Fighting the Russians for 300 Years

April 23rd, 2013

Peter Nolan

Time to Set the Chechen Free

by
Eric Margolis
by Eric Margolis
Recently
by Eric Margolis: Rent-A-Rambos

This column was first published in 2010.

There is
an old saying about the fierce Chechen tribes who inhabit southern
Russia’s Caucasus mountains: “Chechen cannot ever be defeated.
They can only be killed.”

Chechen are
Russia’s nemesis. Even the notoriously brutal Russian mafia fears
the ferocious Chechen, and for good reason.

Last year,
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proudly proclaimed that resistance
to Russian rule in the North Caucasus had been eliminated. The
region was pacified.

Confounding
Putin’s claim, Chechen suicide bombers hit Moscow’s subway last
week, killing 39 and injuring over 70. Chechen suicide bombers
in Dagestan killed twelve, mostly policemen. There were further
attacks in neighboring Dagestan. The North Caucasus was again
at a boil.

The attacks
seriously rattled Russians and left the Kremlin deeply embarrassed
and enraged.

Two “black
widows” wives or daughters of Chechen independence
fighters killed or raped by the Russians (Russians call them “Islamic
terrorists” and “bandits”) took their revenge
last week, as so often in recent years.

The latest
Chechen leader, Doku Umarov all his predecessors were liquidated
by Russia claimed from his hideout in the Caucasus mountains
that the subway attacks were reprisal for the recent killing of
Chechen civilians by Russian security forces.

He warned
Moscow, “we will make you feel what we feel.”

In recent
years, Chechen “black widows” have brought down two
civilian airliners. Other Chechen hijacked an entire Moscow theater,
and derailed the “Alexander Nevsky” Express that runs
from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Chechen are
a tiny but fierce North Caucasian mountain people of Indo-European
origin. They, and other Muslim Caucasian tribes, such as Dagestanis
and Cherkass (Circasians),
have battled Russian imperial rule for the past 300 years.

In 1877,
Imperial Russia killed 40% of the Chechen population of about
220,000. Four hundred thousand Cherkass were expelled.

Stalin, from
neighboring Georgia, hated Chechen. He divided Chechnya, creating
the republic of Ingushetia. Then, in July 1937, his secret police,
NKVD, shot 14,000 Chechen.

In 1944,
Stalin ordered the entire Chechen people rounded up and shipped
in cattle cars to his Siberian concentration camps or dumped to
perish into icy fields. Other Muslims followed: Ingush, Tatars,
Karachai, Balkars.

Neither bullets
nor gas chambers were needed in Stalin’s death camps. A third
of the prisoners died each year from cold, starvation or disease
in the concentration camps. In all, some 2.5 million Soviet Muslims
were murdered by Stalin, “the Breaker of Nations,” among
them half of the Chechen people.

In my new
book, American
Raj, I entitle the section on the Chechen, “Genocide
in the Caucasus.”

Gulag survivors
filtered back to Chechnya. When the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991, Chechen demanded independence like the Soviet republics.

Instead,
Boris Yeltsin’s government invaded Chechnya, killing some 100,000
Chechen civilians through massive carpet bombing and shelling.
Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev was assassinated, reportedly thanks
to telephone homing equipment supplied to Moscow by the US National
Security Agency. President Bill Clinton actually lauded Boris
Yeltsin as “Russia’s Abraham Lincoln.”

Incredibly,
Chechen fighters managed to defeat Russia’s army and won de facto
independence.

But in 1999,
apartment buildings in Russia were bombed, killing some 200 people,
and creating a national panic.

Chechen “terrorists”
were immediately blamed. But there was disturbing evidence that
government agents staged the bombing to justify invading Chechnya.

Moscow media
reported that a group of Federal Security Service (FSB
the successor to the KGB’s internal security service) agents were
caught red-handed planting explosives in an apartment building.
They claimed the explosives were merely bags of “sugar,”
part of a “test.”

An ex-FSB
agent, Alexander Litvinenko, joined other critics in accusing
the government of a false flag operation in staging the attacks
to justify a new war against the Chechen. In 2006, Litvinenko
was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London.

Litvinenko
also accused the Kremlin of being behind the murder of the crusading
Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She told me before her
death that she was marked for assassination by the government
because of her stinging exposés of Russia’s human rights
violations in Chechnya.

FSB chief
Vladimir Putin was catapulted into power by the anti-Chechen hysteria
caused by the mysterious bombings. Two years later, the eerily
similar 9/11 attacks would similarly turn George Bush from a non-entity
into a hero, and provide a pretext for the US to invade Afghanistan
and Iraq.

Powerful
Russian forces invaded and crushed the life out of Chechen resistance.
All moderate Chechen leaders were assassinated, the last in Qatar
in 2004, leaving mostly militant Islamists. A Moscow-installed
Chechen puppet regime imposed a rein of terror upon the population,
using torture, murder, mass reprisals, hostages and rape.

The world
ignored these violations but paid rapt attention to another crime,
the death of over 300 Russian child hostages in the still murky
school massacre at Beslan.

The outside
world totally ignored the death of another 100,000 Chechen after
Moscow successfully branded them, “Islamic terrorists.”
A quarter of the Chechen people, Muslims and Russians, died from
1991 until 2010, not counting Stalin’s mass murder. But Chechen
keep fighting on.

Moscow worries
insurrection is spreading across its soft Caucasus underbelly.
President Dimitri Medvedev made laudable efforts to humanize Russia’s
rule there. But after the subway atrocity, Putin and Medvedev
vow to “destroy” remaining resistance in Chechnya, Dagestan
and Ingushetia.

Moscow
should end this historical tragedy by granting Chechnya independence.
Doing so is of course risky: it could spark demands by other Caucasian
Muslims for independence, and enflame some of Russia’s 20 million-strong
Muslim minority though most still appear content to live
in the Russian Federation.

An independent
Chechnya could also open another door to growing US penetration
of the Caucasus and campaign to encircle Russia. The US and Russia
came frighteningly close to a head-on clash over Georgia. The
Cold War has not ended.

An independent
Chechnya would be unstable and violent. But that is better than
the savagery and atrocities that this terrible conflict continues
to generate.

Modern Russia
needs to set the Chechen free.

This originally
appeared on Huffington
Post and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Eric
Margolis [send him mail] is
contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada. He
is the author of War
at the Top of the World and the new book, American
Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between
the West and the Muslim World. See his
website.