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The Sabres of Paradise

Early in the morning of Monday Jan 15, 1996, Russian forces surrounding Chechen rebels holding hostages in the village of Pervomaiskaya on the borders of Chechnya and Dagestan, opened a general assault. The infantry/armour charge was preceded by an artillery barrage and rocket-firing by helicopter gunships. On the TV screens one could hear the thump/crump of shells and mortars, one could make out scurrying Russian personnel in the snow. The desolate landscape was lit with a slow burning fire and smoke swirled from a number of huts. Outnumbered almost 100 to 1, outgunned many times more than that, cut off from all supplies and support, the outcome cannot be in doubt. Probably by the time this goes into print, the Chechens would have gone down in a hail of fire. Not many will remain to surrender alive, then again not much quarter is likely to be given by the Russians. Given the Chechen history of resistance over hundreds of years, the failure of the Russians despite overwhelming force to overcome them quickly was also never in doubt.

The confrontation had started a few days ago when a Chechen raiding party of about 100-150 persons led by Salman Rudayev, the son-in-law of Chechen leader General Dudayev, stormed a hospital in Dagestan, taking over 2,000 hostages, emulating an earlier successful raid led by Shamyl Basayev across the Chechen border in mid-1995. This time, having drawn them away from the hospital with a number of false promises, the Russians encircled the convoy away from the Chechen border in the village of Pervomaiskaya in Dagestan. With the Chechens determined to get to freedom or die in the attempt, killing the hostages if need be, and the Russians equally determined not to allow the Chechens to escape, the situation had to come to a head. Since most of the hostages were Dagestani and not Russians, it made it easier for the Russians to gamble their lives in an attempt to overcome the Chechens. The end result has been a predictable massacre of Chechens, Dagestani hostages and Russian troops. To quote BBC, “the Russians have solved their moral dilemma by maintaining that the punishment of terrorists is more important than human lives,” unquote. Since almost all the hostages were Dagestani and Muslim, this must have helped their decision-making process.

The last time around, despite the overwhelming superiority in firepower, the Russians failed in their attempt to overpower the Chechens, the result was a bloody fiasco for them along with severe embarrassment. In the subsequent negotiations, Russian PM Chernomyrdin was forced on prime time TV to agree to some Chechen demands. It may be remembered that Dudayev has already lost a son-in-law in action, a son has been badly wounded. The Russians having suffered hundreds of casualties, they were forced to allow the entire raiding party to return to Chechnya along with a screen of hostages and an escort of Russian troops and helicopters, melting away from them in the night as soon as they entered the mountains. Smarting under that humiliation, the Russian were in no mood to give way in the present exercise. To be fair, this time President Boris Yeltsin has been caught in a no-win position. On the one hand are the conservatives and nationalists led by Zhironovsky and the members of the Duma demanding that Chechens be brought to heel, on the other world public opinion looks askance at loss of innocent civilian lives in hostage situations. The hard-liners in the military were keen to overcome the embarrassment they were being subjected to on prime time media by a ragtag small bunch of guerrillas. Having had a taste of Muslim guerrillas in Afghanistan, in Tajikistan and the unfinished campaign in Muslim Chechnya, the Russian military machine were hell-bent on proving their manhood against Muslim dissidents at Russian tutelage, the desolate village of Pervomaiskaya become a symbolic point of carnage. Over the past few days, the Russians accomplished a deliberate military build-up in the area, the assault being postponed only till they had an overwhelming military superiority. Far removed from the hot sands of Karbala, another Karbala came into offing, this time in the cold desolate stretches of Dagestan, only a week away from the holy month of Ramazan. Unfortunately for Russians, Muslims have a firm belief in rising from the ashes after every Karbala, obviously the Chechens take this to heart.

While we can never countenance terrorism in any form, what are the choices open for freedom-loving people when their hearth and home is subjected to death and destruction in the manner Chechnya has been at Russian hand for over a year now? Chechens (and Dagestanis) are a freedom-loving people of long-standing. Their almost mythical spiritual leader, Imam Shamyl, fought the Russians for over 30 years almost 150 years ago. Forced into captivity by overwhelming numbers Imam Shamyl and his entire family remained in internal exile in Russia as an “honoured” guest of the Tzar, the Russian empire remaining in awe of this dreaded enemy. Many a Russian general came to grief at the hands of his galloping horsemen, their freedom obtained at the point of their sabres. Their refusal to surrender to any odds can best be captured in the Song of Hamzad, a typical Chechen war song, “How hot the day; only our swords to shade us! How thick the smoke, how dark the night, only our guns to light us! Oh birds, fly homewards! Give our greeting to our sisters. Tell them our only mourners will be ravens: our only dirge, the howling hungry wolves. Tell them we died, sword in hand, in the land of the Gaiour, where the ravens pick out our eyes and the wolves tear our flesh.” (courtesy “The Sabres of Paradise” by Leslie Blanch) Not many people know that Imam Shamyl is buried in Jannat-al Baqqi in Madina.

History has shown it is difficult to subdue those who love freedom beyond their lives. The Chechens are such a people. In the last year they have lost hundreds of thousands of lives but again this is a part of their tragic history. Many times, the entire population has been uprooted, most recently in this century by the excesses of Stalin and half a century apart by Marshal Pavel Grachev. Everytime the Chechens have come back to their land and their struggle has gone on. The loss of Salman Rudayev and his hundred or so companions will not act as a restraint but a spur to more such raiding parties in this their latest continuing saga against the Russian hegemony. The Chechens have repeatedly threatened to take their war to the Russian homeland. If the lessons of history are of any importance, the Russians (and the rest of the world) should not take this threat lightly. Though Gronzy is badly devastated, the Russians would do well to read the signs on the walls of that burning city and give back the Chechens their freedom, unconditionally. One thing is certain, the future of Boris Yeltsin as a Russian leader of any credibility lies in the ashes of Pervomaiskaya.

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