The difference between Chechnya and Kosovo

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Nezavisimaya Gazeta' of Moscow is normally a good newspaper, but last week it carried a picture of a city in ruins, with the caption: This is not Grozny, but Pristina after the NATO bombardment. It expressed the almost universal feeling in Russia that foreign protests about Moscow's military offensive in Chechnya are mere hypocrisy after the Western alliance's air attacks on Serbia and Kosovo earlier this year.

The picture lied, of course: Pristina got knocked around a bit in the Kosovo war, but the damage did not remotely compare with the Stalingrad-style ruins of central Grozny after the first Russian attack on the city in 1995, let alone the wholesale destruction of the entire city that is now being wrought by daily torrents of rockets, bombs and shells. The Russian government has plainly said that its aim is to erase Grozny (which had 300,000 people in 1995), and start again elsewhere with a new capital for Chechnya.

From there it was a short step to the chilling decree issued recently by the Russian High Command that all those who did not leave the city by last Saturday would be killed: "Those who remain will be treated as terrorists and bandits. They will be destroyed by artillery and aviation. There will be no more talk. All those who do not leave the city will be destroyed."

Never mind that it's a 15-mile (25-km) walk under Russian air and artillery attacks from central Grozny to the designated checkpoint at Pervomaiskoye. Never mind that the city still contains tens of thousands of innocent civilians too old, too ill or too poor to leave, or that around a third of these civilians are actually Russians, not Chechens.

Never mind, either, that there is a yawning gulf between NATO's precision-guided weapons and its largely successful efforts to minimize civilian casualties in Kosovo on the one hand, and Russia's free-fall bombs, unguided missiles and indiscriminate targeting in Chechnya on the other.

Never mind even that the campaign is being waged mainly for domestic political reasons. The patriotic fervor it has unleashed in Russia is meant to boost the pro-Kremlin Unity party (founded only two months ago, but already second in the opinion polls) in the Russian parliamentary elections on Dec. 19, and even more importantly to ensure that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin succeeds President Boris Yeltsin in the June presidential elections.

That is necessary because otherwise Yeltsin's political family would then become vulnerable to legal investigations into its ill-gotten wealth. And it may well be that Putin, if not the generals, realizes that the campaign will inevitably bog down in an unwinnable guerrilla war in the long run. He may not care, provided that it still looks like a military success until June.

But this is all just tactics. Is there is any moral equivalence between what the Russians are doing in Chechnya and what NATO did in Kosovo?

Those in the West who opposed the Kosovo campaign now gleefully insist that there is. So do the Russians, rejecting the mounting Western criticism of the war as cynical meddling in Russia's internal affairs. They fail to realize that in this comparison, they are not playing NATO's role; they are the Serbs.

In both cases a small Muslim subject people, conquered by a much bigger Slav Christian nation generations ago and treated so brutally over the years that they now desperately want to break away, has been savagely punished for its ambition. Both the Chechens and the Kosovars have been the victims of state-directed massacres and even mass deportations. The difference is only that the Kosovars finally got NATO's military help, whereas the Chechens never will.

This is where the West's real hypocrisy lies, if there is any. But consider what Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair said to the Economic Club of Chicago in the midst of the Kosovo war: "If (NATO) wanted to right every wrong that we see in the modern world, then we would do little else than intervene in the affairs of other countries. We would not be able to cope."

Blair's speech was a semi-official public declaration of NATO's new doctrine for humanitarian' military interventions, and it had much in common with St.Thomas Aquinas' medieval definition of "a just war". In NATO's formulation, not only must the offense against human rights be huge -- nothing less than incipient genocide will qualify, in practice -- but the military operation must also promise success at a reasonable cost.

The third of Blair's five general conditions' for humanitarian armed interventions asked bluntly: "Are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake?" In the case of Chechnya there are not, unless NATO's leaders are keen to fight a major war, and probably a nuclear war, with Russia.

So the West's response to the mounting horrors in Chechnya will stay confined to verbal condemnations and to modest political and economic sanctions like excluding Moscow from the next G8 meeting and postponing International Monetary Fund loans. These will have little effect, because the domestic political game in Russia is being played for far higher stakes, and the Russian balance of payments is currently buoyed up by soaring oil revenues.

In the long run, Russia will indeed "pay a heavy price for these actions," as U.S. President Bill Clinton warned recently, but it is the Chechens who will exact it. In the meantime, NATO will have to bear the charges of inconsistency patiently, knowing that its critics are just scoring points. They don't really want to attack Russia either.