http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/07/1094530608641.html
We will never overcome terrorism if we ignore the context of even the most horrendous terrorist acts, writes Gwynne Dyer.
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.
See Also:
Putin Rejects Public Inquiry, Cracks Down on Media
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2004-09/07/article04.shtml
“If that happened, it would not be very productive,” said Putin (AFP)
BESLAN, September 7 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The embattled Russian President Vladimir Putin continued his desperate attempts to link the war in breakaway Chechnya to what is known by the US administration as “war on terror”, ruling out a public inquiry into the school hostage tragedy and likening his troops atrocities in Chechnya to “the abuse scandal” of US soldiers in Iraq.
Putin rejected a public inquiry into the Beslan school hostage crisis, as his government still faces intense world fire over the way of handling the crisis which killed almost 500.
“If that happened, it would not be very productive,” Putin said in a late-night meeting Monday, September 6, with a group of foreign journalists and Russian experts.
If the Russian parliament wanted to set up its own inquiry, he would not object, but he warned that it could become “a political show”, he said at the meeting, attended by correspondents for the Guardian and the Independent newspapers.
He said he would hold an internal inquiry into the Beslan tragedy, but not a public one. “I want to establish the chronicle of events and find out who is responsible and might be punished.”
Human Rights Violations
While admitting Russian forces had committed human rights violations in Chechnya, Putin added “But, like the torture by US soldiers in the prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, these were not sanctioned from the top”.
“In war there are ugly processes which have their own logic,” he said.
But he said there was no connection between Russian policies in Chechnya and the events in Beslan.
Russia remained interested in a political solution in Chechnya, but he ruled out talks with Chechen separatists.
“We will continue our dialogue with civil society,” he said, according to The Independent.
“This will include holding parliamentary elections, trying to get as many people as possible involved, with as many views and policies as possible.”
He added that more Chechens would be recruited into the republic’s police force, and that Russian troops will in time be pulled back to barracks “just as the United States does in California and Texas”.
No Talks
The president claimed he sees the drive for Chechen independence as the spearhead of a strategy by Chechen Islamists, helped by foreign fundamentalists, to undermine the whole of southern Russia and even stir up trouble among Muslim communities in other parts of the country.
“There are Muslims along the Volga, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. Chechnya isn’t Iraq. It’s not far away. It’s a vital part of our territory. This is all about Russia’s territorial integrity,” he said.
Both the Guardian and the Independent, which published Putin’s nocturnal remarks Tuesday, September 7, quoted in full his scarcastic response to those who suggested he consider negotiations with Chechens.
“Why don’t you meet (Al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? Why don’t you do that?” he said.
Media Crackdown
The hard line approach by Putin was coupled with Russian authorities continuing a crackdown on journalists covering the siege crisis in North Ossetia, much to ire of press watchdogs.
The authorities have detained the Moscow bureau chief of the satellite TV channel Al-Arabiya on his way to Moscow from Beslan, where he was covering the hostage crisis.
Al-Arabiya was informed the journalist would be held for two days, but has not been told why he is being detained.
The arrest came amid fears of a crackdown on the media in Russia, following criticism of the government’s handling of the Beslan school siege.
The editor of Russia’s leading daily, Izvestia, was forced Monday to resign over the paper’s coverage of the hostage crisis.
In an interview with Radio Liberty, Raf Shakirov, credited with building the former government newspaper into one of the country’s most outspoken publications, said he had been forced by the newspaper’s owner to resign for what he called his “emotional” coverage of the siege.
Commenting on Shakirov’s dismissal, Viktor Loshak, the editor of the popular magazine Ogonyok, told the radio station: “This scares me because we are moving far away from the country that we had been trying to build for the past 10 years.”
Questions Remain
Meanwhile, Russia still faces lots of loose ends and bitter questions over the circumstances of the assault, which ended with about 500 of the hostages dead after massive explosions triggered by the unplanned raid.
French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin echoed international concerns about the handling of the siege, expressing solidarity with Russia but asking for “all the necessary information” about the crisis.
Among questions which remain unanswered was what did the hostage takers want? Did the authorities recoil from negotiating? Did security forces plan to storm the school? What is the death toll? Who are the hostage-takers?
Authorities, for example, Monday said there were 32 militants, 31 of whom had been killed and one detained. They earlier said that 10 “Arabs” were among the hostage-takers, although no evidence has been produced to back this up.
Officials later said militants included Chechens, Ingushs, one Ossetian and other Caucasians.
A former member of the elite forces said Monday that Russian special troops who launched the ill-fated assault on the Beslan hostage school were aware that a successful storming of the building was not feasible.
“All the specialists were agreed that for several reasons it was impossible to opt for an operation of force in the school,” Igor Senin, president of the veterans’ association for the crack Alpha anti-terrorist unit, told the Vremya Novostei newspaper.
“All the evidence showed that in the end the fighters would have demanded transport and would have tried to leave with a small number of the hostages. It’s at this moment that it would have been possible to launch an assault.”
Senin said that neither the positions of elite snipers nor the various stages of a possible intervention had been agreed. Meanwhile, a map of the school, which was in the hands of the crisis unit, had still not been given to the special forces.
Authorities in North Ossetia said late Monday that 18 of the estimated 1,000 people held hostage at a school in southern Russia are still unaccounted for, their families unable to find them either in morgues or hospitals three days after the tragedy.