Media Portrayals of the Russian-Chechen Conflict

Representations of Political Violence and Identity - a Discourse Analysis

Anja Westberg Supervisor: Maja Povrzanovic Frykman Malmö University Total words: 20 197 Peace and Conflict Studies 91-120 Autumn 2009

Abstract

The thesis aims to examine discourses about internal and “ethnic” violent conflicts as seen in media representations of the Russian-Chechen conflict. Employing the method of discourse analysis, the study analyses news coverage of the two post-Soviet wars in between 1995 and 2009. The theoretical approach is supported by the work of political scientist Michael Evangelista (2002) as well as anthropologists Valery Tishkov (2004) and Jakob Rigi (2007).

The empirical material consists primarily of a selection of articles published by CNN and two Swedish dailies; Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet . The thesis argues that this material tends to rely on a rather simplistic portrayal of the parties in the conflict. Violent responses to the Russian troops are frequently represented as a “collective resistance” from a unified group with shared aspirations, an image which stand in contrast to stories from the ground. Representations of varies between the image of “rebels” and “victims”, but this group is exclusively portrayed as an ethnic group which historically has persisted as culturally different from the rest of the population in . Such images contribute to portray Chechens’ drive for as the primary cause for the wars, which in turn downplays the role of Chechen leaders throughout the conflict. The thesis suggests that the news coverage is embedded in dominant discourses about identity formation and war which shape the selective process of storytelling in the media. The thesis concludes that discourses which are produced during violent conflict should not be taken as evidence for the true nature of difference and antagonism between groups.

Keywords: Chechnya, internal conflict, political violence, identity, discourse analysis

Sammanfattning

Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka diskurser om interna och ”etniska” konflikter som återfinns i representationer av den rysk-tjetjenska konflikten i media. Med diskursanalys som metod analyseras nyhetsrapportering av de två post-sovjetiska krigen i Tjetjenien mellan 1995 och 2009. Uppsatsens teoretiska utgångspunkt baseras på studier av statsvetaren Michael Evangelista (2002) samt antropologerna Valery Tishkov (2004) och Jakob Rigi (2007).

Det empiriska materialet består framförallt av ett urval artiklar publicerade av CNN samt två svenska dagstidningar, Dagens Nyheter och Svenska Dagbladet . Uppsatsen argumenterar för att detta material tenderar att presentera en förenklad bild av konfliktens parter. De väpnade motattackerna mot de ryska trupperna porträtteras som ett kollektivt motstånd från en enad etnisk grupp med gemensamma mål, en bild som ofta står i kontrast till berättelser från ”marken”. Representationer av tjetjener varierar mellan bilden av ”rebeller” och ”offer”, men gruppen beskrivs uteslutande som en etnisk grupp som historiskt har bestått som kulturellt skilda från resten av den ryska befolkningen. Dessa skildringar bidrar till att tjetjeners strävan efter självständighet tolkas som den främsta förklaringen till krigen, vilket tonar ner de tjetjenska ledarnas roll i konflikten. Uppsatsen menar att nyhetsrapporteringen ger uttryck för mer dominanta diskurser om identitetsskapande och krig vilka formar historieberättandet i media. Uppsatsen argumenterar för att diskurser som produceras under väpnade konflikter inte ska tolkas som bevis för till synes naturliga skillnader och antagonism mellan olika grupper.

Nyckelord: Tjetjenien, intern konflikt, politiskt våld, identitet, diskursanalys

Contents

1.Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Background and research problem ...... 2 1.2 Purpose and research questions ...... 3 1.3 Disposition ...... 4

2. Methodological framework 5 2.1 Introduction ...... 5 2.2 The object of study in discourse analysis ...... 6 2.3 Defining discourse ...... 6 2.4 The contribution of discourse analysis to social sciences ...... 7 2.5 Empirical material ...... 8 2.6 Source critical analysis ...... 9

3. Background: 15 years of violence in Chechnya 12 3.1 The Soviet heritage ...... 13 3.2 The “Chechen revolution” ...... 13 3.3 The first war ...... 15 3.4 The interwar years ...... 15 3.5 The second war and current conflict ...... 17

4. Theoretical framework 19 4.1 General theories about “ethnic conflicts” ...... 19 4.2 Scholarly accounts of the Russian-Chechen conflict ...... 21 4.2.1 State centralization and the role of leaders ...... 21 4.2.2 Why violence? Accounts of the escalation to war in Chechnya ...... 24 4.3 Identity and violence – an anthropological perspective ...... 26 4.4 Analytical categories in the study of conflict and violence ...... 28 4.4.1 The category of ...... 29 4.5 Concluding remarks ...... 31

5. Analysis:Representations of the Russian-Chechen conflict in the empirical material 32 5.1 Cause and effect: The origin of the Russian-Chechen conflict ...... 32 5.1.2 The collapse of the – a “Pandora’s box” for violent conflict? ...... 32 5.1.3 Ethnicity as a factor in the conflict ...... 37 5.1.4 Independence and “Chechen resistance” ...... 39 5.2 Representations of violence: reasons and responsibilities ...... 44 5.2.1 “Collective suffering” as a motivator for violence ...... 44 5.2.2 Political agency and the role of leaders ...... 49 5.3 Ethnicity and war ...... 53 5.3.1 Representations of “Chechens” as an ethnic group ...... 53 5.3.2 The basis for Chechen independence from Russia ...... 57

6. Conclusion ...... 60 6.1 Research questions ...... 60 6.2 Concluding remarks on the findings ...... 65

List of references ...... 67 Appendix 1: Maps ...... 70 Appendix 2: Selection of articles from the empirical material ...... 71

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1. Introduction

The topic of this thesis covers the two wars in Chechnya, the first one that took place between

1994 and 1996, and the second which started in 1999 and officially came to an end in April

2009. In recent years Russia’s second military campaign in Chechnya has also been widely referred to as the “war in the northern ”, which in turn was named as an “anti- terrorist operation” by the Russian government after the September 11 events. The wars in

Chechnya can be, and certainly have been, framed in a variety of different ways. Within the international academic community, the most frequently used theoretical categories are civil or internal war, secessionist or separatist war, and also ethnic or ethno-political war. In political, popular and media discourses, categories such as anti-terror war , imperial war and liberation war are also frequently used, depending on the political standpoint of the commentator. The wide range of labels describing the wars also reflects the intensity of debate on what has actually happened during the war times. In fact, one could ascertain that the violence taking place in Chechnya and its neighboring regions during the past 15 years has created a parallel conflict over contesting views about the true nature of these wars.

In the midst of this “war on words” is the population of Chechnya that has been subjected to extreme violence for periods of time. The experiences of violence among civilians in

Chechnya include not only the direct violence in the form of indiscriminate air strikes and fire attacks, but also the indirect 1 violence of living in fear and coping with the hardship of everyday life in a war-torn society. Whatever the reasons, purposes, intentions and responsibilities for the wars, the overwhelming result in tens of thousands of dead and wounded is something that almost everyone can agree on. This thesis is not, however, primarily concerned with determining the question of guilt or innocence. Rather, the purpose

1 The concepts of direct and indirect violence are widely used in the field of peace and conflict studies, but were originally developed by peace researcher Johan Galtung (1969) 2 is to delineate and explain the discussions on these issues, as well as the various explanations for the wars in academic and journalistic writing. Therefore, the main focus of this thesis will lie on the possibility of understanding different interpretations of the Russian-Chechen conflict as discursive knowledge.

1.1 Background and research problem

In the large majority of the political science literature on internal conflict, causes and possible solutions are in focus. In one of my earlier theses in Peace and Conflict Studies at Malmö

University, dealing with academic and media accounts of the wars in former Yugoslavia, I made a call for increased emphasis on the transformative character of violent conflicts

(Westberg, 2008). I argued that Swedish mass media produced simplified representations of these wars, which reinforced primordialist ideas of ancient “ethnic hatred” between various ethnic groups in the Western Balkans. These accounts, which to some extent were also found in academic literature, consequently ignored stories that refuted this dominant theory about ethnicity being the cause of the violent conflict. Furthermore, I had observed that many internal wars, including those in former Yugoslavia, were categorized primarily as “ethnic wars”. The thesis suggested that the often indiscriminate use of this category resulted in a discursive knowledge, or “truth”, about the nature of these conflicts which consistently failed to explain what was actually happening on the ground. In my study, one common feature of both news articles and political science literature was a tendency to treat ethnic groups as clear-cut parties to the conflict, and ethnic groups were often represented as having one common position towards their “enemies”. In this dominant discourse on “ethnic wars”, ethnicity is itself posing a latent or manifest threat to peace within sovereign states.

In my effort to deconstruct discourses about such wars, I have taken a particular interest in anthropological studies on political violence, nationalism and ethnicity. They have 3 contributed considerably to the understanding of social identification in the context of violent conflicts in the post- era. Reviewing the anthropology of political violence, Kay B.

Warren argues that “when we need to interpret wars in terms of culture and change, the traditional political science accounts on macro-level become inadequate” (Warren, 1997: 1).

In this thesis, my interest in discourses about ethnicity in the context of violent conflicts focuses on the Russian-Chechen conflict, since this conflict is popularly referred to as an

“”. This categorization implies that this conflict is actually one between two distinct ethnic groups, and Chechens, and that the wars have in fact been violent

“clashes” between these groups, resulting from conflicting ideas about the future status of

Chechnya within the Russian federation. The problem with this top-down definition is that it treats ethnicity as a fixed or essential entity. A more plausible presumption, and one which I intend to explore in this thesis, is that the meaning of being “Chechen” or “Russian” has not been stable during the course of this violent conflict. Another way of expressing this theoretical point of departure is with the words of the Russian anthropologist Valery Tishkov:

“It is the conflict that constructs Chechens, not vice versa” (Tishkov 2004: 10).

1.2 Purpose and research questions

The larger objects of study in this thesis are dominant discourses about the Russian-Chechen conflict in Western media and in academic literature, particularly in political science. The main focus will be on the representations of Chechens as a distinct ethnic group, and the various traits and aspirations attributed to them as a party in the Russian-Chechen conflict.

The intention is not to find a single “image” which will be assessed as either false or true, but rather to distinguish the different kinds of representations that are prevalent in journalistic and academic writing, and relate them to a theoretical framework on internal conflict.

Furthermore, the thesis aims to examine how representations of Chechen history and current 4 situation contribute to the shaping of dominant discourses about the Russian-Chechen conflict before and during the wars.

The following questions are posed:

-How has the Russian-Chechen conflict been accounted for in academic literature and the in the news media?

- How is the population of Chechnya represented in the empirical material?

-How can media representations of the Chechen wars be related to dominant discourses about internal and “ethnic” conflicts?

1.3 Disposition

The method applied and material analyzed in the thesis is introduced in the following chapter along with a critical source analysis. Next follows a background with a chronological description of the development in Chechnya during the past 15 years. Chapter 4 is a theoretical framework which reviews a number of academic texts on the Russian-Chechen conflict, and in which the thesis’s theoretical points of departure are further clarified. Chapter

5 is an analysis of the empirical material. In the Chapter 6, the findings of the analysis are presented along with concluding remarks.

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2. Methodological framework

2.1 Introduction

The method applied in this thesis is a discourse analysis of media representations of the

Russian-Chechen conflict in the period between 1994 and 2009. To begin with, it should be clarified that as a qualitative research method in social sciences, discourse analysis is rather heterogeneous (Silverman, 2006: 224). Several reasons for this can be identified. First, discourse analysis is not a systematic method subjected to a certain set of rules, and is thus more often described as an approach to the study of social reality. Second, as been pointed out by sociologist David Silverman, there is some disagreement among researchers about what constitutes acceptable data for a proper discourse analysis. While some conduct interviews, which is associated with more conventional qualitative methods, other researchers argue that only “naturally occurring data” is acceptable for a discourse analysis (Silverman,

2006: 224). The news articles used for this thesis constitute such naturally occurring data since they are not produced for the purpose of research. Moreover, the manner in which discourse analysis is applied may vary considerably depending on what discourse theory is being employed in the study. However, although discourse analysis is not easily defined, the method still rests upon some key assumptions about the study of social reality:

1. Accounts of reality are only versions of reality, meaning that they can neither be

“false” or “true”.

2. Discourse analysis presupposes a constructivist approach towards the participants in

discourses.

3. The seemingly objective, “out-there reality” presented in texts is constructed in a

process of selectiveness (Silverman, 206: 224).

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2.2 The object of study in discourse analysis

In general, discourse analysis looks at structures of power in texts, but also in other forms of communication such as visual material. Barbara Johnstone makes an essential point about the importance of making a distinction between language and discourse, since the term discourse analysis has been critiqued for saying nothing more than “the study of language” (Johnston,

2008: 2). When applying discourse analysis as a method in social sciences, however, one seeks to go beyond the purely linguistic meaning of language. For the purpose of this thesis, discourse is seen as something more than language in the sense that discourse is not the text itself , but rather the meaning-making that takes place through texts. The primary object of study is thus the process of knowledge production by the means of texts rather than the producer (here: news agencies) as such. The relationship between the reader and the sender is another interesting aspect in the study of news coverage, but that is a different study. For the purpose of this thesis it is thus necessary to point out the advantages of the term discourse in the first place. Therefore, the discourse theory applied in this thesis is discussed in more detailed below.

2.3 Defining discourse

The term discourse is most famously associated with postmodernism and the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has contributed to the understanding of discourse as an expression for the essential connection between knowledge and power. In this sense, discourses can be understood as expressions of power since knowledge is constantly used for producing facts or “truths” about reality. A common misconception about the term discourse is that it is used simply for discrediting all claims of knowledge. This conclusion is however missing the point. It is certainly true that discourse analysis aims to reveal and deconstruct knowledge that is presented as self-evident, yet the reason for this is that the term discourse 7 itself implies that there is no knowledge expressed in words, which is “liberated” from the surrounding discourse on the subject. While the extreme postmodernist perspective would still hold that we cannot actually “know” anything, the contribution from discourse theory for this thesis is rather the possibility of examining how knowledge is produced and presented.

