Two "black widows," likely of Chechen origin, killed dozens of riders Monday on the Moscow subway. Russian television said virtually nothing of the appalling events through the entire day. Moscow residents resorted to radio and the Internet for information. Sanguinary Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov claimed he ordered the suicide bombings, though a spokesman had already denied it. The head of Russia's Security Council publicly hinted that Georgia may be involved, especially with that man Saakashvili in charge, "whose behavior is unpredictable."
My friend Owen Mathews, Newsweek's Moscow bureau chief, with whom I appeared on WOR Radio's Joey Reynolds show this week, said publicly that already there's speculation in Russia as to whether the state secretly engineered the attacks as a provocation. Many Russians believe that the FSB perpetrated the notorious 1999 apartment bombings in several cities across the country in order to justify the second Chechen War. Plus change in Russia. The sun also rises--but never dispels the eternal murk of Russian affairs.
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Already we've heard noises of concern in the West that the Moscow subway enormities will fuel a return to police-state conditions. What we seldom hear is a discussion of the Chechens--why do they do such things? Are they merely a rabid offshoot of the infectious Islamist cult of death at large in the world? Moscow has successfully sold its genocidal policies against the Chechens as a legitimate reaction to mad-dog jihadism. We've bought into it. But it won't do--I've been to Chechnya and environs, and I can tell you that the story is different: Something unimaginably horrifying happened there in recent years, and before, comparable to the worst excesses of the Congo, possibly even more depraved. And it hasn't stopped.
A terrific op-ed in the March 30 New York Times by three Chicago researchers into terrorism sets out to explain the nature of Chechen terrorism with its strangely high percentage of women participants.
"Many Chechen separatists are Muslim, but few of the suicide bombers profess religious motives. The majority is male, but a huge fraction--over 40%--is women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus. Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global jihad."
It takes a stubborn kind of historical myopia to be mystified by Chechen behavior today. The authors of the op-ed cover a great deal of recent ground, but they shy from detailing horrors and ignore the long history--150 years and more--of Russian brutality in the Caucasus. Let me begin with contemporary horrors. In the time I spent with Chechens in the Caucasus and elsewhere I heard stories and saw evidence of widespread incidents so utterly unspeakable as to rob you of sleep for a lifetime. Nothing in Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon comes close. The op-ed authors' well-meaning assertion that "suicide campaigns are almost always a last resort to military occupation" doesn't begin to describe the matter, conflating as it does the Chechen experience with other conflicts, as if American and Israeli military campaigns might fall in the same category.
There's no comparison. Entire buses full of women and children charred to death by Russian missiles. Children found with hands tied and scalped to death. Women killed by having sharp stakes driven into their vaginas. Men tortured and left to die trapped in basins of concrete. Chechen exile groups have proof--photographs and videotapes aplenty--but they can't get anyone to pay heed.
The Chechens have endured three sustained waves of genocide from the 19th century onwards. The Czarist conquest of the Caucasus region, waged explicitly as a Christian crusading cause, continued on and off throughout the 19th century during which, by some estimates, half a million indigenous Muslims were killed or displaced. (Many ended up in the Ottoman territories, which set the scene for the massacre of Armenians during World War 1). In 1859 Alexandre Dumas traveled to the Caucasus region and subsequently wrote a memoir of his trip. In it, he describes his astonishing reception as a celebrity so far from Europe in the country house salons of the Russian elites there. He also describes how his genteel hosts invited him to go hunting--a common pastime--in pursuit of locals to kill.
In 1944 Joseph Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to the hardscrabble steppes of Central Asia. He suspected them of wishing to collaborate with Hitler. By some estimates only half survived. They traveled by rail, entire families and villages (those that weren't killed outright in their homes) for 20 days in closed cattle cars with scant food or water. Upon arrival they were simply dumped out in the middle of nowhere and left to survive by their wits. Nevertheless, many Chechen soldiers, deeply valued by their Russian officers, fought valiantly on the Russian side against Hitler. For their pains most were deported to the Gulags in Siberia. After Stalin died, the surviving population was allowed to dribble back to the homelands in the 1960s. Also, so many were dying of starvation in the steppe that the weak would crawl to the cemeteries with their last breath so as not to be eaten by dogs first.
Is it any wonder that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens, followed by the neighboring Ingush and Daghestanis, all of whom had suffered similarly, could think of nothing but freedom from Moscow? In the first Chechen War of the early 1990s they kicked the Russians out of the capital Grozny--a conflict in which there's scarcely a mention of religion or Jihad. During that war, many Caucasus Turks from families originally purged in the various Russian campaigns went back to fight. They provided weapons, food, medicine and a crucial sense of solidarity with the outside world.
But no, Moscow would not let the Chechens go. Putin came to power and relaunched the Chechen campaign in 1999. The bombings of low rent apartment blocks in three Russian cities served as a casus belli, even though most Russians believed their own security services likely perpetrated the outrages. In that year, the U.S. was allowed to bomb Belgrade, the Turks were allowed to capture the PKK Kurdish insurgent leader, and Turkish authorities cut off the secret supply lines to Grozny. Though no one in authority has publicly said so, I believe the three countries struck a deal, and the Chechens were left to fend for themselves.
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