Jason Fields: Putin's brutal record in Chechnya and Syria is ominous for Ukraine / My comments on Vladimir Putin's apologists
NB: Beneath this link are two comments I made in response to articles published in Scheerpost about the Russo-Ukraine war. One comment has appeared, the second not yet. DS
Wars aren't civilized. The very definition of war includes death and cruelty, and everyone who dies has loved ones who mourn them. But some wars are more brutal than others, more deadly to civilians, and Russia's recent wars in Chechnya and Syria stand out. Can those fights offer a preview of what the world can expect in Ukraine? The Russian Federation fought its first war against Chechnya in 1994. It went on until 1996, was hugely unpopular at home, and showed that what had been a Soviet bear of a military was now a toothless Russian tiger. Russia's President Boris Yeltsin had to settle for a ceasefire over a definitive victory.
The second Chechen war began in 1999. It was then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's war, and it was to the death. A "they make a desert and call it peace" kind of war. The Chechen capital of Grozny - already damaged by the first war - was left as a hole in a map, called the most destroyed city on the planet by the United Nations. Almost nothing was left standing, nearly no one spared. As many as 250,000 civilians were killed in the combined Chechen wars, along with many thousands more combatants on both sides. Reports of rape, arson, torture, and other crimes by Russian soldiers were widespread — and cast as a wholly necessary evil by those forces. "Without bespredel [no limits warfare], we'll get nowhere in Chechnya," a 21-year-old Russian conscript told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. "We have to be cruel to them. Otherwise, we'll achieve nothing."
The Russians employed infantry, special forces, tanks, and artillery, as well as carpet-bombing parts of Chechnya, with seemingly little regard for whether civilians were underneath their planes….
My comments on Vladimir Putin's apologists
Here are two recent articles on Ukraine/Russia by Professor Brenner
Michael Brenner: Another Casualty of the Ukraine Conflict: The Truth
On Humiliation and the Ukraine War
My response to the article on humiliation is appended to this post, beneath the main text. My response to Brenner's essay on The Truth is as below:
There's not much to disagree with in
Brenner's article, insofar as it relates to American crimes. He appears to know
more about civilian deaths in Ukraine than does the UNHCR; and he does not
mention over one million refugees. I wonder how he could ignore that, but let
that pass.
However, if truth is the first casualty of war, wisdom is the long lasting casualty. The root of 'polemic' is the Greek 'polemos' which means war. Polemic in our time is binary; its whatabout-ery, which I'm sad to say, characterises Brenner's observations. Sad because he is quite right to point to American /and Western lies and hypocrisy. I will add to his list the American involvement in the support of war-criminal President Yahya Khan in his genocidal activity in East Pakistan in 1971, testified to by none other than US diplomat Archer Blood; the Chilean coup of 1973, and the Argentinian coup of 1976. All these interventions led to the death of hundreds of thousands, and the traumatisation of millions. My generation can never forget Vietnam, which along with Laos and Cambodia, suffered 3 million dead. The USA only remembers 58,000 American casualties, whose names are inscribed on a wall. The rest of us are furniture.
Binary thinking (no less than 'group think') is equally an aspect of rendering wisdom itself into an ideology. Why are we obliged to forget the two wars fought by post-communist Russia in Chechnya between 1994 and 2003? Estimates of civilian deaths vary from 50, 000 to over 200, 000. The human rights group Memorial, recently banned for researching Stalinist injustices, (and whose chief historian Yuri Dmitriyev was recently sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony), estimated the number in both wars as over 200,000. Other civil society groups, such as the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, were persecuted and banned for ''ethnic incitement' and extremism'. The second Chechnyan war was Putin's war, and I have to ask Prof Brenner whether that too was justified because of US provocation.
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist and human rights activist was put on trial twice for fighting for human rights for Chechnyans; then murdered in 2006. 58 journalists have been murdered in Russia between 1992 and 2022, according to the International Committee of journalists. Dissident politicians and businessmen have been murdered at long distance. Are all these crimes also to be laid at the door of NATO and 'the West'? Does the Russian establishment have any agency at all? Are they puppets of historical forces? Do high powered executives have any ethical culpability at all or are they exonerated by the dilemmas of sovereignty?
Perhaps the following query will help clarify my objections to Prof Brenner: Given the fate of human rights activists, journalists and truth speakers in Russia (who were doing exactly what Brenner is doing here, calling out the criminal activity of their own government) - given their grisly fate, what does Brenner intend to convey to his readers by ignoring them completely? If the boot were on the other foot, if he with his erudition and conscience were located in Russia today, does he think he could air his view freely, without fearing for his life?
In my response to his earlier article on the humiliation of Putin, I said, let's leave aside the sophistry and have a truthful conversation. The USSR collapsed because the CPSU couldn't legitimise itself. Gorbachev's liberal efforts came too late, and the hard-liners staged a coup against him. Today the population of Russia and the post USSR is paying the price. Let Brenner find out whether the bombardment of residential buildings and nuclear power stations is fake news and whether the flow of refugees is a mere trickle. And let us all reflect on why and whether we owe the Russian tyrants an extended lease on their expired sovereignty over the territories of the post USSR.
And yes, lets hear it from all the liberal minded American intelligentsia, make a public call to try your various ex-Presidents for war crimes and brutal illegal interventions the world over, from Vietnam till the other day, in the Middle East. We've had it up to our throats with tyrants and polemicists.
Dilip Simeon
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Rohini Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
Nesrine Malik: Let the horror in Ukraine open our eyes to the suffering of war around the world
