Chechen War Raises Fear of New Instability

Russia is now a country at war.

The combat theater is small, the location obscure and the casualties likely to remain a relative trickle compared to those in Rwanda or Bosnia.

But when the Kremlin decided to break Chechnya’s bid for independence by military force, when it began dropping bombs on what it considers Russian towns and shelling Russian citizens, it crossed a line beyond which only one thing is sure: This Eurasian colossus has become a more volatile place.

Instead of the stability that was the rationale for the Russian offensive, many observers believe that greater instability is already the result. Instead of sewing the patchwork of the Russian Federation together once and for all, President Boris N. Yeltsin may have helped pull it apart.

And instead of cementing Russia’s image as a country on its way to post-Soviet normalcy, the Chechnya intervention has cast greater doubts on the Kremlin’s commitment to democracy and human rights.

“In Chechnya, Russia has found its own domestic Karabakh,” lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin said in a recent newspaper article, referring to the intractable conflict in the disputed enclave of Azerbaijan that has brought down leaders and crippled economies.

Except that this Karabakh is in the northern, Russian section of the Caucasus Mountains instead of the southern end. A potpourri of clannish peoples sitting on rich troves of oil, the Caucasus is an explosive region with little love lost for Moscow at the best of times.

By killing scores of Chechen civilians in ill-aimed bombing and shelling, Moscow risks inflaming much of the region. Already, the people of neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia have shown their solidarity with Chechnya by blocking Russian troops heading there and lining their roads in a mass protest.

“The longer it takes to reach some kind of political solution, the bigger are the chances that the flames of guerrilla war will move over and engulf the nearest republics, if not the rest of the Caucasus,” said historian Karen Brutents, an expert on ethnic conflicts.

Though in the past Ingushetia, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria have not pushed as hard as Chechnya to secede, the Russian intervention is clearly giving them more incentive.

“It is not the best of federations where issues are resolved by force,” said Ruslan Aushev, president of Ingushetia. “Think about how it feels when you’re sitting there waiting for tanks to invade.”

Aushev said Ingushetia did not plan immediately to secede, but “if everybody starts leaving there will be little else for the Ingush to do.”

In recent months, the Russian Federation had actually seemed fairly solid, with the one exception of Chechnya. Yeltsin signed a broad agreement with virtually all of Russia’s 88 regions and republics last winter, and even former holdouts such as the oil-rich republic of Tatarstan had stopped agitating for more freedom.

But the offensive in Chechnya holds the potential to spark a reaction similar to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union after the 1991 coup attempt, when Soviet republics horrified by the coup and seeing a moment of Kremlin weakness declared their independence one after the other.

Already, republics such as Tatarstan are openly criticizing the Chechnya intervention, calling for the renewal of peace talks.

“We are sure that combat operations should be suspended,” Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev told Yeltsin in a special message Thursday.

Even if the country does not begin to spin apart, Russia has already lost some of its unity by trying to isolate the unrest in the Caucasus. It cut off all flights from Azerbaijan and Georgia this week in an attempt to stop the flow of arms to Chechnya, and has limited other transport access to the Caucasus.

The Russian offensive also threatens to undermine the uneasy peace in other conflict areas of the former Soviet Union. Officials are already broaching the possibility that Russia, by killing the Muslim Chechens, has ruined its authority as a mediator and source of peacekeepers in the former empire.

Islamic states “will consider it good style to reproach Russia for its conduct in Chechnya” and reject Moscow’s role in settling conflicts, such as the one in Karabakh, in which Muslim states are involved, Zatulin predicted.

“I can assure you that if the situation continues this way it will soon produce a powerful seat of destabilization, not only in the northern Caucasus but in the whole Russian Federation,” said former Russian Parliament Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen. “The effect will snowball, pulling in international forces and the sympathies of other countries and other parliaments, especially in the Islamic world.”

If worst-case scenarios come true, the northern Caucasus will become the setting of a drawn-out guerrilla war in which Chechen militants backed by other ethnic groups will harass Russian troops for years. Analysts here compare the Chechens to the Basque separatists in Spain and the Catholic republicans of Northern Ireland.

Many Chechens are sure that the war will not end until their people have been destroyed or the Russians defeated.

“The message we get clearly from the Russians is ‘No people, no problem,’ ” alleged Abdullah Dadayev, an adviser to the Chechen president.

The chief danger in the Chechen crisis, however, is not of a prolonged local conflict but of its implications for the pinnacle of Russian power.

When the Kremlin made the decision to use force, it signaled that what Russian observers call the “Party of War”--the defense and security Establishment--had triumphed over Yeltsin’s more dovish and intellectual advisers. If that happened once, it is likely to happen again.

“No matter what the outcome of the military expedition to Chechnya, it is practically inevitable that other problems will also be resolved by force,” Editor-in-Chief Vitaly Tretyakov wrote in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper.

Though the Russian offensive in Chechnya has the tacit approval of most foreign governments and many Russians, the face of the Kremlin has changed. It is fiercer, more aggressive.

Yeltsin showed in October, 1993, when he sent tanks to battle his recalcitrant Parliament, that he was willing to use force to obtain his political goals. Now he has gone a step further, turning the Russian army’s firepower not only against a rebellious elite with virtually no popular support but also against an entire rebellious people.

For watchdogs such as Sergei Kovalyov, Yeltsin’s top human rights inspector, the very fact of the offensive on Chechnya reveals a Kremlin willingness to violate the tenets of democracy.

“The Chechen people, as any other, can make mistakes in choosing their leaders and ideals,” said Kovalyov, who was visiting Chechnya to monitor the conflict. “But this gives no one the right to dispute them in the language of bombing and shelling.”

The Helsinki Watch human rights group called on President Clinton, who says he considers Chechnya an internal Russian problem, to take a stand against the incursion. The group said he should “make it clear to President Yeltsin that the conflict in Chechnya tests Russia’s commitment to democracy and that Russia’s conduct so far shows a fundamental lack of respect for human rights and humanitarian law.”

“Such behavior is never ‘an internal matter,’ ” the group said.

What frightened Russian media and analysts most, however, was the possibility that, having gotten the country into a virtual state of war, hard-liners in the Kremlin would take advantage of the situation to infringe on other basic rights--from closing down newspapers to harassing lawmakers.

Their argument, warned Sergei Parkhomenko in the newspaper Sevodnya, would be: “Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”

The Road to Chechnya

* A firsthand report of a Times correspondent’s visit to embattled Chechnya, published in this week’s World Report section, is available on the TimesLink online service. Sign on and select Special Reports in the Nation & World section.

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