Blood feud of a rebel region

ChechnyaThe fate of Russia's breakaway state and the brutality of the conflict there are explored in two new books

It is safe to say that few Chechens mourned the recent death of Boris Yeltsin.

He may have helped bring democracy to Russia and dismantled the Soviet Union, but all he gave Chechnya was two devastating wars and enough misery to keep the region's cycle of violence turning for decades to come.

Advised that his plummeting popularity could be pepped up by a "small, victorious war", Yeltsin sent troops into Chechnya in December 1994 to crush its separatist government. They withdrew in defeat two years later, but one of Yeltsin's last acts before resigning at the end of 1999 was to launch another attack on Chechnya, and leave his successor, Vladimir Putin, to finish the job.

For capricious Yeltsin, Chechnya was a place to claw back authority, ratings and respect; for the sober Putin, the republic in the north Caucasus offered a chance to prove himself the unswerving patriot who would bring order into every corner of Russia.

The result of both men's folly, as Tony Wood explains in Chechnya: The Case for Independence, has been the death of tens of thousands of civilians, the brutalisation of a generation of Chechen civilians and Russian conscripts, and the provision of perfect propaganda for religious radicals who seek to channel Chechens' desire for sovereignty into Islamic fundamentalism.

STRONG ON THE history of Chechnya's almost perpetual drive to escape Russian control, and on the flaws inherent in Moscow's policy towards the province, Wood is probably weakest when actually expounding on the titular "case for independence".

In that regard, he adds little to the succinct analysis given by prominent Russian economists Andrei Illarionov and Boris Lvin in 1995, which is reproduced in full at the back of this book.

What Wood provides is not a watertight argument as to why international law demands an independent Chechnya, but rather an indictment of Russian misrule over the region and a weight of evidence to suggest that only sovereignty will fully pacify its people.

Russian forces spent most of the 19th century fighting insurgents in Chechnya and neighbouring regions, and barely a decade after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 the Chechens rebelled against forced collectivisation of land and livestock.

In February 1944, having been falsely accused by Stalin of collaborating with the invading Nazis, almost every single Chechen, along with many of their neighbours in the Caucasus, were herded into cattle trucks and deported to the barren plains of Siberia and Kazakhstan.

About a third of them died from cold, hunger or a Red Army bullet, and Stalin's crime became Chechnya's defining national tragedy.

Little surprise then, that Chechnya demanded freedom from Kremlin rule when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and Wood argues that it had every constitutional right to do so, despite being part of a so-called autonomous republic rather than a full "union republic".

Chechnya was granted only three years of de-facto independence, however, and it was a time dogged by chaos and crime, which Russia helped foment, before Yeltsin invaded in December 1994, claiming the need to restore law and order and preserve Russia's territorial integrity. Fighting has continued ever since, with only a partial lull from 1996-1999, and, as Wood observes, unrest is spreading to neighbouring regions such as Ingushetia and Dagestan, even as Putin claims that Chechnya is finally pacified.

Putin's tactic to end the Chechen war has been to co-opt certain rebels, place them in government and tell them to crush resistance to their brutal rule, which is characterised by widespread extortion, kidnap, rape, torture and murder.

In their tactics the Moscow-backed militias vary little from the most vicious of the separatist guerrillas, but they operate with Russian approval: as long as the killers stop demanding independence and doff their caps to the Kremlin, it seems Putin is happy to give them their head.

THE CRUELTY AND corruption of Russian forces and officials, and their local proxies, embitter ordinary Chechens and drive young men to join the rebels, who at least offer them a cause and something to do in a shattered region where unemployment outside the main towns is almost total.

As Wood observes, poverty and desperation rather than widespread religious zeal are driving Chechen youths into the arms of extreme Islamic groups, which, funded by shadowy paymasters in the Middle East, are currently one of Chechnya's few sources of a reliable wage.

Radical Islam has never taken hold in Chechnya, and Putin's claim that the north Caucasus is a front in the global "war on terror" is a canard that has been happily swallowed by western powers that are eager for Russia's oil and its acquiescence to events in places such as Kosovo and Iraq.

Wood's pages are darkened by the shadow of Kosovo, which is now on the brink of independence from Serbia, despite fierce opposition from Belgrade and Moscow.

"The international legal instruments governing secession," he writes, "are permeated by a tension between the principle of self-determination and the preservation of territorial integrity." As current events show, the hypocrisy of western leaders must also count among the many crimes committed against the Chechen people: the United States and major EU nations drove Slobodan Milosevic's forces out of Kosovo and now demand its independence; the same countries watched Yeltsin and Putin unleash far more bloodshed and destruction in Chechnya, and did nothing to stop them, never mind consider its case for sovereignty.

BEFORE HIS DEATH in 2005, Chechnya's separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov always denounced rebel attacks on civilians. Many of his unruly field commanders were less scrupulous, however.

The three-day siege of School No 1 in Beslan in September 2004 was the most shocking of all rebel atrocities. In that small town in the region of North Ossetia, near Chechnya, at least 330 people - including 188 children - died in a maelstrom of gunfire and explosions.

In Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1, Timothy Phillips allows the survivors to speak for themselves, and they tell a harrowing tale.

Phillips pieces together accounts of the children's excited arrival at school on the first day of term, the gunmen's raid and ensuing siege in which more than 1,000 hostages were kept in horrendous conditions, and some were shot and blown up, before a fierce final battle between rebels, Russian troops and local militia reduced the school to smouldering rubble.

As well as a providing a valuable account of what actually happened inside the school, Phillips shows how this atrocity was an outgrowth of modern Russia, a society riven by violence and corruption, and of the history of the north Caucasus, where centuries of perceived injustice poison relations between the Muslim Chechens and Ingush and the Christian Ossetians.

Both Wood and Phillips also identify what the latter calls Russia's "pathological aversion to honesty and openness" as a key factor in its current problems. A mass of vital questions about Beslan remain unanswered and officials refuse to take responsibility for what happened there: where there is only a fog of confusion and denial, suspicion and conspiracy theory flourish.

Yeltsin is dead and Putin is due to step down next year. But they will not be quickly forgotten in the north Caucasus, a land of blood feud, where their wars will echo for generations to come in a howl for vengeance from the mountains.

• Daniel McLaughlin reports on eastern Europe and the Balkans for The Irish Times, and previously covered Russia for The Irish Times, the Daily Telegraphand Reuters

• Chechnya: The Case for IndependenceBy Tony Wood Verso, 208pp. £12.96 Beslan: The Tragedy of School Number 1By Timothy Phillips Granta, 224pp. £10.99