Johnstone defines discourse as something which is both the source of knowledge and the result of it (Johnstone, 2008: 3). It means that the generalizations we make are based on the discourse we participate in, but also that new discourses are created on the basis on what we already “know”. The term discourse is not only used for the purpose of identifying and describing knowledge-making, but also for a better understanding of how discourses create specific perspectives for interpreting reality. Therefore, discourse analysis is applied in order to reveal the relation between discourse, behavior and the society (Walliman, 2006: 144).

2.4 The contribution of discourse analysis to social sciences

In the practical sense, discourse analysis can be described as a deconstructive reading and interpretation of a problem. The analysis is then not primarily concerned with seeking answers to a specific problem, but rather with revealing the source and implications of the way in which a problem is discussed. The contribution from studying discourses is well described by Silverman (2006), who underscores the importance of looking at the underlying rules, or “formulas” which provide the basis of how a problem is presented in a particular discourse. The point of departure here is that the process of defining social problems is something more than the simple establishing of “facts”. This is not to suggest that there exist no “real” problems, but it means that the researcher needs to ask how widely accepted definitions of problems arise (Silverman, 2006: 17). As for this thesis, it can be argued that the notion of so called “ethnic conflicts” constitute such a problem.

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It could be argued that in order to make generalizations about media discourse, a large body of empirical material will necessarily be required. This is definitely the case when applying, for example, the method of content analysis. However, in that particular method for analyzing texts and documents, the reliability of the study relies on a number of specific rules and procedures that must be followed. Gillian Rose explains that while content analysis is methodologically explicit, discourse analysis is “silent”, meaning that discourse analysis relies instead on what she calls the “good eye” (Rose, 2007: 59). According to Rose, it can thus be argued that discourse analysis, in contrast to content analysis, not necessarily requires an extensive empirical material in order to conduct the analysis.

2.5 Empirical material

The empirical material for this thesis contains primarily of a selection of journalistic articles published by CNN online and by the online editions of two Swedish dailies, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet . The Swedish material is supplemented with one article published by the printed edition of Sydsvenska Dagbladet . Although this thesis’ research questions focus on representations in Western media, the material also includes a more limited number of articles published by the online edition of the Russian news paper The St. Petersburg Times . These articles have been selected in order to provide a comparable basis in the analysis. The total empirical material comprises 34 articles, including news articles as well as background, analytical and opinion articles covering events between 1994 and 2009. In addition to the articles, the material also includes a documentary film about the second war in Chechnya. The film is titled “Greetings from ” (2002) and is produced by the American private media enterprise PBS.

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2.6 Source critical analysis

The research reviewed in chapter four is based on a combination of general theories as well as scholarly work specific to the Chechen wars. This variety of titles was selected for the purpose of providing a basis for assessing the value of different general accounts for the case of Chechnya.

The theoretical foundation of this thesis relies to a relatively large extent on the Russian historian and anthropologist Valery Tishkov’s book Chechnya – Life in a War-Torn Society

(2004). This choice of literature requires some clarification, considering the fact that Tishkov has beside his academic work also served in several important political posts in the Russian government, among others as Minister of Culture. A critical reading of his book indeed confirms that Tishkov is more informed about, and almost certainly more open to, the official

Russian version of the conflict than Western scholars. It is also important to be aware that

Tishkov is rather critical to some of his Western colleagues and their tendency to uncritically frame the conflict as a “genuine national uprising against foreign occupation” (Tishkov, 2004:

212). Tishkov’s contribution to this thesis is however primarily the anthropological perspective on the study of armed conflict, and not the overall framing of the conflict. In addition, the book is concerned with the deconstruction of popular and media discourses on

“ethnic hatred” accounts in both Russia and in Western countries. In this regard, Tishkov makes several interesting points, although it should be noted that he has not done any actual fieldwork in Chechnya during the war years. Instead, his study is primarily based on interviews brought back from Chechnya (made by his colleagues who had access to the field), conducted mainly in the years 1996-1997. For the reasons discussed above, this thesis pays particular attention to those of Tishkov’s findings which can be supported by other scholars, such as anthropologist Jakob Rigi (2007) who in fact stayed in Chechnya in 1995. 10

Political scientist Matthew Evangelista’s book The Chechens Wars: Will Russia go the way of the Soviet Union? (2002) also deserves a special mentioning here. Evangelista takes an important and clear stand against the violent manner in which Russia has confronted the potential threats of decentralization during the Russian-Chechen conflict. His analysis is of particular value for the clear theoretically distinction between conflict and violence, assuring that the wars were by no means unavoidable. Furthermore, Evangelista avoids the fallacy of generalizing about ethnicity and nationalism as the single explanatory factors for the conflict.

The author who most certainly had the deepest knowledge about the actual situation in

Chechnya during the war years was , the late Russian journalist and human rights activist. The news about her being shot in her apartment building in

2006 attracted intense international attention. It soon led to widespread speculations that

Russian politicians and FSB agents were involved in her killing, but today the murder still remains unsolved. In much of the international media, Politkovskaya’s death served as a testimony to the lack of any real democracy and freedom of speech in Russia. Her reporting from Chechnya after 1999 and onwards was published in the investigating paper Novaya gazeta and in several books - most famously Vtoraya Chechenskaya (2003), in English titled

A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya . The Swedish translation, which is used in this thesis, is Tjetjenien: sanningen om kriget (2002). This book is a horrifying reading about the living conditions for the population during the second war, and it reveals detailed stories about of the extreme brutality of the federal soldiers as well as of Chechen fighters.

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Politkovskaya’s book is an important source used in this thesis, not only in the direct sense but also in the sense that it raises the question whether any outside observer, either media or academic, has been able to describe or even understand the extent of the suffering in war-torn

Chechnya. Politkovskaya herself said that she was driven by a call to describe the war for those who could not see it for themselves. The stories of brutality and suffering she brings back from Chechnya are almost hard to believe, but serve as a constant reminder of the devastating effects of the war.

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3. Background: 15 years of violence in Chechnya

The expression “Russia’s war on Chechnya” can easily give one the impression that Russia has been engaged in a war with a foreign power, when, in fact, Russia’s military operations in

Chechnya have been the result of its determination to keep Chechnya as a part of the

Federation. The cost of tens of thousands of dead and wounded throughout this drawn-out conflict has consequently raised questions about interpretations of international law and

Russia’s responsibility towards the Chechen population, who are, after all, nearly all Russian citizens. Both political and scholarly efforts to place the Chechen case in a larger context that could provide some answers to these questions have proven further conflict-generating.

Outside commentators supporting the idea of a sovereign Chechen state have used the analogy of colonies breaking free from Western imperial countries in the aftermath of the Second

World War to illustrate the war. The contrasting version, with reference to public international law and supported by most Western governments, is the image of Russia struggling to establish stability within its internationally recognized borders. In this latter political discourse on the Russian-Chechen conflict, condemnations of Russia’s actions in Chechnya have focused almost exclusively on Russia’s means rather than its ends (Evangelista, 2002:

167).

The question of Chechnya’s status is ultimately a question about Russia’s territorial integrity in the post-Soviet context. To better understand the constitutional status of the Russian

Federation, a short background to the Soviet system is necessary. The reason for doing this is because parts of Russia, including northern Caucasus, have essentially inherited the political and administrative division shaped and reshaped during the Soviet era. Therefore, one must take into account that the debated legitimacy of various secessionist movements in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union is heavily dependent on the different entities’ status under the former Soviet system. 13

3.1 The Soviet heritage

The Soviet were divided into a hierarchical structure of 1) Union republics (SSR), 2)

Autonomous republics (ASSR) and 3) Autonomous regions (AO) (see map in Appendix 1).

When the population from the Chechen-Ingush autonomous was deported to Central

Asia during the Second World War, the republic was dissolved and became the territory of the

Russian SSR. It is important to recognize that the experiences of mass deportation, and later resettlement during the de-Stalinization campaign, have served as a keystone for the idea of a common Chechen identity. However, the notion of a historical “collective suffering” as a factor in the post-Soviet conflict will be discussed later in this thesis (Chapter 5.2.1).

In the post-Stalinist era, the Chechen-Ingush republic was restored. The autonomous republics in the Soviet system had their own parliaments and governments, while being juridically subordinated to union republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Chechen-

Ingush republic formally existed until 1992.

3.2 The “Chechen revolution”

The period of 1990-1991 is often referred to as the “Chechen Revolution”. At the time when the political authority in the Chechen-Ingush republic, the , was still a part of the USSR system, it adopted a declaration of demanding a removal of the epithet

“autonomous”. Its leader Doku Zavgaev was not primarily appealing to any national or religious identity (Evangelista, 2002: 16), but first and foremost promoted decentralization in the spirit of Gorbachev’s reforms. In 1991, the Ingush part of the republic voted for a separate Ingush republic within the Russian Federation. This turn of events opened the opportunity for an emerging political rhetoric about a Chechen nation. Portraying itself as a rival to the old authorities still in place, a “National Congress of the Chechen People” 14

(OKChN) convened in Grozny. The congress officially aimed at creating a foundation for democratic transformation and protection of Chechen national rights (Tishkov, 2004: 58).

The Chechen nationalist movement intensified when a general in the Soviet army, Dzhokhar

Dudaev, was invited to become its leader. As Dudaev seized the leadership of the renamed

“National Congress of the Chechen people”, he mobilized political support for a future separation from Russia. Dudaev started to act more and more independently in Chechnya, and when the old political institutions were dissolved, he and his supporters took control over the government buildings in Grozny. Moscow supported the replacement of the former communist leaders, but regarded Dudaev too radical in seeking control over Chechnya. Given the fact that Dudaev was still a general, attempts were made to promote him within the

Russian army for deployment elsewhere (Evangelista, 2002: 18). Dudaev refused, and even though he had never lived in Chechnya during Soviet times, he was determined to stay and lead the national movement he had started. After holding an election in October 1991, Dudaev was appointed president. The elections were later pronounced illegal by the Russian parliament. Federal troops stationed in Chechnya were now expelled by Dudaev, leaving most of their weapons under his control.

Political scientist Mathew Evangelista defines the period under Dudaev as “a working anarchy ruled by an unsuccessful dictatorship” (Evangelista, 2002: 29): social disruption and violence increased. Russian anthropologist Valery Tishkov argues that the national movement’s assertion of Chechens rights soon turned into an aggressive slogan targeting non- ethnic Chechens, mainly Russians (Tishkov, 2004: 65). At the same time, Tishkov is convinced that the anti-Russian stance was not shared by ordinary Chechens (Tishkov, 2004:

214).

Acting as the first president of the Russian Federation, refused the declaration of independence made by the National Congress in Chechnya. In the 1993 Russian constitution, 15 both and Chechnya were consequently defined as separate republics subjected to the Russian Federation (see map in Appendix 1).

3.3 The first war

After the increase of tension between the Russian government and Dudaev, Russian troops invaded Chechnya in December 1994. What was planned as a quick campaign to crush the separatist forces in Chechnya instead ended up in a devastating 13-month war. The estimated number of people killed range from 30 000-100 000, almost all civilians. President Dudaev was killed by a Russian rocket attack in 1995. The capital Grozny was completely destroyed.

The Federal troops withdrew in 1996, and to most outside observers, Russia’s defeat was a clear demonstration of its poor military strength. Furthermore, the support for the war among the Russian population had been almost non-existent (Rigi, 2007: 37).

3.4 The interwar years

Even though Chechnya was not internationally recognized as a sovereign state after the war, it was now de facto politically independent. In the beginning of 1997, parliamentary and presidential elections were held. The majority of the population in Chechnya voted for Aslan

Maskhadov as president for the renamed Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.

The increasing “islamification” of society and state in Chechnya during the inter-war period is widely recognized. However, the character of this development and how it can be accounted for is a matter of some academic and political dispute. During the first war, Dudaev indeed appealed to the Islamic world for financial and moral support. According to political scientist

Richard Sakwa, this was primarily the result of lacking support for Chechen independence from Western governments (Sakwa, 2003: 177). It should also be noted that the constitution 16 drawn up under the rule of Dudaev had made no reference to Islam, and it recognized religious liberty for all citizens (Tishkov, 2004: 64). Given the fact that Maskhadov had won the elections in 1997, the majority of the population in Chechnya had in fact voted for secularism and more moderate policies towards Russia (Rigi, 2007: 51). Maskhadov was nonetheless immediately faced with internal political struggle when the field commander under the first war, and now his main political opponent, Shamil Basaev, began questioning his authority. The declaration of Shariah law throughout Chechnya in 1999 is described by

Evangelista (2002) as a desperate attempt of Maskhadov to avoid an open split with Basaev, who had already taken control over the military gangs in Chechnya. In yielding from the pressure to adopt Islamic Shariah law, Maskhadov also accepted a (anti-constitutional) dissolution of the parliament and the formation of an alternative governing body, the Shura , headed by Basaev.

The period leading up to the declaration of the Shariah law in 1999 can thus be characterized as a highly political process, resulting primarily from the absence of secular-legal institutions

(which had been completely destroyed during the first war) and dependence on financial and moral support from the Islamic world (Sakwa, 2003: 177). Furthermore, Tishkov points out that the Wahhabi form of Islam promoted by Basaev was, in contrast with the traditional Sufi form of Islam practiced in Chechnya, in fact alien to the Chechen society (Tishkov, 2004:

223)

Anthropologist Jakob Rigi (2007: 51) describes the inter-war-period as a state of complete chaos, a time during which the business of -taking emerged intensively in Chechnya.

