by Mark Curtis
May saw NATO agreeing to allow Russia into its new twenty-member council, giving Moscow an important new role in NATO policies. Jack Straw commented that this was ‘the funeral of the cold war … Fifteen years ago, Russia was the enemy, now Russia becomes our friend and ally.’41
At the same time the human rights organisation, the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, was describing conditions in Grozny. For the 275,000 residents of the city there was no water or electricity while from time to time the gas was turned off. It said that Russia ‘has done practically nothing to restore the Chechen living quarters in Grozny’, so the city was ‘completely unsanitary’ with the majority of hospitals and clinics ‘in shambles or undergoing repair’. Eighty per cent of able-bodied citizens were unemployed and had no means of subsistence.42
In August four international human rights organisations wrote to the UN’s Sub-commission on Human Rights to say that:
Contrary to the recent declaration of Vladimir Putin, the situation in Chechnya is far from normalising. Cleansing operations undertaken by the Russian military forces, indiscriminate arrests, summary executions and torture are happening daily. And the first victims are the civilians.43
By late 2002, Britain’s apologia for Russian terrorism in Chechnya had reached staggering heights. In a media interview in October, Tony Blair said that in view of the ‘terrorism coming from extremists operating out of Chechnya … I have always taken the view that it is important that we understand the Russian perspective on this.’ He added that it was important that Russia’s territorial integrity be upheld and that ‘I have always been more understanding of the Russian position, perhaps, than many others.’44
This came a week after a further (futile) attempt by Human Rights Watch to urge Blair to press Putin on human rights abuses in Chechnya. It noted that over the previous year the situation in Chechnya had not improved, that Russia ‘continues to give the military in Chechnya a free hand to violate some of the most fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law’ and that not a single senior military commander had been held to account for atrocities. By this time, Russia had 80,000 troops in Chechnya (whose population totals 500,000), with reports indicating that this number would be beefed up still further.45
When Chechen terrorists took dozens of people hostage in a Moscow theatre, Putin ordered special forces to storm the building. 150 hostages were killed in a Russian operation for which Blair was one of the first leaders to congratulate President Putin. The hostage-taking offered a propaganda coup to Putin, who was able to continue to portray Chechens as simply terrorists and who continued to refuse to enter into a dialogue to negotiate a political settlement.
One press report in the same month outlined the continuing grisly details of atrocities in Chechnya over recent months: a massacre of twenty-one men, women and children – bound together and then blown up – in July; the bodies of six men found in September, naked with plastic bags over their heads; discoveries of numerous other mass graves; townspeople being forced to watch women being raped by soldiers, and sixty-eight men who protested being subsequently handcuffed to an armoured truck and raped too.46
One might imagine the Western abuse and condemnation that would have been heaped on the Soviet Union had it done what Russia has done in Chechnya. It would have been further proof of the ‘empire of evil’ and used by the hardliners in Washington and London to build more weapons and cut off contacts with Moscow. It would have been used to contrast with the West’s shining devotion to human rights. Regular media coverage would surely have followed and the issue would have become a common talking point.
Instead, as the above chronology shows, British policy has been a series of de facto apologias for Russian atrocities, of accepting the Moscow line, and of refusing to use any levers to press Russia.
Britain has willingly gone along with Russian propaganda that the war in Chechnya is predominantly about fighting terrorism. September 11th was a godsend for Moscow and made it easier for leaders like Blair to apologise for Russian actions. But Blair, Cook, Straw and others were toeing the Russian line well before September 11th.
Russian forces may have been defeated in Chechnya in 1996 but the territory emerged devastated, with massive poverty and deprivation. Elections held in 1997 were won by Aslan Maskhadov with 65 per cent support, but the institutions of a modern state collapsed and government has in practice bordered on anarchy. Maskhadov’s attempts to create a largely secular order in Chechnya have been opposed by some Chechen military commanders. Some of the latter, such as Shamil Basayev, hero of the 1994–96 war, formed alliances with ‘Wahabi’ Islamist extremists who sought to turn Chechnya into an Islamist republic and who led an attack on the neighbouring Russian republic of Daghestan in August 1999.
