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| RUSSIA'S QUAGMIRE | |
 September 29, 1999 
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And with me to talk about the fighting in Chechnya are Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and author of After the Collapse: Russia Seeks its Place as a Great Power. He returned from Moscow Saturday. Yo'Av Karny, a journalist whose book about the Caucasus, Highlanders, is to be published soon. And Stephen Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies at New York University and author of Rethinking the Soviet Experience. |
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| All out war? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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DIMITRI SIMES: It's an interesting and difficult question. I wish I knew whether the Russian leadership had a strategy. Certainly, if their strategy is a ground invasion, full-scale ground invasion, they're asking for a lot of trouble. They don't have enough forces around Chechnya. Their forces are not well equipped; the morale is rather poor. Most Russians want to teach the Chechens to listen, but they are not prepared to pay for this lesson with a lot of blood and treasure, so my hope is that the Russians are posturing, that they're using their air force, that they may want to occupy a couple of fields to position themselves better and to establish some kind of a buffer zone. But if they're trying to start a full-scale invasion, we make a lot of escalation and dangerous miscalculation. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Mr. Cohen, your view of Russian strategy at this point in relation to what Mr. Simes just said, Russia's Interfax News Agency did report today that Russian troops moved into Chechnya, occupying "peaks" overlooking two villages. There is no confirmation of that at all?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Mr. Karny, the bombing is of Chechen villages, Chechen infrastructure. What's the relationship between official Chechnya, the government, and the rebels? YO'AV KARNY: Well, in Russian mind the government is the rebels and
has been so since November of 1991, when exactly eight years ago when
Chechnya declared independence. If I were a knowledgeable Russian tonight,
I would be close to despair, because there isn't a way out. There might
have been a considerable way out four, five, six years ago if only Russia
had let Chechnya |
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| A history of resistance | ||||||||||||||||||||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Before you go on, expand on that. Are you talking about the Islamic ideology and religion that's being put forth by the rebels? What do you mean?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Mr. Karny, very briefly. I interrupted you before you got to answer the question whether there is a tight relationship between the Chechen official government and the rebels. YO'AV KARNY: That's doubtful. The president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, who is a former Soviet army colonel, wanted presumably to reach some sort of agreement with the Russians over de facto independence, perhaps an attempted state and nation-building. The warlords, as they are known, fighters have nothing to do with that. Shamil Basayev who is the warlord who invaded Dagestan last month was offered the prime ministership in 1996. That was a clear attempt at allowing him to show his hand in construction. He turned it down. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Mr. Simes, is there consensus right now among the political leadership in Russian about how to deal with the rebels in Chechnya, and if so, if there is consensus about the bombing, why, given the terrible consequences of the last time that Russia was involved there? DIMITRI SIMES: I think there is consensus in Russia now that Chechen
rebels are pretty terrible people. |
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| The conflict's affect on Russian politics | ||||||||||||||||||||
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STEPHEN COHEN: Well, let me dissent from Dimitri just a bit. I don't know that we really disagree, but in fact the consensus among the Russian political class that he had mentioned existed until about 48 hours ago when a number of prominent members of parliament have called upon the government to stop the bombing of Chechnya because they're afraid it's going to preclude the possibility of any talks with the Chechens. The Kremlin responds, there are no possibility of talks with the Chechens, and that may be so. As for the political dynamic here, I believe that the basic dynamic is, from the Russian point of view, the desperate fear of the Yeltsin regime that the day will come, sooner rather than late other, when it will have to leave power, and that it will be held responsible inside Russia for what's happened inside Russia during the last seven or eight years. And this war gives it a chance, if that's the right formulation-- I'm not sure it's going to be a possible chance-- but a chance to do something that might win some of the allegiance of some of the people. I agree with Dimitri, the government does not have many possibilities. But this fear of retribution has led many very sensible people in Russia, people who are absolutely normal to ask the question of whether it was the Kremlin itself that set off those bombs inside Moscow. I mean what kind of government would be suspected of such a thing? And the answer is a government that has virtually no legitimacy with its own people. And that's the political context in which this terrible war is unfolding. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Simes, before I DIMITRI SIMES: Well, I think it's pretty clear that the government in Moscow is very unpopular. It is pretty clear that Steve Cohen is absolutely right, people suspect this government of all kinds of possible things and indeed presidential contender Governor Lebed today said in an interview that he thinks the Kremlin is responsible for all these terrorist acts. I have to say, however, that if they had a different government, a more popular government, a more legitimate government, they would still have to deal with the Chechen terrorism. There is no option of ignoring this. The invasion of Dagestan was totally unprovoked, and it came from Chechnya. So the Russians have a dilemma: To let Chechnya go, or to continue this bloody nonsense. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Go ahead. Sorry. DIMITRI SIMES: And I think that hopefully the Russians will come to a conclusion soon that full independence for Chechnya is the best possible alternative. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Karny, what about the effects on all this
