Chechnya in the Heart of Europe

From Olivier Dupuis:

Chechnya in the heart of Europe

Diritto e Libertà, July-September 2004

A cloak of silence covers the "Chechen question": the tens of thousands of deaths ignored, the widespread use of torture, the role of the Russian state and of its "services" in the mysterious and bloody explosions and in numerous kidnappings, the denial of justice to victims who are juridically citizens of a member state of the Council of Europe; the Russian media commandeered by the state, and the Western media (with rare exceptions) that spread the news of Mr Putin's so-called "anti-terrorist crusade".

There is another silence, however, which is even stranger: the silence about the role of Europe, of its institutions and its citizens, about what it could and should do within frontiers that it tries hard to hide. For the extermination of the Chechen people, the slow genocide of this small population, the endless string of war crimes and crimes against humanity is taking place here, in Europe. In this geographical and historical Europe, in this political and juridical Europe that should be embodied in the Council of Europe and in the European Court for Human Rights, in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and in the Partnership and Cooperation agreement that ties the Russian Federation to the European Union.

Can this Europe, which aims to be political, allow a genocide to take place within its borders? Can it allow a small population of less than one million people to continue to be the victim of the imperial nostalgia of one side, the ambitions and calculations of the other side, of laisser-faire and spiraling horror?

Can this Europe return - does it want to return - to the head-in-the-sand policy it adopted towards post-Tito Yugoslavia? A policy that led to over 250,000 deaths, an endless list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, destruction unprecedented in Europe since the end of the Second World War, huge financial costs for the international community (and the end is still nowhere in sight) and, last but not least, a lasting return to the worst nationalist sentiments in wide sectors of these convalescent societies.

Would it not be better for Europe to look to the example of the recent enlargement of the European Union to eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe? For this is a policy, no more and no less: who, in fact, could rule out the possibility that without the clear prospect of membership of the European Union - with precise duties and a precise timetable - one or other of these countries would have yielded, along the lines of the Belarus of the sinister Lukachenko, to the sirens of authoritarianism? This successful policy is a policy of the European Union, even though the European Union sometimes gives the impression that it wants to justify or minimize its importance.

In the light of these two experiences, the Yugoslavian catastrophe and the success of enlargement, the European Union should immediately set up negotiations with countries that are still not members. As well as the enlargement to Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia scheduled for 2007 or 2009, it is absolutely necessary to extend the process, without further delay, to the other Balkan countries - Serbia-Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo - the countries of the Caucasus, Georgia (which is about to present a formal application for membership), Azerbaijan and Armenia, Turkey - if only to confirm the universality of the values underlying the European project - Israel - so that a democracy under threat can flourish again in a climate of security and so that those Palestinians who dream of a democratic Palestine can finally govern their own country - and also Ukraine and Moldavia, two countries we seem to want to condemn to an endless struggle against the internal and external demons of the return to the past, and Belarus (without Lukachenko).

We can already imagine the outcry: this new enlargement would end up digging the grave of the political Europe. It is a well-known refrain, sung every time the Union has been enlarged. And belied every time by the facts. Because what has actually happened is the exact opposite. The six-member Europe was more or less immobile. It was the prospect of the membership of Great Britain that kick-started it (the European Monetary System, the first direct election of the European Parliament). As for Spain, Greece and Portugal, their membership not only confirmed their return to democracy but was also accompanied by the relaunch of the European construction (the Single Act: the launch of the single market of people, goods, services and capital), while the enlargement from 12 to 15 members with the arrival of Sweden, Finland and Austria served to give direction to the Treaty of Maastricht (the launch of the single currency, the first steps towards common internal and juridical policy, the first outline of a common foreign policy). With respect to the countries of Central Europe, there is no doubt that the prospect of membership was a decisive factor in their return to democracy and in the forthcoming deepening of the Union (the Constitution). It is not difficult, moreover, to imagine that the contribution of the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians and Baltic peoples will be far from marginal with regard to one of the central questions for the future of the Union, that of its relations with its great neighbour to the East: the Russian Federation.

In truth, each enlargement of the Union has been accompanied by its deepening. At the cost of new contradictions, true, and often of awkward compromises. But the true demons against which it has found itself having to struggle have lain not so much in one or other of the new members, the so-called Trojan horses of dissolution, as in the old internal demons of the imperial nostalgia or the grandeur of "old" member states.

As for the argument about the so-called critical mass beyond which the Union would inevitably implode or become diluted in a vast, formless single market, it is worth recalling that the 25-member Union has 450 million inhabitants, while with 40 or 42 members the total would be only slightly over 600 million. Not exactly a radical change. All the more so since the process would have to unfold by stages: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024 . What, then, are we to say about India, a democratic continent-country faced with problems far more serious than our own! This country, which has just given us another great lesson in democracy, has a total of no less than 1.1 billion inhabitants. Almost twice as many as a European Union enlarged to the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Moldavia and Israel!

Should we be afraid of these 150 million extra European citizens, or of those economists who almost unanimously warn of a serious lack of manpower in the near future, the worst nightmare for those in charge of pension funds, for many European businesses and institutions. Is the aim of the European Union to encourage illegal immigration, with the consequent increase in crime, or to forecast and manage the changes in our societies?

Finally, should we perhaps plan for the membership of the Russian Federation? The reply lies first of all with Russia, undoubtedly the only European country with a critical mass sufficient to make this choice an option rather than a necessity. But there is nothing against it in principle. Except the Russia we know today: full of imperial nostalgia, incapable of closing the chapter of colonialism except by returning to the old methods of cooption-corruption of the elites, destabilization or, as in Chechnya, weapons, fire, blood and destruction.