Even though explaining the complexity of the domestic violence taking place during this period is beyond the scope of this thesis, the escalating brutality and lawlessness in Chechnya between 1996 and 1999 must be recognized in the sense that it contributed to a continuous 17 war-like situation for the population. In order to simplify matters, this violent period will still be referred to as the interwar period throughout this thesis.

3.5 The second war and current conflict

The beginning of Russia’s second war with Chechnya was marked by a ground offensive in

October 1999. Prior to the invasion, a led by Basaev and his “colleague” Khattab had invaded the neighboring Russian republic of . This invasion had been an unsuccessful attempt to support the Shura of Dagestan which sought independence from

Russia. Chechen rebels had also been accused of the bombings of several apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities. Russia’s determination to take control over Chechnya now once again took a brutal turn as several indiscriminate attacks by the Federal forces killed and wounded civilians. Despite the fact that the invasion violated two peace agreements signed in 1996 and 1997, the Federal government now gained, in contrast to the first war, a wider popular support for a violent solution to the “Chechen problem”. The Ichkerian regime in Grozny fell apart in February 2000, but that did not put an end to the violence.

The fighting between Russian troops and Chechen rebels continued outside the larger cities, but Putin maintained that he would never negotiate with either rebel leaders or President

Maskhadov. The violent resistance to Moscow’s rule was dramatically brought to the whole world’s attention with the seizure of the Moscow Theater in 2002, and the hostage-taking in a school in 2005. Anna Politkovskaya became one of the most famous domestic critics of how the government and President Putin responded to the hostage crises, since Putin refused any attempts to negotiate with the terrorists.

During the first years of the 21 st century, the federal government began reconstruction of

Chechen cities and installed a pro-Moscow leadership in Grozny. After some intense political turmoil, the current president was appointed by Moscow in 2007. 18

Separatist leaders in exile continued to sustain the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria until 2007, when its leader Doku Umarov proclaimed a Caucasian Emirate in the northern Caucasus. At this time, most separatist leaders including president Maskhadov and Basaev had been killed.

The was not accepted by one of Umarov’s ministers, , who instead emerged as the new leader of the Chechen separatist movement. In April 2009,

Russia officially ended its drawn-out “ant-terrorist operation” in the northern Caucasus, after which Zakayev called for a halt to the armed resistance.

From 2006 and onwards, the organization as well as the Russian organization has repeatedly reported about the use of and extrajudicial violence in preventing separatist activities in Chechnya. After the killing of the Russian human rights activist Natalja Estemirova in July 2009, the leadership under Kadyrov has faced increased international condemnation for the lawlessness and inability to defend human rights in Chechnya.

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4. Theoretical framework

This chapter provides a review of research relevant to this thesis. It encompasses research specific to the Russian-Chechen conflict as well as general theories about internal wars. It also includes discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of these theories, in addition to a clarification of the theoretical point of departure for the analysis in chapter 5. Throughout this thesis I will continue to treat the Russian-Chechen conflict as an “internal conflict”. It is certainly a broad category, yet it is liberated from any predetermined explanations to why such conflicts exist. The only limitation lies in the fact that internal conflicts occur within sovereign states. It is therefore worth mentioning that between the two wars Chechnya was not de facto an independent state, even though many outside observers considered it as such after the Russian troops left Chechnya in 1996 (Tishkov, 2004: 181).

4.1 General theories about “ethnic conflicts”

As already mentioned, the Russian-Chechen conflict is often popularly described as an

“ethnic conflict”, mainly because of the wide-spread view of Chechens as a distinct ethnic group with common aspirations for their future within the Russian Federation. Regardless of the theoretical value of this categorization, the common reference to the ethnic dimension of the conflict in both academic, popular and media discourse requires a presentation of the main approaches towards such conflicts. These approaches, or theories, will be discussed in more detail below.

General theories about conflicts popularly categorized as “ethnic” fall into three main categories. They are primordialism , instrumentalism and constructivism . This division is clearly a simplification, yet it provides a useful tool in understanding the logic of more complex set of arguments in both popular and academic discourse. Even though the 20 primordialist approach is losing legitimacy in the academic sphere, it is still frequently prevalent in journalistic accounts of internal conflicts. From an academic viewpoint, one could describe primordialism as appealing in its simplicity. In situations when brutal violence along ethnic lines seem fanatical and irresolvable from the outside, the easiest option might be to write it off as “ancient ethnic hatred”. However, within the academic community and particularly within the field of anthropology there is a consensus that such simplistic interpretations of conflicts only reinforce essentialist ideas about group differences (Warren

2001: 16205). The explanatory power of the primordialist approach is indeed weak, since it fails to explain why the importance of ethnic identification changes over time, and how violent conflict arises in some cases, and not in others. The constructivist approach , in contrast, regards ethnicity as a social construct. The strength of social constructivism is that it allows us to understand that an ethnic group only exists in relation to other groups; an argument well developed by anthropologists Fredrik Barth (1996), and more recently Tomas

Hylland Eriksen (2003). The contribution of anthropology to the understanding of ethnicity and nationalism is key to this thesis, and will be further examined later in this chapter.

In the context of violent conflict, however, one should remain aware of the fact that a full- fledged constructivist approach might deconstruct the meaning of ethnic identification beyond recognition. It is then important to acknowledge that people often act on real feelings of fear, resentment, etc., even if those feelings by no means are “ancient” or imbedded in the character of a particular ethnic group. The constructivist approach still has a good explanatory power in terms of describing the changeable character of identities. At the same time, the constructivism approach is sometimes critiqued for downplaying the role of political leaders and their individual responsibility for resorting to violence. It also risks overplaying the manipulative power of group behavior, resulting in generalizations about the (still 21 constructed) attitudes within a particular group during conflict. Instrumentalists , on the other hand, are criticized for ignoring the important question of why so called “ethno politics” can be so appealing. The instrumentalist approach also recognizes the changeable character of identities, yet it focuses more on group leaders. In response to the critique from social constructivists, scholars focusing on elite-driven processes have shown that that ordinary people are not always as responsive to ethnic mass as the constructivist approach holds. This could in turn explain why particular leaders choose to resort to extreme measures, such as violence. This view is well argued by political scientist V.P. Gagnon (2004) in his analysis based on documents and archive material concerning the political background of the

1990s conflicts in former Yugoslavia.

4.2 Scholarly accounts of the Russian-Chechen conflict

Given that some time has passed, the secondary literature on the first war of 1994-96 is more extensive than the literature on the second war 1999-2009. The literature dealing with the first war is relevant, since it provides analyses of the whole underlying conflict leading up to the wars, and thus complements the more recent literature on the subject. For these reasons, the following presentation has an emphasis on the underlying conflict and the outbreak of the first war in 1994.

4.2.1 State centralization and the role of leaders

In the book International Dimensions of Internal Conflict (1996), Michael Brown develops a theoretical model of permissive (underlying) and proximate (triggering) causes and the role of what he chooses to call “bad leaders”. Brown argues that most of the literature on internal conflicts favours “mass-level explanations” of internal conflicts, "but it has less to say about the roles played by elites and leaders in instigating violence" (Brown, 1996: 573). This 22 perspective supports the possibility that leaders sometimes choose not to exhaust all peaceful means possible before they resort to violence. Looking at the first war in Chechnya, Brown’s theory could strengthen the claim that neither Yeltsin nor Dudaev were sufficiently interested in a peaceful resolution of the escalating conflict. As mentioned earlier, the political scientist

V. P. Gagnon (2007) has advanced the theory that the brutal violence used during the wars in former Yugoslavia was not the result of constructed mass hatred between ethnic groups, but rather an elite-driven strategy aiming at dividing the Yugoslavian population. Similarly,

Brown claims that many seemingly “ethnic” conflicts are not driven by ethnic grievances at all, but by “power struggles, ideological crusades, and criminal agendas” (Brown, 1996: 573).

Brown’s general argumentation about the causes of internal conflicts fits well with political scientist Matthew Evangelista’s (2002) analysis specific to Chechnya. He argues that the

Chechen resistance to Russian authority should more correctly be characterized as a rejection of and centralization, rather than the result of intensified Chechen nationalism

(Evangelista 2002: 111). The point being made here is that regional leaders’ strife for independence is not necessarily rooted in genuine ethnic , but rather in aspiration for local control – regardless of the ethnic composition in that region (Evangelista, 2002:

111).

Political scientists David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild have developed a theory about collective fear as the primary cause for violent ethnic conflict. In their well-known article

Containing Fear – the Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict (1996) the authors attempt to explain these conflicts with a “rational choice” oriented approach. Their main argument is that groups become fearful for their survival when central authority declines (Lake and

Rothchild, 1996: 43). Central to this theory is that state weakness is a necessary precondition 23 for violent ethnic conflict, and without going any deeper into the case of Chechnya, the article mentions the former Soviet Union as a prime example of this sort of “collapse” (Lake and

Rothchild, 1996: 57). A problem with this general approach, however, is that the parties of violent conflicts become rather faceless. This is certainly not to say that any theory which is not specific to a particular conflict is invalid, yet much of the secondary literature on

Chechnya is pointing to the fact that more attention needs to be given to the role of leaders in internal conflicts. This is particularly the opinion of anthropologist Valery Tishkov (2004) who defines the war in Chechnya as a personal struggle between the Russian government and the leadership in Chechnya (Tishkov, 2004: 75). Another anthropologist specialized in the

Chechen wars, and also focusing on leaders, is Jacob Rigi. In the article The War in Chechnya

– the Chaotic Mode of Domination, Violence and Bare Life in the Post-Soviet Context (2007), he maintains that the wars have been an exclusionary struggle between “ruling networks in

Moscow and those of Chechens for control of the territory of Chechnya” (Rigi, 2007: 46).

Furthermore, it should be pointed out that Lake’s and Rothchild’s claim that state weakness is the precondition for violent conflicts in the post-Soviet context is a matter of academic dispute. In fact, Brown argues that in general, it is the strengthening of central authority, rather than the weakening or collapse, which is the permissive cause of internal war (Brown

1996). When applying Brown’s theory to the Russian-Chechen conflict, we can identify

Russia’s campaigns in Chechnya as a continued struggle for increased control and centralization, rather than the result of a collapse of the state.

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4.2.2 Why violence? Accounts of the escalation to war in Chechnya

Despite little support for the “mass mobilization” argument in the case of Chechnya, it is still important to recognize that the idea that leaders only express the collective will of the people they represent is fairly common. At least this is what Tishkov discovered in both media and academic discourse in Russia (Tishkov, 2004: 75). From the perspective of a Western scholar spending time with anti-war activists in Chechnya and Russia as a whole during 1995, Jacob

Rigi has observed that voices on the ground often stand in stark contrast to the view prevalent in the West. To put it simply, Rigi characterizes this Western view as the conviction that the first war was the result of a clash between the Chechens’ drive for independence and Russian imperial rule (Rigi 2007: 38). In contrast to this interpretation, Rigi argues that the conflict became nationalized for Russians and Chechens only as a result of the combatants’ violations of civilians on both sides, and not because of any mass support for their leaders’ war efforts

(Rigi 2007: 4). Scholarly writing on Chechnya is indeed challenging general constructivist views of mass hatred, put forward by, among others, political scientist Stuart J. Kaufman. In his book Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (2001), Kaufman asserts that

“ethnic wars only happen when the attitudes of elites and masses are aligned in hostility”

(Kaufman, 2001: 39).

In the case of the , Matthew Evangelista interestingly points out that many of president Yeltsin’s advisers were, as a matter of fact, highly skeptical of using military force in Chechnya and some were even openly against it (Evangelista 2002: 36-37). The decision-making was fashioned in a way that systematically prevented those skeptics from having any real influence, according to Evangelista. In fact, as many as 557 officers expressed some form of or refused to execute orders by the time of the first invasion in

December 1994 (Evangelista, 2002: 38). These circumstances are truly significant for the 25 understanding of the Russian-Chechen conflict, as they demonstrate the absence of an unavoidable violent clash between the federal government and the Chechen leaders. Brown’s focus on “bad leaders” is highly relevant here, since the academic community still debates over to what extent Yeltsin and president Dudaev were willing to negotiate in order to avoid war in 1994. The academic literature covering this issue provides very diverse pictures of the period prior to the Russian invasion in 1994. While Tishkov claims that Western scholars have failed to recognize that Dudaev and his representatives in fact avoided some important opportunities for talks with the federal government’s negotiators (Tishkov, 2004), anthropologist Tamara Dragadze claims that Dudaev had repeatedly asked for negotiations, and to state otherwise would be “simply untrue” (Dragadze, 1995: 463). Rigi, on the other hand, is convinced that Dudaev knew only two alternatives - full independence or war (Rigi,

2007: 48). Evangelista takes a middle position, claiming that Dudaev would probably have shown more flexibility if Yeltsin had shown him more respect (Evangelista, 2002).

The previous discussion highlights the need to make a theoretical distinction between conflict and violence, or war. Denying mass support for the leader’s war efforts is not to deny the conflict over Chechnya’s status in the wake of the Soviet collapse. However, the violent manner in which the conflict has been managed must be treated separately. This is one of the points made by the earlier mentioned anthropologist Kay B. Warren, who argues that explanations of violence must take into account that political actors often seek to foster authoritarian and militarized solutions to conflicts for their own reasons and interests (Warren,

2001: 16205). Consequently, when violence is seen as an unavoidable consequence of social conflicts, as in many “ethnic hatred” accounts, there is a risk that ordinary people belonging to a particular party of the conflict are mistakenly portrayed as violent.

