Without Negotiators, can Negotiation Exist? Politicking, Profiteering, and the Chechen Wars

Without Negotiators, can Negotiation Exist?

Politicking, Profiteering, and the Chechen Wars

Dominic Randazzo

March 23, 2007

PPA 601: Fundamentals of Conflict Studies

From Western audiences, Chechnya—whether as an autonomous oblast, a sovereign state, or a war zone—has never received much consideration. Just one of dozens of ethnic groups within Russia who have declared since the end of the Soviet Union their right to self-rule and self-determination, the Chechens’ struggle for independence was drowned out in the cacophony of calls for independence during the 1990s. However, in a world so greatly affected by the events of September 11, 2001 and given the role of Chechen separatist groups in bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 (which killed more than 300) and the hostage-taking of a Russian theater in 2002 (which resulted in the deaths of 130 Russians and 30 rebels), the rhetoric of Islamic fundamentalism and the terminology of terrorism has brought the Chechen people to the forefront of international concern (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 45). Yet the roots of the conflict in Chechnya, which have spurned two wars with the Russian Federation over the past two decades, are defined neither by terrorist activities or the Islamists who have recently come to typify the most virulent of the separatist rebels; rather, the origin is in the centuries long forging of a group that has faced common persecution from the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation. Ethnicity compounded with a new emphasis on fundamentalist religious ideology has greatly complicated a struggle that has benefited the economic and political interests of groups as disparate as elected officials, crime bosses, business leaders, and international governments (Politkovskaya, 2003). War has wrought the economic and social collapse of Chechnya and simultaneously embarrassed a Russia giant whose participation energizes radicals rebels, mobilizes moderates to further distance themselves from the Russian-installed regime, and is increasingly brought to the realization that Chechen Russia cannot exist in this modern Russia (Tishkov, 2004; Oliker, 2001). Solutions abound but a concerted effort to end this conflict—to end the Second Chechen War and determine the final status of independence for Chechnya proper—has been avoided by both sides. Thus the fighting, oppression, and politicking that have defined Chechen “ethnic separatism” for hundreds of years continue (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 2).

Since the first conflict between Russians and Chechens nearly four hundred years ago, the common identity of Chechens (and to a large extent Ingush and Dagestanians) has been centered around an opposition to the hostile rule of Russians and their descendants. First entering into war in 1785—the First Gazavat in a series of several conquests that would extend Russian domination as far south as the Turkey and Iran—Chechen forces were able repel the tsarist forces and defend the core principles of their society: freedom and equality (Gammer, 2006, p. 6). Lacking traditional social organization, the notion of a hierarchy of governance is alien to Chechen society and is an element that will challenge attempts to resolve conflict through negotiation until today (Gammer, 2006; Tishkov, 2004). Independence and a lack of social cohesiveness were short lived: a fifty-year war that stretched throughout the Caucuses and lasted until 1867 resulted in the complete subjugation of Chechnya to tsarist Russian control (Nikolaev, 1996, p. 8). Control over Chechnya by Russians (or Soviets as proxies) and the extent of the brutality exhibited would forge the evolution of Chechen ethnicity into a nationalist desire that continues to fuel the modern drive for autonomy.

Lenin’s policy of indigenization, which created state institutions within Chechnya, nurtured autonomous rule, provided for the merger of Chechnya and Ingushetia (into Chechno-Ingushetia), and the creation of a Chechen language apart from the reliance on Arabic via the widespread practice of Islam, further developed a Chechen national identity (Tishkov, 2004, p. 21-22). The now infamous anti-Soviet purges during the 1930s resulted in the deaths of up to 200,000 Chechens alone. Yet, the repression of the forced deportation of nearly one million Chechens in the last week of February 1944 is considered to be the most salient to the common sense of distrust held by Chechens of Moscow’s rule (Nikolaev & Malashenko, 2004; Tishkov, 2004; Jaimoukha, 2005; Gammer, 2006). Thousands are thought to have died during the forced relocation to the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) and the eventual repatriation to Chechnya from 1957 to 1960 resulted in even further alienation as ethnic Russians who had taken control of the homesteads and farms of Chechen deportees resisted their return violently (Tishkov, 2004). Valery Tishkov, a renowned Russian ethnographer, explains, “The theme of deportation and its untold suffering dominated Chechen political discourse…and later [was the topic of] youth pop songs….People began to believe that to end any continuing discrimination against them, the Chechens had to assume control over the republic,” (2004, p. 32). The culmination of hundreds of years of common suffering, the forced deportation and repatriation resonates today as primary source of Chechen defiance of Russian rule.

