The War Diaries

A Turkish-language poster of the late Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. The poster reads “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria State Leader” with “Noxçijcö” in the center being the endonym of “Chechnya”as transliterated into Turkish. This term is surrounding  a wolf which is the animal symbol of the Chechen people favored by nationalist separatists. I photographed this poster in a school in the village of Duisi, Georgia south of the Chechen border along the Alazani river. ©2002 Derek Henry Flood

New York- In the two weeks since the tragic double bombing of the Boston marathon with improvised explosive devices, the media has fixated on the ethnic and religious background of the Tsarnaev brothers of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Though various mass casualty attacked have been carried out in the United States in the past year, media outlets did not fixate on whether James Eagan Holmes, who killed 12 people in Aurora, Colorado or Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut were Protestants or Catholics nor what their precise ostensibly ethnic European backgrounds were.  But the fact that Tamarlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were ethnic Chechens and [I would think Sufi] Muslims while also not being native-born Americans has become an obsession of U.S. national media which has almost no knowledge of the history nor present dynamics of the North Caucasus region of which Chechnya is a central part.

In the wake of the Boston attacks and with the Sochi Winter Olympic Games just 10 months away and the insurgency’s western most fringe not far with just 250 kilometers (155 miles) drive separating Sochi and Nalchik, it may behoove some of the ultra ambitious yet very young D.C. jihadi wonks or overnight area experts in the Dupont Circle-Think Tank Row (Massachusetts Avenue) zone to read up on some of this stuff before inadvertently advancing an FSB narrative on the North Caucasus.

With so many people suddenly thrust in writing about a region with which they appear to have only the faintest familiarity (judging by for instance referring to Dagestan as “Russia” rather than as a constituent republic of the Russian Federation), it struck me that a minimal reading list might be useful.

This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list but more of books in my collection the influenced me into the intrigue that is the Caucasus region. A longer list would have to begin with Anatol Lieven’s Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power which was published only months before the start of the second war in 1999 or say Thomas de Waal and Carolotta Gall’s Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus all the way to Emma Gilligan’s Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War.

Here is my very short Chechnya/North Caucasus reading list in no particular order as drawn from my personal library:

1. A Dirty War-A Russian Reporter in Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya

I stumbled upon an autographed copy of the incredible book in New York’s legendary strand bookstore not long after returning to the U.S. from covering the Afghanistan war in the fall of 2001. With a classic James Nachtwey cover photo catching my eye in the book stacks, I quickly became enthralled with the story of Chechnya forever. Part of the reason I went to the first D.C. conference I ever attended was because Ms. Politkovskaya was slated to be a speaker. Disappointed she wasn’t actually there, all day throughout the conference I wondered what happened to her.

Finally a very frustrated audience member shouted out that she didn’t come to Washington because she had been threatened by the Kremlin that were she to speak about war crimes in Chechnya to [an anti-Kremlin] D.C. crowd, she would not be allowed to return to Russia (she was a dual Russian/American citizen). She was then killed by a “control shot” less than three years later while entering her Moscow apartment building.

My autographed copy of the English translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s A Dirty War from 2001.

2. The Chechen Wars-Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? by Matthew Evangelista

This analysis of the first Chechen war (December 1994-August 1996) and the early stages of the second war beginning in the fall of 1999 discusses the role (or lack thereof) of international law in the Chechen conflict and what it meant for the future of democratization in the Russian Federation. Done from an in-depth sociological angle, Evangelista examines the broader problems inherent to Russian federalism when faced with ethnic and regional nationalisms in places other than Chechnya such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and even Sakhalin island facing the Sea of Okhotsk. A fascinating read.

3. Open Wound-Chechnya 1994 to 2003 by Stanley Greene

Nearly all of the books in my collection on Chechnya have covers and are illustrated by black and white photography. The Chechen wars were perhaps the last great era of black and white photojournalism before the American intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11 heralded in the mainstreaming of digital photography writ large. The defining photography book of both Chechen war is Open Wound by Stanley Greene by Trolley Books of London. As a fellow photographer, I cannot recommend this stunning, chilling book highly enough.

Stanley Greene’s photo of Chechen rebel President Dzhokhar Dudaev  in Grozny in February 1994. Dudaev was assasinated while talking on a satellite phone on April 21, 1996. To Daudaev’s right is rebel Vice-President Zeilmkhan Yanderbiyev. Yanderbiyev succeeded Dudaev as president and was later assassinated in Doha, Qatar on February 13, 2004.

4. Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya by Thomas Goltz

This book by veteran Caucasus correspondent Goltz is centered around in the notorious Samashki massacre that took place in April 1995 near Chechnya’s eastern border with Ingushetia. Goltz’s book, a sort of sequel-at least in title anyway-to his earlier Azerbaijan Diary, is a real journo’s type of book. It contrasts the viciousness of war and it attendant crimes with the banal egotism and tiresome logistical challenges of getting a tough story out of a deadly environment.

5. The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of an American Hero by Scott Anderson

My current read about the disappearance of The Open Society Institute’s Fred Cuny who was on his way to Bamut, Chechnya in February 1995 and was never seen again. With a stark cover photo diptych by the above mentioned Stanley Greene, this book reads like a fictious thriller save for the scary fact that it is real.

6. A Small Corner of Hell-Dispatches from Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya

Politkovskaya’s 2003 follow up to a A Dirty War with a dramatic cover photo by Dutch photojournalist Eddy van Wessel. Hard to read but of course well worth it.

7, To Catch a Tartar: Notes from the Caucasus by Chris Bird

A memoir of the chaos taking place in the post-Soviet Transcaucasus of the 1990s by a former AFP and AP Tbilisi-based correspondent with cover photos by my colleague Thomas Dworzak.  This book focuses not solely on the first Russo-Chechen war but also on the tumult in Georgia and even a bit on Abkhazia-which are essential to understanding the overall situation in the greater Caucasus region today.

8. Caucasus: Mountain Men and Holy Wars by Nicholas Griffin

Griffin’s book explore the legacy of the legendary ethnic-Avari anti-colonial warrior Imam Shamil from a sector of Avaristan in what is now Dagestan. Griffin writes about the difficult sectarian and communal history of the Caucasus ending with the rise of the late Shamil Basaev, named after the 19th century Sunni Avari resistance leader.

9. Allah’s Mountains-The Battle for Chechnya by Sebastian Smith

Smith, an AFP correspondent during the first Chechen war and later IWPR analyst in Tbilisi, profiles Russia’s geopolitical enfant terrible that is the Caucasus. All in all, a complex, fantastic read.

9. Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya by Anne Nivat

Nivat’s recollection of 6 months spent behind the lines after sneaking in Chechnya from neighboring Ingushetia during Putin’s re-invasion of the rebellious independence-minded republic. Nivat’s book highlights the importance of refusing to follow rules imposed on modern journalists by both authoritarian and democratic states (think of the French military impeding journalists in northern Mali at present). A decade ago, Nivat very astutely put the hopelessness of the conflict in a passionate context in an excellent NPR interview.

New York- I got a list email last week from Vaughan Smith, the head of London’s Frontline Club (a journalism event space in central London) that he and his club were offering full support to Wikileaks’ Australian guru Julian Assange. Here is the text of the email:

Dear friends of Frontline, many of you will have seen Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people at Frontline. I wanted to copy you the press release that I sent out today. Very best, Vaughan

“I attended court today to offer my support for Julian Assange of Wikileaks on a point of principle.

“In the face of a concerted attempt to shut him down and after a decade since 9/11 that has been characterised by manipulation of the media by the authorities, the information released by Wikileaks is a refreshing glimpse into an increasingly opaque world.”

The Frontline Club was founded seven years ago to stand for independence and transparency.

Recent informal canvassing of many of our more than 1,500 members at the Frontline Club suggests almost all are supportive of our position.

I am suspicious of the personal charges that have been made against Mr Assange and hope that this will be properly resolved by the courts. Certainly no credible charges have been brought regarding the leaking of the information itself.

I can confirm that Mr Assange has spent much of the last several months working from our facilities at the Frontline Club. Earlier today I offered him an address for bail.

7pm. Tuesday 7 December. —

I had no clue that Smith was in cahoots with Mr. Assange and don’t really have a strong opinion on it one way or the other at the moment because I have been too busy with other political and personal machinations to get worked up positively or negatively. I met Smith briefly when Frontline hosted an event several years ago now at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. The whole reason I knew who he was in the first place (which I did not bother to mention when I met him) was the case of Roddy Scott. Scott was a freelance cameraman working for Smith’s now defunct Frontline TV agency in the Caucasus mountains in 2002 when he was killed by a Russian sniper/sharpshooter while filming a firefight in the Ingush Republic.  Smith was quoted in some obituaries about Roddy Scott such as this one in The Independent. Roddy was working for Mr. Smith hoping to make a paltry bit of pounds sterling for his footage which was sure to be remarkable (it was confiscated by the Russian security services upon his murder).

