Chechen war (Part II) (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

For too long now, the Chechen people have held that second-class status was often afforded South Africa’s black population. Indeed, in Moscow they are disparagingly referred to as “blacks” and the prejudice can be traced back over 150 years to the time when Tsarists conquered the area.

Stalin’s hate for them was such that he had the entire population deported to Central Asia in 1944, citing charges of Nazi collaboration—a venture that would wipe out some 60 percent of the Chechen population.

In recent years they have been blamed for every social ill facing Russia, from drug trafficking and kidnapping to black-marketeering. It was therefore not really surprising that the latest Moscow bomb attacks got blamed on Chechenya’s aspiring islamist secessionists—in spite of no evidence existing to suggest this—while providing the Russian rulers with another opportunity to send troops into the tiny republic.

Ostensibly, the present Chechen conflict was sparked by the seizing of border villages by islamic militants—the fundamentalist Wahhabi muslims, intent on creating an independent islamic republic made up of Daghestan and Chechenya. In the Chechen republic Wahhabi support has increased recently, chiefly because of high unemployment, despair at a corrupt local elite, frustration with the slow pace of market reforms and at the little effort Russia has made to rebuild the republic after the bungled Chechen war of 1994-6.

The Russian rulers, however, didn’t need much of an excuse to send troops into Chechenya at the end of September. They still feel the humiliation of Russia’s venture into Chechenya in the mid-90s, when 6,500 Russian troops lost their lives fighting Chechen guerrillas and the consequent pull-out sparked by public outcry at home. Moreover, here was a former superpower being whipped by a tiny band of poorly-trained fighters.

In the wake of that particular conflict, though still claiming Chechenya was breaching laws laid down in the Russian Federation constitution, Moscow was embarrassingly forced to accept the republic’s de-facto independence, but not formally.

More importantly, the Russian rulers are all too aware of Chechenya’s real significance. In spite of its size (7,350 square miles compared with the 8.64 million of the former Soviet Union) Chechenya is a veritable goldmine, and all the more important considering that previous successful secessionists—Georgia and Azerbaijan—took with them a wealth of mineral resources.

Chechenya, landlocked on three sides by Russia, includes fertile farmland that straddles the wheat fields of southern Russia. It has key transport assets—rail/road routes that link the Black and Caspian seas and trade routes to other trans-Caucasus republics. Most importantly, Chechenya controls vital oil pipelines that connect the Black and Caspian seas, as well as vital oilfields and refineries. We can add to this Chechenya’s chemical and engineering industries as well as its supply of building materials. All said, Chechenya equals roubles equals profits.

But one wonders why Russia, in recent weeks, has concentrated air strikes on oil terminals, bridges and dams. The strategy seems to be one of destroying Chechenya’s infrastructure and raw material supplies and to seal it off from the outside world. Sounds familiar? By all accounts Moscow has modelled the attack on the NATO strategy in Kosovo, hoping to bring Chechenya to its knees in as short a space of time as possible and with minimum loss of Russian life.

Nine years after the Chechen nationalists first informed Moscow of its secessionist ambitions, and with hundreds of thousands of Chechens now living the meagre life of the refugee in neighbouring republics, stability looks a long way off, and with President Aslan Maskhadov now enlisting the help of the region’s most prominent warlords—such as Shamil Basayev, a veteran commander of the first Chechen war that Maskhadov initially disowned—the conflict looks set to be long and protracted.

With so much mineral wealth at stake, wealth they are afforded no real share in, the Chechens should at least realise that whichever elite—Russian or Chechen, Russian Orthodox or Muslim—calls the shots, they will always come a poor second to the lure of the rouble and the profits that await the real victors. The 80-100,00 who lost their lives in the first Chechen war is a poignant reminder of this fact.

John Bissett

A Small Victorious War? (1998)

Book Review from the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chechnya: A Small Victorious War. By Carlotta Gall & Thomas de Waal. Pan 1997.

At most times it is possible for most people to find the capitalist system and its executive branch the state merely an annoyance, dangerous if crossed, a block to what really needs to be done but capable of being avoided or pacified, even of being used to advantage. But it is during crises and especially wars that the brutal and bloodthirsty nature of the state becomes transparent.

Carlotta Gall’s book is a particularly well written account of the background and circumstances behind the recent war in Chechnya and shows little of the slackness that many books by journalists have; clearly she has actually been to the place in question. The author shows what caused the war, its course and the all-too-familiar results, in a humane and non-partisan way.