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4.3 Identity and violence – an anthropological perspective

An important contribution to the study of violence is provided by ethnographic and anthropological studies, showing that the civilian population in internal conflicts often experiences violence as something appearing from “the outside”. The perspective of civilians is easily ignored in generalizing macro-level accounts, since groups and communities are often treated as a single party in the conflict, giving the impression that all imaginable members of that group share common goals. This is particularly evident in Lake’s and

Rothchild’s work in the way they explain that groups “invest and prepare” for violence (1996:

43). According to Tishkov, however, this inability to see beyond groups as collective bodies constitutes a methodological weakness in the study of violent internal conflict (Tishkov, 2004:

9).

It can be argued that the “rational choice” approach represented by Lake and Rothchild, tends to view ethnicity as a fixed category. Their article mentioned above speaks of “ethnic peoples”, without clarifying what this specific “ethnic” category means. Taking the relational view on ethnicity as a point of departure here, one is inclined to ask whether only some people are “ethnic”, and then as opposed to what? Non-ethnic people? From an anthropological perspective, it is suggested that this rather primordialist categorization of people risks generating an ethnocentric interpretation of internal conflicts. The reason for this is that ethnicity is seen as a primary determinant only for certain groups, while others are assumed to be more flexible. This view is also, to some extent, evident in the work of political scientist Chaim Kaufmann. In the article Possible and Impossible solutions to Ethnic Civil

War (1996), Kaufmann makes a distinction between conflict between communities and conflict within communities. Consequently, he argues that civil wars are either a power struggle between groups who consider them being different, or between groups who have different political goals . These definitions of internal conflicts may be useful in answering the 27 top-down question: What is at stake? What are the leaders’ official reasons for fighting? The answers to these questions, however, rarely contribute to a deeper understanding of what is actually happening on the ground. This is because Kaufmann’s proposed dichotomy of ethnicity/ideology ignores the complexity of which people make sense of different overlapping identifications. It also ignores the fact that violence itself may change the importance of such categories due to the fact that conflict is subjected to constant transformation . It is certainly difficult to categorize the wars in Chechnya using Kaufmann’s definition, since one can presume that the importance of both ethnic/national and other types of identification has not been constant during the course of the conflict. Another reason for questioning Kaufmann’s argument is that he defines “ethnic wars” as wars with almost no flexibility of individual loyalties, since according to him, the only loyalty lies with the ethnic group (Kaufmann, 1996: 140). Without accusing Kaufman of being a primordialist, since he still acknowledges the flexibility of social identification, one could argue that his view of loyalties overestimates the space for individual actions in the extreme situation of war.

Anthropological studies have well contributed to the understanding that loyalties and identities are often forced upon people, leaving them with very limited options. Therefore, it must be acknowledge that the support for a particular leader, for example, can be the result of a person’s calculation for increased personal security. In a similar way can the emphasis or de-emphasis of a certain identity (civilian, woman, intellectual, Russian, Chechen etc.) be part of a strategy for survival in a particular context.

It is also worth mentioning the social anthropologist Stef Jansen’s work on former

Yugoslavia. He has provided well-supported arguments for the conclusion that “despite appearances, national identification does not always contain the most relevant explanatory factors or the most glaring inequalities” (Jansen, 2005: 63). Furthermore, Jansen points to the 28 importance of focusing on how , and under which circumstances , and to what extent different types of identifications become more or less meaningful. It must be recognized, of course, that ethnic and/or national identification has demonstrably played an important role in the

Russian-Chechen conflict, at least in the sense that the wars became nationalized for people who defined themselves as either Russian or Chechen. However, it is important to take into consideration that this is not necessarily an explanatory factor for the violence, but rather an effect of the violence, as anthropologist Jacob Rigi argues (Rigi, 2007: 38).

4.4 Analytical categories in the study of conflict and violence

The ethnographer Catherine Lutz has well described how the traditional Clausewitzian understanding of war has been constricting the ethnography of war. She argues for a more critical approach towards the established categories of soldiers and civilians, perpetrators and victims (Lutz, 1999: 614). Lutz’s point is central to the theoretical approach used in this thesis, since it is indeed hard to find traditional reductionist explanations convincing in the complex circumstances of the Russian-Chechen conflict. “Reductionist explanations” in this context means the explanation of conflict and violence as simply a competition over resources

(Warren, 2001: 16203).

In academic works on the topic of internal wars, a number of different analytical categories are inevitably used. The point made above then raises the question whether every analysis of conflicts requires a critical examination of these categories? At least, this is the view of

Tishkov who argues that the analytical categories such as pride or liberation are not self- explanatory (Tishkov, 2004: 227). By accepting these categories, he argues, scholars allow personal feelings and ideology influence their work. However, it is important to make a distinction between treating such categories as having fixed theoretical meanings , and 29 acknowledging their symbolic value. Then it is still possible to go beyond such categories and examine what they mean and how they are used in a particular social context.

A key issue to the Russian-Chechen conflict is self-determination or independence. Given the discussion above, the concept of independence cannot be treated as an absolute term. When using the concept of independence as an analytical category, it is therefore useful to recognize the unfixed meaning of independence as an aspiration in the context of this violence conflict.

This is because the relevance and importance of a political goal will inevitably change as the circumstances change. The transformation of the way in which civilians cope with violent conflicts is, for example, well illustrated in the work of the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

In her book Tjetjenien – sanningen om kriget (2002), she tells the stories of civilians who, notwithstanding their political opinions or origins, first and foremost have ended up fighting purely for their physical survival (Politkovskaya, 2002: 46). When traveling around in

Chechnya during the second war, the only battle she observed among ordinary people was the one for continued existence. Such stories indeed contribute to a deeper understanding of the dimensions of violent conflict.

4.4.1 The category of civilians

While the civilian identity is often represented as clear-cut from the outside, there often exists uncertainty about the civilian identity in many wars. This ambiguity of civil identity is well examined by Hugo Slim, a British scholar of international humanitarianism. In the book

Killing Civilians – Method, Madness and Morality in War (2007), Slim illustrates how skepticism about the category of civilians at the heart of many wars often prove potentially deadly for large parts of the population (who are supposed to be protected by the Geneva

Convention). Slim identifies economic , military , social and political aspects of ambiguity in 30 war. These are the main types of voluntary or coerced support which all put civilians at risk of being regarded as collaborators and therefore not as “real” civilians by the enemy side (Slim,

2007: 189-97). Slim maintains, however, that the idea that all civilians are equally harmless is a fallacy. Despite this, he underscores that from a humanitarian law perspective, this fallacy in necessary if we want to show compassion for all those non-combatants who are more or less forced to be a part of the war (Slim, 2007: 188).

The ambiguity of civilian identity is indeed highly relevant for the wars in Chechnya, since the widespread killing and abuse of civilians in Chechnya has often been the result of attacks on villages and houses suspected of housing separatist rebels. In the effort to show that many people in Chechnya never favored a violent resolution to the conflict, it is thus important to avoid generalizing categorizations of more or less “guilty” civilians. In the thesis on media discourse about the wars in former Yugoslavia, it was argued that “ethnic hatred” representations of the war portrayed the civilian population as more or less collectively responsible for the violence in their capacity of belonging to a particular group (Westberg,

2008). In this discourse, little distinction was made between the conflict and the violence, implying that only civilians who did not take a political stand in the conflict was innocent and therefore the “real” victims of violence. Using Slim’s words, this discourse can be understood as an expression of the political ambiguity of civilian identity. Discourses of guilt and innocence in war are equally relevant for the case of Chechnya, because when political opinion in itself is considered dangerous and causes for violence, then all those that have always favored a political resolution to the conflict become invisible.

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4.5 Concluding remarks

Even though determining the question of guilt is beyond the scope of this thesis, it is important to acknowledge the serious disagreement over the political responsibilities for the wars in Chechnya. As suggested in the introduction, the conflict itself has created disagreement over intentions and meanings of events, both within academic, political and popular discussions within and outside Russia. For the purpose of this thesis, it is possible and perhaps necessary to make a distinction between explanatory causes on one hand, and interpretations of what has actually happened on the other. This is because the latter is not primarily a dispute about whether certain events have taken place or not, but rather the meaning of these events. The fact that certain events took place may be easy to establish, yet the words one chooses to describe these events are by no means neutral. This is true not only for the media but also academic literature.

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5. Analysis: Representations of the Russian-Chechen conflict in the empirical material

This chapter is an analysis of media representations of the Russian-Chechen conflict appearing in the empirical material selected for this thesis. The chapter is divided into four main sections, each dealing with a certain aspect of the conflict. Interpretations of the texts are supported by the theories discussed in the theoretical framework. The analysis is presented with references to specific quotes as well as with regard to the empirical material as a whole.

5.1 Cause and effect: The origin of the Russian-Chechen conflict

5.1.2 The collapse of the Soviet Union – a “Pandora’s box” for violet conflict?

Drawing from the discussion in the theoretical framework, there is much evidence to support the notion that the major factors serving to foster enemy images of Russia among the population in Chechnya were the violations experienced during the first war (Evangelista

2002, Rigi, 2007). This view is also supported by Tishkov, who observed no wide-spread

“anti-Russianism” among ordinary Chechens before or even during the first war (Tishkov,

2004: 214). Thus given this wide academic recognition to the effects of violence as an explanatory factor for the transformation of the conflict, this section aims at examining to what extent this process is acknowledged in the articles analyzed here.

An interesting observation can be made about the reasoning in a background story on the violent conflicts in Caucasus and , published in the Swedish daily Sydsvenska

Dagbladet in 2004. In this article, the attempt is made to account for these conflicts, and particularly the wars in Chechnya, as a direct consequence of the collapse of the Soviet

Union. Consider the following quote:

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“The harsh domestic politics of the Stalin era is an important reason for the profound unrest and strong antagonism in the Caucasus and the former Soviet Central Asia./.../When the tight grip of the central power and the security service eased, the conflicts and antagonism once again came to the surface” (“Stalins gränser tog inte hänsyn till olika folk”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet 040919 ). 2

This portrayal uses a historical perspective to explain the political development in the post-

Soviet era, reflecting the idea that violent conflicts are natural or self-evident outcomes of the collapsed . In a larger perspective, it can be suggested that such media representations of political violence are parts of a more dominant discourse about repressed antagonism as the primary cause for war in decentralizing societies. This is a discourse which was also commonly pronounced in the media coverage on the wars in former Yugoslavia

(Westberg, 2008). The effect of this discourse is that political violence is rarely represented as a modern social phenomenon, but rather as the result of ancestral conflicts which have previously been neglected by a central power. In the article quoted above, it is suggested that it is this past “neglecting” that causes conflicts in the present. Such a discourse on contemporary political violence is also pronounced in another Swedish article published by

Dagens Nyheter in 2002. This article describes the of Grozny and the changes it has undergone during the war years. In the following quote, the reporter attempts to portray the situation in Grozny before the collapse of the Soviet Union by using the knowledge we have today.

“In Grozny the youth studied at the town’s university and at nights they visited the big, famous movie theater. But the peace between the peoples in the vast Russia was treacherous” (“Staden som världen glömde”, Dagens Nyheter , 021228).

Here, the peace and prosperity experienced in Grozny during pre-war times is represented as something contrary to what would be expected given the real nature of the underlying conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

2 All translations from Swedish are my own. 34

This discourse about repressed antagonism between ethnic groups as a cause for violent conflicts is also evident in academic literature on internal conflicts discussed in the theoretical framework, and particularly in the work of Lake and Rothchild (1996). It can be argued that media accounts of the type seen in the Swedish articles quoted above interpret political violence with a postfactual and retrospective logic. In this logic, “facts” are provided to support the notion that the grievances we see today have always been lying under the surface.

Another example of such representations can be found in an analytical article published in

Dagens Nyheter around the same time. This article is reporting on the history of the Chechen population:

“The modern has been dominated by war with the Russian intruders, and this struggle has always contained an element of brutal death cult. One of the most famous folk tales tells the story of a squad of Chechen secessionists stealing horses from Russian , but when the Chechens risk being overtaken by their pursuers they slaughter the horses and build parapets out of their bloody carcasses” (“ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903).

This quote is a good example of the way journalists attempt to rationalize acts of brutal violence that has come out of the Russian-Chechen conflict. In articles such as this one, attempting to explain several years of violent conflict, the “Chechens” are frequently represented as a unified group with a collective sense of revenge towards Russians and

Russia. Here, it should be underscored that such representations stand partly in conflict with the scholarly interpretations of the attitudes in Chechnya toward Russia as a whole. After the first war in Chechnya, it has been shown that the enemy perceptions among many people in

Chechnya indeed included the one of Russia as an “occupant” (Tishkov, 2004: 130).

However, there is little evidence for such collective attitudes among those defined as

“Chechens” during Soviet times (Tishkov, 2004: 130). It can thus be suggested that the media representation of the particular “Chechen history” as a direct explanatory factor for the post- 35

Soviet wars is shaped by the present influences. The extreme violence seen during the war times thus permeates a discourse about the serious nature of the Russian-Chechen conflict throughout history.

Another interesting observation can be made about a CNN article and its concern about the effects of the first war in Chechnya. This article reports on the presidential elections taking place in Chechnya in 1997, six months after the federal forces’ withdrawal in 1996. Under the sub headline “War has not killed desire for independence ”, the following quote reveals that the reporter seems to be rather surprised by the increased nationalism observed in Chechnya after Russia’s invasion:

“Separatists have been running the republic since the war ended in August. And although fighting destroyed the Chechen economy and took thousands of lives, it has not dampened Chechens’ desire to be independent of Moscow” (“Turnout heavy as Chechens pick a president”, CNN World News , 970127).