The political and economic liberalization of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika allowed “ethnic nationalism” to emerge as “a great mobilizing power…[while] the granting every Soviet ethno-nation its own state was viewed as natural, desirable, and democratic” in the eyes radical democrats in Moscow at the moment of the Soviet Union’s dissolution (Tishkov, 2004, p. 57). Tishkov notes,

Religion played little part in the forming of the new Chechen identity during perestroika…. Collective suffering, rather than religion, culture, or language cemented Chechen identity. Only after 1991 [when the Soviet Union was dissolved] did the Chechens begin to call themselves nokhchi, meaning “Caucasian peoples” (2004, p. 53).

While religion has played a role in recent years in the altering of conflict in Chechnya (as will be highlighted below), the importance of Chechen nationalism couched within the collective experiences that have formed its ethnic identity are broadly supported within the literature on the conflict (Henze, 1995; Trenin & Malashenko, 2004; Tishkov, 2004; Meier, 2005; Gammer, 2006). Thus, the First Chechen War (1993-1997) was fought “under the slogan of ethnic separatism...[Leading] to the emergence of a new and potentially even more serious threat to Russian security” (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 2). This threat, radical Islam (of which the most fundamentalist form would necessitate the institution of religious precepts into the state antithetical to the makeup of the federation), would challenge the continued stability of federal governance in a fragile post-Soviet Russia. At the outset, while radical democrats supported the development of pseudo-states within the Russian galaxy, actually allowing a former Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) such as Chechno-Ingushetia to realize popular calls for independence might precipitate a domino effect with autonomous oblasti (oblasts) nationwide calling for more authority, autonomy, or even outright succession (Gammer, 2006). Thus the exuberant acceptance of democracy (even in the most academic sense and within a Soviet context) during the eclipsing of the Soviet Union met with a Chechen desire for ethnic separatism and national independence that would result in a broad recalcitrance by Moscow to intervene in a budding call for independence in 1991 but a refusal to allow such a call result in de jure independence just a few years later.

The rise of Dhozkhar (Doka) Dudayev to the equivalent of Chechnya’s Leviathan defies all explanation given the traditional abhorrence by Chechens over hierarchy and the rule of few. A major general in the Red Army (and as the only Chechen to achieve such rank), Dudayev was asked to chair the Second National Chechen Peoples Congress (OkChN) in July 1991. The result of the meeting was that the Chechen ASSR would remain neither part of the Soviet Union nor join with the Russian Federation, all bodies of power outside of the congress itself would be illegal (thus proclaiming de facto independence from Moscow), and that elections would be held for a president (of which Dudayev won overwhelmingly) and a parliament (Tishkov, 2004, p. 61; Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 9). In the coming months, Dudayev would increasingly consolidate power through at times dissolving parliament, closing the constitutional court, killing off members of opposition parties, and conducting personal purges of Russian officials operating on behalf of the federal government within Chechnya (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004). From 1991 to 1994, Russia relied increasingly on the unrecognized government of Dudayev to govern Chechnya, going so far as to withdraw federal troops in 1992 under threat of siege, thus providing the separatist government with a considerable garrison of Russian tanks, machine guns, and supplies (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 10). Meanwhile, Dudayev’s supporters and separatist forces conducted continuous raids against federal forces, FSB (secret service) outposts, and armories within Chechnya, which garnered little retaliation aside from two failed assassination attempts against Dudayev and sporadic reliance by Moscow on the repressed internal opposition parties (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 21). Thus, after three years of acquiescence of Chechen de facto autonomy by Moscow, Russian group troops invaded Chechnya in December 1994.

Prior to the outbreak of conflict in 1994, negotiations in 1993 authorized by Russian President Boris Yeltsin with a high-level delegation of Chechen representatives created a draft agreement on the delimitation and mutual sharing of powers, but talks were dismissed by Dudayev prior to their completion (Tishkov, 2004, p. 66). Dudayev’s reluctance to engage in a political solution has largely been attributed to the lack of willingness by successive Russian presidents to meet with him, which would signify on their part his legitimacy as the elected head of Chechnya (Russia has appointed a federal regime within Chechnya to which it ascribes legitimacy since the outbreak of the First Chechen War) (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004). With significant Russian armament and guerilla tactics that gave advantage to the Chechens’ superior knowledge of their rugged and mountainous surroundings, the Russian army took heavy losses over the war’s three-year span. The First Chechen War was a strategic nightmare for Russian forces, who were prepared to fight a conventional Western European army on the wide plans of Central and Eastern Europe, thus predictably resulting in continued offers by the Russians for a negotiated settlement as to regain control and stem the potential backlash of Russian public opinion (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 50). Following a February 1995 agreement with Tartarstan on the extent of autonomy granted to the autonomous oblast, Yeltsin authorized continued negotiations, including direct consultation with Dudayev (an implicit recognition of his role as legitimate) (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 70). However, continued assaults on Russian garrisons by Chechen forces (as directed by Dudayev’s government and other rebel groups) resulted in the January 15, 1996 order by Yeltsin of a full ground invasion of Chechen territory and the assassination of Dudayev by guided missile in April 1996. In total, 11 separate offers of negotiation were made by Russia to Dudayev’s government (Nikolaev, 1996, p. 67).

