Russia forced to rethink US
ties By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Already coined as Russia's September 11 by
various Russian pundits and editorials, the tragic
slaughter of hundreds of innocent people in a middle
school in Beslan has the potential to trigger a major
tremor in the foreign policy charted by President
Vladimir Putin, perhaps even as far as heralding a new
chapter in US-Russia relations, much to the chagrin of
the so-called Eurasianists around Putin who have for a
long time been advising him to steer clear of the US's
"war on terrorism".
In his first post-Beslan
interview, Putin, in a tone reminiscent of President
George W Bush's post-September 11 behavior, has declared
Russia to be in a "war" with enemies that his defense
minister, Sergei Ivanov, has branded as "unseen" and
"borderless". Cognitively then, the mass killings in
Russia, including the victims of downed Russian
airplanes and Moscow subway commuters, have seemingly
spurred a politico-ideological turn around vis-a-vis the
US, viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin for exploiting
the September 11 tragedies for geopolitical gains at
Russia's doorsteps in Central Asia and elsewhere in the
Middle East, prompting Russian policy-makers to rethink
their cynical gaze at the US war on global terrorism,
eg, the same Ivanov has been on record for making
paranoid statements about a post September 11 "dense
ring of military and intelligence gathering
installations belonging to the US". In the light of the
severity of the Chechen-led terrorist attacks,
reportedly with participation by members of al-Qaeda,
Ivanov and other like-minded people around Putin are
likely more apt to make similar statements about the
threat of Islamist terrorism.
Does this mean
that we are about to witness a foreign policy
"re-orientation" in Russia featuring Moscow's new
willingness to join Washington's war on global terrorism
and to make the foreign policy adjustments deemed
necessary for such an alliance? While we must await the
passage of time to furnish the answer, the current
milieu in Russia, wrought with a governmental crisis in
combating terrorism, is clearly pregnant with such a
possibility.
So far, Putin has offered little
beyond a "tactical" partnership with the US's "war on
terror", refraining from a "strategic" alliance in the
light of his criticisms of Bush's invasion of Iraq and
the US military's post-September 11 base-building in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
Azerbaijan. But adopting an evolutionary perspective,
Putin has of late toned down his anti-US rhetoric,
exploring the option of dispatching Russian troops to
Iraq and extending the areas of security cooperation
between Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), notwithstanding the open agenda of
the Russia-NATO Permanent Joint Council shaped in part
by Putin's, and before him Boris Yeltsin's, singular
emphasis on Russia's European identity.
This, in
turn, raises the question of what specific adjustments
Putin needs to make above and beyond his hitherto
difficult balancing act between the two powerful
impulses of "globalists" and "Westernists" on the one
hand and, on the other, the "nationalists" and the
"Eurasianists"? After all, with its 20 million plus
Muslim inhabitants, Russia relates to and even absorbs
part of the Islamic east, most vividly reflected in
Russia's recent observer status at the summits of the
Organization of Islamic Conference, OIC, and Russia's
recent accession to the regional organization, Central
Asia Cooperation Organization; the latter initiative has
been a part and parcel of a Russian "Eurasian
renaissance" reflected in the development of
transportation networks linking Russia to the West on
the one hand and to Asia on the other.
Contrary
to some of his advisors, including in the military,
Putin has until now hedged his bets on a multi-faceted
foreign policy geared to Russia's national interests and
reflective of Russia's European-Asian ramparts, whereby
he could maintain Russia's independence, particularly
from the undue encroachments by either NATO or the US
superpower, while enhancing economic and financial
relations with Western countries and, simultaneously,
pursuing Russia's "eastern" objectives; the latter
include low-security cooperation with China through the
"Shanghai Six" and escalating arms sales to China, India
and Iran, among others.
Yet the anti-American
confrontational edge of Putin has by all indications hit
a tall wall. On the one hand, this has negatively
contributed to the Western participation in the Russian
oil industry, particularly in the Caspian Sea, putting a
question mark on the future of oil exports from Russia's
second energy hub (after Siberia). Victor Kalyuzny, who
was until recently Putin's point man on the Caspian Sea,
recently dismissed the notion that the US has any
interests in the Caspian Sea, and Putin's removal of
Kalyuzny can be fairly certainly interpreted as a sign
of Putin's decrease of his anti-US tendency and
simultaneous increase of his other tendency to project
the image of Russia as a reliable ally of the West
capable of underwriting security in the fractured
Central Asia-Caucasus.
