SAME PROBLEM, SAME SOLUTION:

The Problem of Chechnya (Gary Leupp, 9/15/04, CounterPunch)

The Caucasus embraces southern Russia (referring to the zone between the Black and Caspian Seas), and the three nations of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. This region is culturally linked to the west and north by Orthodox Christianity (kindred Russian, Georgian and Armenian varieties), and to the east by Islam (a legacy of past encounters between Persians and Turks and the local peoples). In this mix the Caucasus resembles the Balkans, where you have one more or less Muslim nation (Albania, where religious practice was banned for decades but which is officially now 70% Muslim); an unusually-constructed Bosnia-Herzegovina in which about 40% of the population (not all the Bosniaks) embrace Islam with varying degrees of interest; and the de facto NATO protectorate of Kosovo, which is about 90% Albanian Muslim. There are also longstanding Muslim minorities in Macedonia (29%), Bulgaria (12%) and elsewhere in the Balkans. The collapse of the Soviet bloc, the implosion of neutral "socialist" Yugoslavia involving catastrophic ethno-religious strife, and fall of the idiosyncratic Hoxhaite regime in Albania brought Balkan Muslims onto the world stage, as recipients of religious proselytization (by Arab "Wahhabis" in particular, backed up by Saudi largesse) and as the beneficiaries (at least short term) of US-NATO protection against the vilified Serbs and Croatians.

In the Balkans, Washington postures as the great friend of the Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars, although its position is fraught with contradictions. U.S. acquiescence to Helmut Kohl's reunited Germany, which unlike the U.S. State Department championed an independent Slovenia in 1990, contributed to the disastrous dismantling of the Yugoslav state. (This produced much ethnic conflict, including what some term the "Bosnian holocaust.") The U.S., having labeled the Kosovo Liberation Army "terrorists" in 1999, made common cause with the Kosovar Albanians against a Serbian foe whose atrocities were wantonly exaggerated to justify the bombing of Milocevic's Yugoslavia. The Russians meanwhile posture as friends of the Serbs and other Slavs aggrieved by Washington policy.

Across the Black Sea from the Balkans, in the Caucasus, we find Armenia, ethnically homogeneous but abetting an Armenian secessionist movement within the Armenian-peopled Nagorno-Karabakh region of neighboring Azerbaijan. Armenia has occupied 16% of Azeri territory since 1994. 94% of the population of Azerbaijan are Azeri, a Muslim Turkish people. (That's seven million Muslims, double the number of Albanian Muslims; hence if Azerbaijan is in Europe, it is the largest European Muslim country.) Fellow Azeris live across the border with Georgia; 5.7% of Georgia's 4.69 million people (668,000) live in the Adhzaria region. In Abkhazia, in the north along the Black Sea, live an additional 85,000 to 100,000 Muslims speaking a Causasian language distantly related to Georgian. Altogether 11% of Georgia's population (over half a million) is Muslim. About 4% of the population of Armenia are Kurds, mostly adherents of the Yezidi faith, which reveres the Prophet Mohammed but is not commonly regarded as an Islamic sect. So within the southern Caucasus, we have Azerbaijan, Adhzaria, and Abkhazia as Muslim zones. In the northern (Russian) Caucasus, we have in addition, lined up westward from the Caspian coast, Daghestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, three republics in the Russian Federation with predominantly Muslim populations. Daghestan has about two and a half million people, of whom at least 90% are Muslim. There aren't good current figures for Chechnya and Ingushetia, but in 1989, when they were united in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, there were 735,000 Muslim Chechens and 164,000 Muslim Ingush, together 71% of the republic's population (the rest being mostly Russian).