Russia is clearly a fundamental question for the European Union. It is its great neighbour. It has long been a pillar of European culture and history. It is still a military power. It is a potential market of 145 million consumers for European businesses. It is one of the Union's most important suppliers of gas and oil. But this market, this gas and this oil are not only positive factors. Because of them, and despite its rhetoric, the Union turns a blind eye to serious issues such as the Kremlin's control over the media and the judicial system, the physical elimination or imprisonment of awkward personalities - human rights campaigners, environmentalists, journalists, businessmen, political rivals, etc. - and the extermination of the Chechen people. While as a result of the so-called strategic partnership with Russia in the sphere of oil and gas supply, the European Union convinces itself that it has solved the problem of diversification of its energy supply, postponing indefinitely the energy revolution that the finite nature of hydrocarbon resources, and in the meantime their spiraling prices and their devastating effects on the environment, should impose as a major priority.

The questions of the extermination of the Chechen people and of the authoritarian tendencies present in Russia alone should suffice to demonstrate the fact that the European Union should immediately establish a very different kind of strategic partnership with the Russian Federation. A partnership based on generosity and intransigence. As far as generosity is concerned, with the opening of the Union's frontiers to all Russian citizens (and an end to the interminable bureaucratic procedures whose only effect is to favour the mafias and to line the wallets of corrupt European officials); the rapid creation of a EU-Russia customs union; and support for investments by European businesses in Russia. From the point of view of intransigence: the demand for a speedy reform of the judicial system and of the Russian media, and - by far the main priority - the opening, under the aegis of the United Nations, of political negotiations with the Chechen resistance.

Because, as the Russian authorities declare, and as Mr Putin has stated to The Financial Times, it is not the final status of Chechnya that matters. How could it be otherwise? Chechnya represents less than 1% of the Russian population, and its territory covers less than 0.1% of the territory of the Russian Federation. Its oil constitutes less than 1% of Russian oil. And as for the risk of a "domino effect", it has been no more than a product of fantasy ever since the Tatars of Tatarstan, who together with the Chechens had the strongest claims to independence, came to an agreement with the Russian government.

According to Mr Putin, the Chechen question is above all a problem of internal security, that is the need to neutralize any possibility of the emergence of hotbeds of instability on the Russian borders, a sanctuary from which terrorist groups could launch operations against Russia; if this is the case, then there is only one question to resolve: to create the conditions in Chechnya that would allow democracy, the rule of law and freedom to flourish.

Exactly what the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov proposes when he calls for the establishment of an interim United Nations administration in Chechnya. A plan which has been backed by hundreds of parliamentarians, numerous international personalities, and around 30,000 citizens from over 100 countries.

The establishment of an international administration as a stage in the transition towards Chechnya's membership of the European Union could and should form the avante-poste of the indispensable struggle for a new Europe, wider and deeper, of a Europe that sees itself in a new process of enlargement and also of deepening, as well as and better than the draft Constitution drawn up by the Convention.

For it is clearly not the membership of Turkey, or of the Ukraine, or of all the other European countries, forcibly held back at the gates of the Union, let alone the membership of a country of 1,000,000 people and 10,000 square kilometers like Chechnya, that would threaten the deepening of the European Union. On the contrary. As always, the threat comes from those states that are incapable of adapting to the times, still beset by illusions of empire or of grandeur, which project their fading dreams onto the European Union, who see the Union as a surrogate of their lost "power". It is also, though we hear much less about it, the special interest of the approximately 100,000 people who populate the Foreign Ministries of the 25 member countries. A corporation whose current power derives largely precisely from the process of European integration, thanks to which it has managed, as competences were gradually transferred from the member states to the community institutions, to secure competences in almost all the fields of political, social and economic life.

The membership of all these countries is not, it must be understood, a panacea to solve a multitude of very different and very serious problems. It is, however, an absolute necessity to guarantee the development of democracy in these countries, their security, in other words their survival, and the development of democracy in Russia, and also to ensure that the European Union embodies the values and the interests it claims to defend and that the member states of the Union finally decide to throw away the vain frills of a sovereignty that now has no object, thus laying the foundations for the creation of a common foreign policy.

Europe, yet again, is at a crossroads. Without the force of the pictures of the Berlin Wall as it was finally collapsing, without the joy and the hope that this historic event inspired in those who were freed and in those who had too often left them to their own destiny, we will have to find the strength and the means for a great mobilization to ensure that these new partnerships become the imposing new "building site" of a European Union in which enlargement and deepening can once again complete and reinforce each other.

Who was politically irresponsible in the past? Jacques Delors who, as Slovenia was declaring its independence, continued to state before the European Parliament that the disintegration of Yugoslavia would not be allowed, or Marco Pannella and the Radicals, who had been calling from as early as 1983 for Yugoslavia to join the European Community?

Who is politically irresponsible now? Those who, on the subject of Chechnya, confuse integrality and territorial integrity, who spew out the ready-to-use formulas they had already used at the time of the war in Yugoslavia, including the particularly abject appeal to the territorial integrity of Russia, when the integrity of Russia and of the Chechen people, of the individual members of this people, of its culture, its history, and its territory, have been violated every day for over ten years now? Or those who want to make the Union and its enlargement to Chechnya the means and the objective to save a people, to save thousands of lives, and to safeguard the soul of Russia and that of the European Union?



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Olivier Dupuis
Tel. +32-476-21.55.72