Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

  This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends—including the violence that is carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, and causing far more deaths. I’d be quite happy, for instance, to decontextualize nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use. If you want to start decontextualizing things like cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.

  Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel. The point of decontextualizing such attacks was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past thirty-seven years and lost almost half their land to Jewish settlements.

  Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force. Decontextualizing terrorism would neatly solve Israel’s problem with the Palestinians—and it would also neatly solve Russia’s problem with the Chechen resistance.

  That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all, the school massacre in Beslan last Friday, as “a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism.” Not by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia’s main human-rights organization, Memorial, estimates that three thousand innocent people have been “disappeared” by the Russian occupation forces since 1999.

  No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya. Indeed, the Russian security services let it be known that ten of the twenty militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were “citizens of the Arab world” and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.

  And how did they know this, since it’s unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents? It turns out that Federal Security Service “experts” surmised it from the “facial structure” of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.)

  Ever since 9/11, countries like Russia and Israel, which face serious challenges from Muslim peoples living under their rule, have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the “global war on terrorism.” For those countries that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels. Without 9/11, Israel would never have gotten away with building its “security fence” so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.

  Chechnya was a thorn in Russia’s side—and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens—long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden. The Chechens, less than a million strong even now, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, holding out for an entire generation, and they never accepted that they had a duty of loyalty to the Russian state.

  When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994–96, though the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins. That should have been the end of it, but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor.

  The deal was that Putin could be president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement. But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya in order to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.

  Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about a hundred thousand Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russian cities. There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin’s war, and you can’t decontextualize that.

  The fighting in Chechnya has died down, and a Russian-backed local warlord now ensures that almost everybody in Chechnya stays quiet and does what they are told. There are still guerrillas in the hills, but not many.

  The terrorist attacks on Russian territory have not stopped, however, and Moscow still gets very cross if you question its line that they are the product of some international Islamist conspiracy against Holy Russia. When it was first published, the above piece brought a shower of protests from Russian embassies in various countries; five years later, when Chechen suicide bombers caused carnage on the Moscow subway system in early 2010, I made essentially the same points in another article, and had to deal with identical protests from the same Russian embassies.

  But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not followed by war in most places. In fact, it was a remarkably non-violent process. Apart from the Caucasus, where Armenians fought Azerbaijanis, Georgians fought their own minorities, and Chechens fought Russians, the whole transformation was accomplished with only a few hundred lives lost. If only the aftermath had been as well managed.

  March 9, 2006

  BELARUS: A CASE OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

  The ten million citizens of Belarus don’t go to the polls until March 19, but the outcome is already certain: Alexander Lukashenko will win a third term as president. Most other governments in Europe will express their dismay and claim that the election was unfair. They will be right in the sense that the opposition has been mercilessly harassed and that the counting of the votes probably won’t meet international standards. But they will be wrong if they really think that Lukashenko would have lost a fair election.

  “It is necessary … to take a stand against this post-Soviet autocrat and his efforts to totally suppress what remains of independent initiatives in Belarus,” said former Czech president Vaclav Havel last year, but Lukashenko does not see autocracy as a bad thing. As he told Belarusian radio early this month: “An authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. Why? … You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people’s lives.”

  Belarus has more policemen per capita than any other country in the world, and a few of Lukashenko’s harshest critics have simply “disappeared.” Opposition politicians are regularly beaten up or jailed, and people can go to jail for up to two years simply for openly criticizing the president. It is an ugly, petty, oppressive regime that is reminiscent in many ways of the old Communist tyrannies—but Lukashenko has won two elections and a referendum in the past dozen years, all with more than 70 percent of the vote.

  Although many people in Belarus feel intimidated by his rule, if they were really a majority then the tool for their liberation would be readily available. In the last five years, disciplined crowds of non-violent protestors have overthrown similar “post-Soviet autocrats” in several other post-Soviet states, and if the problems are just unfree elections and intimidation, why don’t Belarusians get rid of their faintly Chaplinesque dictator that way?

  The answer is to be found in the results of an international opinion poll published last week by the Social Research Institute in Budapest. The survey was conducted last year in eleven Central and Eastern European countries that were ruled by Communist tyrannies for at least a generation until the revolutions of 1989–91. The only country where a majority of the people polled preferred the
“democratic” systems (some real, some sham) that they have lived in since then was the Czech Republic, where 52 percent actively supported democracy and only a small minority longed to have Communism back.

