The second Chechen war, launched by Russia's leadership in autumn 1999, was intended to be a breakthrough in the revival of the Russian Army. Vladimir Putin, hand-picked by President Yeltsin as the successor, was generous with promises to make Russia proud again in its military might and to give the Armed Forces every support they needed for achieving the victory. Four years later, heading towards the well-prepared re-election in March 2004, Putin assiduously avoided the topic of the deadlocked war and insisted that there was no need for further military reform, since the Army was perfectly capable of performing its duties. For any unbiased observer, however, no amount of PR spin could hide the fact that the victory had not taken place, and the presidential denial of the Army's continuing degradation was not made any more convincing by the supporting roar from the top brass.

The war in Chechnya can rightly be seen as the ‘original sin’ of Putin's regime, determining such authoritarian features as closeted decision-making, obsession with control over every source of power and rigid censorship of the media. At the same time, this war necessitates the building up of conventional military capabilities, both for suppressing the resistance and for engaging in other conflicts of this type. The maturing ‘patriotic’ ideology of the state-centric regime also places a heavy emphasis on the ability to project power as the ultimate argument in relentless geopolitical contests.

The esteemed parties to the agreement, desiring to end their centuries-long antagonism and striving to establish firm, equal and mutually beneficial relations, hereby agree:

1. To reject forever the use of force or threat of force in resolving all matters of dispute.

2. To develop their relations on generally recognised principles and norms of international law. In doing so, the sides shall interact on the basis of specific concrete agreements.

3. This treaty shall serve as the basis for concluding further agreements and accords on the full range of relations.

4. This treaty is written on two copies and both have equal legal power.

5. This treaty is effective from the day of signing.

The Khasavyurt Russian-Chechen Agreement

31 August 1996

JOINT STATEMENT

We the undersigned,

Taking into consideration the progress achieved in the realisation of the Agreement on the cessation of military actions;

Making efforts to achieve mutually acceptable preconditions for a political settlement of the armed conflict;

Acknowledging that the use or threat of armed force to settle disputes is unacceptable; Based on the generally accepted principles of the right of peoples to self-determination, the principles of equal rights, voluntariness and freedom of choice, the strengthening of national agreement and the security of peoples;

Expressing the intent unconditionally to defend the human rights and freedoms of citizens, regardless of national origin, religious denomination, place of residence or other differences, an end to acts of violence between political opponents, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1949 and the international covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966,

We have worked out principles* for the determination of basis of relations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic, on the basis of which further negotiation will take place.

Chechnya is just one of Russia's 21 ethnically defined republics, yet it is here that one of the most terrible conflicts in modern times has raged in various ways since 1991. There has been considerable debate over what provokes one area to seek secession, while another in apparently similar circumstances remains within the existing constitutional order. Why has it been Chechnya, and not one of the other republics or regions of Russia, that has taken this tragic path? Here, I will place the conflict in its broader historical and theoretical context; the details of the background to the independence struggle will be examined in more detail in other chapters.

Comparative Debates

Michael Hechter has observed that it is typically the poorest regions that are most disposed to secede. Certainly, there is a socio-economic dynamic at work in the case of Chechnya, which was close to the bottom in most indicators of modernization in comparison with other regions of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Russia. Levels of educational and general socio-economic attainment were poor, while a high birth rate fuelled exceptionally high levels of unemployment. Reserves of oil had declined and by the early 1980s constituted no more than three per cent of Russian oil production. In most aspects of socio-economic development, Chechnya was in last place in Russia, with over half the population under 30 years of age and with unemployment among ethnic Chechens reaching 30 per cent, forcing some 40 per cent of Chechens of working age to become migrant workers (otkhodniki), with at least 25,000 men leaving each spring to work in Russia to work on building sites as itinerant workers (shabashniki).

On 15 May 2004 Russian economics minister German Gref visited the city of Grozny and was shocked by the sight. ‘What we saw today at Minutka (a square in the south of the city) looks almost like a set from a Hollywood movie’, Gref told reporters. Russian president Vladimir Putin had expressed something similar when he flew over the city four days before. ‘Despite what's being done, from the helicopter it looks horrible’, he told a meeting of the local Chechen government. It is worth considering the words of these two men, both of whom carry enormous responsibility for the state of the city they were visiting. The majority of the destruction they saw had been carried out by the Russian government more than nine years before, with more inflicted by Putin himself almost five years ago. Yet somehow both men had either forgotten or discounted the importance of the fact of this mass devastation of a Russian city until being physically reminded of it. In a way, like most of their compatriots, they had accepted the ruination of Grozny as normal.

The appalling condition of Grozny is of course no secret. The dozens of journalists and aid workers who visited the city over the preceding decade had repeatedly seen its ruins and tried to reflect on its meaning – not to speak of the tens of thousands of Chechens who have to live in these conditions and experience the meaning of it every day.

