War:
Commanders launch campaign for hearts and minds in Gudermes.November 21, 1999
Russia's New Chechnya Battle
War:
Commanders launch campaign for hearts and minds in Gudermes.
November 21, 1999
GUDERMES, Russia
For one thing, the sound of artillery fire thuds
steadily through the muddy streets of this former railway depot, once the
second-largest city in Chechnya. The few residents left say the booming from
Russian positions north and west of town is a constant reminder that their
"liberation" by Russian forces 10 days ago is no guarantee that peace
has come.
But while the rockets and bullets are confined for
now to the outskirts, another battle is being fought in town, street by street,
house by house. It's a fight the Russians have lost consistently, not just in
the eight years since Chechnya declared independence, but for centuries.
The battle, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam
War, is for the hearts and minds of the Chechen people. And at the moment, the
front line is Gudermes, which the Russians say they hope to turn into the new
capital of a new Chechnya.
"We don't want to repeat the mistakes we made
last time," explains Col. Yuri P. Em, commander of the Russian regiment
that has encircled Gudermes. "We don't want to destroy the villages. We
don't want to destroy the people. This time, there is dialogue, dialogue with
the residents and with the local authorities. The soldiers aren't storming the
towns and villages. We are talking to the people."
The people who are left, anyway. Residents
estimate that only 20% to 30% of the prewar population of 50,000 remains in
Gudermes. Those who are left seem to be those who either support the Russians or
had no means of escape.
The fact that they are preaching mostly to the
feeble or the converted doesn't appear to trouble the Russians. They boast
openly of the ease of their victory and warm welcome by the local population.
"The people chased the rebels out
themselves," the colonel says. "They wouldn't feed the fighters. They
are sick of war. When we arrived, there was no one left to fight."
Showcase Staged for Journalists
Em is part of a Russian propaganda effort to
convince locals--and a chopper load of foreign journalists flown in for the
occasion--that the second time around, Russia is doing things right in Chechnya.
"It took us just one day to encircle Gudermes,"
Em recalls, showing the foreigners around his picture-perfect camp on a hill
west of town. "The local population came out to greet us--older men,
everyone. They thanked us for coming into the city, asked us to turn on the gas,
the electricity."
So this weekend, that's what the Russians did.
With as much fanfare as they could muster on short notice in a war zone, they
turned on the gas. A couple of Kremlin officials flew in Saturday to do the
honors, relighting the newly refueled "eternal" flame at the town's
World War II monument.
"Today, we are in Gudermes, a city liberated
without a single shot being fired," said Nikolai Koshman, the
Russian-appointed administrator for Chechnya, who was accompanied by Anatoly B.
Chubais, the head of Russia's state power utility. "The most important task
we face now is to restore normal life to the citizens of the town and the
region."
It was supposed to be a triumphant moment, full of
symbolism and reconciliation between Russian and Chechen. But, as hundreds of
Gudermes residents looked on, in what the Russians can only hope was not a
portent, the relighted flame sputtered and died within about a minute.
"They are promising so much," said
37-year-old Isa Natsayev, catching the mood. "But so far, we see
little."
Natsayev is a former driver who wants more than
anything else to work and support his wife and two children. He supported
independence in 1991, he says, but now "it's more important that the planes
stop bombing."
He says he has stayed in Gudermes as a precaution
to protect his house from looting by Russian soldiers. He is unnerved by the
continued bombing to the north and west.
"I walk around with tablets in my pocket to
calm my heart," he says, retrieving a small bottle of orange pills from
inside his jacket. "The airplanes keep bombing. My heart isn't made of
iron."
Indeed, war weariness is palpable in Gudermes. But
for all the efforts the Russians think they are making, it remains to be seen
whether combat fatigue can be transformed into political support for Russian
rule.
The previous Chechen war, which lasted for 21
months from 1994 to 1996, was about preventing the republic from seceding. This
war, which was touched off largely by terrorist bombings that killed hundreds in
Moscow and other Russian cities, has, at least rhetorically, been transformed
into a war against little except "bandits and terrorists."
But in Gudermes, it's clear that the issue of
independence hasn't died and that, for the "liberated" Chechens,
relations with the Russians remain unresolved.
