Why Are Chechens So Angry at Russia?
... The breakaway Caucasian republic has been a festering sore for the Kremlin since it declared independence in 1991. Unless a political solution is found, which somehow satisfies the Chechens’ desperate desire not to be ruled by Russia and Russia’s equal determination to rule it, then more Beslans are inevitable – and more hijackings, and suicide bombs in Moscow, and exploding aeroplanes, and any number of other terrorist atrocities. Willing perpetrators of such crimes now grow in abundance in the brutalised villages of Chechnya.
In the spectacular craggy ravines of the River Argun, tumbling down from the Caucasus mountains, you can still see the ruins of Chechen fortresses, built in the early 1800s to oppose Russia’s first marauding invasion. The roots of today’s visceral hatred go back to those years. General Yermolov sent his Cossacks in to subdue a people regarded (then and now) by the Russians as bandits, cut-throats and infidels. A Chechen knife-man even features in a strangely spine-chilling Russian lullaby.
Yermolov explained his bloody campaign thus: “One execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction and thousands of Muslims from treason.” One suspects similar reasoning may be heard in the Kremlin today, as President Putin ploughs on with his hopeless attempt to end the Chechens’ rebellion and quash their desire for independence.
Chechens had to put up with a shameless reminder of Yermolov’s conquest right up until 1991, in the form of a statue of the general in their capital city, Grozny. Not just a statue, but an inscription quoting his words: “There is no people under the sun more vile and deceitful than this one.” Under the tsars and communists alike, an attempt was made to systematically wipe out this “vile” nation’s culture.
There was simply no meeting point between the two peoples. The Chechen language is a Caucasian one, with no link whatsoever to Russian. To a Russian’s ears it sounds barbaric. So does Chechen music. Their religion is Islam. And their traditions include “blood vengeance”, which obliges the relations of a murdered Chechen to go out and kill the murderer or one of his relations. It is a tradition totally out of place in the modern world, yet I’ve heard educated, sophisticated people – doctors and teachers – in Chechnya speak about it as something quite natural.
In part it explains the phenomenon of “black widows”, the women who’ve lost husbands and sons in the current Chechen war and are now willing to strap suicide belts to their waists and blow themselves up amid crowds of Russian bystanders.
But it is not ancient history that fuels the Chechens’ drive for independence. During the second world war, Stalin accused the entire nation of collaborating with the Nazis and deported every one of them to Kazakhstan. Chechnya was emptied of Chechens and resettled by Russians. One of Stalin’s generals reported that the deportation from one village high in the mountains had been too tricky, so instead he had herded the 700 villagers into a barn and burned them. He won a medal for that.
Only after President Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes in 1956 were the Chechens allowed to return to their homeland, filled with even greater hatred and lust for revenge.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union broke up, they grabbed their chance and declared independence. But unlike republics such as Georgia or Estonia, Chechnya was part of Russia itself, and Russia was determined to hold on to it – partly because of its strategic importance as an oil-bearing region, and partly out of fear that it would lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation.
At the end of 1994 President Boris Yeltsin sent the troops in to subjugate them again. Within a few months, Grozny was uninhabitable, bombed into oblivion, shades of Dresden and Coventry. Most of the population fled to neighbouring republics, or to mountain villages, which in turn were shelled and destroyed. Tens of thousands were killed, and thousands of Chechen men went through torture chambers known as “filtration camps”.
But by now the Chechens had become used to their freedom. They were rediscovering their Muslim religion, half- forgotten during the atheist Soviet years. It became a symbol of nationhood, and new mosques began to be built. A few years ago, they had never heard of al-Qaeda, but now it has become an inspiration to them.
The resistance movement had almost total support among ordinary Chechens. Even today, many may feel horrified by the blood-letting in Beslan, but they know that many more innocent Chechen children have been killed by Russian troops in the past 10 years. Many may regard the man believed to be the hostage-takers’ leader, Shamil Basayev, as a blood thirsty madman, but they also know about the pillaging and raping carried out by Russian troops in their own villages. They may disapprove of the barbaric violence perpetrated by Chechen warlords. But they do not disapprove of their goal, of restoring their nation’s independence.