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COMMENTARY
September 4, 2004
Russian schooling
The sight of crying children naked and covered with blood running or being carried from a school through explosions and gunfire has huge emotional power. But that power is directed by the people who perhaps from malice or ignorance write the captions. In this case I think ignorance is most of the explanation. The Western media are presenting the pictures from the school in Beslan over the caption Chechnya . But Beslan is not in Chechnya and the terrorists are not Chechens either. For some time now Russia's president Vladimir Putin has been trying to tell the world that his Chechen problem is not that but rather the same problem the Americans noticed on 9/11. In the unfolding events of Beslan in North Ossetia he has more proof. Half the terrorist corpses so far identified were Arabs and the rest other international Jihadis plus a few locally-recruited Ossetes. Moreover it is unlikely the recent destruction of two Russian airliners and the suicide bombing of a Moscow metro station were done by Chechens. The north Caucasus has been disorderly for many centuries and as readers of Tolstoy will realize hostage-takings are not something new there. But that could be said of many frontier regions. While we in the extreme West tend to look upon the Russians themselves as somewhat barbarous the reader may be assured that the Russians entered the north Caucasus in the early 19th century on a civilizing mission. Later under Lenin and Stalin all Soviet nationalities and ethnicities were clamped down -- the Russians as much as any -- under a reign of terror relaxing gradually into a reign of the memory of terror. Yet even so a brilliantly-led Chechen resistance gave the Red Army a good run. What has developed in Chechnya today however and is now spreading through other Russian-ruled Muslim territories is something new. The background history only partially explains it: the real source of disturbance is now outside. There were large numbers of Chechen and other "ex-Soviet Muslim" Jihadis in the training camps of Afghanistan before the Americans cleaned them out; and many of these have since washed up in Iraq Yemen even Indonesia. Reciprocally the "Afghan Arabs" mixed with others coming directly from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have taken over the Chechen "independence" movement. The several irruptions of full-blown war in Chechnya during the last decade -- suppressed by the Russians only when they descended to something like savagery -- were themselves triggered by incidents in which international terrorists played a prominent part. Indeed President Putin is hoarse from trying to explain this to European and American "human rights" advocates who blame Russia for creating its Chechen enemies the way they blame America for somehow creating its enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most worrying: what the Jihadis have achieved in Chechnya is now being taken as a model for how to succeed everywhere. It is what they are attempting in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq: to use terror as the yeast with which to raise civil war. An independent Chechnya is notwithstanding the accounts in our media not the object of this exercise. It is instead to detach Chechnya from the Russian Christian Dar al-Harb and attach it instead to the Dar al-Islam -- to recover it for Islamdom. This has been stated clearly in all the Jihadi rhetoric. In the words of a Georgian familiar with the landscape (among the more unusual correspondents to wash up in my e-mail): "The Arabs have taken over the Chechen 'insurrection' if they didn't start it. The Chechens were not a very religious people and the Russians kept out the radical imams. They have no native tradition of nationalism. Almost universally they view the Arab insurgents as crazy and would rather be ruled by hated Russians than by Arabs if they had to choose only between those two. Even better to be left alone but they know that's not going to happen." President Putin has a sphinx-like reputation yet in light of these realities much of what he has been saying and doing makes sense. Example: he is on record telling Americans how he thinks they should vote. He was surprisingly indiscreet saying that those who don't support George W. Bush need their heads examined. This seemed a paradox given Mr. Putin's siding with the French and Germans against Mr. Bush's policy of invading Iraq. But the Russians appreciate better than most in the West that there is a war on. Russia is only half in the West but in a "clash of civilizations" will be driven closer. And Mr. Putin has been equally unabashed in thus describing the clash. He is juggling large and small Russian interests short and long term political verities in ways that cannot be easily appreciated at this distance. Leaving several of these complexities aside he is saying that the world crisis requires a strong American leader not a weak one as John Kerry would be. And though the Russians may be rivals to the Americans in their own sphere they weren't shy about asking for U.S. aid in clambering out of Communism and will not be shy in the future if they need U.S. military and strategic help to deal with the gathering Jihad. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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