Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails. (weekly review)  By Vadim Borshchev, special to Prague Watchdog
The dreary lines of the news have not been able to conceal from the view of the outside world the fit of rage experienced by Ramzan Kadyrov when he learned of the explosion near the building of the Ministry of the Interior on Friday May 15. Kadyrov’s wrath is understandable: after the death of Basayev, suicide bombings in Chechnya had almost ceased, if one does not count the rare incident that took place in Vedeno in August last year, when two men in a car blew themselves up at the military base of the Russian interior ministry’s Yug battalion. Thus, the lifting of the counter-terrorist regime (CTO), presented by the authorities as the beginning of a new era in Chechen history, has been overshadowed not only by a bold and daring act of terrorism right in the heart of the capital, but also by the apparent revival of a species that was thought to have grown extinct forever.
The use of suicide bombers, a practice which Basayev attempted to transplant from Arab to Chechen soil, never really caught on in the insurgency. The passive role of an instrument of death conflicts with the Europeanized image of war that is common among Chechens, where a person participates actively, with all his being, using his physical and intellectual capabilities to the limit. For Chechens, death in battle is not some instrumental, impersonal episode of global jihad, but an individual act of heroism. So Basayev’s imported “suicide technique” was removed from the arsenal.
All of this is well known in the Kadyrov camp, and so the blast in the city centre must have come to Kadyrov himself as a complete and inexplicable surprise. The return of the suicide bombers could be interpreted as a sign of unpredictable and extreme changes in the tactics and strategies of the insurgency.
The explanations that were given on this occasion by the Chechen interior minister, Ruslan Alkhanov, seem like an ordinary propaganda manoeuvre. The official line is that the blast was caused by Beslan Chagayev, an intimate member of Dokka Umarov’s circle. But why would such a man take on the role of suicide bomber, rejecting active participation in favour of simply exchanging his own life for the lives of some rank-and-file policemen? To this question there is no answer, and indeed none is needed. The Chechen interior ministry’s habit of adding all those who are killed to the list of Umarov’s close confederates cannot be eradicated.
The sequel to the story brings to mind the magnificent scenes that characterized the beginning of the Trojan War. Kadyrov, refusing in rage to pardon his enemy, and with a single motion of his hand hurling his army into the final battle – the spitting image of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae:
The mighty hero, Agamemnon, wide-ruling, king of men,
was moved by anger and within his breast his gloomy heart
filled up with incandescent rage; his eyes shone like a flame.
It is well known that Agamemnon began the war against Troy in alliance with the leaders of various Greek tribes. Similarly, Kadyrov has decided to move his thousand ships under the gates of the fortress of Dokka Umarov in alliance with Ingushetia’s leader Yunus-bek Yevkurov. This weekend, more than a thousand officers of the Chechen and Ingush police besieged Troy on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia. The epic nature of what is taking place is highlighted by the timeless scale of the operation and its related activities - in Kadyrov’s words, the "forest brothers" can forget about amnesty forever, and the campaign against them will continue until the last Islamic insurgent is killed.
In the fight against the enemy Kadyrov has decided to make use of the plan of warfare that has been developed by the insurgents. He is trying to create his own "military Emirate”, which will operate in the three neighbouring republics – Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia. Federal forces are excluded from the allies’ ranks – the head of Chechnya intends to prove that the explosion in Grozny which caused him such embarrassment was a mere fluke, and that with the counter-terrorist operation now out of the way he is capable of dealing with the problem on his own.
There are, it is true, one or two incongruities which clash with the lofty Hellenic pathos of the local warlords’ rhetoric. The number of mujahideen against whom the grand army of forces from neighbouring regions has been summoned is vanishingly small, and certainly not worth the effort of destroying. According to the statements made by Kadyrov and Yevkurov at their press conference in Magas on Sunday 17 May, at the outset of the operation the targets were two groups of insurgents numbering 50 and 15 men respectively.
In ancient cosmogony the course of symbolic history was directed by gods, kings and heroes, and ordinary people were excluded from the list of actors. So it is also here – on the list of those who are to achieve glory by their participation in warlike deeds there are no ordinary names. It is easy to find in the Iliad suitable characters for all the major participants in the current mystery play. State Duma deputy Adam Delimkhanov, who has taken command of the military campaign, could be compared to Achilles. But in our search for similarities, we are not really helped by the episode when unarmed Achilles, coming out on the field of battle, turns his formidable enemies to flight by the mere fact of his menacing appearance. This, to judge by all the evidence, is not going to happen under any circumstances. What brings Delimkhanov together with the poem’s great hero is rather the presence of his Achilles’ heel – his increasing vulnerability to accusations by the Dubai police that he organized the assassination of Sulim Yamadayev.
The Trojan War lasted for ten years. By this summer, the second Chechen war will have lasted just as long. But there, with the best will in the world, the parallels end. The concept of "the last and decisive battle" which will destroy the mujahideen permanently, does not seem convincing. In order to have any faith in it, one would need to suppose that for ten years both the federals and the Kadyrovites themselves have fought in a slipshod manner, not even trying to win. And that only today they have decided for some reason that it can’t go on like this – it needs to be brought to an end.
* “Insomnia. Homer. Taut sails.” – line from a poem by Osip Mandelstam.
Photo: PanAsia.ru. (Translation by DM ) (P,DM)
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