Editorial: "A Blind Eye on Chechnya"

The Boston Globe, 4/19/03

In Chechnya, Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been getting away with murder. And ethnic cleansing. And Kidnapping rackets run by Russian officers and criminal gangs. Under the cover of what Putin calls his contribution to the war against terrorism, the Kremlin has killed or made refugees of about half of Chechnya's 1996 population of 1 million people.

The Bush administration's passivity in the face of this catastrophe has been shameful. There was hardly a murmur of complaint when the Kremlin staged a sham referendum in Chechnya on March 23, after which it claimed that Russia's local loyalists had received more votes than there are voters left in Chechnya.

Voters were intimidated and bribed into voting the right way. Putin's aim in staging the referendum was to pretend that the balloting was a valid local election within the Russian Federation; that it confirmed Chechens loyal to the Kremlin as legitimate leaders of the republic; that it showed that Chechens did not really want the independence for which they have fought for 300 years; and that the Chechen government of Prime Minister Aslan Maskhadov, elected in January 1997 under the scrutiny of monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, should no longer receive international recognition.

As Illyas Akmadoc, foreign minister of the Chechen government elected in 1997, said during a visit to the Globe Thursday, Russia's imposition of last month's referendum "was like making people in the Warsaw ghetto vote for the Third Reich."

Neither the phoniness of the March referendum nor the genocidal crimes the Kremlin has committed in Chechnya are a secret. Yet this past Wednesday the UN High Commission for Human Rights, stocked as it is with human rights violators, failed to pass a resolution sponsored by the European Union that would have deplored systematic human rights abuses in Chechnya and called upon Russia to take "all necessary steps" to conduct or permit thorough and rapid investigations of abuses such as kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial executions.

The Bush administration, appearing to play geopolitics with a flagrant Russian assault on human rights, refused to cosponsor the resolution. Fortunately, the administration did decide at the last minute to vote for the EU's draft. For President Bush to accept Putin's pretense that the Kremlin's ethnic cleansing of Chechnya is really a war against terrorism is to give a green light to crimes against humanity. As a director of the Russian human rights group Memorial, Eliza Moussaeva, said to the Glove this week, "Russia wants to look like a democratic state, but what is going on there can be called fascism."

It is time for Bush to take another look into Putin's soul and tell him that he cannot pass for a democratic leader if he does not permit political negotiations to end his dirty war in Chechnya.