The second Chechen war has been continuing for over half a decade. The tenth anniversary of the start of the first Chechen war has come and gone. Even before the Russian intervention in December 1994, latent post-Soviet ethno-social conflict in Chechnya had been articulated as a separatist Russo- Chechen confrontation. Russian society has now become used to regular despatches from this ‘hot spot’ about battles and terrorist acts. The Chechen war has become part of everyday reality, and has affected the lives of all Russians. It has made an indelible impact upon the lives and destinies of hundreds of thousands of people – the inhabitants of the republic, refugees and servicemen. During this time, international perceptions of Russia have been significantly influenced by the interminable war in the North Caucasus. In this chapter, we will first look at some of the ways the conflict is perceived at home and abroad, and will then examine the role of human rights organizations in the settlement of the armed conflict in Chechnya.

The International Context of the Chechen Wars

Both Chechen wars were accompanied by a massive violation of human rights by the warring sides, by military crimes and crimes against humanity. In both cases the federal side sought to place these actions outside the context of law, both national and international. In both wars, as in all developments in Chechnya over the last ten years, the trend has been from ‘bad to worse’.

From the beginning the Chechen conflict has in essence been an armed revolt against the Russian Federal authorities by one of the country's ethnically based autonomous republics, which in 1991 declared unilaterally that it was seceding from Russia and setting up an independent state. Similar armed conflicts in the form of ‘wars for self-determination’ emerged at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s in several regions of the former USSR (in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, in the Transdniestria region in Moldova). Almost all of these ended in a victory of sorts for the separatists, but not one of these conflicts has produced an independent state, nor has a political solution to them yet been found.

Context

The federal authorities' attempt to put an end to the separatist regime in Chechnya by force spilled over into the drawn-out and destructive military campaign of 1994–96, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from the republic and the signing of peace agreements in August 1996 and in May 1997. According to official figures, in the first Chechen campaign the federal forces and police alone lost around 4,000 dead. The 1994–96 war in Chechnya led to enormous human and material losses: around 35,000 people were killed, more than one third of the republic's population (almost 450,000, including those who had left before the war) became forced migrants and refugees, while Grozny and many other places suffered severe destruction.

There have always been differences in Western policy towards the war in Chechnya, but among Western governments, at least, the differences have been in emphasis rather than substance. Thus throughout the crisis Western governments have always publicly backed Moscow's policy on Chechnya. The West has refused to recognize Chechnya's claim of independence, and has accepted Moscow's right to defend its territorial integrity, if necessary by force (jus ad bellum). On the other hand, the West has occasionally spoken out against Russia's conduct in the war and the violation of human rights by the Russian authorities (jus in bello), but it has always been reluctant to back such rhetoric with any kind of meaningful sanction. Post-9/11, the West has also become more willing to accept Moscow's argument that Russia's struggle in Chechnya has become a war against militant Islamism as much as a war against separatism. As such, Western leaders have stressed the need for an end to terrorism before any political solution might be viable.

The Western media, on the other hand, tend to portray the Chechen conflict as primarily a war of national liberation. Although rarely spelled out in these terms, the implication of much of the coverage is that the Chechen cause is just. The Chechens have been oppressed by the Russians for the last two hundred years and deserve their independence. The use of force by the Russian authorities is heavily criticized, with the media focusing in particular on the war crimes and human rights violations perpetrated by the Russian forces in Chechnya.

When asked in early 2004 by a journalist about the road to peace in Chechnya, president Putin retorted combatively: ‘Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, we destroy them’. Putin's public eschewing of negotiations with Chechen insurgents is reminiscent of the assertions by past leaders of imperial regimes, and of contemporary democratic Western leaders, most recently in Iraq. The Russian-Chechen war is undoubtedly one of the most protracted, most bitter and bloodiest of the post-Soviet conflicts, involving terrorist acts such as those by Chechen extremists at the Budennovsk hospital, the Dubrovka theatre, and the Beslan school, and by the Russian military's terror-bombing of Grozny and massacre at Samashki. It is also a conflict, however, that involves a complex peace process which has engaged the main protagonists in periodic attempts to reach a settlement through dialogue and negotiations. The peace process in the conflict in Chechnya is littered by a ‘truce’, a ‘treaty’ and several ‘agreements’, though a final peace ‘settlement’ to the conflict remains elusive. While the key issue at the centre of the conflict is sovereignty for an independent Chechnya, the dynamics of the conflict have developed through several different phases, alternating between military conflict and negotiations. By examining these dynamics we can track how the mutual interaction of the military conflict and the peace process has shaped the parameters of a potential agreement. What might have been the basis for compromise and a settlement at one stage of the conflict may over time become redundant as new issues and new protagonists emerge, and new events transform the nature of the conflict and negotiation.

