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VLADIMIR VELENGURIN/KP for TIME
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RAID: Chechen police on a house-to-house search |
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Profits of Doom |
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A Russian special ops commander says the Chechen war is really being fought for oil, arms and money |
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By YURI ZARAKHOVICH | Moscow |
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Posted Sunday, September 28, 2003; 12.48BST
Andrei Petrov (not this soldier's real name) knew he'd never have a better chance than this. It was a scorching August day in 1999 and Petrov — commander of a Russian special-ops team in Dagestan, a Russian republic bordering Chechnya — had Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev in his sights. Earlier that month, Basayev had led an invasion of Dagestan and called upon local separatists to help in the fight against Russia. With a simple squeeze of his finger, Petrov could take out Basayev, the Chechens' most effective guerrilla general and the man responsible for some of the conflict's worst terrorist attacks. But Petrov says he received the following order over his walkie-talkie: "Hold your fire."
"We just watched Basayev's long column of trucks and jeeps withdraw from Dagestan back to Chechnya under cover provided by our own attack helicopters," Petrov recalls. "We could have wiped him out then and there, but the bosses in Moscow wanted him alive. They want the war to go on indefinitely [because of] the money: millions made in oil, millions made in the arms trade, millions siphoned off from funds earmarked for reconstruction. That's why the war can never end."
Though a senior Russian Federal official dismisses Petrov's story as "improbable," other Chechnya vets have told similar tales, and in his book Forgotten Chechnya the late State Duma Deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin stated that the Basayev column was escorted out of Dagestan by Russian choppers. President Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 1999 vowing to quell the Chechen insurgency, says that the battle there is part of the global war against terrorism. But for many Moscow officials and Russian soldiers on the front lines, it has become a form of government-sanctioned organized crime.
"Extortion and looting in Chechnya are just the tip of the iceberg," says Alexei Mitrophanov, a Deputy in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. "We're talking big money, money that's shared all the way from the top down to mere troopers." Last May, General Victor Kazantsev, Putin's envoy to the Southern Federal District that includes Chechnya, said that $6 million earmarked for Chechnya had been siphoned off by officials in Moscow. According to Usman Masayev, deputy head of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration, only 20% of $148 million earmarked to reconstruct Chechnya last year made it to the republic.
The Chechen war is a deadly business, but according to confidential government reports, the Russian military estimates that 75% of Russian casualties are due to friendly fire. "Russian losses, allegedly caused by friendly fire, often result from showdowns between rival army and police forces," says Mitrophanov. They clash over the right to fleece the Chechens coming through lucrative checkpoints, or over "protection" rights for tank trucks smuggling oil across the Chechen border. Or, says Petrov, they just clash when too much vodka releases the traditional enmity between soldiers and cops. "Russian soldiers guard oil rigs that are run by the very Chechen warlords they're supposed to be fighting," Mitrophanov says. The payoff — up to $10,000 for a common riot police trooper serving a three-month-long stint — is too big to ignore for starving and ill-equipped conscripts who normally make $100 to $160 a month in Chechnya.
Other rackets popular with both the Russians and the pro-Moscow Chechen police force are kidnapping and looting. "The cops have a pattern," says Petrov. "They surround a village, and some mop it up while others loot houses, schools and mosques." The Russians also do a brisk trade as arms merchants, selling their own weapons to the Chechens. "The Chechens have state-of-the art, Russian-made weapons, including sharp shooters' rifles and automatic rifles that we don't have," Petrov says. "They even have choppers, now hidden in the mountains. Guess who sells them all that matériel."
The commanders who didn't let Petrov take out Basayev seem determined to prove him right when he agrees that a line spoken by the witches in Macbeth applies to Chechnya: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." With unlimited supplies of guns, money and hatred — but no rules — it could hardly be any other way.
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