In this quote, the desire for independence is portrayed as almost a contradictory development, given the devastation of the war. Such an interpretation can be contrasted to the academic literature, and particularly to Rigi’s (2007) conclusion that it was the violations on both sides during the first war that actually deepened the conflict (Rigi, 2007: 4). In another CNN article, the effects of the first war are describes as follows:

“But the passions and hatred released by this war, like an out-of-control oil fire, continue to burn on throughout the shaky peace” (“An uneasy peace hangs over Grozny”, CNN World News , 960702).

The use of the words “passions” and “hatred” here is rather striking. The reason for this is that a closer examination of the analyzed CNN articles published 1995-1997 shows that none of the Chechen citizens quoted in the these articles mentions feelings of hate or revenge, but 36 exclusively a desire for an end to violence. In fact, when these CNN articles give voice to ordinary people, the following is what is being quoted:

““They are killing us”, said one Grozny resident. “We can’t sleep at night, we can’t live”” (“An uneasy peace hangs over Grozny”, CNN World News , 960702).

““Russian troops are being withdrawn now”, said human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov. “As long as there are no troops…there is no war”” (“War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary”, CNN World News , 961211).

“”When is this going to end?” demanded one of a mob that attacked a checkpoint. “These drunken soldiers are shooting into our houses” (“An uneasy peace hangs over Grozny”, CNN World News , 960702).

““We’re afraid of the Russian forces. They’re cruel. They keep on shooting, not the Chechens” a Russian woman said” (“Lebed meets with Chechen rebels as civilians flee”, CNN World News , 960815).

““We need an end to chaos and these elections will put us on the road to a better life,” said Musa Sagalayev, 45, after casting his ballot in Grozny ” (“Turnout heave as Chechens pick a president”, CNN World News , 970127).

“I don’t look to Maskhadov as a leader,” said Ludmilla Salnekova, a 57-year old former teacher who said she lived in fear in a war-torn church compound. “But I will vote for him because he stopped the war” (“Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127).

Thus despite the conclusion that the war has caused “hate” and “passion”, that particular CNN article as well as the other CNN articles at that time repetitively choose quotes expressing a resistance to violence , and not “Russia” or “Russians” as such.

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5.1.3 Ethnicity as a factor in the conflict

A number of articles in the analyzed material show a tendency to portray the first war as a confirmation of the perceived ethnic conflict between Russia and Chechnya. This interpretation was evident in one of the Swedish articles commented on in the previous section, in which the reporter speaks of a “treacherous peace” between the peoples of Russia

(“Staden som världen glömde”, Dagens Nyheter , 0212289).

In the above mentioned article, the Russian-Chechen conflict is primarily represented as a clash between ethnic groups. This media portrayal can be compared with stories from inside

Chechnya, and particularly from the first war when enemy perceptions were not as clear as they came to be during the inter-war period and second war. Rigi (2007), for example, points out that many ordinary people in Chechnya were openly against a violent resolution to the conflict during the first war, and his informants argued that they and the “Russians” belonged to the same people (Rigi, 2007: 37). Furthermore, these people stated that they viewed the war as determined by the “bandits” in Moscow and in Chechnya, which meant the networks of

Yeltsin and Dudaev.

Drawing from the discourse theory outlined in the methodological framework (Chapter 2.3), it can be suggested that the representation of a historical ethnic conflict between “Russians” and

“Chechens” has taken on the form of an established “truth” in some media accounts analyzed here. In addition to the article in Dagens Nyheter quoted above, this discourse is particularly evident in a fact box in an article in Svenska Dagbladet . Here, the Chechen resistance to

Russia is described as a historical continuum:

“Chechnya has never accepted to be ruled from Moscow. The fight for freedom started already in the end of the 1700s when Catherine the Great with her war of conquest expanded the to the east. In the traces of the dissolution of the Soviet 38

Union 1991 the air General Dzhokhar Dudaev proclaimed Chechnya independent” (“Norra Kaukasus en glömd konflikt”, Svenska Dagbladet , 090906).

This portrayal of the Russian-Chechen conflict can be further contrasted to the instrumentalist approach of Brown (1996) and Evangelista (2002). As discussed in the theoretical framework (Chapter 4.3.1), these authors conceptualize the Russian-Chechen conflict primarily as a response to a radically new political situation in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Deriving from their arguments, it can be suggested that it was the strengthening of central power in Russia, rather than the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, that laid the foundation for the conflict. Nevertheless, it is evident that the media portrayals seen above are influenced by a more dominant academic discourse about state weakness and decentralization as the primary causes for internal conflict (Brown, 1996). In the case of the Russian-Chechen conflict, this discourse is also challenged by Evangelista

(2002), who argues that the nationalist movement in Chechnya was not primarily rejecting an already decentralizing society on ethnic grounds, but rather rejected the Russian leaders’ strive for centralization (Evangelista, 2002: 15).

The analysis shows, however, that the discourse on ethnic antagonism as a primary cause for the Chechen wars is not particularly dominant throughout the material analyzed here. For example, the specific label “ethnic conflict” does not appear in any of the analyzed articles. It should be noted, however, that few articles attempts to explicitly categorize the conflict as a certain type. Furthermore, the representations of the conflict as a historical ethnic one, as seen in the examples given in this section, are not as noticeable in the articles published by CNN or

The St. Petersburg Times . This is not to suggest that this material do not entail representations about “Chechens” as a group (such representations will be discussed in further detail in 39 section 5.3), but it is to suggest that the Swedish articles analyzed here tend to use the dramaturgy of ethnic polarization to a larger extent than CNN and The St. Petersburg Times .

5.1.4 Independence and “Chechen resistance”

An overall reflection on the material is that there is little mentioning of the opposition to the separatist movement within Chechnya during the years leading up to the Russian invasion in

1994. In the large majority of the articles commenting on this period, Dzhokhar Dudaev’s rise to power is portrayed as rather uncontroversial. This period is almost exclusively described in terms of the following quotes:

“/…/the Chechens’ struggle to break free from Russia” (“Antalet döda I Groznyj var 55”, Dagens Nyheter , 021228).

”Nearly two years later, Dudaev is dead, but the desire for independence lives on, stronger than ever” (“War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary”, CNN World News , 961211).

These portrayals of Chechen separatism prior to the Russian invasion in 1994 are highly interesting, particularly when contrasted to the academic analyses of this period. Like Tishkov

(2004), Rigi (2007) underscores the fact that Dudaev was seen as a “Godfather” in Chechnya.

Furthermore, he argues that Dudaev pushed his own personal agenda with little concern for the welfare of his constituent public (Rigi, 2007: 37). Similarly, Evangelista describes his regime as an “unsuccessful dictatorship” (Evangelista, 2002: 29). In contrast to these scholarly accounts, it is evident that the analyzed articles commenting on the pre-war years represent this period more in terms of a public uprising, and less in terms of an elite-triggered development.

The lack of attention paid to the internal political turmoil in Chechnya during the pre-war years contributes to strengthening the image about a unified Chechen population striving for independence “at any price”. The frequent representation of a collective “Chechen” resistance 40 to Russia implies that Dudaev’s political strategy leading up to the war was in fact “the

Chechens’ strategy. Regardless of the level of popular support for the general idea of independence at this time, it must be recognized that Dudaev made it practically dangerous not to agree with his separatist politics (Tishkov, 2004: 91).

Thus, while the academic literature on Chechnya focuses primarily on Dudaev’s role in the period leading up to the Russian invasion, the media coverage analyzed here more often refers to his choices as a strategy of a unified ethnic group. This representation is also evident in the following quotes from CNN and Dagens Nyheter :

“With only a fragile cease-fire holding, thousands of Chechens surrounded the presidential palace Wednesday to celebrate four years of declared independence from Russia” (“Chechens celebrate independence among ruins”, CNN World News , 950906).

“The Chechens wanted to break away from Russia and now virtually entire Grozny is in ruins” (“Staden som världen glömde”, Dagens Nyheter , 021228).

It can be argued that this portrayal of the development in Chechnya during war times makes little distinction between the political conflict and the actual violence that followed. As a consequence, the issue of independence itself is described as the cause of war. In addition, it can be suggested that the more wide-spread support for outright secession observed in

Chechnya after the first war is retrospectively viewed as a self-evident and widespread idea before the war. Thus, in the discourse about surfacing antagonism in the former Soviet Union

(as discussed in section 5.1.2), the opposition to the separatist movement in Chechnya is being systematically downplayed. This tendency can be confirmed by Rigi’s argument that during the first war, the view prevalent in the West was that the war resulted from a clash between

Chechens’ drive for independence and Russian imperial rule. According to Rigi, however, this view stood in stark contrast to the shared Soviet identity and opposition to the war that he observed among ordinary Russians and Chechens in 1995 (Rigi, 2007: 38). It is not suggested here that the opposition to Dudaev’s politics is deliberately ignored by journalists, 41 but it exemplifies how dominant discourses shape the selective process of storytelling in the media.

However, it should be noted that some exceptions to this general image of the nationalist movement are found in the material. What is perhaps paradoxical is that the same article that speaks of an eternal “freedom spirit” among Chechens reveals a more instrumentalist approach towards the emerging nationalist movement in the early 90s. Consider the following quote:

“In the wave of declarations of independence around 1990 came also that of the Chechens. It was Dzhokhar Dudaev, an air force general who had been in Tartu and been inspired by the Estonian struggle for freedom, who proclaimed the notion of independence and later became the first president in a Chechnya that Moscow never recognized as being free. The rule of law was weak in Dudaev’s country – significantly, prisoners in Grozny were released to become his bodyguards – but when Russian troops marched in December 1994, they were met by very strong resistance.” (“Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025).

In this quote, the declaration of independence is attributed primarily to Dudaev as a person and leader, and not to the Chechen people as a whole. The article is an interesting example of the mix of primordialist, constructivist and instrumentalist interpretations appearing in the material. (The level of importance the articles attribute to “mass attitudes” in relation to the role of leaders will be examined more closely in the next section.)

An interesting comparison can be made between the portrayal of Dudaev’s leadership 1991-

1994 and Ahmad Kadyrov’s leadership after the second invasion in 1999, which displaced

Maskhadov’s separatist government. Supported by Moscow, Ahmad Kadyrov ran the administration in Chechnya for three years before he was elected president in October 2003.

The Russian human rights organization Memorial described the elections as unfair, a view which was shared by the European Council and OSCE 3. In the articles published by CNN and the Swedish newspapers, much attention is paid to the dictatorial character of the Kadyrov regime:

3 The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe 42

“Kadyrov is seen to govern the republic as his own feudal vassal country. He has got his own well armed private army, which some estimate to be 10,000 strong. Most of them worked for Dudaev’s regime or are ex “bandits” from various guerilla groups. They do as they please. In the beginning of September Kadyrov’s men came to the TV-building in Grozny and replaced the leadership for a more loyal one, and this only a month before the election.” (”Tjetjeniens väljare har inget val”, Dagens Nyheter , 031002).

In this quote, the political situation in Chechnya during the second war is described as heavily dependent on the individual actions taken by Kadyrov. Furthermore, the article as a whole is based on the notion that the presidential elections to come are rigged beforehand. This is also evident in the title of the article – “The voters of Chechnya have no choice”. In this article, the upcoming election is described as follows:

“In the midst of a war the population of Chechnya will go to the ballot boxes, but tens of thousands of refugees outside the republic have other things on their minds: They do not even dare to return home. In any regard, the outcome of the election has already been decided - by Moscow and President Putin.” (”Tjetjeniens väljare har inget val”, Dagens Nyheter , 031002).

The framing of the 2003 elections in this Swedish article can be compared with the reporting on the same event in The St. Petersburg Times . In an article titled “Kadyrov Holds All the

Cards in Chechnya Race”, the constraints of the election are examined too, but described in less dramatic terms:

“With the Chechen presidential race officially about to begin, it is becoming more and more apparent that the way is being cleared to make it easier for to win on Oct. 5.…Until recently, Kadyrov, 52, had Putin’s public support. He appeared to be part of the Kremlin’s plan to install an elected government in Chechnya with the aim of restoring some sort of order to the republic. But, since Kadyrov announced his plans to run earlier this summer, the Kremlin has distanced itself from his candidacy. Putin has said he will support whomever is elected by the Chechen people and has demanded that the elections be free and fair.” (“Kadyrov Holds All Cards in Chechnya Race”, The St. Petersburg Times , 030905).

The comparison between the reporting on Ahmad Kadyrov and the reporting on Dudaev’s rise to president in the separatist regime of 1991-1994 shows that no Swedish or CNN article in the material mentions the circumstances under which the election of Dudaev took place.

Throughout this material, Dudaev’s rise to power is represented as a natural course of events: 43

“There has never existed an organized Chechen state before general Dudaev became Chechnya’s first president” (“Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025).

”When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Chechen parliament – under President Dzhokhar Dudaev – proclaimed the region Republic of Ichkeria, or Chechnya.” (“Indepth: Chechnya”, CBC News Online , 060710).

These quotes are examples of the way Dudaev is portrayed as a natural and legitimate leader of the separatist regime 1991-1994. The lack of attention to the circumstances of the election of Dudaev can be contrasted to the academic literature covering this period. It is confirmed that Dudaev did indeed receive more votes than any of the three other candidates, but Tishkov has shown that voting only took place in 70 of 360 election districts. In addition, Dudaev had already branded all opponents of an independent Chechnya’s “enemies of the nation”

(Tishkov, 2004: 62).

While Tishkov (2004), Evangelista (2002) and Rigi (2007), describes Dudaev’s regime in terms of a dictatorship, the term “dictatorship” or “dictator” never appears in the news articles analyzed here. Such terms only appear in the reporting on Ahmad Kadyrov and in recent years his son, Ramzan Kadyrov, who succeeded Ahmad Kadyrov after his in

2004:

“During the summer has also Chechnya’s dictatorial president Ramzan Kadyrov failed to keep order and the death rates are rising…” (“Norra Kaukasus en glömd konflikt”, Svenska Dagbladet , 090906).

