PERSPECTIVES: You kill ours; we'll kill yours (09/26/04)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

You kill ours; we'll kill yours

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel, "The Brothers Karamazov," Ivan Karamazov challenges his pious brother Alyosha with a chilling proposition: imagine you have the power to create a fabric of human destiny that will make mankind happy, but first a single child must be tortured to death. Would you agree to be the architect of such a construct, he asks? Alyosha rejects such a diabolical bargain. Yet that, and more, is what the Chechen terrorists agreed to when they seized 1,200 hostages in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, withholding food and water from their captives for days before triggering the catastrophe that killed more than 300 people - half of them children.

There can be no response to that "operation" but disgust, revulsion and condemnation.

Yet, even a tragedy as horrific as that has a context: historical, political and indeed, a personal context - perhaps personal, above all. A teacher released by the terrorists a day before the massacre said that one of them justified his action because, "Russian soldiers are killing our children in Chechnya, so we are here to kill yours."

Can anything be more wrenching than the death of a child at the hands of an abductor? Little wonder that the Russian parents who lost their children to the Chechen terrorists at Beslan are vowing revenge. And President Vladimir Putin is tapping into those sentiments so he can stay the course on a decade-old policy - no, centuries-old policy - that spawned the atrocity in Beslan. Consider the terrorist's message: you killed our children, so we're going to kill yours. How loathsome.

The Chechens are a tiny nation: about a million people. Like Ukrainians, Chechens declared independence when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but unlike Ukraine, Chechnya was not a Soviet republic. Chechyna was part of the Russian Federation, so no other country offered to recognize its independence, least of all Russia itself. In 1994 President Boris Yeltsin launched a war to rein in the renegade province. It turned out to be a humiliating disaster. After two years, Russia pulled out its troops, leaving behind a demolished Chechnya governed by warlords and gangsters.

In October 1999 Mr. Putin renewed the conflict. And that's how it's been ever since, Russian troops attacking the Chechens with bombs, rockets, landmines, helicopter gunships, automatic weapons, knives and clubs. With 100,000 killed - many of them children - the population has literally been decimated. As the Chechen terrorist said, it's personal and he was going to make the Russian people take it just as personally: yours for ours.

Responsible people have long since come to the conclusion that the situation in Chechnya is intolerable. More than three years ago, for example, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted a resolution, co-sponsored by 16 countries from the European Union, strongly condemning Russia's use of disproportionate force and its human rights violations in Chechnya, including forced disappearances, torture and summary executions. President Putin, however, contemptuously dismisses criticism of his policy. His approach to the problem is to ban media coverage of the conflict, oust any outside observers and continue to apply the harshest of military measures.

Now, with wrenching hostage dramas, downing of passenger airliners, suicide bombings and gun battles, Russia is reaping what it sowed: an endless cycle of terror and response. Some 10,000 Russian soldiers are said to have died. At least that many families are grieving. For them, as well, the conflict is personal.

It's certainly personal for President Putin. Many political analysts strongly suspect the decision to renew the war in October 1999 was driven at least partly by his calculation that it would help him in the 2000 election. He campaigned as a tough leader and that's how he's governed.

The Chechen people were brought into the Russian Empire by force nearly 200 years ago. Their experience as citizens of Russia has been singularly unhappy, both under the tsars and the commissars. Besides imprisonments and official murders that were routine for long periods of time, the entire nation was expelled from its ancestral land in World War II and shipped in boxcars to Central Asia. Tens of thousands died in that "operation," including many children. You kill ours; we'll kill yours.

Like other peoples who declared their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chechens want to be left alone to determine their own destiny. Only Mr. Putin won't let them. With 21 republics in the Russian Federation, he fears Chechen independence could start a domino effect leading to the further dissolution of the once mighty Russian empire. Not wanting to go down in history as another Mikhail Gorbachev, President Putin, no less than the Chechen terrorists, is willing to accept the death of children as the price for the future as he would like it to be.

And so the madness continues: Russian military measures taken beyond the ken of outsiders, followed by some Chechen outrage deliberately designed to attract the very attention that President Putin seeks to avoid, each child's death reinforcing the resolve of their fathers and mothers to wreak bloody revenge. Who can blame them?

Pondering the horror of Beslan, one can only conclude that the Chechen rebels who perpetrated it have fundamentally discredited their cause. There is no justification for seizing children, their parents or their teachers in pursuit of Chechen happiness, however that's defined. Yet looking at it from the perspective of their history, who can argue that the Russians didn't bring this calamity on themselves? Indiscriminate bombing, rape, murder and deportation, all perpetrated under the cover of censorship and military checkpoints to preserve a 19th century construct, are just as fundamentally evil.

The situation in Chechnya cries for a different approach than the one that's been taken for the past 10 years. If that means going back a couple of centuries to the time when Russia first invaded that remote region and setting right the things that went wrong back then, then that's the place to go. It won't bring all the murdered children back to life, but just maybe it'll spare further such outrages in the future. Otherwise, the unhappy Russian Federation and the unfortunate Chechen Republic will continue to reap the whirlwind.

As it is, neither the sanguinary status quo that Russia pursues nor the murky vision of Chechen terrorists is worth the life of a single tortured child.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: fedynsky@stratos.net.

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