceded that in ‘moments of intense paranoia’ he wondered if they had worked out what his ransom was worth. At one point, he was the only Western journalist in the country. Without him, there was little prospect of accurate facts emerging from its borders, which Russian troops had sealed. He was arrested trying to get back into the country in the company of an American photographer friend and a wealthy Bangladeshi who had a fax purportedly from Vladimir Putin granting him permission to enter Chechnya. Loyd only just had time to eat the page of his notebook containing the name of the contact he was due to meet before he was dragged off to detention under suspicion of being a spy. One officer conducted an overnight interrogation while wearing a balaclava and playing an Elvis Presley cassette of Love Me Tender. Another began the session by putting Loyd’s British passport into a drawer and whispering with almost caricature villainy, ‘Without it you have no identity. You do not exist. And that is what we can do to you if we wish – make you disappear.’ It was, Loyd conceded, not a promising start.55 Finally, after three days of unrelenting cross-examination, he was released.

  Loyd’s brush with the Russian intelligence community did not put an end to The Times’s effort to uncover the truth about what was going on. Janine di Giovanni was one of only two journalists (the other was a German photographer) still in Grozny when it fell to the Russians again in February 2000 after a 102-day siege. Her situation was precarious. ‘Unlike Bosnia, Kosovo or East Timor,’ she admitted, ‘there are no aid workers inside Chechnya, no medical relief teams, no United Nations.’ She was placing her survival entirely in the hands of Chechen rebels who had a habit of taking outsiders hostage prior, often, to killing them. Grozny’s fall did not end the struggle. The rebels who survived the city’s bombardment escaped by walking across a minefield. With the Russi
ans left to occupy the pile of rubble that had once been a capital city of 400,000 people, di Giovanni moved to the village of Alkhan Kala where she was given hospitality. This place, in turn, became surrounded by Russian troops, closing in for the kill. Local women dressed her up as a headscarf-wearing peasant and, in this disguise, she made her getaway with two of them and a baby in a car that was driven down an icy road at full speed. As she looked back, she ‘saw the column of Russian tanks with their guns mounted, moving steadfastly into the village, the soldiers cockily hanging off the sides’.56 She survived to collect the What The Papers Say award for Foreign Correspondent of the Year.

  V

  Despite the bloodshed in the Balkans, the Caucasus and in Africa, the twentieth century ended with considerable evidence that Western values had indeed triumphed after all. Except in agriculture, where it suited the producers (if not the consumers) of the United States and the EU to be dyed-in-the-wool protectionists, trade barriers were continuing to come down. Instant global communications helped to ensure the triumph of the market. Membership of its quasi-governing body, the World Trade Organisation (as GATT was rebranded), was the badge of all nations with aspirations towards economic respectability. Even the formerly Maoist republic of China prepared for accession. Nor was the world merely being made safe for capitalists. Political liberalism also received official endorsement. The UN’s courts trying those implicated in the horrors of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were the first fruits of a new international jurisprudence. Most nations of the world, including Britain, began signing up to create an International Criminal Court, investing it with the powers to try those suspected of crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide from any country that failed to prosecute them itself. The former President of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, found himself arrested while in Britain for a hospital operation on the basis of a warrant from a Spanish judge who believed he was implicated in political murders that had taken place during his period of power in South America.

  Not everyone in the West was excited by these developments. The left protested against the economic liberalism of globalization. Gatherings of the World Trade Organisation were accompanied by riots on the streets as left leaning and anarchist protesters from all nations congregated to condemn globalization. At the same time, the right was apprehensive about a committee of liberal lawyers sitting in judgment over the world’s politicians and soldiers. There were anomalies, not least in Ulster where liberals tended to support the political imperative of sharing power with murderous gangsters rather than the legal imperative of holding them accountable for their crimes. Whether the world would be made safer by legal incursions on the exercise of realpolitik remained to be seen. Despite the qualms, the process went ahead unchecked. Yet this new order was not remotely taking over the whole planet. In the Muslim world – covering one-fifth of humanity – the pax liberalis was not so keenly felt. Its military, monarchical and dictatorial regimes were not swept away by the march of democracy that pinned red-blooded Communism back to North Korea, Cuba and a handful of other enclaves. Secularly administered Turkey was one of the few Muslim countries that remained fully democratic throughout the 1990s.

  Indeed, the Muslim world confounded the West less because it was moving in the slow lane towards liberal values than because large tracts of it appeared to be moving in the opposite direction. There, the headway was being made by Islamic fundamentalism.

  As the Islamist threat began to assert itself, there were attempts in the West to explain this anger as a product of resentment at economic inequality. In short, selfish capitalist hubris had brought forth a nemesis from the disempowered. On closer inspection, there were considerable problems with this overly simple analysis. In some of the countries where fundamentalism flourished most ardently, oil was reversing the master and servant relationship with the energy-dependent West. Perversely, the fuel for Islamic fundamentalism came from modernization. Many of those who came to prominence as terrorist leaders were first-generation university graduates from lower-middle-class, but not poor, families. Some, like Osama bin Laden, came from backgrounds of ostentatious wealth accumulated through Saudi Arabia’s building boom. Like so many other revolutionary movements, the Islamist revival was in large part, a youth movement. As well as providing educational opportunities, the process of modernization boosted the birth rate. A swelling and youthful population in Arab countries migrated to cities. In these sprawling, anonymous urban environments, faith became a pronounced and militant badge of identity. It was in the cities that so many of the charitable, educational and medical organizations upon which inhabitants came to rely were provided by religious, and often hard-line Islamist movements. Indeed, religious charity successfully filled the void left by corrupt state governments that failed to provide reliable or comprehensive services themselves. Thus, civil society was a product of faith, rather than the font of state or secular provision.