In ordering the December 1994 invasion, Yeltsin was playing the nationalist card to counter Zhirinovsky. He felt certain of a quick easy victory in order to win the impending elections (one senior adviser is quoted as saying “It is not only a question of the integrity of Russia. We need a small victorious war to raise the president’s ratings”). He managed to gain public enthusiasm for the war by a most astounding misinformation campaign. The profit motive however, was not far beneath the surface—a Russian oil company demanded a stable Chechnya to run its oil pipelines through. On the other side Jokhar Dudayev, the Chechan leader, was unpopular due to economic decline and the state’s unstable political circumstances. Dudayev, the anti-Russian Chechan nationalist (who spoke Chechan badly and was married to a Russian), avoided any possibility of compromise, wanting to preserve his corrupt little fiefdom hoping that defiance would improve his standing.

The irony is that this was by no means a small victorious war. It was not small; one military figure said the number of tanks lost during the battle for Grozny (December 1994 to March 1995) was more than were lost in the Battle for Berlin in 1945. It was also by no means victorious: in August 1996 the Chechens occupied the ruins of the town in a swift overnight operation. The Russian government, fearful of starting another Afghanistan-type conflict, decided to call it a day and withdrew its troops.

The arrogant attitudes of the political leaders to the led are fully exposed in the book. Grachev, the Russian defence (!) minister, said during the height of the war “18 year old boys have been dying for Russia, they have been dying with smiles on their faces and we should raise a monument for them”. The ill-fed, ill-equipped conscript soldiers were less thrilled at the prospect; desertion was rife, insubordination answerable by firing squad. The unpredictable, possibly mad, Dudayev was as bad: as Grozny was in its final death throws he is said to have laughed and said “my mood is excellent”.

As to the result—of the one million population in this state less than the size of Wales over 250,000 have become refugees and 50,000 killed. Grozny, a town the size of Bristol or Edinburgh, was almost completely destroyed by house-to-house fighting and 27,000 of its population killed. As is customary the victorious Russian army ran wild after the fall of Grozny; looting, raping, atrocities, unprovoked massacres and murders of civilians were commonplace. Taught to kill and brutalised by the army life such occurrences always happen when discipline slackens after a “victory”. Perhaps the surprising thing is how amazed some people appear to be when this sort of thing happens.

The war in Chechnya as related in A Small Victorious War gives further proof, if any were needed, of the consequences of war in the modern world, but wars are inevitable while politicians are allowed to play with people’s lives and the desire for profit dictates their policy. In other words, they are an inevitable part of capitalist society.

Kaz.

Voice From The Back: Business ethics (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard  

Business ethics 1 

Hundreds of Western firms are courting Saddam Hussein’s regime in the hope of contracts if the embargo imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 is lifted soon. Scores of deals have been struck, aiming to take advantage of possible waivers of sanctions on certain goods . . . The courting of Baghdad, which has the second largest oil reserves in the world, surprises few experts. “Iraq is the big prize,” said Lowell Feld, of the US Department of Energy, who wrote a recent report on Iraq’s oil industry. “There are dozens of firms out there salivating, ready to move in as soon as the UN gives the go-ahead.” Observer, 26 December.

Business ethics 2 

A United Nations embargo on all diamond exports from Liberia, a high level commission of enquiry into the links between organised crime and the Belgian diamond industry, and a new International Diamond Standards Commission under the UN are urged in a new report on the disintegrating society of Sierra Leone. The report, released in Canada and launched by a former foreign minister, Flora MacDonald yesterday, is critical of De Beers, the dominant player in the world’s diamond industry. It set a challenge to the UN to take decisive action on one of the motors of war across a swath of west and central Africa. The diamond trade, most of it illegal, plays a major part in the wars or shaky peace in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and Congo, but the actors reach far beyond west Africa. Guardian, 13 January.

For our safety 

The United States stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and five American territories during the cold war—including Morocco, Japan, Iceland, Puerto Rico and Cuba—according to an article based on a recently declassified document. The document, a secret study written by the Defense Department and titled “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977”, is described in the November/December issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. New York Times, 20 October.

Competition—great! 

The relentless factory-like drive to produce the perfect 40mph racing machine results in the mass slaughter of 20-30,000 greyhounds each year. These make way for the next 20-30,000 which are bred each year in the UK and Ireland. Only a small number of them make it to the betting tracks. The rest is “wastage”. Despite attempts by the industry to prevent the slaughter, some trainers and owners prefer the cheaper option of killing dogs to paying between £20-30 for them to be humanely put down by a vet. Unwanted greyhounds have been found starved, clubbed, electrocuted and injected with petrol. Some are flung from speeding cars, sold to vivisection labs or hung from trees. Corpses have been dragged up from the sea with rocks tied to their legs. Big Issue, 12-23 January.

Care in the community 

The government is to net a £4 million windfall after the West Midlands NHS Executive sold off a slice of the former Rubery Hill [mental] Hospital site for a new pub and lodge. Evening Mail, 13 January.