  In most of the former Soviet-bloc countries, the nostalgia for Communist rule remained strong, peaking at 38 percent in Bulgaria and 36 percent in Russia (where only 13 percent favoured democracy). But this is hardly surprising when you consider that most people’s experience, in most of these countries, was that the end of Communist rule brought a steep fall in living standards and a sharp rise in insecurity and inequality. For Russia, it also brought the loss of a centuries-old empire, the “exile” of tens of millions of Russians as minorities in newly independent countries, and a huge decline in the country’s power and influence in the world.

  These things are not what normally accompanies the advent of democracy elsewhere. They happened in Central and Eastern Europe partly because the social and economic costs of converting from a centrally planned economy to a free market were bound to be very high, and partly because the former Communist elite seized the opportunity to “privatize” the state’s former assets (that is, almost everything) into their own pockets. It was an experience that has given democracy a very bad name in the former Soviet bloc, and only time and the rise of a new generation will erase these attitudes.

  And here we have Belarus, where a former collective-farm manager legitimately elected to power in 1994 halted the privatization process before it had properly got underway. Lukashenko has preserved both the good and the bad elements of the Communist system almost unchanged (except that the actual Communist Party no longer rules), and as a result there has not been the same crash in living standards in Belarus and none of the soaring inequality and unemployment experienced by almost all of its neighbours.

  There is also no free media and the secret police are everywhere. Belarus has the drab conformity typical of late-period Communist states, with occasional state violence against “dissidents,” but Lukashenko would probably have won a majority of the votes honestly in every election and referendum he has held.

  Why has it happened this way in Belarus and not elsewhere? Partly pure chance, but Belarus was also an ideal candidate because it has a very weak national identity (most people there actually speak Russian). Also, there is little of the nationalism that helped most other former Soviet countries to persevere with the changes, and many Belarusians would be happy to be reunited with Russia. But even if this were to happen they would still have to undergo many of the painful changes that they have so far avoided by choosing to live in this time-warp.

  Sooner or later, they will have to go through those changes anyway, but not yet. Not in this election.

  If you like the Caucasus, you’ll love Central Asia. With the obvious exceptions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, all the ’stans are former Soviet republics, and they sometimes seem engaged in a race to the bottom. They are former Russian colonies, and, as in post-colonial Africa, the successor regimes tend to be both autocratic and incompetent. The roads are crumbling in Central Asia, too.

  And just like post-colonial Africa, Central Asia has become an arena for strategic competition between the great powers.

  May 8, 2006

  CHENEY AND KAZAKHSTAN: USEFUL HYPOCRISY?

  Had U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney declared during his visit to Kazakhstan last weekend that “in many areas of civil society—from religion and the news media to advocacy groups and political parties—the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of the people,” human-rights groups would have cheered. But he said that in Russia, a few days earlier.

  What Cheney told Kazakhstan’s dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was that “all Americans are tremendously impressed with the progress that you’ve made in Kazakhstan in the last fifteen years. Kazakhstan has become a good friend and strategic partner of the United States.”

  Admiration for Kazakhstan’s progress is not actually a leading conversational topic in the United States. The man whom the Financial Times recently and memorably described as “the Bush administration’s Lord Voldemort” was merely engaging in a little useful hypocrisy, or so he imagined. The question is whether it really is useful.

  Cheney’s blunt condemnation of the Russian government’s behaviour certainly roused a vehement reaction in Russia. President Vladimir Putin’s drift towards a “soft dictatorship” has the support of most Russians, who are still smarting from the anarchy, corruption and poverty of the first post-Communist decade under Boris Yeltsin. Now the anarchy has been suppressed, the corruption is better hidden and the economy is growing, so the Russian media’s bitter response to Cheney’s strictures really did match popular attitudes.

  Under the headline “Enemy at the Gate,” the Moscow business daily Kommersant, normally a critic of the Kremlin, said that “the Cold War has restarted, only now the front line has shifted.” An overreaction, of course, but Cheney’s criticisms would have been less offensive if he were not so obviously applying a double standard. Kazakhstan will become one of the world’s top ten oil producers in the next decade. It is a close ally of the United States, and even sent a small contingent of Kazakh troops to Iraq. But Kazakhstan is not a democracy, and Nursultan Nazarbayev is not a democrat.

