Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Despite the fact that Grozny and the other cities were occupied, and despite their heavy losses, the Chechens went on fighting. The war in Chechnya became more and more unpopular in Russia. Instead of promoting Yeltsin’s reelection, the war began to endanger it. On February 9, 1996, four months before the presidential election would be held, the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post wrote: “President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged today that he cannot be reelected if Russia’s 14-month-old war against the separatist movement in Chechnya continues . . . . Many Russians have recognized that the war is an enormous liability for Yeltsin.”^[29] On March 31, 1996, in a nationwide televised speech, Yeltsin presented a peace plan, consisting of an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of some Russian troops, and mediation with Dudayev. The peace plan received at that time much positive publicity on Berezovsky’s pro-Yeltsin TV channel ORT, which may have salvaged Yeltsin’s reelection. But in reality the fighting still went on, and, in August 1996, the Chechens even succeeded in recapturing Grozny. Finally, on August 31, 1996, Yeltsin’s envoy, General Aleksandr Lebed, signed a ceasefire with the Chechen commander, Aslan Mashkadov, in the Daghestani town of Khasavyurt. The Russians promised to withdraw their troops from Chechnya by the end of 1996 and to postpone a final decision on Chechnya’s status until December 31, 2001.

A Genocide?

Thomas de Waal, an analyst who visited Grozny after the war, described the city in the following words:

The destruction wrought on Grozny makes even the damage to a battle-scarred town like Sarajevo seem light. Wandering through the streets after its ruination during the first Chechen war in 1994–1996, it was hard to conceive how conventional weaponry had done so much harm. The centre of the city was reduced to rubble, with many of the inhabitants of these streets lying in mass graves. Ruins had been swept into tottering piles. Streets had become empty thoroughfares that ran between large areas of sky. If an occasional building had escaped the bombing, it was only a large windowless façade facing nowhere. It would have seemed more plausible to be told that the place had suffered a nuclear attack or some giant natural catastrophe.^[30]

Why this virulent, brutal overreaction by the Kremlin against a small mountain people? In a seminar organized by the Russian human rights organization Memorial that took place in Moscow in March 1995, shortly after the bombardment campaign on Grozny had started, one of the speakers, Nikolay Kandyba, already spoke of a genocide.^[31] Another speaker, Mara Polyakova, attacked the criminal character of the war. She criticized the formulation of the presidential decree in which President Yeltsin had announced that the war would be conducted “with all the means that the government has at its disposal.”

A President who acts according to the laws and the Constitution, should say: “with all lawful and constitutional means. . . .^[32] He knows very well that not only are such means being used that are allowed by the law and the Constitution, but also those that are not allowed by them. The possibility of the use of such means against the population of one‘s own country is not allowed by any legal norms. Thereby, instead of repressing these acts, the President through [his declarations in] the mass media condones them and takes the responsibility for everything that happens there.^[33]