on the Chechens themselves? Are YO'AV KARNY: That's a good question because for a couple of moments, one might have thought that we are talking about domestic Russian politics. We are talking about a historical confrontation between an imperial Russia and the indigenous nations of the Caucasus, something that goes back to the 18th century. The Chechens, you see, are a rare phenomenon in a Russian contest. There isn't a single ethnic group in Russia which has been as persistent and as determined in resisting Russian occupation since the 1780's. The Russians have just bombed the Grozny airport named after a fellow by the name of Sheck mon suer [ph?]. He was the first resistance leader executed by the Russians in the 1790's. Now, we must understand what happened here. The Chechens performed heroically in 1994 to 1996, but then their cause has started degenerating. It has been abducted. They forgot what they were fighting for. They were fighting for their own independence. Now it seems no longer to be the case. They are talking about, or some of them, are talking about an all-encompassing Islamic union of Dagestan and Chechnya. There fare-- therefore I disagree with Mr. Simes, in the sense that letting Chechnya go right now will no longer solve the problem. It's too late. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Mr. Cohen, we have a very little amount of time left. How is this all likely to affect U.S.-Russian relations? STEPHEN COHEN: Well, it isn't going to do it any good. They're already
at a low, but the thing that worries me is ---- and I may be alone in
this - nobody seems to ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Thank you all very much for being with us. |
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Dimitri
Simes, please expand a little bit on what we just heard about Russian
strategy in Chechnya right now. Is Russia headed toward another all-out
war there?
STEPHEN
COHEN: Well, strategy may be too grand a word for it, but militarily
the Russian government, the Yeltsin regime, to be specific, is viewing
Chechnya as a kind of cancer in the Russian Federation -- as a plague
-- and it's attempting either to destroy it with military force or to
utterly quarantine it from the rest of Russia by some sort of military
buffer between the rest of the Russian Federation and Chechnya. Politically,
the strategy would appear to be on the part of this very desperate Yeltsin
regime, which is loathed by the Russian people, to do something in Chechnya
that would gain itself some measure of popularity with the Russian people,
or at least gain it a sense among the Russian people that it's a needed
regime, that it can protect the people, it's not clear that they'll
succeed in either strategy, but I think that's what the strategy is.
go at the time, before the bad blood, before 80,000-odd casualties,
which incidentally, proportionately speaking, is more than Britain and
France suffered during the entire period of World War II. What happened
between 1994 and 1996 is probably irreversible, and that is, the radicalization
of the Chechen population. And the fact that the cause has been to a
large extent surrendered to a militant, to some extent alien ideology
that had never existed in the Caucasus before this war... 
YO'AV
KARNY: I do, indeed. The Northeast Caucasus, of which we are talking,
is of course historically Muslim. But the Islam that prevailed in the
Caucasus before 1994 had been largely eclectic, idiosyncratic, full
of indigenous habits, customs and heritage. It was essentially tolerant.
It was laid back, relaxed, steeped in Islamic mysticism, close to what
Muslims call Suf-ism. What we are seeing now, the rise of fundamentalism,
what is attributed to Wa hab-ism, which is basically Saudi Arabia militant
school of Islam is entirely new, should have never happened. The Russians
have developed expertise in opening cans of worms in Islamic countries.
Shamil
Basayev, I have to say, is not just a rebel commander; he's a bandit,
he's a terrorist, he has a record of hostage-taking. I think that anything
the Russians can do against him is justified, not just strategically
but morally. I also have to say that most Russians agree that President
Maskhadov doesn't control the situation, but that is besides the point
because the same dilemma as the Israelis in Lebanon. If the government
cannot control the situation, then you are being subjected to terrorist
attacks, you have to do something. The trouble is, the trouble is that
the Russians do not have good options. They know what they are against.
They have consensus that something has to be done, but they have no
strategy. They have no forces which could implement an effective military
strategy. And I think that they are trying to do whatever they can do
to hold the situation, to manage the situation, but they don't have
any real solutions. And the danger is that their attempts to intimidate
the Chechens, these attempts may backfire and lead to a full-scale war.
ELIZABETH
FARNSWORTH: And Stephen Cohen, you touched on this, but how do you see
the politics of this action and the effects on the politics of Russia?
move
on to Mr. Karny, do you want to respond to that? 
they
able to resist this sort much bombing? 