The rule of law 

“If there is indeed a ‘war on drugs’ it is not being won; drugs are demonstrably cheaper and more easily available than ever before. The same picture can be seen in the USA and elsewhere . . . If a significantly large, and apparently growing, part of the population chooses to ignore the law for whatever reason, then that law becomes unenforceable. A modern western democracy, based on policing by consent and the rule of law may find itself powerless to prevent illegal activity—in this case the importation and use of controlled drugs . . . The best example of this is cannabis—the UK has the highest rate of cannabis use in Europe, higher even than in the Netherlands which has a tolerance policy . . . If prohibition does not work, then either the consequences of this have to be accepted, or an alternative approach must be found. The most obvious alternative approach is the legalisation and subsequent regulation of some or all drugs.” Richard Brundstrom, former Assistant Chief Constable, from a report published by Cleveland Police.

The causes of war are . . . 

Three days after raising its flag in Grozny’s last rebel stronghold, Russia is claiming the richest prize of the war: Chechnya’s potential as a conduit for the vast oil reserves of the Caspian basin . . . As one export put it yesterday: “Access to the Caspian has historically been the reason for Chechnya’s importance. Why else did Hitler try so hard to conquer it?” Times, 10 February.

It all depends . . . 

Death in Britain is not an equitable business. Nor is health. People in Springburn, Glasgow, suffer a rate of chronic illness of 155 per 1,000. In Wokingham, Berkshire, the rate is 36. There are 67.9 deaths per 10,000 live births in Springburn but only 53.2 in Wokingham. Our environment can kill, in other words. But not at the same rate. Observer, 13 February.

Rear View: Die young (2017)

The Rear View Column from the May 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Die young

‘Wealth and health are intrinsically linked in the United States, with rich Americans living between 10 to 15 years longer than their poor counterparts, a study has found. A series of five papers published in the medical journal The Lancet found that a widening income gap, structural racism and mass incarceration are fuelling growing health inequalities’ (newsweek.com, 7 April). Bernie Sanders’ diagnosis cannot, for once, be faulted: ‘the USA is one of the richest countries in the world, but that reality means very little for most people because so much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny sliver of Americans’. Tragically, his treatment plan, as outlined in Our Revolution, if followed, amounts to yet another spin on the reformist misery-go-round. Dr. Marx’s observation, published 150 years ago, that ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital’ remains valid. His cure is possibly best summarised as workers of the world unite!


Utopian capitalists

Dr. Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, asked recently ‘Is Ayn Rand still relevant 35 years on from her death?’ This resulted in some feedback, the most outrageous example being that ‘Ayn Rand will remain relevant till the end of time for the same reason as Newton, Michelangelo, Copernicus, or any other brilliant mind who discovered eternal principles.’ One blogsite, theobjectivestandard.com (5 April), is slightly less effusive: ‘It’s great to see such a prominent thinker at such a renowned think tank recognizing the nature and importance of Rand’s ideas. I suspect that if Adam Smith and Ayn Rand were alive to see it, they would greatly appreciate this development.’ Smith would likely be horrified by the Institute which bears his name, by Rand and by capitalism today. One of his admirers was none other than Marx. Smith held that ‘labour… is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities,’ noted ‘the masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen’ and, tellingly, ‘wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many’ (Wealth of Nations, 1776).


Philosophers have only interpreted the world

Noam Chomsky is listed as one of the ten most quoted writers of all time, but the description of him as the ‘most dangerous man in the US’ has surely been Trumped. Chomsky is more cognisant of capitalism than Sanders but shares his reformism, alas. During a recent interview titled ‘Chomsky: Why Trump Is Pushing the Doomsday Clock to the Brink of Midnight’ (alternet.org, 4 April), Noam stated ‘.. a couple of years ago, the secretary-general of NATO made a formal statement explaining that the purpose of NATO in the post-Cold War world is to control global energy systems, pipelines, and sea lanes. That means it’s a global system and of course he didn’t say it, it’s an intervention force under US command, as we’ve seen in case after case.’ Whether he means Anders Fogh Rasmussen or the incumbent Jens Stoltenberg does not really matter – this is surely the first time that socialists are in agreement with Chomsky and a head of NATO.


Waiting for the last Chechen?

‘I haven’t had a single request on this issue, but if I did, I wouldn’t even consider it, Kheda Saratova, a Chechen activist who is on Kadyrov’s human rights [sic] council, told a Russian radio station. In our Chechen society, any person who respects our traditions and culture will hunt down this kind of person without any help from authorities, and do everything to make sure that this kind of person does not exist in our society’ (theguardian.com, 4 April). Examples of such primitive prejudice – in this case towards homosexual men – and practices abound. Will the lack of social progress delay the establishment of socialism? No. Developments in communications technology allow for the near instantaneous dissemination of ideas everywhere, as well as the circumvention of state censorship. Further, globalisation leads to the increasing uniformity of conditions and experiences and convergence in thinking. Socialists can use such factors in targeting our arguments.

