Chechnya reborn: The Russians won the war, human rights the issue

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Now there’s a hero and villain called Ramzan A. Kadryov running things in Checnya. He’s a friend of Putin’s, a very hard case as an administrator, and something of a mixed blessing, according to the Chechens. Even his critics have a few good words for him, but suspicions are everywhere. The New York Times has attempted to wring some sense out of the situation.

Chechnya was a problem. The Chechens aren’t ethnic Russians, but Russian as a result of long campaigns by the Tsars. They fought a guerrilla war against the Russians for years. Modern Chechnya, as a republic, suffered from 90s Russian economics and the cookie cutter Islamic militancy which attempted to take over and create a separate state. The first Chechen war was a disaster. The Russians repeated Afghanistan. After a fairly unconvincing, expedient peace, the fighting flared up again. Terror attacks were made in Russia. Most famous were the attacks on the Moscow Theatre by the Black Widows, widows of Chechens killed in the endless bloodshed.

I saw Chechen teenagers interviewed in the early 2000s who were even then thoroughly sick of the whole thing. They were neither pro Russian nor impressed with the Chechen fighters. Chechnya could be the world’s first case of Terrorism Fatigue, and there’s no doubt they had a lot of reasons. Chechnya was almost entirely impoverished. Grozny was a collection of ruins. Life was almost impossibly difficult, and the most basic daily life was conducted more or less under fire or under threat of fire.

The fighting has died down, and the separatists haven’t managed much on a large scale. As a result, in less than two years, Grozny now looks like a modern city. Electricity and water are back, there’s even air conditioning sticking out of some of the windows, traffic is back on the roads, and a few modern vehicles.

Kadryov is largely credited, even by his critics, as the motive force behind this extraordinary recovery. He’s said to be tough on contractors, demanding his deadlines be met. Commerce is obviously healthy, and consumer goods are getting into the local markets. Areas outside Grozny are now seeing some benefits, too. The NYT article has various comments from Russians and Chechen alike who are all a bit stunned by the depth of the recovery.

Kadryov’s life story has a few things in common with Chechnya. His father was a president, who was assassinated three years ago. He’s a former rebel who switched sides. He is a Sufi Muslim. His paramilitary forces are accused of what are basically terror tactics. He is referred to by critics as an illiterate, which doesn’t quite gel with the fact that he has contractors functioning like human beings, or the speed with which a modern infrastructure has reappeared.

It needs to be remembered in assessing the relative merits of Kadryov that the Chechen war was fought with a mindlessness reminiscent of the Russian Front in World War Two. At one point, at the height of the fighting, Russian forces were simply flattening Grozny and other towns, and the Chechen separatists were fighting anyone or anything they considered to be an opponent with literally murderous tactics not far removed from the worst seen anywhere in the world. The result was that people had a pretty good chance of being killed by both sides.

As the New York Times article says, the war was won by extraordinary violence, followed by extraordinary investment. That’s brought a few problems with it, in that in modern Russia, property is king. People have been evicted, developers are moving in, and some of the accommodation people are finding themselves living in is to put it mildly theoretical rather than adequate.

Some good old Russian corruption has made an unwelcome appearance, are there are some significant complaints. Property disputes are common, with returning residents in Grozny claiming ownership of the same apartments. To give some idea of the destruction in Grozny, the city had 79,000 apartments before the war, and only 45,000 have been able to be restored. That gives some idea of the speed of the reconstruction, too.

Slum redevelopment has shunted the former residents to what appears to be an improvised shanty town. This quote sums up quite a bit about the reconstruction:

“In Grozny, a few buildings have been rebuilt on the outside only, and remain ruins inside or only partly finished — the result of what some residents said was construction fraud. The means by which the vast and almost instantaneous program of reconstruction has been underwritten has also not been clear.

Mr. Bakharchiyev, the deputy mayor, said roughly half of the reconstruction was paid for by the Akhmad Kadyrov Fund, named for Mr. Kadyrov’s father. The fund is not open to outside scrutiny; its holdings and financial sources are not publicly known.

Several Grozny residents, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety, said one financing source was extortion of contractors and government workers, who are required to donate. There is also, officials said, graft on a monumental scale.”

Sounds like the building industry anywhere on Earth, in some respects.

Glaringly obvious is the fact that a mangled republic, with not much going for it as an economic entity, has returned from being a disaster area to a place where people can live. That takes money, competence, and some fairly strenuous string pulling up the line to Moscow level. Some of those strings, in Russia, have others trying to pull them too, so it’s no mean achievement.

However, for all that, there is a place called Grozny again, not a graveyard of the same name.

Just for the record, here's a search of images of Grozny I did: the appropriate caption would be "Pictures can't really paint a thousand words, and in some cases, they probably shouldn't". It's a bit like Dali running amok with an army. There's an aerial black and white of Grozny before and after, on the first page. The left hand side of the main road has been obliterated. It looks like the city's been mown. Artillery and air strikes at work.