Failed Chechen Utopia

The current chaotic situation in Chechnya, including last week's assassination attempt on the republic's president, Aslan Maskhadov, is not at all surprising.


Signs of these events could have been foreseen several years ago, when the republic, led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, rushed into the whirlwind struggle for independence that the republic perhaps never really needed, desperately resisting the brutal and simultaneously amateur operations of the Russian political-military establishment sent to Chechnya in 1994 to restore constitutional order.


But order was not restored. And the Chechen republic of Ichkeria completely immersed itself in independence. The essence of independence, the ultimate goal of achieving it, is in creating a national state. Doing this is harder than gaining ground in a partisan war against an army semi-paralyzed by politicians.


The Chechens do not know how to build a state. And this is completely logical: There is no way to acquire experience for such a laborious and thankless task. Unlike other former Soviet republics, this little bit of the Chechen-Ingushetia autonomous republic had neither proper structure, personnel nor much else. It has been easier for Uzbekistan and Moldova, but things are also not going smoothly for them. In Chechnya, however, there has been war, postwar destruction, absence of social security, a weak central authority and other problems too numerous to name. During the tenure of Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev at the head of the Chechen leadership, not one state-building problem has been solved.


First of all, nobody has recognized Chechnya as an independent state. Even the Moslem world, where, it turns out, separatists are not liked, did not call for its sovereignty, to say nothing of Western countries, where Maskhadov's visits have been perceived as private trips. As before, the key to acknowledgement of Chechnya is in the Kremlin.


Second, Grozny has not managed to achieve normal relations with Moscow, where people are getting used to viewing the "Chechen question" more as a provincial issue -- miners and taxes are much more disturbing. A decision on Chechnya's status has been postponed until the 2000 presidential elections, and afterward, any winner, at least among the current contenders, will certainly take a much harder stance. For example, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's version of recognizing Chechen sovereignty is to completely isolate it from Russia. Some people are laying hopes on the meeting between Maskhadov and Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko scheduled to take place this week. But it is hard to believe that this meeting will be epoch-making, that it will be a historical landmark in bilateral relations between Moscow and Grozny.


Third, there is no political stability within Chechnya. Maskhadov has not provided it. He cannot be considered an absolute leader, one of the basic conditions for building a new state. Clans, field commanders and religious groups are acting independently of the authorities, and no state of emergency will save the situation. There is nobody on the political horizon who can firmly tell them to stop.


Fourth, there is no elementary order in Chechnya. As before, it remains a pirate state, where everybody loiters with automatic rifles slung around their shoulders, where people are systematically robbed, where a class of drug barons is on the rise. Even the spirited Basayev could not deal with all this madness.


Order was not restored in Chechnya even after Shariah law was introduced, something in which many, I being one of them, put no small amount of hope. What sort of laws are in effect in Grozny and the surrounding areas today Allah himself does not know. However that may be, Islam, being an ideology of resistance -- the catchword of the battle against federal forces was jihad, or holy war -- has not become a consolidating peacetime factor.


Different interpretations of Islam have only strengthened Chechnya's internal opposition. The most recent proof of this was a clash in Chechnya's second largest city, Gudermes, between forces loyal to the Chechen government and Moslem radicals called Wahabbites. The potential leader of the Islamist radicals, Maskhadov's predecessor as head of Ichkeria, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, has returned to the scene.


Note that I didn't mention economic or social issues, which are proving difficult to decide in the current situation. "Ichkerian socialism" never existed and, it seems, will not be built in the near future.


Thus, Chechnya, having won the war against federal forces, has completely lost the battle for sovereignty.


Most likely, Maskhadov, Basayev and many other intelligent people in Grozny recognize this, that it is already too late to do anything. And this is the tragedy for Chechnya.


Then spasmodic searches for an external enemy begin -- Russian special forces, cosmopolitanism, Moscow television stations. The desire to spread the Moscow-Chechen conflict to the rest of the North Caucasus is also starting to manifest itself: unrest in Dagestan, talk of a "Caucasus Islamic Nation," the desire to participate in peacekeeping operations in Abkhazia.


The worse things get in Chechnya, the more persistent become the searches for an external enemy. Some blame foreign states for encouraging the growth of Wahabbism. But the roots of the Wahabbite movement are in Chechnya itself.


Because the foundation of the radicals' ideology is a natural disappointment in today's situation, disappointment in the idea of Chechen statehood, they strive to find a way out by embracing Islam. Of course, this is utopia, but this utopia is important and understandable to many local Moslems. Foreign mentors -- they do exist-- throw the seeds of radicalism onto fertile ground.


Things are difficult for the Chechens. In essence, they wound up alone with their difficulties. At times it seems that today in Grozny, not everyone is burning with the desire to pay such a high price for autonomy. And probably more people are starting to think: Was the game worth the candle?


Alexei Malashenko is a scholar-in-residence at the Moscow Carnegie Center. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.