It can thus be observed that the media attention paid to the antidemocratic and dictatorial aspects of the regimes in Chechnya during the past 15 years is dependent on the federal government’s involvement in putting these regimes in place. In the material analyzed here, the separatist regime of Dudaev is portrayed in the light of a more unified Chechen uprising, while the regimes supported by Moscow during the second war are portrayed in light of

Russia’s brutally violent suppression of Chechen separatism during the course of the conflict.

This is perhaps not very surprising, but it serves as an interesting example of how news 44 articles’ focus on Russia’s unjust means may downplay the undemocratic aspects of the separatist governments in Chechnya throughout the conflict.

5.2 Representations of violence: reasons and responsibilities

A significant aspect of the material presented in this analysis is the representations of violent acts carried out by the parties of the conflict. This is because such representations often reveal the understandings journalists may have about the motivations for using violence, which in turn shape representations of the legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of these actions. This section will examine how this form of discursive knowledge takes place in the analyzed articles.

5.2.1 “Collective suffering” as a motivator for violence

In one of the Swedish analytical articles quoted earlier, the reporter mentions the particular

“modern history of the Chechens” as an important factor for the escalation to war in

Chechnya (“ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903). This article is concerned with explaining acts of blamed on or claimed by Chechen separatist rebels after the outset of the second war. It is suggested here that such accounts use a retrospective analysis which serves to rationalize extreme violence targeting civilians. In the accounting of this particular type of violence occurring in the course of the Russian-Chechen conflict, several articles refer to the history of the whole Chechen people as a motivation for violent acts in the present. In this attempt, events in the past and present are represented as a joint experience for “Chechens”, with little significance given to the point in history at which certain events have taken place. For example, the article mentioned above continues its analysis of terrorist attacks by listing the experiences which have contributed to a collective sense of revenge among Chechens. These are Stalin’s deportations of 1944 as well as the two post-Soviet wars killing several tens of thousands of people in Chechnya. What is interesting 45 about this article is not the mentioning of these experiences as such , but the way the method of terrorism is represented as a more or less natural response to this collective suffering. This tendency to portray terrorist actions as an expression the general feelings among the Chechen population is seen in the following quote:

“The negative trend can at least to some extent be explained by the injustice the Chechens have suffered from under the rule of Moscow” (“ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903).

This is an attempt to find a rationale for the continued military provocations and terrorist attacks by rebel leaders like Basaev and Khattab during the second war. In this effort, again the answers are primarily being searched for in the shared experiences of “Chechens” as a unified group or party in the conflict. The actions are portrayed as acts of the Chechen people as a whole, rather than actions chosen and taken by a particular group or person. Although this representation of violence can be understood as an effort to avoid primordialist accounts of “ethnic hatred”, since it talks about constructed feelings of revenge, it still portrays these extreme measures as acts by the “Chechen people” (rather that those who actually had claimed responsibility for them). The logic in this discourse is that violence can be, and certainly is, an expected consequence of the collective suffering during Soviet times and during the first war in Chechnya.

It can be suggested that representations of violence discussed above fail to make a clear distinction between feelings and actions . In turn, this may contribute to mistakenly attributing ordinary people with a violent agenda. This image is problematic since it stands in stark contrast to stories from the ground. For example, Evangelista (2002) has shown that there was little or no support among ordinary civilians in Chechnya for Basaev and his military gang’s operations before and during Russia’s second invasion (Evangelista, 2002: 68). Given the horrifying experiences of the first war, the main motivation for the civilian population was 46 thus not revenge, but rather the opposite since the use of violence against Russian forces or other Russian targets would seriously jeopardize their lives. Interestingly enough, not even

Basaev claimed that he represented “the people” in the period leading up to the second war.

In fact, at one point he admitted that ordinary civilians were afraid that his provocations might lead to renewed Russian bombings (Evangelista, 2002: 68).

Media representations in the material which actually do reflect such rejection of violence per se can be found in CNN’s reporting. In one article reporting on the 1997 elections in

Chechnya, the reporter summarizes interviews with Grozny citizens who express their hope for stability and safety:

“Many Chechens said they favored Maskhadov because he negotiated the peace agreement ending the bloody fighting that made Grozny and other parts of Chechnya nearly inhabitable” (“Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127).

In this quote, it is made clear that even during the first war, ordinary people were primarily motivated by the prospects of peace, rather than violent resistance to the Russian invasion.

The examination of the material as well shows that the image of a historical “Chechen” resistance to Russia as a trigger for the series of terrorist attacks against Russians or Russia

(as seen in Dagens Nyheter ) is less apparent in the analyzed articles published by The St.

Petersburg Times. In one of its news articles reporting on the situation in 2001, the motivation for the second invasion in 1999 is described as following:

“Russian forces rolled into Chechnya in 1999 after rebels based there invaded a neighboring region and rebels were blamed for apartment bombings in Moscow and two other cities that killed about 300 people.” (“12 Dead in Chechnya Fighting”, The St. Petersburg Times , 010216).

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In this quote, the reporter talks about rebels based in Chechnya instead of “Chechen rebels”.

This attempt to avoid generalizations about the historical basis for a collective Chechen resistance to Russia during the second war is also found in an opinion article in The St.

Petersburg Times. In this article, the commentator focuses on individual motivations and the present conditions in Chechnya as explanations for terrorist attacks during the second war:

“The soldiers have also been forced to contend with a new trend: Suicide bombings and other attacks committed by young Chechen women. Nineteen women were among the separatists who took 700 people hostage at the Theater Center Na Dubrovke in Moscow in October. “My sister went for her own ,” explained a 19-year-old woman, conservatively dressed in a headscarf and cloak, whose sibling was a perpetrator of the theater attack. We spoke in the kitchen of a relative’s house in the countryside, as her family has lived as nomads since their house in a village southwest of Grozny was dynamited by the Russians in revenge for her sister’s actions. “She sought revenge by escaping to paradise,” the woman told me. “And I am willing to do the same if nothing changes.” Her friend, 21-year-old Tamara, added: “We women are now acting because nobody else is reacting and no one cares about Chechnya.” Terrorist attacks are signs of desperation and, as the situation in Chechnya stagnates, suicide attacks by young Chechen women, and other, will continue.” (“No Light at the End of the Chechnya Tunnel”, The St. Petersburg Times, 030808).

Another contrasting image to that of a collective “Chechen” sense of revenge as a trigger for violence can be found in the documentary film “Greetings from Grozny” (2002). Throughout this documentary, the film crew accompanies Russian troops on “cleansing missions” and also leads the viewer behind the line of the “Chechen” side during the second war. In an interview with a separatist fighter located in the forest, the film gives voice to the motivations of a fighter who continues the violent resistance against the Russian operation:

“In January 1995, Russian soldiers took my father away in an armoured personnel carrier. We never saw him again. We didn’t even find his corps. That’s what drove me into it” (“Greetings from Grozny”, PBS , 2002).

The quote above reveals that this man is primarily driven by feelings of personal revenge.

Here, it is again evident that the reason for fighting has a strong individual dimension, rather than a historical or collective one. This portrayal of an individualistic rather than collective strategy is further strengthen in another sequence of the film, which shows how rebel 48 commanders pay fighters according to the number of Russians they have killed. This portrayal of the separatist fighting during the second war as a way of making a living is interesting, since such an image is less evident in articles published by the Swedish news papers and CNN during the same period. In that material, this fighting is more often portrayed as a continuous of the historical resistance from Chechens as a group. In an article in Svenska Dagbladet, describing Moscow’s’ politics towards Chechnya, this type of representation is pronounced as follows:

“President has always remained a relentlessly hard line towards the Chechens’ struggle to liberate its republic from Russia” (“Moskva ändrar inte sin hårda linje I Tjetjenien”, Svenska Dagbladet, 021229).

The role of history in identity formation is indeed a commonly discussed aspect of the study of violent conflicts. Among the scholars studying the Chechen wars, it is Valery Tishkov

(2004) who pays most attention to this issue. In fact, Tishkov is rather critical of the rhetoric which turns to the “abused past” among Chechen for arguments applied to the present

(Tishkov, 2004: 15). From a constructivist perspective, it is commonly argued that historical events in themselves do not constitute any self-evident explanations for actions taken in a present context, since historical events must be “politicized” first. However, it can also be argued that the way in which Tishkov dismisses the rhetoric on past suffering might fail to contribute to a deeper understanding of the social reality in which people live and act. The point being made here is that regardless of the constructive nature of collective memory, the formation of a suppressed identity can still be recognized as a process with real effects.

Furthermore, it should also be acknowledged that official discourse on past experiences influences the way people feel about them in the present. Then we can understand that, for example, experiences of mass deportation during the Stalin era (whether self-experienced or

“inherited”) are remembered in a particular political context. For example, Nanci Adler 49

(2005) interestingly points out that the Russian leadership has shown little interest in a full- scale examination of the Soviet past. Such a process was initiated in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union but halted in the (Adler 2005: 1110). Adler argues that the official historical writing in Russia tends to downplay Stalin’s crimes, focusing instead on his role in protecting Russia from its enemies during the Second World War. It can be argued that such denial of Stalin’s crimes in political discourse contributes to a sense of continuous collective suffering for the victims and their relatives. Therefore, one must take into consideration that feelings about past suffering are not only dependent on the memories as such, but also on the extent of official recognition of these experiences. This is perhaps even truer for the younger generations in Chechnya who never experienced deportation and resettlement, but who still experience this ongoing denying of the past.

5.2.2 Political agency and the role of leaders

The way in which the parties of the Russian-Chechen conflict are represented throughout the material also reveals some interesting discursive constructions. As already suggested, the

Chechen side in the conflict is portrayed as a unified group with common aspirations in the majority of articles. In contrast, it can be observed that representations of the Russian side of conflict are more instrumental, focusing more on political agendas and responsibilities. With few exceptions, the news articles analyzed here talk about “Moscow” rather than “Russians”, and the political agenda of Moscow is often described in terms of individual choices made by

Yeltsin and later Putin. Furthermore, there is little mentioning of the level of popular support among the Russian population for their leaders’ war efforts throughout the conflict. In fact, throughout the material only The St. Petersburg Times comments on the public opinion in

Russia during the second war:

50

“Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in downtown Moscow on Monday to protest the continuing war in Chechnya. Despite the threat of a downpour, about 500 people rallied on Pushkin Square, calling for peace in Chechnya and demanding that Russian journalists take a more critical line on the war. Organized by a coalition of human-rights groups, and endorsed by a long list of Russian cultural and scientific celebrities, the rally was led by popular political satirist Viktor Shenderovich. “We are a group of normal people who do not accept what the authorities are doing in our name in Chechnya”” (“Hundreds Protest War in Chechnya”, The St. Petersburg Times , 030717).

Even though the secondary literature points to the fact that Putin generally enjoyed wide- spread popular support for the second war, it can be observed that the instrumentalist approach towards the “Russian” side is more evident in the rest of the material reporting on the second war. For example, in the following quote from a CNN article published in 2004, the war is explicitly described as “Putin’s war”:

“/.../it was just the message he wanted to hear as he seeks to rebuild Russia’s status, boost inward investment and win a more sympathetic hearing for his problems in Chechnya. He wants to persuade other world leaders that the Chechen rebels are part of the worldwide network of terrorism they must all fight.” (“Analysis: Putin singing Europe’s song”, CNN World News , 011004).

In contrast to this instrumentalist approach, representations of the Chechen side in the conflict show that there is less focus on leaders’ personal agendas. For example, while Russian troops are described as being “sent “ to Chechnya during the first war, armed Chechens responding to attacks from Russian troops are more often represented as if they have chosen to fight for a larger goal. This image is quite paradoxical, since the military organization in Chechnya, during both wars, has been much more fragmented and differentiated than that of the federal army. Furthermore, it should be recognized that the armed resistance to Russia’s first invasion

(that killed tens of thousands civilians) included both those fighting under the command of

Basaev, but also ordinary people who felt they had to fight to protect their homes and families

(Evangelista, 2002: 48-68).

51

It can thus be argued that the discourse on Chechnya’s “armed uprising” to Russian rule fails to recognize that many of those who are described as “Chechens fighting for independence” in both wars were in fact fighting for their own existence. The point being made here is not that these people did not “really” support independence from Russia. What is interesting with this image of the Chechen side (as it is established in the material analyzed here), is rather that it implies that support for the idea of independence inevitably means support for the use of force in order to reach that goal. Such an image is evident in some of the more sweeping comments about the nature of the first war, such as the one below:

“More than 30.000 Russians fought for almost two years to stop the Chechens from pulling out of the Russian republic” (“Last Russian troops leave Chechnya”, CNN World News , 970106).

“The Chechens wanted to break away from Russia and now virtually entire Grozny is in ruins” (“Staden som världen glömde”, Dagens Nyheter , 021228).

It can be suggested that the traditional Clausewitzian understanding of war, which is discussed in the theoretical framework, provides little room for a category of civilians who end up using violence primarily as a means of self protection. Consequently, there is a tendency in the articles I analyzed to represent all violent resistance to the Russian troops as subordinate to a larger goal which, in reality, people may or may not agree with. The failure to portray this type of violence as very different from, for example, terrorist attacks targeting civilians, can thus be understood as an expression of a discourse about traditional warfare which falls short in accounting for the complexity of agendas and needs on the same “side” of a violent conflict. To some extent, the media coverage analyzed in this thesis thus tends to rely on a rather simplistic portrayal of the Russian and Chechen side in the conflict.

