ON A recent afternoon in Chechnya’s capital I indulged in a delightful lunch of dumplings and salad at a snazzy corner bistro called Café Paris. Pop songs crooned from a flat-screen TV; outside, beneath a travertine mosque that presides over the city like a giant pink cloud, a group of young women in knee-high designer boots giggled in the February sun. It required mind-bending effort to conjure up the memory of this street corner the last time I saw it, five years ago: a crumbling wreckage of strafed apartment blocks jutting out of a bomb-blasted road. That time, I had been told to watch out for mines and snipers.
At first glance, Chechnya is a dream come true for any country fighting a prolonged war against Islamic rebels. After 15 years of bloodshed that killed between 130,000 and 300,000 people, Russia declared the war over last April and withdrew most of its troops. Physically, the reconstruction has been meteoric. Much of the Connecticut-sized republic bears no outward sign that there was ever a war. There’s even a sushi bar down the street from Café Paris.
“Look how fast we have recovered,’’ Adam, the café’s owner, told me. “Not like the other countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.’’
But scratch the surface, and Chechnya becomes a cautionary tale, particularly for the US odyssey in Iraq, now almost in its seventh year. A deadly insurgency, which the Kremlin has pronounced all but defeated, perseveres in the mountains that have sheltered rebels for centuries, and is spilling out beyond Chechnya’s borders into other republics of Russia’s North Caucasus.
The circumstances that fuel the insurgency are familiar to American troops and diplomats stationed in Iraq: a weak, nascent kleptocracy; staggering unemployment; revenge that is easily harvested by the enduring Islamic fundamentalism. Unable to keep the rebels in check, the government — with the tacit support of the Kremlin — carries out arbitrary abductions and summary executions.
After Sunday’s election in Iraq, top American commanders said the performance of Iraqi security forces demonstrated that the country is on track to the level of stability and peace needed to withdraw American combat troops by Sept. 1. (That at least 38 people were killed in bombings and artillery attacks in Baghdad suggests that the commanders’ bar for what is considered stability and peace — or good performance of Iraqi forces — is rather low.) As Washington gears up for the pullout it might serve it well to look at Chechnya as an example of one way violence can continue to bleed a former counterinsurgency battlefield long after the war is officially over.
The back history of the conflict in Chechnya — nearly 300 years of relentless opposition to the oppressive Russian rule — is radically different from that of Iraq. But the efforts by Washington and by the Kremlin to extricate themselves from their respective wars follow an uncomfortably similar pattern: Prop up a relatively amenable government and hand over to it the responsibility to quash rebellion; pour money into reconstruction projects, ignoring the ensuing corruption and graft; tolerate human rights violations in the name of relative political stability; accept occasional flare-ups of an Islamic rebellion; and declare — or, in the case of the United States, strive to declare — the end of major military operations.
In Chechnya, “the model failed,’’ according to Sarah Mendelson, director of the Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The end of the war here has given way to a smoldering, self-perpetuating conflict that is quietly ravaging the region like an underground peat fire.
A recent CSIS report shows that the number of suicide bombings in the North Caucasus in 2009 nearly quadrupled compared to the previous year. Most of the attacks occurred in Chechnya. Ambushes, shootings, and roadside bombings are also on the increase across the region: last year, more than 900 people were killed here, almost double from the year before.
Of course, bloodshed in Chechnya is less dramatic in scope than the bombings and shootings that are claiming lives today in Iraq. But Chechnya’s population is smaller by almost 30 times. And this war is older. Think Iraq 2019.
On the other side of the dark spectrum of violence lies what Human Rights Watch has called “a culture of impunity for abuse.’’ The abduction and killing last July of Natalia Estemirova, the Chechen activist, was one of 86 abductions documented in one-third of Chechnya in the first nine months of last year by the Russian human rights group Memorial. Like Estemirova, many of these “disappeared’’ later turned up dead. Russian and international activists blame paramilitary forces loyal to Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin President Ramzan Kadyrov, who has portrayed some of the victims as separatists killed in battle and touted their killings as examples of his counterinsurgency successes.
In the suburbs of Grozny last month, I met the relatives of two young men whom Kadyrov’s forces had abducted last summer in separate incidents. Both had been taken in front of their loved ones.
The mangled body of one, a 21-year-old construction worker from Argun, was returned to his mother three months later. Chechen authorities told the woman that the evidence that her son had been a rebel fighter was the howl of a wolf — a symbol of the Chechen resistance — he had used as his cellphone ring tone.
The other man, a legally blind greenhouse worker from Shali, has been missing since August. His family presumes him dead.
That night I visited a large farmhouse in Samashki, a onetime rebel stronghold an hour west of Grozny. My host was a Chechen businessman in his late fifties whose father had fought a guerrilla war against the Soviets in the 1930s and ’40s. My companion was born in exile. He had no fondness of the Russians or of Chechnya’s new government. We drank tea at a long table and talked about the way insurgencies around the world draw on the sympathies of people who feel mistreated by their leaders, and who are looking for protection elsewhere, or for revenge. It was close to midnight.
Is the war in Chechnya over?, I asked
The man pushed away his teacup.
“There is no shooting war.’’ His eyes bore through me. “But every day there is violence. Except today it goes on at specific addresses.’’
Anna Badkhen has reported extensively from Chechnya since 2001. Her book about war and food will be published in October.
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