Remember Chechnya
Friday, September 26, 2003; Page A26
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin was a strong opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and now he says he is skeptical of U.S. plans for reconstruction. Any political transition, he insists, must be endorsed by the United Nations and Arab states around Iraq.
So we can only imagine what Mr. Putin's reaction would be if, during their scheduled meeting at Camp David this week, President Bush were to confide that his official plan to return Iraq to representative government was a mere facade. Mr. Bush might say that Iraq's constitution actually would be written in Washington so as to permanently require the presence of U.S. troops and political control and that the United States would select a presidential candidate who would be allowed to install his campaign manager as supervisor of all Iraqi media. If any serious challengers dared to take on Washington's favorite in a U.S.-run election, the White House would simply force them out of the race.
Mr. Bush surely could not sell such a scheme to Mr. Putin or anyone else, yet the Russian president now demands that his "friend George," together with the rest of the world, swallow that solution for the predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya. Mr. Putin likes to compare the four-year-old Russian war against Chechens seeking independence with the U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; in a meeting with American journalists last weekend, he questioned whether U.S. forces were violating human rights on the streets of Baghdad. In fact the comparison is obscene. In Chechnya Russian troops have wiped out a democratically elected government, killed tens of thousands of civilians, forced others out of refugee camps and back into the war zone, reduced the capital and every major town to rubble, indiscriminately rounded up the entire male populations of dozens of villages for torture or summary execution and so shattered the country's civil society that previously marginal Islamic extremists now are a major force.
Having launched the war against Chechnya four years ago in an effort to bolster his own presidential ambitions, Mr. Putin has found himself trapped. Though thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and Mr. Putin has repeatedly declared the war over, the bloodshed relentlessly goes on. In theory the presidential elections Moscow scheduled for next month offered a way out: If a credible Chechen leader had been chosen to replace the deeply unpopular Kremlin appointee, Akhmad Kadyrov, meaningful negotiations on the republic's future might have been possible. Instead Mr. Putin chose the Stalinist route of eliminating Mr. Kadyrov's main opponents -- "a matter of tactics in the pre-election campaign," he told the U.S. correspondents.
Mr. Putin was infuriated that a State Department official, Steven Pifer, reported to a congressional commission last week that the rigged election lacked credibility and could set back rather than advance prospects for a political settlement. Mr. Pifer's admirably frank statement added that Mr. Putin's policy in Chechnya had "a deleterious effect on the overall U.S.-Russia relationship" and "will be among the most troubling" of issues at the upcoming summit. Mr. Putin warned the journalists that he would not accept "the mentor tone" from Mr. Bush. Clearly the Russian leader hopes that Mr. Bush, in his eagerness to win Moscow's cooperation on Iraq and other issues, will avoid mention of Chechnya. But he should not. There is a great difference between trying to replace a brutal dictatorship with a sovereign democracy and suppressing a nation's aspiration for self-rule through force and fraud. Mr. Bush should not fail to point it out.
