Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism

Of course there is the famous question of intent that, according to international conventions, must be proven in order that an act can qualify as genocide. Did the Russian government intentionally kill such a great proportion of the Chechen population? This cannot be proven as long as there are no records (texts of the orders given by the political leadership to the military commanders, minutes of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, etcetera) that provide undisputable proof. But is such a proof necessary? Daniel Goldhagen denies this requirement. According to him, “intent should not be a criterion for determining what instances qualify as genocide.” And he added: “If a large number of people, except through defensible military operations, are eliminated in any manner, why should this not be part of a study of genocide, which rightly becomes a study of mass murder, which rightly becomes a study of mass elimination?”[61]

It is quite clear that in Chechnya such a large number of people could not have been eliminated “through defensible military operations.” If one estimates the total number of Chechen fighters in both wars at around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand, this means that for each killed Chechen fighter the Russians killed nine to ten Chechen civilians. This indiscriminate mass killing of civilians cannot, under any circumstance, be qualified as collateral damage. The human rights activist Sergey Kovalyov wrote in February 2000, during the bombing campaign of Grozny:

The Russian army is quite prepared for genocide. This was demonstrated in the previous war; it was proven again recently by events in the village of Alkhan-Yurt, where professional soldiers shot around forty unarmed inhabitants—for no reason. It has already been confirmed by official announcements that vacuum bombs are being employed in Chechnya—terrible weapons that kill every living thing over a wide area, including people in shelters. What is new this time around is that Russian society as a whole is prepared to carry out genocide. Cruelty and violence are no longer rejected.[62]

Goldhagen is quite clear on the Chechen case. “States and their leaders often give tacit support, remain silent, or make quiet pro forma objections when allies or other important countries commit mass murders or eliminations. Aside from a few tepid and oblique objections, this has characterized virtually every state’s stance toward the Russians’ mass murdering and vast destruction in Chechnya.”[63] The likelihood of members of the Russian government being pursued for war crimes and crimes against humanity is not great. The juridical instruments, however, are in place. On the table is an important verdict of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Akhmadov and others v. Russia. This concerns an attack on October 27, 2001, by Russian soldiers, firing from helicopters on people, harvesting in the fields near the village of Komsomolskoye. The court decided that the attack violated article 2 of the Convention (right to life). In the explication of the verdict the court spoke of an “armed conflict” in Chechnya. This was the first time the court used the expression “armed conflict.” In all former verdicts the court had spoken about the “repression of an armed rebellion.” Amnesty International has stressed the importance of this verdict: “to agree that in Chechnya exists an armed conflict is of great importance for the international legal and penal qualification of human rights violations. The existence of an armed conflict is the necessary condition for the application of norms concerning war crimes that, let us remember, are imprescriptible.”[64] Another hopeful initiative was the adoption of a resolution on April 2, 2003, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) asking for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes committed in Chechnya. Unfortunately, this initiative remained without follow-up.[65]

It is disappointing that—apart from condemnations by the European Court of Human Rights—the alleged war crimes committed by Russia in Chechnya have met with so little protest from the international community, especially from nearby Europe. This lack of interest can certainly be explained. Not only was the war considered an internal affair of the Russian Federation, but the West also believed (or wanted to believe) the Russian propaganda that the war in Chechnya was a part of “the global war on Islamist terrorism.” The West’s failure to react—and especially Europe’s failure to react in the framework of the Council of Europe—was a disgrace. The war crimes committed in Chechnya—repulsive and criminal as they were in themselves—were also a warning for the West about Russia’s eventual future behavior. Michael Ignatieff wrote: “Even when a state’s domestic behavior is not a clear and present danger to the international system, it is a reliable predictor that it is likely to be so in the future. Consider the example of Hitler’s regime, 1933–38, or Stalin’s in the same period. In hindsight, there seems no doubt that Western governments’ failure to sanction or even condemn their domestic policies encouraged both dictators to believe that their international adventures would go unpunished and unresisted.”[66]

Chapter 13 The War with Georgia, Part I A Premeditated Russian Aggression

After the War in Georgia, Vaclav Havel and other prominent personalities, wrote an op-ed in which they argued that “a great power always finds pretexts to invade a neighbor whose independence it does not accept. Let us remember: Hitler accused the Poles of being the first to have opened fire in 1939 and Stalin held the Finns responsible for the war he started against them in 1940. The fundamental question is to know which is the occupied country and which is the occupying country, who has invaded whom, rather than who has fired the first bullet.”[1] We should keep these words in mind when analyzing the events which took place in Georgia in August 2008.

61

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 29. A similar argument is made by Susan Neiman who, rightly, emphasized that not intentions, but the results are decisive. “What counts,” she wrote, “is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell. Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned.” (Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 275.)

62

Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”

63

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 250–251.

64

Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” 119.

65

Cf. Miriam Kosmehl, “Tschetschenien und das internationale Recht,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Rußland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel, 121–122.

66

Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–42.

1

Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik, and Josep Ramoneda, “Le test géorgien, un nouveau Munich?” Le Monde (September 23, 2009). The real question was, indeed, who invaded and not who fired the first bullet. As John Lukacs wrote, it is an old ruse used by politicians, “who wanted war (and attempted to tempt their opponents ‘to maneuver [them] into firing the first shot.’” (John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 211.)