Negotiations with Dudayev failed for two critical reasons: first, “the Chechen political culture resists in principle the granting a monopoly of power to any single individual. Dudayev’s authoritarian, if not dictatorial, style was therefore particularly at odds with this tradition in Chechen society” (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 19). Second, Dudayev, like many involved with the Chechen war, was becoming fabulously rich off of the continuation of the conflict—so much so that the Chechen Wars have often been called commercial wars for their effect on the sale of oil and the liquidation Russian reconstruction aid (Trenin, 2004, p. 66, 16). Dudayev was known to have personally insulted Russian leaders, called for a holy war against Russians (as led by Muslims within Russia), and threatened terrorist action in order to prevent negotiations from occurring (Nikolaev, 1996, p. 74). However, Dudayev’s interests in personal wealth and authority are not wholly to blame for the lack of a political solution to the issue of Chechen sovereignty. If Russia was to treat Chechnya as sovereign and allowed it membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States, it “would have created a dangerous precedent for the other regions of the Russian Federation” (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 22). Thus allowing it a measure of independence demanded in order to stop hostilities would have been far greater than the level of autonomy granted in the landmark agreements with other autonomous oblasti.

According to Tracy German, given Russia’s desire to end the war, “The death of Dudayev made it far more probable that a negotiated, political settlement would be achieved” (2003, p. 145). As such, resolution of the First Chechen War was reached at the first formal negotiations following Dudayev’s death in August of 1996 at the Chechen village of Khatsavyurt. Moshe Gammer notes that this agreement and the resulting Moscow peace accord of May 1997 “symbolize the Chechen victory, especially as [it] symbolized the Chechen victory [and] came close to recognizing Chechen independence de facto” (2006, p. 209). However, a decision on the final status of Chechen autonomy was delayed until presidential and parliamentary elections could be held in 1997, thus leaving the de jure status of Chechnya in the same precarious and ambiguous position as had existed since 1991.

The interwar period (1997-1999) was characterized by a vacuum of leadership within Chechnya. In the 1997 presidential vote, 30% of voters supported a fundamentalist Islamic candidate seeking to establish Chechnya as an Islamic state (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 30). It was in the critical interwar junction that the role of religion began to take on considerable importance to the conflict, especially given that Dudayev used Islam as a tool for political mobilization, included no aspect of shari’a law in the state’s first constitution nor limited the freedom of religion (Henze, 1995, p. 34). Traditionally, the Sufi form of Islam practiced by the Chechen people is a far more secular version than the fundamentalist (what has been called “Wahabbist” by moderate Muslims and hard-line critics of Chechnya in Russia), which advocates for an Islamic state with caliphate-like qualities (Meier, 2005). Andrew Meier explains that Islamist practice was exported to Chechnya following the dissolution of the Soviet Union from former patron states in the Middle East and Afghanistan, noting that “On scorched earth, among a generation raised on war and little else, the movement found a fast and impassioned following” (Meier, 2005, p. 6). The radicalization of Chechen Muslims, however, is not a trend that typifies the mean of society; rather, the rebel groups that were strengthened in the interwar period, especially those directed by Shamil Basayev, a former vice president of Chechnya and advocate for the formation of an Islamic state, benefited greatly while the Chechen people as a whole were harmed greatly in terms of international public opinion, which has largely shunned radical Islam. What remains critical is that “Islam is an important part of [Chechen] identity, but only a part. Ethnic traditions and customs…are at least as important” (emphasis as original) (Henze, 1995, p. 41).

In August of 1999, Chechen forces under the leadership of Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan with the intention to create a Checheno-Ingush-Dagetanian state under Islamic rule as a springboard for broad “ideological expansion” (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 34). The response from Russia was lukewarm and displayed a concerted effort to prevent military action in the form of a full invasion until the string of apartment buildings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk (all Russian cities) killed more than 300 and was tied by the Russian media to Chechen separatists (Jaimoukha, 2005, p. 70). According to Jaimoukha, the Russian response—a military bombing campaign that redressed the error of the First Chechen War by completely destroying Chechen cities, leaving no hiding space for urban warfare—“already drawn up, was set into motion” (2005, p. 70). On October 1, 1999, federal forces invaded Chechnya, eventually controlling 80% of its territory, where it installed a new federal government to divide separatist opposition and proceeded to drive the remaining separatist forces into the Chechen highlands to the north and south of Grozny, the Chechen capital (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 35-41).