In December 1994, the Russian federal authorities launched their first attempt to suppress Chechen separatism by military action. After fierce fighting, the Russian army brought practically the whole territory of the republic under its formal control. It was at this point, however, that a guerrilla war started, and the Russian forces began to suffer defeats and considerable losses. According to official figures (probably understated), the military action of 1994–6 cost the lives of more than 30,000 Chechens, and 5,300 Russian soldiers. This war, the economic cost of which is estimated at $5.5 billion (not including the cost of rebuilding the ruined Chechen economy and social sector), was among the main causes of the Russian economic crisis of August 1998, when the state found itself unable to honour its immense debts.

The two-year military operation ended with the signing of the so-called Khasavyurt agreement in August 1996, which allowed for presidential and parliamentary elections in Chechnya. The Russian authorities recognized the winner of the presidential elections, Aslan Maskhadov, as the legitimate head of a Chechen Republic as part of the Russian Federation; this was confirmed by a raft of legislation. In March 1997 Maskhadov went to Moscow and signed a treaty with the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, by which both sides committed themselves to seeking only peaceful solutions to disputes arising between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic.

For Carlyle the contrary of history is not fiction but oblivion, the unraveling of the collective human memory that holds civilization together. History is not a record of civilization; it is civilization itself, the past speaking to the present and to the future through the voice of the historian. Without that animating voice, we would have neither history nor elegy – only gibberish and unmarked graves.

History and the human voice, life and speech, are virtually one in Carlyle's mind. His moving reminiscence of his stonemason father, begun while the body still lay above ground and finished just after it was laid in the grave – an elegy so spontaneous as to be the diary of the mourner as well as a portrait of the dead – is above all a tribute to James Carlyle's powers of speech. ‘Never shall we again hear such speech as that was,’ Carlyle writes, the purest ‘of all the dialects I have ever listened to,’ a ‘full white sunlight.’

James Carlyle died in 1832; three years later, on the occasion of another loss that Carlyle took at least as hard, his father returned to him in a dream. Carlyle had gone to sleep late on the night of 6 March, 1835, after John Stuart Mill, pale and shaken, had told him that the entire first volume of The French Revolution, which Mill had been reading in manuscript, had been inadvertently burnt.

The city is at once an organism and an idea. As an organism, it flourishes and fades, presenting a different aspect to the beholder at each moment in its history. As an idea, the city has haunted the human imagination with a fixity equaled perhaps only by the idea of time or of God. The new industrial towns of the nineteenth century were probably as unlike the early cities of the Fertile Crescent as hell is from heaven, yet we still apprehend and describe cities in archetypal patterns that predate ancient Babylon or Tyre. Even the literature of the modern city, like modern man himself, is haunted by recollections of the gods and by the ghosts of the fallen cities they once founded.

The earliest cities were believed to be sacred in origin and to have come into being as the terrestrial counterpart of a celestial model. The golden city that the Evangelist sees at the end of the Apocalypse might stand as the type of all urban foundations: ‘And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ (21:2). The vision still dazzles, but the mode of thought is elementally archaic.

Swinburne is a poet not of natural objects but of natural energies – of winds and surging waters. His scale is macrocosmic, his focus less upon the small celandine than upon the spines of mountains, less upon things seen than upon forces felt. At times he is nearly a blind poet, all tongue and ear and touch. His poetry moves away from the art of painting and, in Pater's phrase, aspires to the condition of music; after reading Swinburne one retains not an image but a tonality and a rhythm.

Traditionally, the English poet has prided himself on particularity, which the New Critics exalted as the clearest sign of genius. Donne's ‘bracelet of bright haire about the bone’ has dazzled readers for nearly a century. Our very conception of poetry has been shaped by the practices of the metaphysical poets and by Keats's dictum that the poet must have ‘distinctness for his luxury.’ We are at a loss in reading a poet who, like Swinburne, is diffuse not by default but by design.

From the perspective of Keats's principles, Gerard Manley Hopkins is in the mainstream of nineteenth-century verse and Swinburne is the eccentric. For Hopkins's attempt to etch in words the dappled individuality of things was as much a cultural as a personal preoccupation.

A lover of beauty in all of its forms, but especially of the male figure, Walter Pater suffered the misfortune of being incarnate in an ungainly body surmounted by a large, unlovely head. His contemporaries were invariably struck by the disparity between Pater's unprepossessing person and his finely wrought prose, in which he celebrates a beauty which no mirror could ever return. Pater ends the most artful of his Imaginary Portraits – of Watteau, the ‘Prince of Court Painters’ – with a sentence that might serve as his own epitaph: ‘He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’

Such a temperament is intrinsically elegiac, fixated on the fleeting – the heady scent of roses the moment before they fade or on the handsome faces of the freshly dead. These ‘still lifes’ are artfully planted throughout Pater's writings, perhaps most memorably at the end of Emerald Uthwart, the most self-illuminating of his imaginary portraits. Two schoolboy companions, their friendship patterned on the ‘Greek’ model, enlist in the army, serve heroically, but are court-martialed for an unspecified crime. The elder is shot before a firing squad, the younger discharged in disgrace. Emerald returns to his birthplace, where he dies of an old gunshot wound and is buried amidst a riot of richly scented roses.