Putin's Wars полностью

Interesting in this context are Elazar Barkan’s remarks on the important role apologies play in improving the relations between nations. Barkan wrote that “the new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination. The leaders of the policies of a new internationalism—Clinton, Blair, Chirac, and Schröder—all have previously apologized and repented for gross historical crimes in their own countries and for policies that ignored human rights. These actions did not wipe the slate clean, nor . . . were they a total novelty or unprecedented. Yet the dramatic shift produced a new scale: Moral issues came to dominate public attention and political issues and displayed the willingness of nations to embrace their own guilt. This national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations.” (Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii.) Although I would prefer to speak of “responsibility of nations” instead of “guilt of nations” (the latter term is too “psychological” and comes too close to collective guilt), I agree with Barkan when he writes that the “interaction between perpetrator and victim is a new form of political negotiation that enables the rewriting of memory and historical identity in ways that both can share” (viii).

41.

Quoted in Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 335. Yeltsin added: “But the guilt syndrome persists. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about Chechnya, even in Russia itself. But more often it’s the West trying to instill this feeling of guilt in us” (ibid.). Yeltsin, tellingly, referred to a guilt syndrome, qualifying guilt feelings as some kind of a psychological disorder. Yeltsin apparently rejected any guilt and considered attempts at putting the crimes committed against the Chechen population on the agenda a deliberate policy of the West to weaken Russia.

42.

Quoted in Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner 1969–2003 (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 203.

43.

Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier, 259.

Chapter 11

The Mysterious Apartment Bombings

Detonator of the Second Chechen War

The Second Chechen War was “Putin’s War.” This fact was immediately recognized by Sergey Kovalyov, who chose it as the title of an article for the New York Review of Books in February 2000.^[1] Putin’s war would surpass the First Chechen War in cruelty, lawlessness, cynicism, and murderous violence. It would, additionally, become the longest war that was fought in Europe after the Second World War. There were, however, five important differences with the First Chechen War.

Unlike the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen War consisted of two phases, the first of which was the detonator of the second. The first phase was a secret war against the Russian population; the second phase was an open war against the Chechen population. The first phase consisted of an incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in Russia proper and a series of apartment bombings in the Russian Federation of which Chechen militias were accused. However, soon allegations hinted at a possible implication of the FSB, the Russian secret service.

The war was given another ideological justification. The First Chechen War was still presented as a war against Chechen “separatists” or “bandits.” The Second Chechen War was presented as a war against “international Islamist terrorism.”

In the First Chechen War the Russian soldiers were almost exclusively conscripts. In the Second Chechen War, alongside conscripts, contract soldiers (kontraktniki) also were engaged. This could explain the increased ferocity of the violence against the civilian population.