Daily Times

The Chechens have always been a stalwart people. They were one of the few groups to successfully withstand the invasive assault by the Mongol Empire during two centuries. A survivalist mentality that evolved within the 13th and 14th centuries allowed them to develop battle-tested mountain, forest and stream guerilla warfare tactics.

The later meddling of Ivan the Terrible within the region forged their capability to endure hardship. The Grand Prince of Moscow destroyed the great Muslim enclave of Kazan on the Volga and stationed his Cossack army at Tarki. The Ottoman and Safavid dynasties took their stab at the Caucasus region. Stalin did them one better. In 1944, he calmly twirled the corners of his mustache whilst deporting the entire population of Chechnya to Central Asia. One third of the Diaspora died before the remainder was allowed to return to their homeland in the late 1950s.

The second half of 1991 was a heady time for the Soviet satellites. En masse, they declared their sovereign status. Former Soviet Air Force General Dzhokhar Dudayev, the national leader and symbol of Chechen resistance, cast his gaze toward a crumbling world power in 1993. He essentially said, “I dare ya!” He declared full independence from the Russian sphere of influence. Boris Yeltsin rose to the challenge for reasons more related to the economy than any real patriotic fervour for his former serf. Chechnya is located along the north slope of the Caucasus and boasts vital transit corridors to the Caspian and Black Sea. The value of the real estate increases substantially when considering that a vast network of Russian gas and oil pipelines surge their products through Chechnya into neighbouring Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. If the Chechens had been mere millet farmers, we might not be having this discussion today.

In December of 1994, Yeltsin’s administration gave the nod for a military solution, which led to a bombing campaign. The Chechen centre of power, Grozny, suffered immeasurable and irreversible structural damage. Perhaps some of the most compelling images were posted by the Dallas Morning News on January 2, 1995. One image shows a Chechen couple picking their way through a street littered with the debris and bodies of their countrymen lying beneath the open sky. Blood testifies. A second image shows an elderly man cradling his Kalashnikov and taking cover behind a Russian tank. A grandfather took up his weapon and marched toward the battle. Ferocious courage. The same possibly cannot be said for the average Russian conscript.

The bombing and siege of Grozny was followed by a prolonged period of guerilla warfare with no defining Russian victory. The Russian intelligence sector followed through with steady tracking of the Chechen leadership. Their security apparatus moved forward with a nod from President Clinton and Prime Minister John Major. The needs of an international sky sill sets the table differently than the dictates of regional aspirations. ‘Peace’ sets the international table with implements of war on any given day.

In 1996, a carefully baited trap was set with a bit of western connivance. Men from a ‘Christian organisation’ — a handy humanitarian front — moved carefully within a pro-Chechen network to deliver satellite telecommunications to the embattled Dzhokhar Dudayev. When the rebel leader fired up his new toy in a remote field, he was unaware that a homing device had been placed in the telephone. The signal was tracked, an air-to-surface missile dispatched, and the rest is history. The man who was the first Chechen general in Soviet history, a man who had previously stood by Yeltsin’s side, moved into the pages of history. From cellular respiration to a molecular product peering out from a book is a very short sprint. We are finite.

One rebel leader dead. As a numerical value, this is inconsequential. But it must be noted the Russian campaign against Chechnya boasts a humanitarian toll of up to 300,000 civilian deaths between 1994-1999. The conflict has also created a refugee population of 300,000 in a nation with under one million inhabitants. Line up three family members. Choose one. Line up three more family members. Choose one. See how this works? Battlefield military solutions always leave a debris field of innocent human flesh. The conflict is now contained as one of low-intensity sparks, kind of like the awareness of lightning bugs in the dark. But the general population continues to suffer the secondary consequences of dashed dreams carried along on the wobbly legs of nationalism and the cry for freedom. They continue to suffer in a manner that causes me to rework a bit of Biblical text: “The wages of sin is death.” But the wages extracted for war are a slow humanitarian death. Neither is desirable.

The revolutionary class rides the rails of justice and freedom. The words belong on banners. Maslow’s hierarchy belongs on the ground. Oppression thrives within political environments when the more granular concepts that reach out to meet basic population needs are not addressed in aggressive manner. We live in an entropic universe. Our unique planet inhabited by sentient beings understands the concept of entropy — the natural movement from order to disorder — in natural and political systems. We cannot control the sentinel reminders of entropy such as Hurricane Sandy. But we can seek political solutions, which promote societal homeostasis. We are free as a species. We may pursue policy objectives that stabilise volatile societal rims. We can place distance between entropic military solutions of last resort and holistic models of governance, which meet the needs of both the citizen and the state. With a lack of political will, a congenital cycloplegic military model will prevail.

While political systems can sport anomaly, they also exhibit signs of evolution. So it is that the Chechen now play the mongoose to the snake. They have developed an evolutionary acetylcholinergic response that serves them well. They play their part due to an unabated political entropy within the region.

The writer is a freelance journalist and author of the novel Arsenal. She can be reached at tammyswof@msn.com