Chechnya: Welcome to POST-MORERN warfare. from CNN, October 29, 2000

By TIME Moscow burea chief Paul Quinn Judge in Itum Kale, on Chechnya's southern border with Georgia.

The army truck with a menacingly large machine gun mounted on its back lurched to a stop at the edge of the shattered village. There was a security alert on, and it was supposed to escort visitors through narrow mountain passes to safer territory.

Russian military authorities say more than 2,700 soldiers have died -- observers say the true figure could be double.

A soldier plunged his arm deep into the fuel tank. It came out dry. The colonel in charge was fatalistic: "If we kept gas in the tank," he explained, "our soldiers would steal it." Meanwhile on the back of the truck soldiers discussed how to work the gun -- "Does this thing have a safety?" Their radio call-sign said it all: "Cock-up."

Military operations in Chechnya began a year ago with grim efficiency. Artillery and aircraft smashed everything in their path, and generals promised -- at times declared -- an early victory.

Grozny, a city with a peacetime population about equal to Atlanta's, was leveled. Terrorized by the blitzkrieg and exhausted by four years under a secessionist government that had surrendered power to bandits and kidnappers, many Chechens were ready to shelve dreams of independence.

Now, however, the situation is sunk in a vicious stalemate. Russia has squandered its chances. Atrocities, pillage and arbitrary arrest reinforce the traditional image of Russians as occupiers. Moscow has failed to create a new political infrastructure in Chechnya, and its local appointees have little popular support.

Russian military authorities admit to over 2,700 soldiers killed in action, though many independent observers suspect the true figure is double that. Even during quiet periods, an average of three to four soldiers die every day. There are no authoritative figures for civilian dead.

Russian troops control population centres during daylight and man 400 fortified checkpoints along the main roads. But they cannot break the back of the resistance in the countryside, where guerrillas move freely in both plains and mountains. Their enemy, however, has not been able to launch the dramatic, demoralizing raids on big towns that could swing Russian public opinion behind a negotiated settlement. The result is a world of shadows.

In a village officially said to be firmly under Russian control, a Muslim cleric introduces a visitor to local guerrillas. In Gudermes, Chechnya's administrative capital, pro-Russian officials live as if in hiding, rarely without sidearms even at home. Their nervousness is well-founded: Guerrillas use the town for rest breaks and give interviews a few minutes from the city centre.

The present campaign is not a repeat of the war of 1994-96, when the Russian army was destroyed by an ad-hoc group of desperately brave civilians. This is a post-modern war, pitiless and cynical, without heroes, battle lines, allegiances or ideals. Medieval barbarism on both sides is combined with advanced technology, from lasers to computers, video-cameras and satellite phones. It is probably the first conflict where a guerrilla martyr for the faith was a correspondent killed while reporting for the mujahideen website, Kavkaz.org. And it is not a people's war. Chechens who fought the last time have stayed neutral, disillusioned by the arrogance and corruption of resistance leaders turned mobsters.

Aslan Maskhadov, president of Chechnya and hero of the first war and the country's hopelessly incompetent president afterwards, is now a figurehead. The Russians' main adversaries identify themselves with the fundamentalist Wahhabi Islamic movement. Fanatical, ruthless and well-equipped, they care little for public opinion, either domestic or foreign.

In the last war, guerrillas welcomed foreign journalists; this time they are openly anti-Western. They are equally scornful of their own people's feelings. Talking casually a hundred yards or so from a Russian checkpoint, an articulate young mujahideen commander laid out his movement's aims: The creation of an Islamic state composed of Chechnya and its two neighbours, Dagestan and Ingushetia -- to be headed by Khattab, an Arab veteran of Afghanistan who is often described as an associate of international terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Most Chechens bitterly dislike the Wahhabis' rigid orthodoxy and show no interest in being ruled by a foreigner. The commander dismissed such quibbles. "They will understand when they fully embrace Islam," he explained. And, while Moscow indignantly though unconvincingly rejects atrocity allegations, the mujahideen's website publishes theological justifications for the execution of prisoners, along with grainy video film of this happening.

