The Pattern is Global, But the Causes are Local
Terrorism and the measures adopted against it acquire reciprocal momentum that is all but impossible to stop once a certain threshold has been crossed. That threshold was crossed in Russia last week, with potentially enormous consequences for civil liberties in that country, for civil peace in the Caucasus and possibly for the existing peaceful relationship between Russia and America.
This is why issues of nationalism, irredentism and religion - the usual motives for terrorist outrages - are so desperately dangerous. Ignored or misinterpreted, assigned to spurious international causes, they can do immense damage. They have to be dealt with in their natural dimensions.
There is a competitive auction in terrorism. Righteously misdirected reactions to terrorism contribute to the dynamics of the terrorist interaction, reinforcing the next outrage, which is constructed to be more horrible than the retaliation suffered for the last one. This is an escalation of terror in which neither side can prevail since the possibilities are unlimited - as demonstrated at Beslan in North Ossetia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has mistakenly (or culpably) assigned an international cause to his crisis. He has followed George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in identifying his national problem as "international terrorism." This is not true. Putin's terrorism problem is specific to him and to Russia. America's terrorism problem is specific to the United States, its past, its foreign relationships and its policies. Israel's is a matter of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians.
The source of terrorism in Russia since the late 1990s has been the ethnic nationalist uprising in Chechnya that Russian authorities have brutally been trying to stop.
Today there certainly are international reinforcements fighting for the Chechens, and there are increasing numbers of radical Islamic teachers and clerics in the Caucasus. Like Iraq, the region has become a battlefront in the war of Islamic radicals against the infidels. But to hold them responsible for what has happened in Chechnya is like insisting that "regime remnants and foreign terrorists" are the only ones doing the fighting in Iraq.
The affairs retain their national causes, and the only hope of solution remains national. But once the terrorist action-reaction auction begins, it is almost impossible to stop. Russia has already invaded Chechnya twice to "end terrorism," but terrorism simply got worse. Ariel Sharon's entire career has consisted in failed attempts to solve Israel's problem of national existence by brute destruction of what he considers its enemies. The United States invaded Afghanistan and overturned the Taliban government, but the terrorists took to the hills and the country is in political and social pieces. And now there is Iraq.
If the terrorist auction has a tangible value, such as an independent Chechnya (if that is what the Beslan terrorists wanted: nobody has yet said what they wanted, assuming that they wanted anything tangible), there is no solution except to give it to them. Everyone knows how to solve the tangible and national part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An acceptable compromise of their national claims was agreed to long ago. The clash of eschatological expectations between some Israelis and some Palestinians is what continues to make that solution impossible.
The religious fanatic has no tangible goal to be satisfied. He - or she, as we increasingly find - wants paradise and the destruction of heretics. For such a person, the terrorism auction has no earthly limit.
Putin has made a second internationalized interpretation of the Beslan massacre. He implied in his address on Saturday that U.S. activity in Georgia, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, is partly behind separatist forces there and is part of an American effort to disarm Russia as a nuclear power and otherwise weaken it.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 had left Russia defenseless, he said. It had once been invulnerable, with unsurpassed power to protect its frontiers. Now, "we have shown ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." The implication was obvious.
Could Putin do anything now other than promise resistance, power, security, repression? Politically, probably not. Is what he said going to do any good? Again, the answer is no. Moscow, and Bush's Washington and Sharon's Jerusalem, have to prove their "resolve"; they can't be seen as "pitiful, helpless giants." Yet until they tell the truth to themselves, or their countrymen tell it to them, that is just what they are.
William Pfaff
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune
This is why issues of nationalism, irredentism and religion - the usual motives for terrorist outrages - are so desperately dangerous. Ignored or misinterpreted, assigned to spurious international causes, they can do immense damage. They have to be dealt with in their natural dimensions.
There is a competitive auction in terrorism. Righteously misdirected reactions to terrorism contribute to the dynamics of the terrorist interaction, reinforcing the next outrage, which is constructed to be more horrible than the retaliation suffered for the last one. This is an escalation of terror in which neither side can prevail since the possibilities are unlimited - as demonstrated at Beslan in North Ossetia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has mistakenly (or culpably) assigned an international cause to his crisis. He has followed George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon in identifying his national problem as "international terrorism." This is not true. Putin's terrorism problem is specific to him and to Russia. America's terrorism problem is specific to the United States, its past, its foreign relationships and its policies. Israel's is a matter of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians.