The warlords in the territory, together with Islamic extremists, have been responsible for kidnappings and murders. Basayev and some other Chechen military leaders were trained in the mojahidin camps in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Basayev in particular had close contacts with high level officers in Pakistan’s International Security Service, ISI, which organised the mojahidin, and which also helped train the Chechen rebel army. But the Russian propaganda line has essentially tried to depict all Chechens as terrorists. In reality Chechen society is too secular to justify Putin’s claim that it acts as a base for Bin Laden-style fundamentalism. Putin’s official spokesperson, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, admitted in late 2001 that there were only 200 Islamic mercenaries fighting in Chechnya.47
It is clear that the principal Russian objective in Chechnya is to defeat the prospects for full independence for the territory. Emil Pain, a former adviser on nationality affairs to president Yeltsin, states that:
The main goal of the Russian army is not a struggle with terrorism but a desire to keep Chechnya within the [Russian] Federation … For a struggle with terrorists a completely different tactic is needed: the concentration of the efforts of small mobile groups of Special Forces and of a network of agents.48
As the respected military analyst of the weekly Moscow News, Pavel Felgenhauer, has noted, the Russian dilemma in Chechnya is ‘the fact that the separatists are actively supported by a significant part of the populace while, it appears, the overwhelming majority sympathise with them’.49
The line that Russia is fighting terrorism is being promoted even when evidence has emerged of Russian security services involvement in the Moscow bombings that provided the pretext for the Russian invasion. No convincing evidence has emerged of Chechen involvement in the bombings. The Independent obtained video evidence from a Russian officer testifying to the involvement of the FSB, the Russian security service, and the GRU, military intelligence, in the explosions. In September 1999 the Russian police discovered that FSB agents had planted explosives in the basement of a block of flats 100 miles south of Moscow. Various prominent figures have provided evidence of official Russian involvement in the bombings.
According to former Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky:
Evidence exists that entire apartment districts of Moscow were blown up by the special services in order to incite hatred against the Chechens. Chechnya was used for political goals. It permitted Putin and the KGB to return to power … What the Russians are doing in Chechnya is no less a crime than what Milosevic did in Kosovo, but Milosevic is in the Hague while Putin for some reason is not.50
Former Russian interior minister and prime minister Sergei Stephashin has said, according to British journalist Patrick Cockburn, that: ‘Russia made its plans to invade Chechnya six months before the bombing of civilian targets in Russia and the Chechen attack on Daghestan which were the official pretext for launching the war.’ Stephashin said that the plan to invade Chechnya had been worked out in March 1999 and that he had played a central role in organising the military build-up before the invasion.51
In this light, our ally may be directly responsible for terrorism, in Moscow as well as in Chechnya, a fact that has troubl
ed neither New Labour’s propagandists nor, apparently, most of the mainstream media.
Chechen President Maskhadov’s proposals to negotiate a political settlement have been repeatedly rejected by Putin. General Sergei Babkin, commander of the pro-Moscow Chechen security services, told reporters that the FSB’s strategy towards Maskhadov’s ministers was that ‘our conditions … remain unchanged: if you want to live, surrender; if not, that’s your problem’. Putin’s preference is for war rather than political negotiation – perhaps a quality that endears him to Blair and Bush, judging by their own records, and despite their lip service to the need to negotiate a political settlement.52
Peace overtures from Maskhadov have also been rejected by the G8 states. In June 2002, for example, Maskhadov wrote to G8 leaders saying that ‘I am writing to bring the tragedy in Chechnya to your attention and call on you to do everything possible to stop this senseless war’, proposing a halt to military action and the renewal of negotiations between a Chechen representative and the Russian government. Commenting on this appeal, Maskhadov’s special representative, Akhmed Zadaev, said that ‘a halting of the conflict depends much on the good will of the US administration’. However, the newspaper Kommersant reported that in meetings with Putin several weeks after the Chechen appeal, President Bush ‘did not touch upon the Chechen theme’.53
Putin’s whole presidency partly owes its fortunes to being the strongman wanted by the military to reassert control over Chechnya. Nikolai Fedorov, president of the autonomous republic of Chuvashia, recently said that the war was part of a process in which ‘a strongly centralised Bolshevik Russia is being built’; it was also ‘criminal’ and ‘hopeless, with no end in sight’.54
British indifference to atrocities in Chechnya is especially striking in view of the fact that President Maskhadov has been democratically elected. Robin Cook admitted to a parliamentary inquiry that Maskhadov had been ‘elected by the people of Chechnya, admittedly not quite by the same detailed standards that we apply ourselves, but it was held to be a reasonably free and fair election’.55 This inconvenient fact is rarely raised by the government. Neither has it troubled too many journalists – there are very few mentions of the Russian strategy of destroying a democratically elected presidency in Chechnya but all too many simply buying the line of fighting ‘terrorists’.
It is instructive that Britain is prepared to antagonise Moscow over bombing Iraq and Yugoslavia, which were bitterly opposed in Moscow. But it has not even lifted its little finger for the sake of mere Chechens. For them, Britain has even refused to support calls for an international inquiry into human rights abuses. Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw noted in April 2001: ‘The UK has not called for an international inquiry into allegations of human rights violations in Chechnya’ – Russian crimes now reduced to ‘allegations’.56
The deceit maintained by the government is that Britain has few levers with which to press Russia into stopping the worst of the abuses. The standard line has become that the only option is all-out war with Russia, as when Robin Cook admonished those calling for stronger British protests by saying: ‘Are you really suggesting that we go to war with Russia?’57 The media largely plays along with this absurd fiction that there is nothing short of war that Britain can do.