Such behaviour should give Moscow an immense political and strategic advantage. It does not. The Russians are acting true to form, said a senior Chechen official in the Moscow-appointed administration: "Like an occupying army, looting, killing and carrying out punitive operations." To call the Chechens who work for the Russian administration pro-Moscow is misleading. They want to defeat the guerrillas, and they want their cut of the war-profits -- reconstruction aid, oil or other more sinister commerce. But they, too, ultimately want the Russians out. Chechens of all political stripes believe that Russia intervened last year for purely selfish motives. "Russia is famous for its contract killings," Supyan Taramov remarked wryly, "but Chechnya is a contract war." Taramov, the unofficial boss of the Vedeno district, believes the war was launched to ensure that Vladimir Putin was elected president. Now, he says, the Kremlin is happy to let it drag on as long as it serves their interests. Many so-called pro-Russian Chechens share his opinion -- he is only rare because he is willing to be quoted by name. Until recently, Vedeno was the stronghold of Shamil Basayev, one of the most successful Chechen field commanders during the 1994-96 war, and Khattab, his Arab comrade in arms. After the Russians invaded in late 1999, Taramov came back home, bought arms, organized a militia and negotiated Basayev's withdrawal -- the only way, both men realized, to stop the Russian forces from levelling the town,

Before they left, Basayev and Khattab an Arab veteran of Afghanistan cached weapons and even buried two armoured personnel carriers, one of them fully armed, in the centre of the town. Russian forces are still looking for a third armoured car that they suspect is hidden somewhere nearby, but get little help from the local inhabitants. A web of silence still protects the guerrillas.

Taramov argued forcefully, and for a while successfully, that the only way to break the guerilla hold on Vedeno was to let Chechens handle security. He persuaded the Russian high command to turn his militia into a Chechen unit of the Russian army -- a 738-strong force commanded by a man who had sworn a blood feud with Basayev and officered by former lieutenants of both Basayev and Khattab. Local Russian commanders did not trust the unit, though, while Taramov's men openly denounced Russian abuses like the indiscriminate shelling of villages. As Aslan, a company commander, put it, Russian troops "get drunk as pigs, lob out a few shells, claim combat pay and get drunk again." The Chechen battalion was excluded from combat operations, and its salaries were delayed. In frustration Taramov disbanded the unit in late September.

Fake combat pay is just one of the many scams in this deeply corrupt war. Sworn enemies -- guerrilla commanders on one side, Russian-appointed officials on the other -- collaborate to make big money from hostage deals. Senior Chechen and Russian officials make small fortunes from the oil wells that dot Chechnya -- one district chief in northern Chechnya and the local Russian military commander make at least $500 a day each from the trade, according to colleagues of Shamil Basayev, one of the most successful Chechen field commanders during the 1994-96 war.

Front-line Russian officers sell weapons to locals, fully aware that these will be turned against their own men; paramilitary police let guerrillas buy their way through check-points -- 500 rubles a car, according to Chechen officials and Russian soldiers.

But the most pernicious -- and politically devastating for Moscow -- is looting. The main road south through the mountains looks like something from World War II -- one shattered village after another. But everywhere local officials -- Russian appointees like Elbek Usuyev, a lieutenant colonel in the Russian police and the head of Itum-Kale -- say the same thing. Their villages were destroyed only after guerrillas pulled out. First the Russians soldiers shelled the empty settlement for a couple of days, earning risk-free combat pay. Then they looted it.

Behaviour like this has led many Chechens to put their dream of independence on hold, but not renounce it. Back in Vedeno, a vigorous, white-bearded Chechen named Aslanbek is slowly nursing back to health his son, who suffered massive injuries in the first war. Basayev, Maskhadov and other leaders, Aslanbek says contemptuously, have betrayed their own fighters and their ideals. He points to his grandchildren playing on the family bunker. "This generation will lead us to freedom," he said. It was a statement, not a prediction.

Salud y Paz,

Charlie N.