The source of terrorism in Russia since the late 1990s has been the ethnic nationalist uprising in Chechnya that Russian authorities have brutally been trying to stop.
Today there certainly are international reinforcements fighting for the Chechens, and there are increasing numbers of radical Islamic teachers and clerics in the Caucasus. Like Iraq, the region has become a battlefront in the war of Islamic radicals against the infidels. But to hold them responsible for what has happened in Chechnya is like insisting that "regime remnants and foreign terrorists" are the only ones doing the fighting in Iraq.
The affairs retain their national causes, and the only hope of solution remains national. But once the terrorist action-reaction auction begins, it is almost impossible to stop. Russia has already invaded Chechnya twice to "end terrorism," but terrorism simply got worse. Ariel Sharon's entire career has consisted in failed attempts to solve Israel's problem of national existence by brute destruction of what he considers its enemies. The United States invaded Afghanistan and overturned the Taliban government, but the terrorists took to the hills and the country is in political and social pieces. And now there is Iraq.
If the terrorist auction has a tangible value, such as an independent Chechnya (if that is what the Beslan terrorists wanted: nobody has yet said what they wanted, assuming that they wanted anything tangible), there is no solution except to give it to them. Everyone knows how to solve the tangible and national part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An acceptable compromise of their national claims was agreed to long ago. The clash of eschatological expectations between some Israelis and some Palestinians is what continues to make that solution impossible.
The religious fanatic has no tangible goal to be satisfied. He - or she, as we increasingly find - wants paradise and the destruction of heretics. For such a person, the terrorism auction has no earthly limit.
Putin has made a second internationalized interpretation of the Beslan massacre. He implied in his address on Saturday that U.S. activity in Georgia, and elsewhere in the Caucasus, is partly behind separatist forces there and is part of an American effort to disarm Russia as a nuclear power and otherwise weaken it.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 had left Russia defenseless, he said. It had once been invulnerable, with unsurpassed power to protect its frontiers. Now, "we have shown ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." The implication was obvious.
Could Putin do anything now other than promise resistance, power, security, repression? Politically, probably not. Is what he said going to do any good? Again, the answer is no. Moscow, and Bush's Washington and Sharon's Jerusalem, have to prove their "resolve"; they can't be seen as "pitiful, helpless giants." Yet until they tell the truth to themselves, or their countrymen tell it to them, that is just what they are.
William Pfaff
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune
posted by R7 | 9/09/2004 01:17:00 AM
1 Comments:
Forget terrorism, Chechnya is Putin's war
September 8, 2004
What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody's favourite American neo-conservative? It was he who came up some years ago with the notion that we must "decontextualise terrorism": that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons that some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill them. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.
This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends - including the violence carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, causing far more deaths.
I'd be quite happy, for instance, to "decontextualise" nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use, and if you want to start decontextualising things such as cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.
Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and the point of "decontextualising" them was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past 37 years and lost much of their land to Jewish settlements.
Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force.
"Decontextualising terrorism" would neatly solve Israel's problem with the Palestinians - and it would also solve Russia's problem with the Chechen resistance, which is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all the school massacre in Beslan last Friday, as "a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism".
Not by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia's main human rights organisation, Memorial, estimates that 3000 innocent people have been "disappeared" by the Russian occupation forces since 1999. No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya.
Indeed, the Russian security services quickly let it be known that 10 of the 20 militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were "citizens of the Arab world" and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.
And how did they know this, since it's unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents on them? It turns out Russian security "experts" surmised it from the "facial structure" of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.) But that was where Putin wanted the finger to point.
Ever since September 11, countries such as Russia and Israel that face serious challenges from Muslims living under their rule have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the "global war on terrorism". For those that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels.
Without September 11, Israel would never have got away with building its "security fence" so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.
Chechnya was a thorn in Russia's side - and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens - long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden.
The Chechens, less than a million strong even today, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian empire in the 19th century, holding out for an entire generation.
When German troops neared the Caucasus in 1943, Stalin deported the entire Chechen population to camps in Central Asia, fearing they would collaborate with the invaders - and half the Chechens died there before they were allowed to return home after the war. When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994-96, although the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins.
That should have been the end of it, but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor. (The deal was that Putin could be Russia's president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement.) But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.
Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about 100,000 Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russians cities.
There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin's war, and you can't "decontextualise" that.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based international affairs commentator.
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