Scott had filmed the only footage (at least by a Westerner that I have heard of) of the PKK in battle with the Turkish army, from the PKK’s point of view no less and his Chechen footage was sure to be unique. It was not terribly likely that Scott’s footage of Chechen mujahideen would have ever seen the light of day even if he had made it back to Britain in one piece because of the impending American-Anglo invasion of Iraq that was brewing to a boil in the fall of 2002. The Chechen war had long not been a fashionable conflict to cover when Scott died and that mattered none to someone of the intellect and curiosity of someone like Roddy Scott. After reading Smith’s email, I saw some footage on PBS Newshour from outside a London courthouse of Assange’s lawyer saying that Assange would be staying with a supporter after his release on bail had been secured. I guessed that that supporter would be Vaughan Smith only to read in the NY Times that was exactly the case.

What I did not know was that Vaughan Smith was such a wealthy man as described by the Times. The paper describes him as putting up Assange in a “a 10-bedroom home on a 650-acre estate” in Sussex. Why then, I have to go back to 2002 and wonder, could he not have even bought Roddy the hiking boots he desperately needed to traverse the Greater Caucasus range with Chechen warlord Ruslan Gelayev and his fighters? I never knew Smith was a man of such means or I would have asked such an awkward question back then in the dark days of 2002. I had no idea that I was a few “degrees of separation” from the whispy-haired, sallow looking Assange. Let’s hope Smith has better luck helping the newly famous Assange than he did a poor freelancer lying dead in a post-Soviet nightmare eight years ago.

Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Glen Howard discuss the Obama administrations successes and failures in the South Caucasus and wider Middle East regions. ©2010 Derek Henry Flood

Washington D.C.- The Jamestown Foundation and the Central Asia Caucasus Institute hosted an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace entitled, US-Azerbaijan Relations: State of the ‘Strategic Partnership’ featuring Ambassador Richard Morningstar, special envoy for Eurasian energy and Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The core issues at hand were the future of both Caspian and trans-Caspian oil and gas projects, the competition between the Nabucco and South Stream pipeline project proposals competing to bring Eurasian energy to European Union markets, as well as the inability to confirm the appointment of America’s ambassador to Azerbaijan in waiting Matthew Bryza who’s posting is currently being blocked by a hardline ethnic lobbyist group calling itself the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). Longtime Jamestown analyst Vladimir Socor said that ANCA was linked to the radical Dashnaks.  As with any Washington event, there were those in attendance espousing their own ethno-centric political positions, in this case hard line Armenians as well as a few Israel lobbyists stirring the Iran pot for good measure insofar as Iran is Azerbaijan’s southern neighbor. An AIPAC lobbyist, perhaps the city’s most dreaded, brought up the point about an Iranian state oil concern, the National Iranian Oil Company and it’s Swiss-based subsidiary Naftiran, having a 10% stake in the Shah Deniz 1 field 70 kms off the Azerbaijani coast (along with BP, Lukoil, and Statoil) in relation to U.S. backed, Israeli supported, sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Of course, AIPAC, WINEP, and the others have it completely backward. Engaging Iranian bazaaris and oil technocrats despite Ahmadinejad is the obvious way forward to foment positive engagement with Iran that would likely dilute its rhetoric on the international stage. The Iran of today is not some analogy of the Soviet Union under the Jackson-Vanik act. Brzezinski told the audience of Israel’s objectives: “They are more dependent on our fate than we are on theirs.” On the Karabagh, Lachin corridor and seven adjoining districts of Azeri territory occupied by ethnic-Armenian forces (Armenian army regulars and the so-called Nagorno-Karabagh Republic Defense Army) and their supposed “strategic value” (to the Armenian diaspora I guess), Dr. Brzezinski stated that in global affairs as a whole, the idea of a disputed territory’s strategic value is applied very unevenly dependent upon the differing perspectives of the opposing belligerents. One country’s essential disputed or occupied territory may have little intrinsic value for the rest of the international community. His comments to me evoked the Indian establishments constant talk of Kashmir being strategically essential to India’s survival. Azerbaijan, despite having elections, is essentially a one-party state described as employing soft authoritarianism. It is also a pivotally important, if fractured, Eurasian state that is the scene of classic great power competition in the 21st century. Elkhan Nuriyev, basically representing President Ilham Aliyev, alluded to this by saying that Baku skillfully balances its relations between D.C., Tehran, Moscow and Brussels. The U.S. is desperately interested in getting the Nabucco pipeline project off the ground to counter Russian maneuverings in the region. The U.S. seeks to isolate both Russia and Iran in this sense and discourage the European Union market from being dependent on these two massive suppliers of natural gas and link Europe, specifically Austria, to the existing BTE (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum) gas pipeline with the possibility of later hooking up an Iraqi (actually Kurdish) pipeline (if Erbil and Baghdad can ever come to an agreement on Kurdistan’s potential gas exports). Azerbaijan, sitting on the edge of the woefully polluted Caspian Sea (not to mention playing a sizable role in NATO’s NDN) is the total pivot state in today’s Eurasian realm. Geography is destiny as they used to say.