Given the traditional lack of preference for hierarchy and unitary rule, governance over Chechnya not imposed by force (either by Dudayev’s near tyrannical presidency or the Russian federal army) has largely failed to produce a functioning government. In example, in 1999 president Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate Sufi Muslim, was unable to stop the more radical Basayev from venturing into Dagestan (thus perpetuating the Second Chechen War) and was forced by more radical elements within his government to declare a limited form of shari’a law (with Islamic courts included) (Tishkov, 2004, p. 34). The result has largely been a diarchy of governance, of secularists versus the radical militia commanders, thus preventing the process of negotiation with Russian forces from beginning (Trenin & Malasehnko, 2004, p. 33). Anna Politkovskaya—a Russian author and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was murdered in Moscow in 2006—notes in her 2002 survey A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, “Maskhadov is no longer commander-in-chief…All of his former field commanders are on different pages now; each has his own view…[and] they all viciously hate each other” (178). In discussions with Akhmed Zakayev, a representative of Maskhadov, concerning the failed negotiations of November 2001, she notes that even Putin can’t control the situation; that the Russian military is completely in control of the Second Chechen War (2003, p. 205). (Domination of the war’s determination by the Russian Ministry of Defense is roundly supported by Russian public opinion following the school massacre in Beslan in 2004, the hostage-taking in a Moscow theater in 2002, and apartment bombings in 1999. Trenin and Malashenko state, “at the beginning of the second campaign the public would settle for nothing short of total victory” [2004, p. 50], which further demonstrate how the rhetoric of “Caucasophobia” and “Islamophobia” have been successful in ensuring that the second war ends in a better position for Russia than the first [2004, p. 58-63].) If neither Maskhadov (who was assassinated in 2004) nor Putin can be reliably counted upon to have the authority to stop the violence and guarantee the safety of the Chechen people, there is little reliable expectation that the Second Chechen War and the final status of Chechnya’s autonomy can be agreed to on paper.

The interests that have defined more than ten years of remain as significant obstacles to the conflict’s resolution. For Russia, the threat posed by Islam is so great that no solution besides complete eradication is acceptable (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 74). Moreover, the precedent that would be set by achieving a victory that is less than total—that is, a solution in which Chechens are granted more autonomy than the status quo—would upset the careful balance Russia has struck with other ethnically defined autonomous oblasti. The Russian position, then, remains that “the Federation’s territorial integrity is non-negotiable and therefore Chechnya will remain a constituent part of the Federation” (German, 2003, p. 160). Yet Tracy German finds this an impossible position, given that Chechnya has been ungovernable and reconstruction of “the republic which [Russia] helped destroy” has been less than complete (2003, p. 160). For Chechens, whose lives have been defined by post-war economic stagnation and continued persecution by Russia military forces, the struggle for separatism is seen as the only viable solution to ensure the long-term security of the Chechen people in light of a struggle in common for nearly four hundred years (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004; Politkovskaya, 2003, p. 212). Moreover, as “the demand for Chechnya’s independence has become coupled with the cause of creating an Islamic state,” which is especially salient in the eyes of the separatist militias that continue the war today, the interests of the Chechen people are often mischaracterized and a single negotiating position to satisfy all active parties is non-existent (quotation taken from Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 101; German, 2003; Tishkov, 2004). While a new Chechen constitution drafted in 2003 provides for limited autonomy, the reality of Russia federal control over Chechnya and continued fighting even following the assassinations of Maskhadov and Basayev point to a conflict whose resolution is far from being realized.

The resolution of the Second Chechen War and a final determination of the level of autonomy of Chechnya have considerable impact on several groups not involved directly in hostilities. Given the dispersion of separatist fighters throughout the Chechen highlands following the Russian invasion in 2002 and the rise of demands for the creation of an Islamic state that would encompass the entire North Caucuses, the Ingush and Dagestanians are especially interested in maintaining stability over the region. However, for other ethnic minorities living in largely homogenous regions with some autonomy elsewhere in Russia, a Chechen victory or acquiescence to additional Chechen sovereignty by Russia would signal that taking up arms against the Russian government could have a positive outcome, thus possibly resulting in extensions of ethnically-based warfare throughout the federation. For Georgia, a small nation adjacent to Chechnya on the southern Russian border, Shamil Basayev’s excursions into its breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the increasing importance of fundamental Islam in securing the independence of these territories has complicated the process of negotiation and national reconciliation. Moreover, given that Chechen separatists have been radicalized via the rhetoric of Islamic terrorism by the world media and Western governments alike, the West is interested on ensuring that a Chechen victory is not realized, nor that it becomes an impetus for the further spread of fundamental Islam. However, in the view of Western nations, such repression of Chechen separatism must also be equated with the assurance of human rights given the repressive nature and “escalating brutality” of conflict, especially in light of Russia’s recent move towards more consolidated (if not more authoritarian) governance (Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, p. 42). Given the broad importance of states maintaining security and stability against non-state actors, the conclusion of the Second Chechen War is of great importance.

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