THE NATION
Putin's War
by MATT BIVENS

[posted online on September 25, 2003]

As Vladimir Putin and George Bush sit down today at Camp David, back
in Russia Putin's government is driving women and children who had
fled the fighting in Chechnya back into the war zone.

Of the conflict's 220,000 displaced persons, about 11,000 sit
conveniently concentrated in tent camps just east of Chechnya. The
Kremlin has for years pursued an on-again, off-again policy of trying
to herd these refugees "home." It's about sweeping dirt under the
rug: Putin insists there's sufficient calm and order in "pacified"
Chechnya to hold a presidential election in two weeks. Tent camps
filled with refugees shrieking that they won't go back because
there's a war under way don't agree with that pretty picture, so the
refugees and tent camps must go.

Or something like that.

So while this week's spotlight is on the diplomatic dance between
Putin, Bush and the United Nations over Iraq, there's been little
notice of desperate refugees being driven out by harassment. The
Associated Press reports that a 1,150-person tent camp has suddenly
been closed to journalists and rights activists. Residents of the
camp have snuck out word that police and government officials have
arrived and begun to cut off electricity and gas and to remove
latrines--a nice touch, that--and that two desperate women who tried
to stop them were beaten severely enough to need hospitalization. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is alarmed, human
rights groups have put forward thorough documentation of these crimes
against humanity as a long-running Kremlin policy--and now the
American President is sitting down across the table from the Russian
President.

Moreover, the American President is armed not just with intelligence
from the human rights crowd but from his own State Department. In
blistering and detailed testimony before Congress last week,
Assistant Secretary of State Steven Pifer asserted that "the daily
reality for the people of Chechnya has been bleak and deteriorating."
He laid much of this at the door of Chechen terrorist groups. But he
also--in a new breath of common sense for Washington--insisted that
large portions of the Chechen resistance could not be considered
terrorists. And he harshly slammed Russia's conduct of the war.

"Credible human rights organizations" continue to report "atrocities,
disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings committed by
Russian federal forces.... Chechens picked up in [federal] raids
disappear, most often permanently; in some cases corpses are later
found.... disappearances continue on virtually a daily basis."

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the Republican senator from Colorado, calls
this "the picture the Kremlin does not want us to see...a wasteland
dotted with mass graves, villages depopulated of men--young and old--
and unspeakable crimes committed against civilians."

Unspeakable crimes, Russian federal death squads, "disappearances,"
civilians herded into a war zone--is this reason enough for the
American President to sternly register his displeasure with the
Russian President?

Probably not, because the Russian President has a handy reply. When
American journalists recently asked Putin about his government's
rights abuses in Chechnya, he parried by asking us about Iraq. "Are
you sure everything is OK with human rights there?" he said. "Or
Afghanistan. Are you sure everything is OK there on human rights?"
And what about down in Guantánamo Bay, Putin added, what about human
rights there? America is holding children as terrorists in a place
called Camp Delta; so from what moral high ground do we speak when we
complain that Russia is abusing babushkas in a place called Camp
Bella?

"Commentators have begun to urge Bush to chastise Putin for
abandoning many of the democratic reforms that Russia so recently
adopted. Unfortunately, it looks less and less likely that Bush will
do any such thing...[because] increasingly the United States seems to
be adopting policies that at an earlier time we would have condemned
as antidemocratic," writes Russia expert Marshall Goldman. "[Bush and
Putin] may find they have even more in common than they initially
assumed. This is unfortunate not only for the Russians, but for those
of us in the USA who fear that we are becoming more like what they,
rather than what we, used to be."