Bordering Ingushetia is North Ossetia, a predominantly (80%) Christian republic in the Russian Federation, with an Ingush minority. (Among the ethnic Ossetians themselves, some 20% practice Sunni Islam.) Then to the west, bordering Georgia, are the predominantly Muslim republics of Kabardino-Balkaria (Kabardins mostly Sunni Muslims, Balkarians mostly Orthodox Christian) and Karachayevo-Cherkessia, whose Muslim populations together number maybe a million. In other words, in the Caucasus you have in addition to the seven or eight million Azeri Muslims, four or five million other Muslims, living in historically Muslim districts in the Christian-majority behemoth that is Russia, and in the ancient Christian land of Georgia.

Some of these Muslims, since the breakup of the Soviet Union, have become involved in violent secessionist movements. Moscow and Tblisi, who have differences between themselves, have both become inclined since 9-11 to depict their response to such movements as counter-terrorist in character, to represent the secessionists as ideological soul-mates of al-Qaeda, and to manipulate the "War on Terror" paradigm to justify their repressive measures and to even threaten "pre-emptive" actions. Putin like Bush vows to strike at terrorists "wherever they may be" (which might mean, say, striking at Chechens in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia). Thus in the Caucasus, the implosion of the USSR, like the implosion of Yugoslavia in the Balkans, produces a welter of nationalist strivings, coupled with long-dormant religious sensibilities, that both the hyperpuissance U.S. and the weakened regional hegemon Russia seek to exploit. They do so now in the context of Bush's eternal war project, which exploits anti-Islamic sentiment in the U.S. (drawing especially on the most ignorant varieties of Christian fundamentalist intolerance), even as the administration insists before the global audience that the U.S. respects Islam as "a religion of peace." Putin, powerless to prevent the U.S.'s projection of power into formerly Soviet territory from Central Asia to Georgia, applies an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" policy, depicting his own measures against unruly Muslims in Russia as part of the global Terror War. [...]

Of Muslims seeking independence from Russia, the Chechens receive the most attention. Their secessionist movement has been the bloodiest in the region, and exacted a most grotesque toll on Russians, in particular, from the Caucasus to Moscow. The small Chechen homeland has had a very bad press, internationally, and most Americans who've heard of Chechnya no doubt by this point associate its people with Islamic terrorism. The recent school hostage episode in Beslan, in Russia's North Ossetia, presented the world with the most nightmarish spectacle: a school commandeered, children specifically targeted, seized, terrified, shot in the back as they attempted to escape. About 330 Christians, half of them kids, killed by Muslims from Chechya, and the adjoining Muslim republic of Ingushetia, and (if one believes an early Russian report uncorroborated by reporters) Muslim Arabs. (I seriously doubt any Arab participation, simply because it too obviously serves Putin's wish to depict his repression of the Chechen independence movement as part of the global Bush-war project targeting Arabs.) Anyway, a horrible, unforgivable scenario, which some may see as Russia's 9-11.

One might suppose that, as Putin seeks to link Chechen rebels to al-Qaeda, the U.S. would support the Russian leader in his moves against Chechen separatism, rather as it endorses every single move the Likud regime in Israel takes against the cause of the Palestinians (a "terrorist" cause to the Likudists in the Bush administration), or that President Arroyo in the Philippines takes against the Moro. But no, not quite. Just as Washington found it useful to validate Bosnian and Kosovar nationalism in the Balkans (entrenching its expanding NATO-self into what was once proudly non-aligned European territory), so it has (under the Clinton and Bush administrations alike) found it useful to promote Muslim separatisms in southern Russia, to better destabilize the Russian Federation. Why? Because Russia seeks to thwart U.S. oil pipeline ambitions and the U.S.'s general pursuit of geopolitical advantage in the Caucasus. Ruling circles in both the U.S. and Russia are acting rationally in pursuit of their ends. Those anti-people ends are the problem.

Two points:

(1) If all we care about is oil then why don't we just tell the Arabs they can have Israel?

(2) If Putin wants to be treated as well as Likud, all he has to do is build a wall and impose Chechen statehood as Sharon is doing in Palestine.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2004 12:12 PM