There are levers available, but we do not know if they could be effective since Britain has never had any intention of using them. For reality to dawn, one only need read a Foreign Office memo submitted to a parliamentary inquiry in January 2000. This outlines the range of contacts Britain has with Russia, many of which could be regarded as important levers: £30 million annual aid from the Know How Fund; a Training Management Initiative, an aid scheme to support Russian private sector managers; military assistance and training under the ‘Outreach’ programme; exports to Russia of £296 million in 1999 and imports of £763 million; and a line of £500 million in export credit guarantees available to exporters to Russia. Britain is also the fifth largest foreign investor in Russia and signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement on trade and investment in 1997.58
The aid programme is an obvious lever, especially as it claims to support human rights activities. The Foreign Affairs Committee says that the programme’s ‘first priority is the promotion of good government, human rights and free, independent and responsible media’.
Robin Cook was asked in parliament in December 1999:
What advice is the Foreign Office giving to British companies at the present time preparing bids for alternative oil pipelines to duplicate or perhaps replace the pipeline which passes close by Grozny?
He replied:
We do not have the temerity to offer advice to financial companies or to oil companies on this question. This is a matter that we are leaving entirely to their commercial judgement.59
Rather than pressing Russia, the Blair government has been doing the opposite – actively stepping up contacts, especially with the Russian military. The MoD notes that in early 2000 ‘the Russian Ministry of Defence indicated that it was willing to re-commence a defence relationship with the UK’. It said that Britain had a ‘new defence relationship with the Russians’.60
At the same time, Britain has been engaged in bringing Russia into Western structures in order to ‘develop Russia as a comfortable, willing partner in the global economy and in global security’. According to the British government, Russia needs to be ‘open to the West, attracting Western investment and working together to resolve regional conflicts’ not retreating into ‘chauvinist isolation’ – the threat of Russian nationalism.61
A key British and Western aim has been the economic re-colonisation of Russia in the post-Soviet era, shaping the Russian economy to benefit Western business interests. British policy is to ‘make Russia a more attractive market for foreign companies and investors to do business in’, Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt explains. This has involved promoting the usual array of privatisation, deregulation and ‘shock therapy’ under the auspices of Western advisers and the International Monetary Fund. Foreign Office minister Mike O’Brien told a Russian business and banking conference in London that the Russian authorities were ‘taking a clapped out old communist economic system and driving it forward into the twenty-first century with remarkable skill’.62
O’Brien’s description is truly amazing, even by traditional British standards of apologia for human suffering at the hands of allies. The fact is that the Russian people have in the past decade been plunged into gross impoverishment by their own leaders, aided by the advice of international institutions and the new liberalisation theologists in Britain and elsewhere. Poverty has skyrocketed as the country has undergone an unprecedented economic collapse. The Russian population fell by three million in 1992–96 alone as a result of higher death rates and lower birth rates. This was an even greater fall than in the civil war of 1918–20, when the population fell by 2.8 million. Between 1991 and 1998 overall agricultural and industrial production fell by half.
A form of oligarchic capitalism has been established in Russia where financial flows, the mass media, raw material resources and political influence have become concentrated in the hands of a few dozen families, while a new criminal class has gained huge wealth. This has occurred under an increasingly authoritarian and centralised political system of which Putin is the current apogee.63
A priority for the international community should have been to help post-Soviet Russia establish a democratic political system and an economy that benefits people, after decades of totalitarian tyranny – but these have never been British goals. The threat of Russian ‘chauvinism’ to which Cook referred is surely real – and the West, with Britain in the lead, could hardly have contributed to its likely emergence more than by pushing on Russia traditional ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies, with entirely predictable effects. At the same time, US/British military interventions elsewhere have, if anything, strengthened militaristic voices in Russia. Britain can hardly claim the excuse that over Chechnya it
is suddenly discovering the need not to contribute to ‘chauvinist’ forces in Russia; its general policies have aided the rise of a new authoritarian despotism.
The ‘double standards’ involved in the West’s condoning of Russian actions in Chechnya compared to bombing Yugoslavia supposedly in defence of human rights were so obvious that some media comment was inevitable. But usually this inconvenient comparison was quickly dealt with. The fact is that Russian crimes in Chechnya are worse than Yugoslav crimes in Kosovo. Though Putin is one of Tony Blair’s favourite leaders, presiding over a grim chronology of Russian atrocities in Chechnya, Blair’s rhetoric on human rights continues to be taken seriously, on policy towards Russia as elsewhere.
8
LABOUR’S REAL POLICY ON ARMS EXPORTS
My people have suffered terribly from the effects of armaments made in countries far from our shores … I appeal to the government of the United Kingdom, and its allies, to consider the dreadful consequence of this so-called defence industry. Please, I beg you, … do not sustain any longer a conflict which without these sales could never have been pursued in the first place, nor for so very long.
East Timor’s Bishop Belo1
BISHOP BELO SAID in the speech in Westminster noted above that British arms exports were ‘sustaining’ the conflict in East Timor. He was, tragically, only scratching the surface of the British arms exports industry.
In the business of death, Britain is truly a global player. It is the world’s second largest arms exporter (after the US), with a full quarter of the global trade, selling around £5 billion worth of arms to 140 countries.