GLOBE EDITORIAL
Putin's Caucasian loopIF THE 100 or so fighters who staged a deadly raid from Chechnya into neighboring Ingushetia Tuesday intended to demonstrate the failure of Vladimir Putin's brutal war policy in Chechnya, they succeeded.
These attacks on Ingushetia's interior ministry and the republic's border guards belied Putin's repeated claims that his army and special forces have virtually extirpated Chechen armed groups that have been fighting since 1994 for independence from Russia. On the contrary, the ability of the attackers to plan and execute such a military operation outside Chechnya suggests that instead of eradicating Chechens' willingness to fight for self-rule, Putin's reliance on repressive force risks dispersing the violence into surrounding regions of the Russian Federation. In a salient admission that the Tuesday strike in Nazran -- the biggest city of Ingushetia -- does portend an enlargement of the Chechen conflict, a spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya, Major General Ilya Shabalkin, said yesterday that the raiders had been recruited from both Chechnya and Ingushetia. It is always difficult for a statesman pursuing a failed policy to admit failure, particularly when his antagonists have inflicted on him an embarrassing tactical defeat. In Putin's case, the usual motives for plowing ahead stubbornly with the same futile strategy are magnified by political considerations. The former KGB officer came to power as an unapologetic Russian nationalist who, unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, was determined to wipe out the Chechen separatist movement. Moreover, the themes of patriotic pride and reasserted authority that Putin sounded in rationalizing an all-out assault on the Chechens looped back to his concept of a strong centralized government. Under the influence of Kremlin propaganda, the Russian populace has generally shrugged off what Amnesty International has called "credible reports that Russian forces have been responsible for violations of international human rights and humanitarian law," in Chechnya, "including `disappearances,' extrajudicial executions, and torture, including rape."
For the sake of Russians as well as Chechens, Putin ought to reverse course and open genuine negotiations with the government of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov that was elected in 1997, but is ignored today by Moscow. Putin himself created the symmetry between his merciless suppression of the Chechens and the hierarchical power structure he consolidated in the Kremlin. He will have to be the one to liberate Russia from its authoritarian reflexes by freeing Russians of their colonialist burden in Chechnya. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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