  Islamic fundamentalism was concerned not only with confronting the infidels living in Israel and its supporting states in the West; it developed out of a sense of outrage at the inefficiency, corruption and self-serving worldliness of its own region’s temporal rulers. The Arab nation states created out of the vanquished and vanished Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War failed to engage the emotional loyalties of their subjects in the same way as those in the Christian world had done. Instead, loyalties remained strongest either at the local levels of family, village and tribe or at the pan-national level of Islamist and Arab awakening. Furthermore, whatever the claims of the various Islamic nation states to lead the Muslim world, none of them attained pre-eminence. None proved able to assert commanding leadership over the others. The consequence not only prevented a strong mediating regional power being able to settle neighbourly disputes (thereby insuring the West intervened) but also underlined the power of Islam as a force greater than any temporal power among the faithful.

  As the Islamist revival began to assert itself towards the end of the 1970s, the response from many of the Arab governments was one of appeasement. Radical clerics spreading their message in the mosques of the sprawling cities to impressionable youths generally received less persecution than liberal reformers committed to democracy. Some organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood, were actively funded and encouraged by regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The accommodation of Islamism by nervous regimes was not confined to Arab states. In the 1970s, Bangladesh dropped its secular constitutional commitments. Pakistan adopted the sharia as its supreme law. Elsewhere, Suharto’s Indonesia increasingly Islamicized its laws and Malaysia developed a twin secular and Islamic legal system.

  The Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 suggested that fundamentalism was winning, spurred by Ayatolah Khomeini’s instruction that, ‘To kill and be killed is the supreme duty of every Muslim.’ The suicide bombs directed at the US presence in Beirut – and Reagan’s response to scuttle out – suggested that the fearlessness of faith was more than a match for Western technological superiority. The Iranian commentator Amir Taheri provided thoughtful perspectives on the Op-Ed page of The Times. In 1989, he reflected that the decade had witnessed the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism but not its victory. Iran failed to overcome Iraq and Baghdad remained under the control of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Neither Egypt nor the Lebanon became a theocracy. Pakistan elected a woman, Benazir Bhutto, and elections in Malaysia, Jordan and Tunisia restricted, rather than hastened the path of the extremists. ‘Today, the Islamic fundamentalist movement is almost everywhere in retreat,’ Taheri believed. But he was not complacent. He warned that it would ‘return with a vengeance’ if the Muslim states turned away from the process of democratization.57

  The Arab nations’ inability to sort out their own affairs was laid bare when in 1991 the American-led coalition delivered a drubbing to the Iraqi forces. Even though many Islamic governments had sided with the UN-endorsed coalition to free Kuwait, the attitude of their populations was very different. This was not just
what Western commentators described with intriguing imprecision as the mood on the ‘Arab street’. Even many Arab intellectuals regarded Western military action in their part of the world as a far greater outrage than Saddam Hussein’s original boundary transgression. The presence of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of Islam’s holiest sites, was especially singled out as an abomination. Resentment at the West intensified. Subsequent aerial bombing missions over Iraq, intended to enforce the no-fly zones and the UN resolutions, enjoyed little support from Arab governments, even those that had sanctioned the original mission into Kuwait.

  Meanwhile, Algeria appeared to be on the brink. The Islamist FIS’s challenge for power was only halted by the cancellation of the 1992 elections. Western protests at this retreat from democratic principles were understandably muted. However, Afghanistan joined Iran and Sudan as the third country to be swept up by the fundamentalists when, between 1994 and 1996, the Taleban, a theocratic movement of merciless severity whose warriors had been trained in Pakistan, gained control over the majority of the country. They beat back the mujahidin tribes that, having seen off the Soviet invasion, made the mistake of reverting to infighting among themselves. The spectre of Osama bin Laden began to cast a shadow, at first fleetingly, over the pages of The Times in 1997 when Christopher Thomas, filing from Kandahar, drew attention to bin Laden’s presence in the city with his three wives in tow. ‘Mr Bin Laden is living near the derelict airport,’ Thomas wrote, ‘hidden from view because, even for Taleban, which claims to have ended his terrorist activities, he is an embarrassment.’58 Embarrassment or not, it was soon evident that Mr bin Laden had not gone into retirement. On the contrary, his al-Qaeda terrorist network broadened its focus from undermining insufficiently fundamentalist Arab regimes to hitting the United States and its interests. Al-Qaeda was blamed for a lorry bomb that had killed nineteen Americans at a barracks in Saudi Arabia and wounding nearly four hundred others in June 1996. This was but a foretaste of what was to come. In February 1998, bin Laden announced he was launching a ‘pitiless’ war against ‘Jews and Crusaders’. He proved as good as his word when, in August, al-Qaeda lorry bombers blew up the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224 – overwhelmingly in Nairobi – of which twelve were American and injuring five thousand, most of whom were locals. Failing to kill bin Laden with air strikes, by November, the US was offering $5 million for his capture. He remained at large. In October 2000, al-Qaeda struck again with a suicide attack on the USS Cole while it was docked in Aden, killing seventeen and injuring thirty-nine American sailors.