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Chechen separatists have grievances that shouldn't be obscured by atrocities committed in their name.
As soon as I heard the news of the school siege in the Russian town of Beslan, my first instinct was to call or e-mail every Russian I knew. Many of the same Russian friends had e-mailed me right after 9/11, sending messages of condolence in an effort to show solidarity with Americans. In the Beslan tragedy, more than 1,000 parents and schoolchildren were taken hostage and more than 350 killed by terrorists calling for the Russians to leave Chechnya. This was also the kind of unspeakable crime against humanity that demands a show of international solidarity. But were these two terrorist outrages really the same? Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly thinks so. He denounced foreigners and some Russians who criticized him for his past failure to negotiate with Chechen separatists, with whom Russia has been waging a bitter war. "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks... . ?" he angrily asked some Western visitors. William Kristol, the editor of the neoconservative flagship the Weekly Standard, echoed this thinking. He urged top U.S. papers to stop "rehashing the dismal history of Russian-Chechen relations" or criticizing Putin's handling of the Beslan disaster. Instead, said Kristol, we must commit to winning the global war against terror. In other words, as President Bush would put it, you are either with us or against us in the fight against jihadis. "We are all Beslaners now," as Kristol put it. Forget talk of "root causes," or negotiations. Nuance is dead. In these Manichaean times, it is much simpler to lump all terrorist outrages into the global struggle of good versus evil. It is simpler to ignore where the killers came from, or whether there are nonmilitary as well as military means to fight back. But this approach is insufficient to stop the jihadis. All terrorists may be evil, but their causes are not all the same. There is indeed nothing to talk about with al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and his circle dream of driving Westerners out of the Middle East and turning the region into a caliphate out of the Middle Ages. In Beslan, there was something to talk about. Skilled negotiations might have rescued more of the children before the inevitable shoot-out. Ruslan Aushev, a former leader of the province of Ingushetia, where Beslan is located, went into the school and got 26 women and babies released. More to the point, there is something to talk about with Chechen separatists. The reason for negotiations exists wholly apart from the demands of the Beslan gang. Unless Putin finds a negotiated solution to Chechnya's future, Russia will face a permanent terrorist war in the north Caucasus region. If the Russian leader uses terror attacks as a reason not to talk, he plays right into the hands of the baby-killers. The hostage-takers reportedly talked of provoking a war throughout the Russian Caucasus. They wanted Putin to react with force; they want to turn Christian Ossetians against Caucasus Muslims. Their idea is to ignite a war of civilizations, to destroy any moderates who seek to find a compromise between Russians and Chechens. Aushev is a perfect case in point. A former general and war hero, he tried to promote talks between Russians and Chechens but was pushed out of office by the Kremlin. In 1995, I sat in his freezing cold office in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, and listened to his glum predictions of where Russia's fight with Chechnya would lead. On that same trip, I watched Russian heavy artillery pound civilian apartment buildings in the Chechen capital of Grozny for hours. One cannot ignore the suffering of ordinary Chechens at Russian hands. Indeed, Beslan shows us the two conflicting realities that must coexist in fighting terrorism. Suicide bombers can't be condoned, but their actions shouldn't obscure the causes they have hijacked, be they the conflicts in Chechnya or Sri Lanka or the West Bank. Unless those issues are addressed, local populations will become passive or active supporters of terrorism. Some jihadi groups, such as al-Qaeda, deserve no quarter. Shamil Besayev, the Chechen warlord who reportedly sent the terrorists to Beslan, must be hunted down. But this doesn't mean the Chechen cause can be ignored. In these times, it is tempting to sneer at nuance, to claim any tactic is justified in fighting terrorism. This is Putin's style, muzzling the Russian media and getting the editor of Izvestia fired because the paper criticized the handling of Beslan. The Russian leader has raised the specter of bin Laden against his critics, but that won't stop the killing. Putin wants the world to view Beslan in black and white, but Chechnya is shaded gray. |
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