Larisa Bashayeva is a 29-year-old secretary whose
entire adult life has been spent at odds with Russia. She supported independence
in 1991 and voted for Chechnya's pro-independence president, Aslan Maskhadov, in
1996. But two cycles of war and three years of deprivation in Maskhadov's
"independent Chechnya" have sapped her zeal.
"Independence is probably impossible to
achieve, and simple people don't need it anyway," she says. "Eight
years ago, there was something to it--there was an idea, a vision. But what do
we have to show for it now?"
The only people left who want to fight, she says,
are "extremists." And she says the Russians are right when they claim
that the residents of Gudermes chased the rebels out.
In her neighborhood, "the fighters moved into
an abandoned house," she recounts. "And everybody, especially the
grandmothers, went to them every day and asked them to leave. And eventually,
the fighters listened to them and left."
But Bashayeva's disgust at war and dislike of the
rebels doesn't add up to support for the Russians. Her cousin was killed when
the Russians stormed Grozny, the Chechen capital, in 1995. A few months later,
she watched Russian aircraft bomb a truck as a family of six, including women
and children, was climbing aboard. The entire family perished.
'Worst of All Are the Helicopters'
As she is speaking, a new volley of rockets booms
from the north and she casts a glance in the direction of the guns.
"It's not the artillery that's so bad,"
Bashayeva says. "The planes are worse. But the worst of all are the
helicopters. You can look up and see the person inside, see his face as he fires
at you."
She says the Russians are making a lot of promises
at the moment, promises of public services, schools, jobs. Maybe some of those
promises will come true, maybe "normal" life will come back. But that
won't change her mind about the Russians.
"There's no way we can say the Russians are
good and thank you so much for coming," she says. "I don't feel like a
Russian citizen. And I won't feel that way in a year or two or even five."
If the Russian strategy for winning Chechen hearts
and minds seems at times obscure, so also does the Russian strategy for winning
the war.
Gudermes is a scant 15 miles east of the outskirts
of Grozny, which was bombed nearly to dust in the last war. Russian officials
have refused to say whether they plan to retake Grozny, the stronghold of
Maskhadov, whom even the Russians consider Chechnya's legitimately elected
leader.
But during the past few weeks, Russian forces have
been slowly encircling the capital, claiming Sunday to have surrounded it
"80%." Russian officials have said that by the time the war is over,
Grozny might be too badly damaged to rebuild and that it would make more sense
to move the capital to Gudermes.
At first, Col. Em says the firing, audible
throughout the town, is just target practice. But after a particularly large
volley of Grad rockets--an expensive and powerful weapon--he acknowledges that
they are probably, in fact, firing on rebel positions in villages between here
and Grozny.
The soldiers manning the rockets are more
forthright.
"We fire at them every night, in that
direction," says Alexei Churkin, a 19-year-old from the central Russian
city of Kirov, pointing in the general direction of Grozny. "For the most
part, we do all the firing. They don't really fire back."
Gudermes is only one of a string of cities the
Russians claim to have retaken "without firing a shot." But all that
means is that there is no street fighting when they roll into town. In Gudermes
and elsewhere, the Russians have spent weeks lobbing shells and rockets at rebel
positions first, and they don't enter the towns until the rebels have already
abandoned them.
As a result, the real question in this war is
whether and where the rebels will choose to take a stand.
In the last war and indeed throughout history,
Chechen fighters have been able to evade the Russians by seeking refuge in the
republic's southern mountains. It is not clear whether the Russians intend to
pursue them that far this time.
Gen. Alexander G. Mikhailov, who heads the
Russians' press information center, gives a hint.
Historically, he says, there are two kinds of
Chechens--the mountain Chechens and the valley Chechens. "The lowland
Chechens would farm and raise livestock, and the mountain tribes would just come
down and loot. That's the reason a line of fortress towns was built at the base
of the mountains." He implies the same strategy would work now.
But that would resolve only the military
situation, not the historical dilemma, not the political one. The residents of
Gudermes know full well that it is not altruism that has brought the Russians
back.
At 15, Adam Amlayev is part of a new generation in
Gudermes, on the cusp of fighting age, watching the Russians' return and
wondering what it means. He says he hopes the war is really over, but if not,
he's "ready to fight if I have to."
Fight for what? a visitor asks. "My
motherland," he replies. And what is your motherland? the visitor persists.
Chechnya? Russia?
Adam pauses. "If there is peace," he
says finally, "there will be no difference if it's Chechnya or
Russia."