Russian Campaign Against Chechnya Copy-Cats
NATO In Kosovo
By Jon Boyle
Despite its fierce criticism of NATO tactics in Kosovo, Russia has adopted a
similar air war strategy against Islamic militants in Chechnya, even adopting
western-style media presentations to build support for the campaign.
The military top brass has been drafted in to explain the air raids on the
Chechen capital Grozny, attacks on communication centers, the republic's
main airport, key roads and bridges, and oil facilities.
The offensive was launched last week after Moscow accused
Chechen-based rebels of being behind a wave of huge bombings of Russian
apartment blocks this month which killed nearly 300 people.
Analysts said the Chechen campaign mirrors the strategy of the Atlantic
alliance in Yugoslavia, where NATO jets carried out a three-month
bombardment of military and infrastructure targets to force President
Slobodan Milosevic to halt a crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.
Pitched as a merciless war against "bandit formations," the Russian campaign
aims to pin down the guerrillas, destroy them in their bases, harry resupply
routes, and cut off radio and mobile phone links used by the rebels.
The goal of the aerial attacks, analysts said, is to avoid a potentially bloody
ground offensive while retaining support for an operation among ordinary
Russians who are still scarred by Moscow's disastrous 1994-96 war against
Chechen separatists.
Airforce chief General Anatoly Kornukov at the weekend detailed the more
than 30 bridges and some 250 kilometers (150 miles) of roads destroyed
during 1,700 combat sorties from August 3 to September 24.
His press conference, broadcast on national television, bore an uncanny
resemblance to the daily briefings given in NATO's headquarters in Brussels
by the Atlantic alliance's chief spokesman Jamie Shea.
Using high-resolution reconnaissance photographs and footage from in-flight
cameras on SU-25 ground-attack aircraft, Kornukov showed bombs
destroying designated targets in "surgical" strikes which first hit the world's
television screens during the Gulf War.
"Russia severely criticized NATO for all it did in Kosovo, but this experience
has not become a reason to avoid similar actions in Chechnya," Ivan
Safranchuk of the PIR-Centre think-tank said in an interview published in the
Vremya daily on Monday.
"The logic of the military operation in Chechnya consists of minimizing losses,"
added Vladimir Baranovsky, from Moscow's prestigious Academy of
Sciences. "The NATO operation in Yugoslavia was founded on the same
principle."
Military sources quoted by Vremya said Moscow's air campaign could last
up to 18 months as its warplanes try to destroy the republic's infrastructure,
including roads leading to Georgia and Azerbaijan.
At the same time, the army will seek to seal Chechnya's border with the
neighboring Russian republics of North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Dagestan, as
part of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's strategy to protect Russia from the
"terrorist contagion."
A second aspect of the campaign is apparently to sow discord among the
Chechen warlords and trigger a civil war which would turn public opinion
against the gunmen and pave the way for installation of a pro-Moscow leader
in Grozny who would curb Chechnya's fractious groups.
However, the strategy is high risk because, as Baranovsky told Vremya,
NATO military planners had better aircraft and more accurate weapons
systems at their disposal than their Russian counterparts.
Chechnya's "foreign minister," Ilyaz Akhadov, told Echo Moscow radio at
the weekend that about 100 civilians had died in Russian air raids since
Thursday, a rate of loss which threatens to further alienate ordinary Chechens
from Russia.
Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, predicted
that the air campaign "will be a total military disaster."
"The more Russia destroys the remnants of civilian society and the civilian
economy in Chechnya, the more Chechnya will become a land dominated by
warlords," he said.
"You can bomb warlords until doomsday, they don't give a fig about civilian
casualties, but you can't destroy them by such attacks. So this strategy is
doomed from day one." ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse) |
