Chronicle of a brutal but largely ignored war zone

BOOK OF THE DAY: Terror in Chechnya. by Emma Gilligan, Princeton University Press, 288 pp, £24.95

WITHOUT TROUBLING the world’s headline writers, more than 30 people were shot dead in the last month in the Russian Caucasus, a region of extreme beauty and danger between the shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian. They died in gun battles and ambushes that erupt every day in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, mainly Muslim republics that present Russia with what President Dmitry Medvedev has called its greatest domestic challenge.

Only last spring Russian officials were declaring an end to anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya, scene of two brutal wars since 1994. Full-scale war may be over in Chechnya, but it has spawned a regional insurgency with a strong Islamist element that is arguably a greater threat to Russian stability than Chechnya’s independence- minded fighters ever were.

Emma Gilligan’s book chronicles Moscow’s brutal response to the republic’s demand for freedom, an onslaught that has shattered Chechen society, fuelled armed resistance across the Caucasus and bred a new generation of violent extremists. She focuses on the second Chechen war, started by Boris Yeltsin in autumn 1999 and pursued by Vladimir Putin when he stepped up from the prime minister’s post to the Kremlin in 2000.

She looks at the indiscriminate bombing of Chechen towns and villages in 1999-2000, which killed up to 10,000 civilians and caused 250,000 to leave their homes for neighbouring Ingushetia, a desperately poor republic that had no way of coping with such an influx. Russia made refugees of its own citizens, did little to ease their misery and even bombed them as they fled.

Gilligan, a lecturer in Russian history and human rights at the University of Connecticut, also studies the phenomenon of the “zachistka”, which is now a byword for state terror in Chechnya. Ostensibly a security sweep and document check by police, army or paramilitaries, it often ends in the disappearance of its subjects into a nether-world of illegal detention, demands for ransom from relatives, false accusations, torture and even summary execution. The mass graves listed here by Gilligan are testimony to the horror of Russia’s dirty war in Chechnya.

The second part of the book examines the response to the Russian campaign: the rebel attacks on civilian targets, including the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow and the school in Beslan; the brave work of journalists like the late Anna Politkovskaya; and the failure of Europe, America, the UN and other international organisations to challenge Moscow over Chechnya.

Gilligan finds a rare glimmer of hope in the European Court of Human Rights, where many have won compensation from a Russian state that denies them recourse in its own law courts. One of the few officials to win praise in the book is Mary Robinson, for her efforts as the UN’s human rights chief.

Her thorough research is enlivened by testimony from Chechen victims of Russian troops and their local henchmen. She argues convincingly that Moscow’s failure to use proportional force against the rebels, its collective punishment of Chechens, the massive civilian casualties, disappearances and torture constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Her case that racism motivates Moscow’s treatment of the Chechens is less successful; Russia’s history shows that the brutality of its rulers makes little distinction for colour or creed.

Daniel McLaughlin covers central and eastern Europe for The Irish Times