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Buried Alive
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There are deaths that weigh no more than a feather. Entire peoples who don’t count. They can claim only one right, the right to disappear. They are absent from our concerns and from our television screens, even before the tanks, the bombs, the raids and the landmines reduce them to nothing. The Chechens live in absolute solitude, surrendered to the pleasures of a massacring Russian army. And no one -- not the United Nations, not world public opinion, not any one of the democracies that are so proud of their principles --cries bloody murder!
Neither of the conflicts that has gotten the attention and sympathy of the world -- Iraq or Palestine -- is as cruel as this one. The Chechen nation counts barely a million individuals, of whom between 100,000 and 200,000 have died at the hand of the Russian army, which first invaded in 1994 and left a few years later, humiliated. To celebrate the millennial year 2000, President Vladimir Putin sent the troops back and razed the Chechen capital Grozny, and transformed their tiny country into permanent hell. The few travelers who risk the ire of the authorities to visit Chechnya (and I was one of them) bear witness to the worst of the worst that dishonors this good year of 2003.
On Sunday, presidential elections organized by Moscow will take place on this devastated terrain. No one ends them legitimacy. Not even the Kremlin. Their candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov, the current chief of the pro-Russian administration, enjoys feeble popularity (13%). Bought or threatened with death, all of the competitors capable of challenging him have backed off or are forbidden to run. As for the people, pushed towards the urns with a Kalashnikov pointed at them, they know that it’s not the ballots that will decide, but rather the armed man who will count and invent them (200,000 “dead souls” are on the electoral lists). Such a farce fools no one, not the Chechens, not the Russians, nor the Europeans.
What good are such theatrics? Well, this staged election is a useful operation by which Moscow sends a triple message:
First to the Chechens, the occupying army -- 100 000 men -- and the collaborationist Chechen militia signify that the war will be fought to the finish. No question of negotiating with the non-Islamic independence movement or former President Aslan Maskhadov, who was routinely elected under the auspices of the OSCE but is now on the run. Given the habits of Mr. Kadyrov’s own secret police, whose cruelty sometimes scares the Russian “services”, Sunday’s vote will force the Chechen voter to sign his own condemnation to servitude and to death.
To the Russian population (of whom a majority, according to recent surveys, is favorable to negotiations with Mr. Maskhadov), the Kremlin sends an implicit ultimatum: if you don’t obey orders, you too will be treated as rebels. From Nicolas the 1st, to Stalin, to President Putin, there’s an implacable continuity: colonial war in the Caucuses turns inexorably into the extermination of the local people, put to the sword, deported to the last man, villages razed, pogroms, filtration, blood and ruins.…
Why so much cruelty? The great Russian writers revealed the secret: it’s an educational exercise. The Chechen incarnates the spirit of resistance. It’s him or me, suggests the Tsar when the head of the rebel leader is brought to him (Leo Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murat”). Over the centuries, the Kremlin has bled Chechnya and made it a model for the rest of Russia, forced to submit to the central powers-that-be. The Russian autocracy is born and born again in the very exemplary laying to waste of a little people.
Russian diplomacy’s third message to the civilized world is: Get lost! Yes, Sunday’s elections make a mockery of democratic rules, but you will all close your eyes. Paris and Berlin compromise, too eager to integrate into their improbable “peace camp” on Iraq a Russia that is carrying out the dirtiest war of the dawn of the 21st century. Thirsty for Russian oil and natural gas, the European Union swallows its principles and rolls over. Washington, partly out of strategy (nuclear balance), partly out of cynicism, forgets the support in arms and in advice that Moscow gave to Saddam Hussein up until the last minute. Mr. Putin’s hands are free and he ridicules democracy by projecting his bloody urns to the face of the world.
The democratic governments and the millions of demonstrators “against war”, who take to the streets against George W. Bush and never against Vladimir Putin, are guilty of not helping a people on the verge of extermination. Indifferent, but not ignorant. They know about the four years of massacres, savagery, terror and horror... but they don’t care.
The global capitulation to the Caucasian butchery, worse than a crime, is a grave error. Do they not suspect that the Afghan scenario is repeating itself? Remember that for 10 years, the Soviet Red Army broke Afghanistan, set up gangsters in the ruins. Then the Taliban and Osama bin Laden came. The fall of the Twin Towers was the result. From the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001 in northern Afghanistan to the abandonment of Aslan Maskhadov, the tragedy repeats itself. How long will the survivors of the Russian “cleansing” hold back on the slippery slope of suicidal terrorism? How long until a crazy missile is aimed at a nuclear reactor? Mr. Putin is a pyromaniac fireman and his relentlessness places us all, Russians and Europeans, on the edge of the abyss.
Everyone senses this supreme risk--no Russian site is any more immune to a suicide attack than Manhattan was--even as they buy into Mr. Putin’s “final solution”: no more Chechens, no more terrorist threat. The silence of the pacifists and world leaders is equal to their benediction.
And so they try to justify such a weighty complicity. For months after September 11, it was trumpeted that Osama bin Laden was protected by an iron guard composed of “Pakistanis, Arabs and ... Chechens”. The rumor, started by Moscow, was taken at face value. After the defeat of the Taliban, not one Chechen was discovered in Afghanistan, dead, alive, in the prisons, or at Guantanamo. I’m still waiting for the rectification by the world media, so quick with their accusations. The incorrect news sweeps away our bad conscience, by stigmatizing the entire population.
Lies, blindness, indifference pave over the leaden silence. Worse, world opinion, neither under-informed nor unaware of the risks, tacitly adopts the genocidal impulses that drive the Russian military. The world media rids us of our scruples and washes them away: a good Chechen is a dead Chechen. Nous vivons une grande première au Caucase, l’instauration du meurtre avec universelle préméditation.