  When Dick Cheney became Secretary of Defence in the administration of the elder George Bush in 1989, Nursultan Nazarbayev was the First Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party. By 1990, he was president of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and a member of the Soviet politburo in Moscow. And, by the end of 1991, he was the president of an independent Kazakhstan and a keen advocate of the free market, as if his Communist past had been merely an adolescent foible.

  Fifteen years and three “elections” later, Nazarbayev is still president of Kazakhstan, re-elected last December with a 91 percent majority in a vote that foreign observers condemned as fraudulent. His daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, who controls the Khabar media conglomerate and leads the “opposition” Asar Party, is expected to take power when his current seven-year term expires in 2012. (“I can’t swear it will never happen,” she says coyly.)

  Nazarbayev’s regime does not boil people in oil like the regime of his neighbour in Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov (who was First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party in 1989). It is not as megalomaniacal as the regime of President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan, who has renamed the month of January after himself, April after his mother, and May after his father. (Niyazov became First Secretary of the Turkmenistan Communist Party in 1985.) Indeed, among the ’stans, Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan is only the third- or fourth-worst dictatorship, but it is a far less democratic and tolerant society than Putin’s Russia. So why did Dick Cheney castigate Russia’s imperfect democracy while saying not a word about Kazakhstan’s shameless travesty of the democratic system? Oil, obviously, but how could he be so ignorant of Nazarbayev’s priorities?

  Senior oil company executives know that you sometimes have to kiss the nether regions of local potentates in order to make the deals happen, but they generally only do so when it seems fairly certain that the deal will really go through as a result. This one won’t.

  What Cheney wants out of Nazarbayev is commitment to pipelines that will move Kazakh oil and gas to Europe by routes that do not cross Russia—which means pipelines under the Caspian Sea. In turn, what Nazarbayev wants is a solid American offer that he can take to the Russians, so that he can demand a higher price for his gas exports to them through the existing pipelines. He will also take it to the Chinese and suggest that they build pipelines to bring his oil and gas to China. In short, he has been playing the game at least as long as Cheney, and he holds a better hand.

  Nursultan Nazarbayev is holding out for the best price, and the winning bid is unlikely to come from the United States. Cheney’s kowtowing to Nazarbayev is as futile as his chiding of Putin. And although his hypocritical moralizing about the shortcomings of Russian democracy probably ha
s little direct effect on the calculations of a strategist as cool as Vladimir Putin, it does poison the relationship at many other levels. And that still matters because Russia is coming back as a force in the world.

  Russia is not coming back as a coequal superpower to the United States, of course. That role is reserved (if they want it) for the Chinese. But it is coming back as a dominant regional power with a sphere of influence that other great powers respect, just as the other great powers respect the dominant role of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean.

  I am too fond of the Russians, so I may be an unreliable guide in these matters, but I do think that Russia will evolve into a modern democracy one of these days. Generational turnover solves a lot of problems and, in the end, I think it will erase the bad memories of the 1990s and make democracy respectable again in Russia. Although many Russians (and many Europeans) would dispute it, Russia is a European country, and democracy has become the European norm.

  June 26, 2006

  RUSSIA: CUCKOO IN THE NEST

  On Sunday, July 1, the Russian rouble will become a fully convertible currency, traded under the same rules as dollars, euros, pounds and yen. The date was obviously chosen to impress President Vladimir Putin’s guests at the G8 meeting in St. Petersburg in mid-July with Russia’s economic progress. And there really has been quite a lot of progress on that front since he took over. But the Group of Seven, “the world’s most exclusive club,” was originally meant to be an annual gathering of the leaders of the biggest industrialized democracies.

  It would be stretching the term to say that the new member of the Group of Eight, as it became in 1996, is a democracy anymore. While sections of the Russian press still conduct raucous political debates, the all-important medium of television has been brought under direct or indirect state control, and more and more power has been concentrated in Putin’s hands. He speaks of a “managed democracy,” but his chief economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, resigned last December saying that Russia was no longer free or democratic.