The reasoning above can be related to another aspect of dominant discourses on war which are fought along ethnic lines. For example, Tishkov argues that minority groups are often 52 seen as collective bodies with “universal motivations” (Tishkov, 2004: 9). The suggestion that the analyzed material downplays of the role of leaders on the Chechen side, but not so much on the Russian side, can thus be understood as an expression of a discourse on minorities in which the majority groups (here “Russians”) are rarely seen as an ethnic group with any collective “needs”.

A more instrumental approach towards the “Chechen” side in the conflict is also evident in two CNN news articles, reporting directly from Grozny during and right after the first war. In the following quotes, the article writer makes a clear difference between the civilian population and the separatist leaders:

“The Church of St. Michael was destroyed in the fighting between Chechen rebels and Russian troops” (“An uneasy peace hangs over Grozny”, CNN World News, 960702).

“A nearly two-year war for independence between Chechen separatists and Russian troops cost between 18 000 and 100 000 lives, mostly civilians.” (“Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127).

Another CNN articles however portrays the Chechen side as more unified:

“Russia has vowed to prevent Chechnya from seceding, and the two sides appear headed for renewed confrontation if the Chechens cut all ties with Moscow, as they are almost certain to do” (“Turnout heavy as Chechens pick a president”, CNN World News , 970127).

Furthermore, while the violent resistance on the “Chechen side” is portrayed as passionate and hard, the articles analyzed here rarely reflects on the behavior of Russian soldiers, who are overall portrayed simply as brutal instruments of the Russian war machine. In fact, only two articles in the material give voice to a Russian solder. Interestingly, both of them are seriously questioning Russia’s war effort:

“It was nice when I realized that this is it, I’m leaving. That this asinine war is almost over for me” (“War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary”, CNN World News, 961211). 53

“Among the Russian troops, low morale is rampant. About 100 Russian soldiers die here every month, the government says. “We are here only for the big money they are paying us, “Private Andrei Kosnikov, 23, muttered as he examined my car at a checkpoint near Grozny. Near the entrance of his base someone has written: “We are tired of killing the Chechen people for nothing. Our pay is blood money!” (“No Light at the End of the Chechnya Tunnel”, The St. Petersburg Times , 030808).

The quotes above can be compared to the following comment in Dagens Nyheter , which portrays the whole Russian military as sharing a homogeneous attitude towards Chechens:

“From the Russian side it is about dehumanization: the military do not see the Chechens as people, but as lower creatures” (“I Tjetjenien råder anarki och laglöshet”, Dagens Nyheter , 021026).

The analysis shows that that the majority of articles analyzed here tend to overstate the space for political agency among the civilian population in Chechnya. The Russian side, in contrast, is portrayed as almost exclusively dependent on the leaders’ political agenda.

5.3 Ethnicity and war

It has already been shown that the empirical material used for the analysis includes representations of the Chechen conflict as continuum of a historical conflict between

“Chechens” and Russia. Even though the ethnic aspect of this conflict was most seen in the

Swedish articles, different images about the “Chechens” as a group are still evident throughout the whole material. The following section will examine how such representations may contribute to the framings of the Russian-Chechen conflict.

5.3.1 Representations of “Chechens” as an ethnic group

The analysis has provided examples of how “Chechens” are represented as a collective body with common aspirations. This subsection will take a closer look at the underlying assumptions made about this group in the material. 54

One interesting portrayal is found in the background article quoted earlier in the analysis, titled “Chechens always feared by its neighbors” and published by Dagens Nyheter in 2002.

This text provides a historical overview of “Chechens”, who are explicitly described as an isolated ethnic group. Below follows a quote from the article:

“The Chechens and their neighbors the Ingushetians belong to an isolated linguistic group and has lived alone and isolated in the Caucasus in what could be called a premodern society. The Chechens lived both in the mountains and down in the tableland near the river , but it is in the mountains where one can see their first leavings – remarkable stone towers” (“Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025).

This representation of “Chechens” as a group who has lived isolated in a premodern society is noteworthy for several reasons. To begin with, it is rather striking that the article portrays the pre-war society in Chechnya as premodern . This expression implies that the society in

Chechnya was premodern “up until” the war. The choice of word reveals the idea that the post-Soviet separatist governments under Dudaev and Maskhadov are seen as a development towards an emerging “modern” society and statehood. However, it should be noted that the image of the Chechen society as premodern is widely disputed in the secondary literature on

Chechnya. For example, Tishkov holds that during Soviet times, Chechnya constituted a dynamic society moving at the pace of the modern world (Tishkov, 2004: 16). Hence, it can be suggested that such a discourse on “premodern Chechens” during Soviet times is shaped and reshaped by the media coverage of the wars years. While the academic literature characterizes the development in Chechnya during the war years in terms of

“demodernization” (Tishkov, 2004) and a “chaotic mode of domination” (Rigi, 2007), such images are considerably less evident in my material.

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Furthermore, the article quoted above well exemplifies a tendency to take ethnicity as an explanatory frame for the wars in Chechnya. The “Chechens” are portrayed as a distinct ethnic group with common traits and attributes. Little recognition is given to the transformative processes of identity formation. In this discourse on ethnicity, identity is represented as something which exists independently from the social and political context in which it exists. Moreover, group difference is here primarily treated as an explanation for the historical development, with little emphasis on the reversed causal relationship between historical events and the shaping of group identity. This representation was, for example, found in the earlier quoted CNN article commenting on the effects of the (section 5.1):

“Separatists have been running the republic since the war ended in August. And although fighting destroyed the Chechen economy and took thousands of lives, it has not dampened Chechens’ desire to be independent of Moscow” (“Turnout heavy as Chechens pick a president”, CNN World News , 970127).

These representations also reveal a tendency to portray ethnic identity as something more

“real” if it has a long history. Consequently, several articles in the material tend to downplay more recent events as explanatory factors for the process of identity formation. It can be argued that the logic in this discourse is that identity shapes social development and not the other way around. This discourse is explicitly pronounced in the following quote:

“Ever since the Russians conquered Caucasus in a long and bloody war which lasted over 50 years has the Chechens been an unwieldy people. Their freedom spirit and unity have given them a bad reputation”(“Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025).

In this quote, the perceived “freedom spirit” and “unity” among Chechens is presented as a given fact, and consequently serves as an explanation for the “bad reputation”, rather than portraying the experiences of having bad reputation as an explanation for unity and freedom aspirations.

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The representation of Chechens as an isolated group in the quote presented at the very beginning of this section is also worth a closer examination. The assumption that “Chechens” are radically different from the rest of the Russian population is in fact seriously challenged by Tishkov (2004). He argues that journalistic as well as academic accounts tend to highlight cultural difference in their framings of the conflict (Tishkov, 2004: 10). Tishkov concludes that the reality of the violent conflict in Chechnya has indeed forced people to think in terms of ethnic or national identity, yet he underscores that one must be careful not to treat the discourses which are produced during a violent conflict as evidence for the true nature of difference and diversity.

Although ethnic groups are not explicitly treated as a threat to peace and stability in the articles analyzed in this section, Chechens as a distinct group are still portrayed as a historical and contemporary “problem”. Interestingly, this “problem” is discussed in a way which combines the images of Chechens as “eternal rebels” as well as victims of imperial rule. This is particularly seen in background story on “Chechens” commented on above (“Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025).

Even though media representations that I analyzed focus little on the post-Soviet wars as a formative factor for Chechen identity, many articles in the material make a clear connection between abuses of civilians during the first war and subsequent terrorist actions. At the same time, it is evident that in the analyses of terrorism during the second war, reporters appear as very cautious about the risk of framing these actions as legitimate:

“One thing is sure. The longer the war in Chechnya is lasting and the more abuses civilians are suffering from, the more unmerciful terrorist attacks become.” (“ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903).

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“The indifference for innocent civilians’ lives that the perpetrators have shown in the school in Beslan can of course not be defended” (“ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903).

These quotes express some ambivalence in the reporting of terrorist attacks. In the latter quote, it is evident that the journalist is faced with the dilemma implied in explaining violence without justifying it.

5.3.2 The basis for Chechen independence from Russia

There is a common tendency in my material to view the first war as a humiliating setback for

Moscow. A CNN story about the Russian troop’s withdrawn in December 1996 quotes a

Russian soldier:

“It was nice when I realized that this is it, I’m leaving. That this asinine war is almost over for me” (“War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary”, CNN World News , 961211).

The reporter continues by elaborating about the future for the population in Chechnya:

“In the meantime, the Chechens are beginning to build their own state, based on Islamic law” (…).

This latter quote exemplifies a common representation of Chechen unity after the end of the first war in the material. Given the fact that Moscow failed to squelch the independence movement in Chechnya in the first war, there is a clear tendency in the analyzed material towards portraying the Chechen population as “ready” to create the society they have always wanted. However, this representation stands in contrast to the actual development in the interwar period. In fact, much of the secondary literature on Chechnya points to the fact that the interwar period was characterized by intense internal conflict in Chechnya, resulting from very different views about what the new politically independent Chechnya should be like. For example, the idea that the Chechen population wanted to create a state based on Islamic law is 58 widely disputed by, for example, Rigi (2007), who points to the fact that the elected president

Maskhadov was favored because of his secular politics. An interesting observation can be made here, namely a tendency to see the actions by leaders as a true expression of the will of the people they represent. In CNN stories in particular, the notion of “islamification” is rarely described as a political process but more often as a historically predestine outcome, regardless of the leadership in place. This media image is confirmed by Tishkov, who claims that the role of charismatic leaders is often being downplayed in the Russian academic and media discourse (Tishkov, 2004: 75).

For these reasons, it is interesting to see an exception to this representation in a CNN article published a year later, prior to the presidential elections in January 1997. This article is reporting on the end of the war, which the reporter describes as a humiliating defeat for

Russia and its leaders. Commenting on the upcoming elections, the article states that:

“More than a dozen candidates are seeking the presidency, and all have pledge to lead the region to independence. A failure to deliver on that promise is likely to spark violent reprisals from heavily armed hard-liners, many of them partisans of consolidating Islamic law in the republic.” (“Last Russian troops leave Chechnya”, CNN World News , 970106).

In this quote, the issue of independence is not treated as a self-evident aspiration of a collective body, “the Chechens”, but rather as a political strategy to avoid further conflict within Chechnya. In contrast to the majority of articles in the analyzed material, this article as a whole applies a more instrumentalist approach to the political situation in Chechnya after the first war.

From an instrumentalist point view, represented both by Rigi (2007) and Evangelista (2002), it is indeed important to be careful about making sweeping generalizations about “mass attitudes” during violent conflict. Returning to the development of “islamification” as presented in my material, it is interesting that the CNN article quoted earlier portrays 59

“Chechens” as a group striving for establishing an Islamic state at the time when Russian troops left Chechnya in 1996, when this was in fact the proclamation of elected president

Maskhadov’s main political rival , former field commander Basaev. A striking image of

Basaev as a representative for Chechen popular opinion is reflected in a CNN article covering the elections in 1997:

“The 32-year-old Basaev is a wanted man in Russia for leading a deadly raid on a town in southern Russia in 1995, but is considered a national hero in Chechnya” (“Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127).

This representation of a Chechen population glorifying Basaev is highly interesting, as there is little evidence for this support in the academic literature on the inter-war period. It is true that Basaev fought together with Maskhadov in the first war, yet according to Evangelista, it was Maskhadov who was considered the hero in Chechnya since he was the one who contributed the peace agreement ending the war (Evangelista, 2002: 48). The idea that ordinary Chechen first and foremost praised peace initiatives, and not violence, is voiced by a

Grozny citizen quoted in the same CNN article commenting on Basaev as a hero:

“I don’t look to Maskhadov as a leader,” said Ludmilla Salnekova, a 57-year old former teacher who said she lived in fear in a war-torn church compound. “But I will vote for him because he stopped the war” (“Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127).

In conclusion, it is evident that representations of “Chechens” are not consistent throughout the analyzed material. There is no question about the fact that “Chechens” are portrayed as an ethnic group which historically has persisted as culturally different from the rest of the population in Russia, but the traits and attributes of this group varies between “rebels” and

“victims”.

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6. Conclusion

One of my starting points was to examine to what extent simplistic and primordialist accounts of internal conflicts were evident in journalistic writing about the Russian-Chechen conflict.

Furthermore, I stressed the relevance of finding out whether these texts acknowledged the transformative effects of violence during the course of the conflict. The theoretical framework in Chapter 4 provided means by which to approach internal violent conflicts in general and the Russian-Chechen conflict in particular. In the analysis in Chapter 5, the empirical material selected for this thesis was interpreted in relation to a theoretical point of departure that treats the Russian-Chechen conflict as a political rather than an ethnic conflict. Furthermore, the analysis relied on an instrumentalist approach to the parties in the conflict that emphasizes the role of leaders in determining the nature of the conflict.

In this concluding chapter, the most important findings are presented by providing answers for the research questions that were formulated in the introduction. This is followed by a discussion of the findings and their implications for the study of internal violent conflicts.

6.1 Research questions

How has the Russian-Chechen conflict been accounted for in academic literature and the in the news media?

In the academic literature on Chechnya used in this thesis, the Russian-Chechen conflict is regarded primarily as a political conflict between Russian and Chechen leaders. Rather than framing the war as the result of a clash between Chechens’ drive for independence and

Russian imperial rule, which Rigi (2007) and Tishkov (2004) claim has been the dominant discourse in the West, this literature underscores that ordinary people did not generally 61 support their leaders’ war efforts. Rather than highlighting the ethnic and/or nationalist dimension of the conflict, this literature views the wars as determined by leaders who pursued their own political agendas with little consideration for the human costs among the civilian populations. These studies on Chechnya acknowledge that the Russian-Chechen conflict indeed became nationalized during the war times. However, the standard view is that this was an effect of violence experienced on both sides (and particularly the atrocities by Russian troops on Chechen civilians) and not the cause of the wars.