My autographed copy of the English translation of Anna Politkovskaya's A Dirty War from 2001.

New York- I was looking through some boxes of old dusty books today and came across my now most treasured copy of A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya by Anna Politkovskaya. Anna was killed by a so-called “control shot” in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006; the assassin still unknown. Her killing has been unsolved for over four years now and likely never will be. It is the Russian Federation after all. Many years ago now, I stumbled upon a semi-rare copy of her paperback book from England in the stacks of the Strand bookstore here in New York. I hurriedly went up to the register to pay for it knowing it was a score. Then when I went to leaf through it on the subway I noticed it was autographed. In December of 2003, I attended a conference on Chechnya in D.C. where she was supposed to speak. I disappointedly noticed she never arrived. An ally of hers, an American professor then stood up and announced to the audience that she had been notified by a crony of Vladimir Putin that if she traveled to Washington and spoke out against the atrocities of the second Russo-Chechen war, which she had every right to do as an American citizen (she was an ethnic Ukrainian born in New York holding US citizenship, the child of Soviet diplomat parents), she would be barred from returning to Russia. I have no way of ever knowing if that was exactly the case but I have no reason to doubt it either. Damn.

A Dirty War is one of the most serious books on the subject out there. Her second book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya is hard to read. I’m not sure if I ever quite finished it. I still haven’t brought myself to read any of her posthumously published works. Вы все еще пропустили Анна… (на украинском языке: Ви все ще пропустили Ганна)

New York- I finally found Marsho (“Freedom” in Chechen) by director Murad Mazaev  in its entirety online. Marsho is Chechnya’s first film shot on location in Georgia’s Pankisi valley in 2002. The film is notable in that it was shot with the permission and acquiescence the late warlord Ruslan Gelayev. Gelayev essentially ran the area at the time and anything that took place there required his ok. The other person helping the production along from afar was British stage and screen legend Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave later helped Murad take the film to festivals in Europe to showcase his work, an impassioned critique of the (still) ongoing Chechen wars. Murad made the film with Surkho Idiev who is shown playing the piano in the first scene. Murad’s costar is a half-Georgian, half-Kist actress named Mariam Kublashvili from Akhmeta. I joined Murad into this murky world in 2002. We almost got shot making a run out of the place ducking in the back of an old white Lada barreling through a Georgian checkpoint on the way out and then I was later grabbed off of a marshrutka (minibus) by the Georgian successor to the KGB. Sure, there’s lots more to tell in this story but that’ll be in the book.

For more, see Murad’s website: http://chechenfilms.org/ (in Cyrillic)

The Bastara River valley, a route once used by Chechen resistance fighters and foreign terrorists to travel from the Pankisi Gorge to to the battle zones of the North Caucasus. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Birkiani, Georgia- I returned to Georgia’s once infamous Pankisi Gorge yesterday after visiting the area seven years ago when it was hyped to be one of the most dangerous places in the world (which it sort of was). Revisiting the gorge to do fact checking for a book project was my impetus for this return trip to the Caucasus. A lot has changed since the flailing, quasi-failed state, late Shevarnadze period in 2002 when Pankisi was under the effective control of Chechen rebel commander/warlord Ruslan Gelayev (who was killed at a random checkpoint in Dagestan in early 2004).

Pankisi was once overrun by Chechen mujahideen and their Arab and Turkish epigones and was rumoured to have had the occasional spetznaz infiltration from north of the border. Pankisi was used a political football by both Moscow and Washington to advance their interests in a peripheral and weak Georgia. The BTC pipeline was more of an idea than reality at the time and the second Chechen war was still going very badly much to the consternation of Mr. Putin. Today the gorge exists as the quiet alluvial fan it once was before 1999 when Moscow came to Grozny in an attempt to demonstrate its will and refugees from Itum Kale and Shatoi poured over the mountainous border.

The refugee population has gone from somewhere in the range of 7-8000 at its height to just shy of 1000 today. The one prominent reminder of that era is the small, brick, supposedly Saudi-funded mosque in the center of Duisi. I found the house where I once stayed in the village of Birkiani which was a sort of mujahideen hostel at the time and found only a very senile, old Kist (ethnic Chechen, Georgian national) man who had no idea what I was talking about. I was taken to the region courtesy of Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in part to demonstrate once of Mikhail Saakashvilli’s early tactical successes in reintegrating this very fractured nation.

Out of place “Wahabbi” mosque in Duisi. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood