Russia's Securitization of Chechnya

How War Became Acceptable

Julie Wilhelmsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book provides an in-depth analysis of how mobilization and legitimation for war are made possible, with a focus on Russia's conflict with Chechnya.

Through which processes do leaders and their publics come to define and accept certain conflicts as difficult to engage in, and others as logical, even necessary? Drawing on a detailed study of changes in Russia's approach to Chechnya, this book argues that 're-phrasing' Chechnya as a terrorist threat in 1999 was essential to making the use of violence acceptable to the Russian public. The book refutes popular explanations that see Russian war-making as determined and grounded in a sole, authoritarian leader. Close study of the statements and texts of Duma representatives, experts and journalists before and during the war demonstrates how the Second Chechen War was made a 'legitimate' undertaking through the efforts of many. A post-structuralist reinterpretation of securitization theory guides and structures the book, with discourse theory and method employed as a means to uncover the social processes that make war acceptable. More generally, the book provides a framework for understanding the broad social processes that underpin legitimized war-making.

This book will be of much interest to students of Russian politics, critical terrorism studies, security studies and international relations.

1 Introduction

Russians were reluctantly dragged into the first post-Soviet war against Chechnya in 1994. By contrast, the Second Chechen War was launched with a collective call for violent attack. Charles W. Blandy argues that the main difference between the two Russo-Chechen conflicts is not in terms of military strategy, but in terms of the 'resolute firmness of the political authorities in prosecuting the war in Chechnya, having secured the backing of Russian society as a whole'.¹ Most Russians had considered a new war against Chechnya totally unacceptable only half a year before Russian ground troops again entered Chechen territory in the so-called counter-terrorist campaign in October 1999. However, when October came, hardly a voice was raised in protest against the massive violence launched against this Russian republic.² How was this shift made possible? In more general terms: how does war become acceptable?

Scholars agree that the brutality and the extent of war crimes committed during the Second Chechen War were as massive as during the First Chechen War. While identification with Chechen suffering inflicted by war increasingly constituted a pressure to end the First Chechen War, no such pressures emerged in Russia during the Second Chechen War.³ How can acceptance of massive violence against fellow citizens continue, when the human cost of war is revealed? This book seeks answers to these questions by exploring the 'securitization' of Chechnya in Russia from 1999 to 2001.⁴ Advancing a post-structuralist reinterpretation of securitization theory, it argues that representations of the Chechen issue in Russia during 1999 comprised a re-drawing of the boundaries between 'Chechnya' and 'Russia' in Russian discourse that served to legitimize the violent practices employed against Chechnya and Chechens during the Second Chechen War.⁵

This is not a study of why the Second Chechen War was launched and what the motivations were, but about how it became seen as a legitimate undertaking. The new military campaign against Chechnya was allegedly planned well in advance, but this book will not delve into what the Russian leadership wanted to achieve by it.⁶ The focus is rather on how broad public acceptance for a new war came about in the first place, and how such broad acceptance was sustained as the war unfolded in all its brutality. This book reveals how the intensive, observable linguistic practices that served to represent 'Chechnya' and 'Chechens' as an existential terrorist threat to an innocent and victorious 'Russia' made violent practices such as those used in the Second Chechen War possible and acceptable. It holds that a deep estrangement of 'Chechnya' and 'Chechens' from 'Russia' was created through a collective and intersubjective (re) construction of this territory and this group of people. This made war acceptable in the first place, and produced a new but enduring blindness to the suffering of Chechnya and Chechens in Russia.

The first post-Soviet conflict over Chechnya, which erupted into full-scale war in 1994, was initially represented as a local separatist conflict. On the Russian side a primary reason for going to war was given as preventing the new Russian Federation from unravelling along the pattern of the Soviet Union.⁷ 'Chechnya' was not detailed as a threat to 'Russia' in any substantive way before the war was launched.⁸ In Chechnya, the leadership headed by General Dzhokhar Dudayev mobilized the population around primarily nationalist slogans as part of the build-up to the war, and the claim that Chechens could not survive under Russian rule acquired resonance among the Chechen population as the war was fought.⁹ During the First Chechen War and the ensuing interwar years. Islam came to acquire a more prominent role in Chechen society, particularly among certain warlords who turned to Radical Islam. Their statements increasingly presented 'Russia' as an 'infidel' enemy and as an existential threat to the Muslims of the North Caucasus.¹⁰

On the Russian side, representations of 'Chechnya' changed as well. During the interwar years, official statements depicted President Asian Maskhadov's Chechnya as a partner and friend. When the Second Chechen War was launched in October 1999, that move was presented as a response to the September 1999 terrorist attacks in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk, which were blamed on Chechens. According to the Russian leadership, Chechnya had become 'a huge terrorist camp'.¹¹ The war itself was labelled a 'counter-terrorist campaign'.

While these radical shifts in the representations of the 'Other' on both sides in the Russo-Chechen conflict need to be investigated in order to understand the sum of gross violence and terror associated with the Second Chechen War, this book tells only half the story. I do not seek to attribute all blame on the Russian side or to deny that atrocities were committed by the Chechen side. Atrocities were committed on both sides during the Second Chechen War. There is no doubt that the escalation of the conflict to such violent heights was the result of a reciprocal process. However, this book has a narrower focus. The puzzle it tries to solve is how this war came to make so much sense on the Russian side.

Based in the tradition of Critical Security Studies, the origin of conflict is understood not as the outcome of timeless structures, but as grounded in reflexive practices. Rather than the competition of existing sovereign states or ethnic groups, the constitution of collective identity provides much of the impetus behind conflict.¹² Michael C. Williams has formulated this standpoint as follows:

This is not to say that empirical elements are unimportant, but such conflicts cannot simply be reduced to the competing interests of pre-given political objects. They are about the creation of these objects, and the way in which different identities are constitutive of them.¹³

Guided by a post-structuralist reading of securitization theory, the book assesses Russian re-phrasing of Chechnya by analysing the process of naming and describing the Chechen threat in official language (Chapters 4 and 5), evaluating to what extent representations among key groups in Russian society resonate with these official representations (Chapters 7, 8 and 9), and what kind of policies and practices of war these representations legitimized (Chapters 10, 11 and 12). It covers the years from 1996 to 2001, with an emphasis on autumn 1999. This timespan captures Russian official representations of and policies on Chechnya during the period between the two wars (1996-1999) and then Russian representations of the Chechen threat during summer and autumn 1999, as well as the material practices undertaken against Chechnya until 2001 in what most reasonably can be called the Second Chechen War. The First Chechen War (1994-1996), as well as parts of several hundred years of Russo-Chechen relations (Chapter 6), will be re-visited several times, but not in depth.

Although it is the war against Chechnya that is presented, the book provides general insight into how the mobilization and legitimation of war comes about in Putin's Russia and to what effect. It shows how a re-phrasing of another group or territory as an existential threat is essential to making the exercise of violence widely accepted in Russian politics and, at the same time, how such a rephrasing creates cohesion in the fragmented Russian polity. On the one hand, the making of an acceptable war in Russia is a much more complex social process than most accounts make it look like. It is not decided and grounded in one authoritarian leader, but is a collective and intersubjective endeavour in which many societal actors take part. On the other hand, broad and collectively articulated representations of existential threat trigger a re-articulation of the threatened 'Self' and serve to re-constitute and unite the Russian political community internally. During the crises in Ukraine, we again witnessed the making of an acceptable Russian war. The object subjected to war is different. This time it was the 'fascist' Ukraine that was projected as a threat to Russia. But the broad social process that made Russian military action against Ukraine seem necessary and legitimate to the Russian public was recognizable. For those of us who have studied Russian war-making over years, the counter-terrorist campaign against Chechnya was a laboratory, a test case of how war becomes acceptable in Putin's Russia.

This holds also today. When Russian military force was employed in Syria in 2015 and 2016, it was made reasonable through a broader social process. The projection of terrorism as an existential threat to Russia was the focal point in this process. As put by Putin in his 2015 state of the nation speech, 'Russia has long been at the forefront of the fight against terrorism. This is a fight for freedom, truth and justice, for the lives of people and the future of the entire civilisation.'¹⁴ While this looks like a radical shift away from Ukraine and the West as Russia's contemporary radical Others, it still has the effect of uniting, strengthening and re-constituting the Russian Self. Moreover, the articulation of international terrorism as the prime existential threat to Russia is powerful, credible and effective because it resonates with broad and enduring discursive patterns in Russian society. When Putin told the story of Russia's righteous fight against terrorism, the terrorist acts that sprang from the Chechen wars made up the foundation of his claims. A straight line was drawn from the Chechen threat to the present-day terrorist evil:

We know what aggression of international terrorism is. Russia faced it back in the mid-1990s, when our country, our civilian population suffered from cruel attacks. We will never forget the hostage crises in Budennovsk, Beslan and Moscow, the merciless explosions in residential buildings, the Nevsky Express train derailment, the blasts in the Moscow metro and Domodedovo Airport.... It took us nearly a decade to finally break the backbone of those militants. We almost succeeded in expelling terrorists from Russia, but are still fighting the remaining terrorist underground. This evil is still out there. Two years ago, two attacks were committed in Volgograd. A civilian Russian plane was recently blown up over Sinai.... The militants in Syria pose a particularly high threat for Russia. Many of them are citizens of Russia and the CIS countries. They get money and weapons and build up their strength. If they get sufficiently strong to win there, they will return to their home countries to sow fear and hatred, to blow up, kill and torture people. We must fight and eliminate them there, away from home.¹⁵

Critical studies of Russia and terrorism

This study can be placed in the social constructionist camp. I believe that neither the threat nor the character of the Second Chechen War was determined by the nature of things.¹⁶ It is not the aim of this book to argue that there was no Chechen threat, nor any threat from Radical Islamic fighters: determining the magnitude of the Chechen or Radical Islamic threat is scarcely feasible, and it is not my concern here.¹⁷ The intention is rather to study how representations of 'Chechnya' in Russia have changed, how 'Chechnya' has been given a new meaning, and how this has influenced the means deemed legitimate for dealing with this Russian republic. Quite a few international jihadi fighters took part in the first post-Soviet war in Chechnya; the numbers participating in the Second Chechen War were not necessarily much higher. However, this fact was not spoken about during the First Chechen War, and the representation of 'Chechnya' prevalent in 1996 made negotiation and peace possible. In contrast, articulations of the Chechen enemy in Russia and of the Russian enemy among the Chechen insurgents during the Second Chechen War militated against such a solution.

The counterfactual reasoning which guides this book is that, if representations of Self and Other on each side of the Russo-Chechen conflict had been different, then different policies and practices would have been possible. In many ways, the whole book is an exploration of how discursive practices matter and work in making war and violence acceptable. But I do not suggest that acceptance of the Second Chechen War was an inevitable outcome of attempts by the Russian leadership to make it so. Rather, I point out how representations negating the version of Chechnya as a terrorist threat could have emerged in Russia to make the war unacceptable. This is an important point to make, giv...