Mr. Glucksmann’s most recent book is “Ouest contre Ouest” (Plon). This article was translated from the French by Lisbeth Shepherd.
Neither of the conflicts that has gotten the attention and sympathy of the world -- Iraq or Palestine -- is as cruel as this one. The Chechen nation counts barely a million individuals, of whom between 100,000 and 200,000 have died at the hand of the Russian army, which first invaded in 1994 and left a few years later, humiliated. To celebrate the millennial year 2000, President Vladimir Putin sent the troops back and razed the Chechen capital Grozny, and transformed their tiny country into permanent hell. The few travelers who risk the ire of the authorities to visit Chechnya (and I was one of them) bear witness to the worst of the worst that dishonors this good year of 2003.
On Sunday, presidential elections organized by Moscow will take place on this devastated terrain. No one ends them legitimacy. Not even the Kremlin. Their candidate, Akhmad Kadyrov, the current chief of the pro-Russian administration, enjoys feeble popularity (13%). Bought or threatened with death, all of the competitors capable of challenging him have backed off or are forbidden to run. As for the people, pushed towards the urns with a Kalashnikov pointed at them, they know that it’s not the ballots that will decide, but rather the armed man who will count and invent them (200,000 “dead souls” are on the electoral lists). Such a farce fools no one, not the Chechens, not the Russians, nor the Europeans.
What good are such theatrics? Well, this staged election is a useful operation by which Moscow sends a triple message:
First to the Chechens, the occupying army -- 100 000 men -- and the collaborationist Chechen militia signify that the war will be fought to the finish. No question of negotiating with the non-Islamic independence movement or former President Aslan Maskhadov, who was routinely elected under the auspices of the OSCE but is now on the run. Given the habits of Mr. Kadyrov’s own secret police, whose cruelty sometimes scares the Russian “services”, Sunday’s vote will force the Chechen voter to sign his own condemnation to servitude and to death.
To the Russian population (of whom a majority, according to recent surveys, is favorable to negotiations with Mr. Maskhadov), the Kremlin sends an implicit ultimatum: if you don’t obey orders, you too will be treated as rebels. From Nicolas the 1st, to Stalin, to President Putin, there’s an implacable continuity: colonial war in the Caucuses turns inexorably into the extermination of the local people, put to the sword, deported to the last man, villages razed, pogroms, filtration, blood and ruins.…
Why so much cruelty? The great Russian writers revealed the secret: it’s an educational exercise. The Chechen incarnates the spirit of resistance. It’s him or me, suggests the Tsar when the head of the rebel leader is brought to him (Leo Tolstoy’s “Hadji Murat”). Over the centuries, the Kremlin has bled Chechnya and made it a model for the rest of Russia, forced to submit to the central powers-that-be. The Russian autocracy is born and born again in the very exemplary laying to waste of a little people.
Russian diplomacy’s third message to the civilized world is: Get lost! Yes, Sunday’s elections make a mockery of democratic rules, but you will all close your eyes. Paris and Berlin compromise, too eager to integrate into their improbable “peace camp” on Iraq a Russia that is carrying out the dirtiest war of the dawn of the 21st century. Thirsty for Russian oil and natural gas, the European Union swallows its principles and rolls over. Washington, partly out of strategy (nuclear balance), partly out of cynicism, forgets the support in arms and in advice that Moscow gave to Saddam Hussein up until the last minute. Mr. Putin’s hands are free and he ridicules democracy by projecting his bloody urns to the face of the world.
The democratic governments and the millions of demonstrators “against war”, who take to the streets against George W. Bush and never against Vladimir Putin, are guilty of not helping a people on the verge of extermination. Indifferent, but not ignorant. They know about the four years of massacres, savagery, terror and horror... but they don’t care.
The global capitulation to the Caucasian butchery, worse than a crime, is a grave error. Do they not suspect that the Afghan scenario is repeating itself? Remember that for 10 years, the Soviet Red Army broke Afghanistan, set up gangsters in the ruins. Then the Taliban and Osama bin Laden came. The fall of the Twin Towers was the result. From the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud on Sept. 9, 2001 in northern Afghanistan to the abandonment of Aslan Maskhadov, the tragedy repeats itself. How long will the survivors of the Russian “cleansing” hold back on the slippery slope of suicidal terrorism? How long until a crazy missile is aimed at a nuclear reactor? Mr. Putin is a pyromaniac fireman and his relentlessness places us all, Russians and Europeans, on the edge of the abyss.
Everyone senses this supreme risk--no Russian site is any more immune to a suicide attack than Manhattan was--even as they buy into Mr. Putin’s “final solution”: no more Chechens, no more terrorist threat. The silence of the pacifists and world leaders is equal to their benediction.
And so they try to justify such a weighty complicity. For months after September 11, it was trumpeted that Osama bin Laden was protected by an iron guard composed of “Pakistanis, Arabs and ... Chechens”. The rumor, started by Moscow, was taken at face value. After the defeat of the Taliban, not one Chechen was discovered in Afghanistan, dead, alive, in the prisons, or at Guantanamo. I’m still waiting for the rectification by the world media, so quick with their accusations. The incorrect news sweeps away our bad conscience, by stigmatizing the entire population.
Lies, blindness, indifference pave over the leaden silence. Worse, world opinion, neither under-informed nor unaware of the risks, tacitly adopts the genocidal impulses that drive the Russian military. The world media rids us of our scruples and washes them away: a good Chechen is a dead Chechen. Nous vivons une grande première au Caucase, l’instauration du meurtre avec universelle préméditation.
Mr. Glucksmann’s most recent book is “Ouest contre Ouest” (Plon). This article was translated from the French by Lisbeth Shepherd.