World View: Hot War in the Caucasus (1995)

From the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

If anything, the end of the Cold War has given even the least enlightened of us a geography lesson. Most of us are now all too familiar with names like Basra and Bosnia, Zagreb and Sarajevo and Mogadishu and Macedonia, and we can locate them on a map without too much difficulty. Grozny and Chechnya are the latest example of hitherto unheard of names that have suddenly rocketed themselves into the world news. But why the tiny Caucasus republic of Chechnya?

Yeltsin and his generals would have us that Chechnya is breaking laws laid down in the Russian Federation constitution by declaring itself a sovereign republic. Therefore, they must be returned to the fold at any cost.

One wonders at the importance tiny Chechnya holds for Yeltsin, considering its size. The old Soviet Union covered a total area of 8,647,172 square miles. Chechnya covers an area of 7,350 square miles (smaller in fact than Wales - 8,018 square miles). Surely Chechnya can't be that important - or can it?

To Yeltsin, the free-marketeer, Chechnya means vital roubles to a crippled Russian economy. Chechnya is basically essential to Russia's economic interests - all the more important since Georgia and Azerbaijan, both rich in natural resources, seceded successfully from the Soviet Union.

Oil Pipeline

The tiny republic of Chechnya, land locked on three sides by Russia, includes fertile farmland that straddles the wheat fields of southern Russia. The republic is also an important rail/road trade route to other trans-Caucasus republics. But most importantly, Chechnya controls the oil pipeline that connects the Black and Caspian Seas. Chechnya also claims several oilfields and a refinery and is further invaluable for the supply of chemicals, building materials and engineering.

So, like all wars in the modern world, the Chechen conflict has profit motive at its root, in particular who controls the Chechnya's mineral wealth and strategic pipeline.

The Chechen separatists feel they have every reason to claim independence. The area was initially forcibly incorporated into Russia by Tsarist expansionists some 150 years ago, since which time they have suffered the status of t the second class citizen, their Islamic faith making them subhuman to racist Russians and having to endure travel restrictions all too reminiscent of South Africa.

Stalin hated them so much that he had the entire population deported to central Asia in 1944 on trumped-up charges of Nazi collaboration -  a venture that wiped out 60 percent of the Chechen population.

Yeltsin has since blamed Chechens for every social evil facing Russia, from drug-trafficking and black-marketeering to the current trend for hijackings.

Chechnya sparked the current conflict in September 1991. When General Dzhokha Dudayev assumed power and declared Chechnya an independent republic. This was flatly denounced by Russia on November 1 1991.

Russian hostility to Chechnya's claims to sovereignty led some Chechen extremists to carry out hijackings to force their message home. This provided Moscow with the pretext to finance and supply weapons to the anti-Dudayev forces led by the pro-Yeltsin Umar Authurkhanov, in an attempt to nip Chechen nationalism in the bud.

Confidence in support from Moscow inspired anti-Dudayev forces to launch an attack on Grozny on November 25 last year, with the help of Russian mercenaries - an assault that was quickly repelled. What only became clear later was that the FSK (the successor to the KGB) had in fact recruited the mercenaries to fight Dudayev. The present crisis is, therefore, grounded in the covert backing Russian security forces gave to internal Chechen opposition forces. For it was the humiliation of that defeat that prompted the Russian massing of troops on the Chechen border at the beginning of December.

Opposition to the war

Polls since carried out in Russia have found that 75 percent of respondents oppose the war. The Russian media has also condemned the invasion of Chechnya, including the normally pro-Yeltsin Izvestia newspaper. On December 23, MPs in the Duma voted overwhelmingly for a halt to the war and even the army has been reported as feeling compunction pangs.

The only support Yeltsin has had for his Chechen operation has come from the parliamentary faction "Russia's Choice", the right-wing lunatic Vladimir Zhirinovsky and other nondescript opportunists. To the majority of Russians, Yeltsin, "the champion of democracy", is in reality a Stalin in miniature.

Many Russians are bewildered at Yeltsin's overnight change of character. For this is the same Yeltsin who came to world attention lambasting Gorbachev's attempt to stifle Lithuanian independence, begging army officers to disobey orders and calling on the UN to intervene.

Yeltsin, in three years, has learned quick that the rules of capitalism means that a country can only prosper if it is aggressive in defence of its economic interests. That's why the governments in the West have been so reluctant in coming forward with their criticism - because they have been doing the same thing as Yeltsin for 200 years.

John Bissett