Chechnya: Russian troops out!
10 September 2004

The massacre of more than 300-400 hostages in Beslan – half of them young children – apparently by Chechen fighters is a repugnant act and must be totally and unequivocally condemned.

As a tactic of war such actions are indefensible. Firstly, because the of ordinary Ossetian or Russian population is not to blame for this oppression and must be won over to the side of the Chechens if the Russian government is to be undermined in its brutal war to forcibly retain the oil and gas rich country within the Russian Federation.

Secondly, because such barbarous acts seem to confirm the racist propaganda of Putin, isolate the Chechens even more and open them up to massive reprisals, which on past evidence, will exceed in cruelty and heartlessness even the slaughter in Beslan.

Of course, Putin is a vile hypocrite with many times more blood on his hands than the Chechen guerillas. George Bush and Jack Straw who rushed to declare their support for Putin themselves have the blood of thousands of Iraqi children on their hands. Straw moreover insisted that no questions relating to Russia&Mac226;s occupation of Chechnya and to its huge scale war crimes and human rights violations should be asked.

Only the "absolute evil" of the terrorists should be denounced and he roundly condemned the hapless EU spokesperson who dared to mention the Chechen war as being in some way connected to the Beslan massacre. As with Iraq, Straw is demanding that people should not think &Mac247; should not ask why it is that three years of the war on terrorism has led to more and more individual terrorism and the wholesale variety dished out by himself, Blair and Bush.

According to UNICEF, between 1 May 2003, the supposed end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, and mid-July of the same year, more than 1000 Iraqi children were injured by "bomblets", the payloads of US cluster bombs, which act as anti-personnel mines if they fail to explode on impact. Let us see if Straw applies the same moral criteria here. In which case his masters, Bush and Blair and himself are simply evil baby killers too. Except they do it on a far bigger scale and motivated not by revenge or despair but the sordid search for profits for big oil and global hegemony..

In Chechnya the reason for the cruelty o f such tactics is the systematic, comprehensive genocidal acts of Russian imperialism against the Chechen people over the last ten years. Chechnya in the mid-1990s had around one million people. Since the first Chechen war (1994-96), the Russian army has slaughtered from 80,000 to 100,000 Chechens &Mac246; that is some 10 per cent of the total population! 200,000 have been driven out of their homes and a further 200,000 fled abroad. Innumerable people have suffered terrible injuries and mutilation. Yet the Chechens drove out Russian occupiers at the end of the first war.

Given the proven lying and cover-ups of the Russian government throughout the hostage taking, it is not even clear what or who actually triggered the school holocaust. Past experience would not lead one to easily exonerate the Russian government. During the hostage taking in Budyonnovsk in 1995, Russian soldiers shot indiscriminately into the crowd. In 1996 in Pervomayskoye, the Russian special units launched devastating rockets against the Chechen fighters and their hostages, reducing the entire village to rubble.

And in October 2002 in at the Moscow theatre siege, Russian forces gassed to death 129 of the hostages as well as executing in cold blood 41 of the, by then totally helpless, hostage takers.

Putin rules by posing as the hard fisted ruler who will never allow the Russian Federation to disintegrate, as Gorbachev allowed the USSR to do. He has refused to negotiate with even the more moderate, elected Chechen nationalist leaders like president Aslan Maskhadov, who he insists is a terrorist, much as Ariel Sharon insists Yasser Arafat is.

Instead he has imposed puppet regimes, "elected" by rigged elections. Himself a former KGB nonentity, he came to power at the invitation and after the resignation the senile Boris Yeltsin, when the latter looked certain of losing the upcoming elections to the Communist Party candidate Gennadi Zyuganov. But without "the Chechen question " it is not certain he would ever have been elected.

In the second Chechen war, official Russian estimates claim that more than 10,000 "terrorists" have been killed. But independent commentators estimate that tens of thousands have perished&Mac246; mainly civilians&Mac246; and the figures may be even higher than that. Many of them have been children far, far more in number than the little victims of Beslan. But, their slaughter their parent&Mac226;s agony was not televised or broadcast to millions around the world. Nor did it attract from the US president or the British prime minister either statements of sympathy for the victims or condemnation for the perpetrators.

The capital of Chechnya, Grozny, is today like a ghost town &Mac246; hardly a building that has not been destroyed or seriously damaged. Many villages, accused of sheltering fighters have been erased from the map by the occupying army, especially by the "Kontraktni" mercenary killers. Add to this the destruction of the entire Chechen economy and infrastructure and one can understand the despair that leads actions to Beslan. As one hostage taker told a hostage who escaped "Russsian soldiers come to Chechnya and kill our children so we come here and kill yours."

Those ultimately responsible for the tragedy unfolding in the Caucasus are not to be found hiding in caves in the Chechen mountains, but rather in the in the Moscow Kremlin. And their conscious aiders and abettors are to be found in the White House and in Downing Street. Why? Because they want Putin on their side in their plans for world domination. To get his aid or at least his silence, in the Middle east and Central Asia, they throw him their own silent complicity in the rape of Chechnya.

The demands of the hostage takers obscured by both the Russian and the entire world media were not outrageous. They were as simple as they were just: "release of the Chechen resistance fighters in Russian prison camps and withdrawal of the Russian army of occupation from Chechnya".

Democrats, let alone socialists should support these demands, whilst opposing totally the measures taken to gain them in Beslan. Of course we do not preach to the Chechen people the impermissibility of using force, or of fighting a war of national liberation. On the contrary, we support this war. And here very much criticism is necessary in the deed. We, as Marxists know from historical experience that either an oppressed class or an suppressed people can shake off its rulers&Mac226; tyranny only by force.

In situations as well as in Palestine, Iraq or in Chechnya we believe armed resistance to be a legitimate and appropriate means given the actions of the oppressors.

However, it is just because we unconditionally support the struggle for Chechen freedom that we criticise such actions as the hostage-taking in Beslan. They are grist to the mill of the reactionary Putin regime, to Bush and Blair and the whole gang of "warriors against terrorism".

The deeply reactionary effects of the hostage drama appeared last week when trade unions participated in 130,000 strong demonstration in Moscow under slogans such as : "Russia against the terror", "condemn the non-humans", "with terrorists only negotiate with bullets ". This is reactionary chauvinism in spite of trade union participation, in spite of the understandable pain and horror of the events, because it places the Russian workers on the side of the national oppressors. This is neither in the interests of the Russian workers nor the people of Chechnya. It is why the mass hostage taking tactics are a disaster.

Chechens should not despair of ordinary Russians. The response of the Spanish workers, youth, indeed the mass or ordinary people to the bombing in Madrid in March this year was to put the blame on their own government, to realise that the main figure responsible was at home, the warmonger José Maria Aznar.

Reactionary Islamism offers the Chechen people no perspective beyond prolonged suffering. Only an alliance of the peoples of the Caucasus, an alliance with the Russian workers can offer one, and on the basis of the overcoming of the capitalist plunder and market chaos, find an exit out of the present misery.

• Islamist terror tactics are not the way!
• Solidarity with the armed struggle to drive out the occupiers!
• All Russian troops out of Chechnya now! Freedom for Chechnya!
• Solidarity with the soldiers and mothers' committees that support Russian deserters!
• For a voluntary socialist federation of the peoples of the Caucasus!
• Down with Putin and capitalism in Russia