Thus, without doubt the
terrorist-related setbacks faced by Putin, whose
confidence in his charted course of action has now been
seriously undermined, underscore the need for a new era
of partnership by Russia in the global campaign against
terrorism. This may, in fact, lead Putin to reverse
course on Chechnya, solidly regarded until now as an
internal problem, by instead seeking to internationalize
the problems faced by Russia in Chechnya, such as the
growing role of outside forces fueling Chechen
separatism. Concerning the latter, the dominant wisdom
in Moscow until now has been that Chechen separatism may
be motivated by religious principles, but is primarily
driven by political goals. The "shock of Beslan" may be
precisely in revising this perception and thus closing
the mental gap between Washington and Moscow.
But for this gap to close altogether, there are
other important prerequisites, above all the US's
willingness and ability to put to rest Moscow's
lingering suspicion that Russia's separatist movements
are exploited by the US to weaken Moscow, particularly
in its resolve to steer an independent foreign policy,
and, even worse, to "dismember Russia". After all,
commensurate with Putin's criticisms of the US's Iraq
policy, there has been a reciprocal criticism of
Russia's Chechen policy, after a temporary hiatus after
September 11 when Russia was "given the green light" on
Chechnya after it endorsed the invasion of Afghanistan
and the hunt for al-Qaeda. The short-lived honeymoon,
replaced by growing acrimony over Iraq, is now
potentially resurrected in a more forceful union in case
the few remaining obstacles pertaining mostly to
political psychology than to actual policies, are
mutually removed. Take the case of the latest
"presidential elections" in Chechnya for example,
blasted by members of the US Congress as a "total sham",
yet without drawing even half as much criticism from the
White House, which has been equally silent with respect
to growing reports (eg, by Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch) of widespread human rights abuses by
the Russian military in Chechnya.
Old habits die
hard, on the other hand, and this much is clear in
Putin's rather xenophobic post-Beslan speech warning of
"others" who help the separatists "because they think
that Russia, as one of the greatest nuclear powers in
the world, is still a threat, and this threat has to be
eliminated. And terrorism is only an instrument to
achieve these goals." Indeed, what can a content
analysis of this speech reach other than the conclusion
that Putin is making one last-ditch effort to ignore the
inevitable, that is, the terrorist-induced march to a
new, and more energetic, common cause with the US. In
the same speech, Putin failed to mention that what is
necessary in combating the evil of terrorism is more
than a "unified society", or a fortress Russia, but
rather a unified world community.
Thus the
"lessons of Beslan", so to speak. Admitting that "we
showed weakness", Putin has vowed to reorganize Russia's
anti-terror system and to set up a new crisis-management
system, indeed a remedy too late for the Beslan victims
and their relatives, who may have benefited from a more
patient counter-terrorist strategy which proved rather
successful in 1996 when the Chechen rebels invaded the
Dagestan towns of Kiziliar and Pervomaiska and held some
2,000 hostages. whom they freed after two weeks of
negotiations. Instead, the Beslan tragedy turns out to
be the recycling of another botched rescue attempt - in
June 1996 when some 150 hostages held by Chechens in a
hospital in Budennovsk were killed.
This aside,
with Putin's Chechen plans in pieces, he is under
tremendous pressure to apply even greater military
pressure on Chechens to break their will to
independence, this while what is really needed is a more
prudent policy that requires a deft mixture of soft and
hard approaches, including the use of international
mediators, such as OIC and OSCE (Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe) recently expelled
from Chechnya, and perhaps even the United Nations, for
the fact of the matter is that what the Chechen crisis
and its spillover effects inside Russia clearly
demonstrate is the limits of military power and the
urgent need for a more civil Russian approach vis-a-vis
its irredentist pressures.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini:
New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's
Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy
foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003, and "Khatami
and OIC Mediation in Chechnya", Iranian Journal of
International Affairs, No 3, 1999. He is currently
working on a book on conflict management in Central
Asia-Caucasus.
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