From the Introduction

The purpose of this book is to set out the case for Chechen independence. Many works have examined the historical background and events immediately preceding Russia’s two onslaughts on Chechnya since 1994, in which more than 70,000 people have been killed and several times that number displaced from their homes. Journalists and activists have provided vital testimony to the devastating effects of these wars; Anna Politkovskaya, brutally murdered on 7 October 2006, was one of the bravest. The present volume owes a great debt to the courage of such individuals, as well as drawing extensively on the scholarship of others. However, the fundamental issue at stake has generally been absent from public view, especially in the West: whether or not the Chechens have the right to a state of their own.

The question can, I believe, only gain in urgency the longer the killing is allowed to continue. By the time these words are printed, the Russian occupation of Chechnya will have entered its eighth year, with atrocities still being committed against the civilian population by Russian troops and their Chechen proxies with appalling regularity. Western governments and commentators have repeatedly endorsed the view of successive Russian administrations that war has been waged in Chechnya to prevent the disintegration of Russia, to restore the rule of law in a criminal enclave, and to counter the threat of Islamist terrorism. These justifications have little basis, and only serve to obscure the true substance of the conflict, which remains at root a struggle for national self-determination.

The Chechens’ demands are modest – full sovereignty, retaining economic and other ties with Russia. Yet the Russian response has been staggeringly disproportionate: two full-scale invasions, resulting in the deaths of perhaps 10 per cent of the population. The indiscriminate violence unleashed on Chechnya only adds weight to their case for independence, for which, as the following chapters aim to demonstrate, there are incontrovertible historical, moral and legal grounds. These have been almost unanimously dismissed in Russia and the world at large on pretexts that are weak in fact, and shameful in principle. Against the craven consensus that has permitted the crushing of the Chechens’ legitimate aspirations to statehood, this book holds that any just and lasting resolution of the war must proceed from a recognition of their legitimacy.

* * * * *

The best means of ending the war lies in Russia recognizing the Chechens’ right to govern themselves. It is a straightforward enough demand, and one that has been accorded to hundreds of peoples across the world. Many of them are smaller, in terms of population, than the Chechens: of the UN’s 192 member-states, 41 – more than a fifth – have under one million inhabitants; moreover, 37 states have been admitted to the UN since 1990, giving the lie to any idea than Chechen independence would overstretch the international state-system.

Why, then, have the Chechens been ruled ineligible for statehood? There are three principal claims. Firstly, an appeal to realpolitik, according to which Chechen aspirations for independence must be ruled out of court, merely because Moscow would not accept such an outcome. On these grounds, of course, most of the nearly 200 states the world presently contains would not exist: following the same logic, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman and indeed Russian empires would have been left intact. The argument that Russia should not be antagonized is also groundless: the Western powers have eagerly expanded NATO right up to its frontiers without concern for such niceties. The oft-cited risks to Europe’s energy supplies, meanwhile, should be assessed more soberly: Russia needs markets for its abundant natural resources as much as Europe needs to purchase them.

The second basis for dismissing Chechnya’s right to existence is that the country had its chance at independence between 1996 and 1999, and performed so woefully that its sovereignty could justifiably be revoked. Such reasoning is an outgrowth of a worldwide trend among liberals in the 1990s to see national frontiers as little more than a shield enabling rogue regimes to commit crimes against humanity; the same notion has served to legitimate military intervention by Western powers, from the Balkans to Iraq, purporting to punish those responsible – though the enormous civilian toll of such ‘humanitarian’ adventures makes clear the low priority actually accorded to human life. What holds for these places is even more true of Chechnya: the idea that a country already reduced to rubble deserved further pulverization is simply untenable. Whatever the misdeeds and failings of its rulers, the scourge of war was never an appropriate means for redressing them. The existence of a slave trade in Chechnya has also been listed among the subsidiary factors giving cause for an intervention; it is worth noting, however, that the same experts have not cast a concerned eye at Thailand’s child prostitutes, for instance, and called for Bangkok to be razed to the ground. Moreover, how many states routinely fail to provide security and livelihood for their citizens, and yet their leaders – many of them not even elected, unlike those of independent Chechnya – are regularly welcomed in the White House, Kremlin or Downing Street?

Thirdly, it has been argued that the war has now mutated into a struggle between a corrupt army, armed criminal gangs and Islamist extremist factions, and that the ideal of independence has simply evaporated from this stinking morass. On this view, the question of sovereignty is irrelevant to the populace’s more basic need for security and stability, which should be established by any available means. This rests on a number of false premises. The war has indeed created an atmosphere of arbitrary cruelty and impunity in which corruption and crime thrive, and as the situation in Chechnya grows more desperate, the rhetoric of millenarian religious sects seems more closely to reflect the shattered reality. But if material gain and scriptural dogma were all that was at stake, the fighting would long ago have ceased. Its continuation is due to a substantial pool of popular support for those fighting the invaders, and to widespread rejection of the authorities put in place at gunpoint by their armies. The pro-Moscow regime is utterly devoid of legitimacy, which is not, as one observer has said, ‘a political luxury that most Chechens know they cannot afford’. On the contrary, it is the only possible foundation for a government with effective authority over its territory, and hence for a secure and stable future. Such a government, in turn, can only be produced by giving the Chechens the right freely to choose whether they wish to remain under Russian rule, or whether – as they have insisted on the only occasions when they have been asked – they want the state of their own to which they are legally and morally entitled.

There are, of course, grounds for concern at what would happen in Chechnya following a Russian withdrawal. In a country rife with weapons and unslaked vengeance, a generalized settling of accounts could take an immense toll. But this is no reason for allowing the present slaughter and repression to continue. It should rather prompt urgent discussion of how best to demilitarize the republic, and what kind of judicial processes will have sufficient popular legitimacy to pre-empt bloodshed. The extreme social fragmentation Chechnya has undergone since 1994, and the obstacles to economic revival in a context of deindustrialization, pose further vital problems that are not to be scanted. However, all of these matters depend on the establishment of a representative, democratically elected government. This is not possible while Chechnya is under military occupation, and while its population faces torture or death for speaking in favour of independence.

None of the counter-arguments listed above answers the basic question of principle: is Chechnya entitled to independence? The burden of this book is to demonstrate that the Chechens have as much right to a state as any other people, and that their moral case for sovereignty is an increasingly strong one. It is only as a sovereign state that Chechnya will be able to fulfil the wishes of its citizens, and it is as a sovereign state that it must negotiate relations with Russia and resolve its considerable internal problems. As an occupied nation, on the other hand, it will continue to suffer the brutality and impoverishment wrought by great-power domination – and to respond with the sole possession of a proud but dominated people: resistance.