The news media analyzed in this thesis entails no single dominant framing of the conflict, as expressed in the material as a whole. Even though the material includes representations of

“Chechens” as an ethnic group at war, the war is generally not explicitly framed as an “ethnic conflict”. However, one conclusion is that the analysis reveals that little distinction is made between the political conflict and the actual violence that followed. As a consequence, the issue of independence is itself frequently represented as the cause of the wars in Chechnya. It is further suggested that the more wide-spread support for outright secession observed in

Chechnya after the first war is retrospectively viewed as a self-evident and widespread idea before the war. Furthermore, and even though the military organization in Chechnya has been much more fragmented and differentiated than that of the federal army, the various violent responses to attacks from Russian troops is generally represented as a “collective resistance of the Chechens”.

This thesis argues that such representations of violence fail to make a clear distinction between feelings and actions , which in turn attributes ordinary people in Chechnya with a violent agenda against Russia and “Russians”. The problem with this image is that it stands in stark contrast to stories from the ground about ordinary people using violence as a means of 62 protecting their homes and families. This type of violence is described by both Evangelista

(2002) and Tishkov (2004) but is little accounted for in the journalistic articles analyzed in this thesis.

Predictably, The St. Petersburg Times was the only news paper in the material that challenged the prevailing image of Russian soldiers as cruel and inhumane. As a basis for comparison, the analysis of this Russian paper also showed that it portrayed the undemocratic aspects of the pro-Moscow regimes during the second war in less dramatic terms than CNN or the

Swedish newspapers.

Overall, it is suggested that these articles’ focus on Russia’s unjust means during the conflict involves a downplaying of the undemocratic aspects of the separatist governments in

Chechnya during the conflict. For the reasons stated above, it is concluded that the analyzed material tends to rely on a rather simplistic portrayal of the Russian and Chechen side in the conflict.

How is the population of Chechnya represented in the empirical material?

Throughout the material, the “Chechens” are portrayed as an ethnic group which has persisted historically as culturally different from the rest of the population in Russia. In representations of this group, their traits and attributes however vary considerably between articles in the material. In articles that highlight cultural difference when framing the conflict, “Chechens” are described in terms of eternal “rebels” against Russia. In articles reporting on the actual fighting during the wars, representations of “Chechens” combine the image of such “rebels” with that of innocent victims of the Russian imperial rule.

Primordialist readings of ethnicity are not particularly evident in the material as a whole, but are more apparent in the Swedish articles. In general, the material tends to downplay more 63 recent events as explanatory factors for the process of Chechen identity formation.

Particularly in the Swedish articles, there is a tendency to portray the Chechen ethnic identity as something more “real” if it can be supported by facts proving the unity of this group throughout history. Such representations can be seen as a discourse in which identity is regarded as an explanatory factor shaping social development, rather than the other way around.

Furthermore, the analysis shows that in the majority of analyzed articles, journalists tend to overstate the space for political agency among the civilian population in Chechnya. This can be contrasted to my observation that the Russian side in the conflict is portrayed as exclusively dependent on the leaders’ political agenda. A striking example of this was seen in a CNN article, in which the “islamification” of Chechen society after the first war was represented as a historically predestined outcome, rather than a strategy of particular leadership figures seeking control over Chechnya.

The analysis thus confirms Tishkov’s (2004) claim that the role of charismatic leaders is often being downplayed in academic and media discourse. However, this thesis suggests that in the analyzed material, this downplaying is only evident in the portrayal of the “Chechen” side of the conflict. In turn, this has contributed to representing the “Chechens” as a collective body with shared aspirations and values.

How can media representations of the Chechen wars be related to dominant discourses about internal and “ethnic” conflicts?

In light of the discussions in the theoretical framework (Chapter 4), several types of representations in the analyzed material can be understood as expression of more dominant 64 discourses about wars with an ethnic and/or nationalist dimension. In accordance with

Tishkov (2004), Brown (2001) argues that most of the literature on internal conflicts favours

“mass-level explanations” of internal conflicts, but that it has less to say about the roles played by elites and leaders in resorting to violence. This thesis suggests that the frequent portrayal of violence on the Chechen side as a “collective resistance” from an ethnic group exemplifies such a discourse on internal conflicts. In my material, the framing of the conflict is thus more influenced by the “rational choice” approach represented by Lake and Rothchild

(1996), which holds that internal conflicts escalate as “groups” invest for violence. Moreover, it is argued here that the material entails representations that reflects the idea put forward by

Kaufman (2001), who argues that ethnic wars only occurs when “the attitudes of elites and masses are aligned in hostility” (Kaufman, 2001: 39). Such understandings can serve as an explanation for why the material generally pays little attention to the poplar opposition to

Chechen leaders’ war efforts.

The view represented by Kaufman (2001) is also evident in the material when the pre-war drive for independence is exclusively seen as a collective strategy of the “Chechens” and less in terms of the pre-war Chechen president Dzhokar Dudaev’s strategy. The explicit representation of “Chechens” as eternal “rebels” in some articles can also be understood in light of Tishkov’s (2004) observation that journalistic as well as academic accounts tend to highlight cultural difference in their framings of the conflict (Tishkov, 2004: 10).

Furthermore, Brown (1996) argues that contrary to the dominant understanding of wars in the post-Cold War era, the underlying cause of internal wars is rather the strengthening of central power. In the case of Chechnya, my material tends to confirm Brown’s notion that the collapse of the Soviet Union is seen as the triggering factor for the wars. In several articles, the wars in Chechnya are explicitly portrayed as a continuum of a suppressed antagonism 65 between Chechens and Russia which was released by decentralization in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

6.2 Concluding remarks on the findings

Drawing from the findings of this thesis, it can be concluded that the prevalent media image about a particular “Chechen” violent resistance that could be explained by a “collective suffering” is grossly misleading. A more plausible notion is that ordinary people in Chechnya generally rejected violence as a method (regardless of who initiated it), since violence ultimately endangered their safety. However, it must be underscored that the devastating experiences of violence among ordinary people in Chechnya indeed contributed to strengthening a “Chechen” identity throughout the conflict. This effect of violent conflict is also recognized by Tishkov (2004), who concludes that the reality of the violent conflict in

Chechnya has indeed forced people to think in terms of ethnic or national identity. However, he importantly stresses the fact that one must be careful not to treat the discourses which are produced during a violent conflict as evidence for the true nature of difference and diversity.

(Tishkov, 2004: 10). A similar point is made by Jansen (2005), who argued that the wars in former Yugoslavia created a “nationalist regime of truth” that ordinary people were forced to comply with for the sake of their own safety (Jansen, 2005: 49). Jansen’s analysis is highly relevant here, since it well demonstrates the power of discourses in violent conflicts.

It was suggested that the Western discourse about a Chechen “national uprising” contributes to downplaying the opposition to the policies and strategies of Chechen leaders throughout the conflict. However, this thesis does not argue that such opposition is deliberately ignored by journalists, but it exemplifies how dominant discourses shape the selective process of storytelling in the media. The conclusion that the material pays little attention to the 66 differentiation of attitudes and strategies among the population in Chechnya during war times is thus central to this thesis. If the aspiration of independence in Chechnya is not critically examined, it risks taking on the form of an established fact. From an anthropological perspective, it is crucial to rather ask under which circumstances these aspirations have been shaped and how they have changed over time.

The work with this thesis has also raised questions about the normative conception of the

Russian-Chechen conflict embedded in the both journalistic and academic accounts. For example, it is evident that a particular theoretical standpoint also might serve to support a particular political agenda. This thesis has argued that Tishkov (2004) makes several good anthropological points about the conflict, and particularly when challenging the image of

“Chechens” as a culturally very different and unified ethnic group. However, it is evident that

Tishkov uses this knowledge to make a political point about the illegitimacy of Chechen independence from Russia. Since this thesis is not concerned with public international law and the issue of independence as such, the aim was not to conclude whether independence for

Chechnya is a legitimate goal or not. However, to the extent this thesis draws any normative conclusion, it is more in line with Evangelista’s (2002) argument that Russian leaders have overreacted to the threat of secessionism triggered by the wars. Finally, this thesis agrees with his conclusion that this threat should not serve as an excuse for Russia to commit war crimes and atrocities (Evangelista 2002: 8).

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List of references

Adler, Nanci 2005. “The Future of the Soviet past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Stalinist Symbols Amidst the Exhumation of Mass Graves”. Europe-Asia Studies , Vol. 57, No. 8, pp. 1093-1119. Bart, Fredrik 1996. “Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.” Ethnicity . John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (red), pp. 75-82. & New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Michael E (ed.) 1996. The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict . . Dragadze, Tamara 1995. “Report on Chechnya”. Central Asian Survey 14, No. 3, 463-71. Evangelista, Matthew 2002. The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press. Gagnon, V. P. JR 2004. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. Galtung, Johan 1969. “Violence, Peace and Peace Research”. Journal of Peace Research 3: pp. 167-191 Hylland Eriksen, Thomas 2003. Etnicitet och nationalism . Ny Doxa. 2003. Jansen, Stef 2005. “National numbers in context: Maps and stats in representations of the post-”. Identities , 12 (1), pp. 45–68. Johnstone, Barbara 2008. Discourse Analysis. Oxford : Blackwell Kaufmann, Chaim 1996. “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars”. International Security , Vol. 20. No 4 (Spring) pp. 136-175. Kaufman, Stuart J 2001. Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War. Cornell University Press, London 2001, pp. 1-47. Lake, David A. and Donald Rotchild 1996. “Containing Fear. The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict”. International Security , Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 41-75 Lutz, Catherine 1999. “Ethnography at the War Century’s End: Reflections at the Century's End”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28(6): 610–19. Politkovskaja, Anna 2002. Tjetjenien : Sanningen om kriget. Stockholm: Ordfront. Rigi, Jakob 2007. “The War in Chechnya: The Chaotic Mode of Domination, Violence and Bare Life in the Post-Soviet Context”. Critique of Anthropology , Vol. 27(1), pp. 37-62. Rose, Gillian 2007. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials . London, Sage. 68

Sakwa, Richard 2003. “Chechnya: A Just War Fought Unjustly?” Contextualizing secession: normative studies in comparative perspective . Bruno Coppieters, Richard Sakwa(red). New York: Oxford University Press. Silverman, David 2006. Interpreting Qualitative Data . London: Sage Publications. Slim, Hugo 2007. Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War . HURST Publishers: London. Tishkov, Valery 2004. Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society . University of California Press. Warren, Kay B 2001. “Violence in Anthropology”. International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioural Sciences . Walliman, Nicholas 2006. Social Research Methods London, Sage.

Empirical material

CNN World News (www..com) “Chechens celebrate independence among ruins” (950906) “An uneasy peace hangs over Grozny” (960702) “Lebed meets with Chechen rebels as civilians flee” (960815) “Russian troops begin pullout in Chechnya” (960825) “War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary” (961211) “Last Russian troops leave Chechnya” (970106) “Chechens cast ballots in national elections” (970127) “Turnout heavy as Chechens pick a president” (970127) “Russia tries to restore civilian rule in Chechnya” (000301) “Analysis: Putin’s ambitions in Europe” (011001) ”Analysis: Putin singing Europe’s song” (011004) “Putin’s new approach to Chechnya” (011121)

Dagens Nyheter (www.dn.se) ”Antalet döda i Groznyj var 55” (021228) ”Staden som världen glömde” (021228) ”Tjetjenierna alltid fruktade av sina grannar” (021025) ”ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien” (040903) ”Tjetjeniens väljare har inget val” (031002) ”Stalins gränser tog inte hänsyn till olika folk” (040919) ”Elva döda i Tjetjenien” (050918) ”I Tjetjenien råder anarki och laglöshet” (021026) ”Moskva långt ifrån seger över rebellerna” (020817) ”Norra Kaukasus en glömd konflikt” (090906)

Svenska Dagbladet (www.svd.se) ”Moskva ändrar inte sin hårda linje i Tjetjenien” (021229) ”Skakande rapport från ett laglöst Tjetjenien” (031002) ”Fundamentalister tar över scenen” (021002) ”Skakande rapport från ett laglöst Tjetjenien” (031002)

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Sydsvenska Dagbladet ”Stalins gränser tog inte hänsyn till olika folk” (040919)

The St. Petersburg Times (www.sptimes.ru) “Combatants or Criminals in Chechnya War?” (030812) “12 Dead in Chechnya Fighting” (010216) “Hundreds Protest War in Chechnya” (030717) “No Light at the End of the Chechnya Tunnel” (030808) “Kidnapping in Chechnya: A Thriving Business and Political Tool” (010130) “Kadyrov Holds All the Cards in Chechnya Race” (03095)

CBC News Online (www.cbc.ca) “Indepth: Chechnya”

PBS Documentary “Greetings from Grozny” (2002)

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Appendix 1

Administrative map of Caucasus in USSR, 1952-1991.

Chechnya and Caucasus map

Source: www.wikipedia.org

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Appendix 2

Selection of articles from the empirical material:

“War-ravaged Chechnya marks bitter anniversary”, CNN World News, 961211 “Chechens cast ballots in national elections”, CNN World News , 970127 ”Tjetjenerna alltid fruktade av sina grannar”, Dagens Nyheter , 021025 ”ANALYS: Ond cirkel av terror i Tjetjenien”, Dagens Nyheter , 040903 ”Stalins gränser tog inte hänsyn till olika folk”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet , 040919 “No Light at the End of the Chechnya Tunnel”, The St. Petersburg Times , 030808