Yes, I think most mainstream media reporting on the Chechen situation is very biased. In part this is because of a lack of background of Western media audiences regarding the history of the current Chechen conflict. The Chechens never wanted to be part of the Russian Empire in the first place, and it took decades for the Czarist armies to gain military control over the North Caucasus. (See Moshe Gammer, * Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan. *) Conflicts flared up again during a brief period of absence of government control immediately after the Russian Revolution, and have flared up at various points to a greater or lesser degree over the last 15 years.
If you leave out the history leading up to the current conflict, then it just looks like the Chechen rebels are committing a mindless, aimless bunch of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. Yes, various bunches of rebels have committed terrorist attacks against civilians, but that’s not the whole picture, and also does a grave disservice to the bulk of the Chechen population, who are victims both of history and of current circumstance.
Reasons why media reporting is insufficient? For starters, the RF government has been very selective about who they will let into the region at all. One Radio Free Europe reporter was arrested and held incommunicado for his reporting on Chechnya, and a French reporter (Anne Nivat: see her book, Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya) was unceremoniously kicked out of the RF for defying the restrictions on reporting from Chechnya (she was denied permission to enter the area). Frankly, I think the lack of demand for news on Chechnya is circular: nobody here knows what’s going on there, so nobody cares, so nobody reports on it. That’s how Putin can get away with calling it a “Russian internal conflict,” and we leave him pretty much alone, and then he can cast his Chechen campaigns as battles in his own “war on terrorism.”
The only difference I’ve seen so far is that it’s somewhat sneakier, because the Soviet and RF governments have had to at least pay lip service to common ideals of human rights and equality for political reasons, whereas under the Russian Empire, there weren’t the same kinds of formalized international accords in which nations agreed to respect the human rights of their indigenous peoples. The Chechens are guaranteed a number of rights under the Soviet and the current Russian Constitutions, among which are state support for their language and culture. That ain’t happening. And Grozny and various other Chechen cities have been bombed to death, and very little in the way of resources or political effort have been invested in rebuilding. Of course, it’s hard to rebuild if there’s still a war going on.
If I knew that, I’d be up for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a situation almost as sticky as the Middle East, although of much shorter duration (although in the Chechen case, there is no question of who was there first). Trust between the two sides is almost completely shattered. For starters, how about the Army stops “disappearing” Chechen men of military age? And removing restrictions on the movement of civilians between villages and cities? The terrorist attacks committed by some Chechen rebels against civilians didn’t start until after the Army tanks rolled into Chechnya and the RF Army started bombing the crap out of cities and villages inhabited by civilians, so I think it is incumbent upon the RF government/military to take the firs step toward rebuilding trust.
But all this is still pretty much a hijack. The deportations happened, and a large proportion of the Chechen people died, and all this is pretty much ignored outside Chechnya and dismissed even within the RF. I think that’s fundamentally wrong, and I think we as a society need to acknowledge it and other human rights abuses, both past and current. To me, the only question is how, and in what venue(s). I await your suggestions.
