Bush's public support of Putin has silenced almost all Western criticism.

A Free Pass on Chechnya

21 July 2001

The Washington Post

WARMING UP for his summit meeting with Western leaders in Genoa, Italy, today and his separate conference with President Bush tomorrow, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his first full news conference at the Kremlin this week. In it, he was careful to portray himself as the kind of leader the G-7 is hoping he will be: politically moderate; committed to opening Russia's economy; interested, even, in joining NATO someday. On one subject, however, Mr. Putin offered no concessions and no gloss whatsoever: Of Chechnya, he said, "I have no intention of changing . . . my approach."

That approach, as Russian and Western human rights groups have exhaustively documented, is a scorched-earth military campaign by some 80,000 troops that has included the systematic torture, robbery and murder of civilians. Not only has Mr. Putin not toned down his bellicose and mendacious rhetoric about Chechnya in the five weeks since he last met Mr. Bush, but his forces have stepped up "cleansing operations" in the republic. Thousands of civilians have been rounded up in at least seven villages amid widespread reports of torture, disappearances and summary executions. The behavior of Russian forces has been so brutal that even leaders of the Moscow-appointed puppet Chechen administration have resigned or threatened to do so.

The politically savvy Mr. Putin is obviously concerned about his image in the West, yet he clearly felt no pressure to temper his Chechnya campaign or even his description of it just days before a summit meeting with the presidents and prime ministers of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada. You can hardly blame him: After all, none of these governments has had anything significant to say as reports about the bloody cleansing operations have poured in. In fact, even as news of two particularly grisly sweeps in the villages of Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya was breaking two weeks ago, Mr. Bush issued an extraordinary -- we would say shocking -- public endorsement of Mr. Putin. The Russian president "is deeply concerned about extremism and what extremism can mean to Russia," Mr. Bush told reporters, parroting the terms that Mr. Putin often uses to describe the Chechen war. "As you know, I am too." Those words were delivered on July 6 -- the day after the pro-Moscow mayors of Sernovodsk and Assinovskaya resigned in protest over an operation that even Russia's commander in Chechnya acknowledged was "lawless."

Mr. Bush's public support has had the effect of virtually silencing almost all other criticism of Chechnya by Western governments, and it has emboldened Mr. Putin to deliver ever-more-inflated falsehoods about the situation there. At his press conference Wednesday he said that Russian cleansing operations "boil down to passport checks and measures to identify people who are on the federal wanted list"; in fact, what happens is that hundreds or thousands of boys and men are rounded up in fields or placed in pits, where many are tortured and some are summarily executed. Mr. Putin also claimed that the judicial system in Chechnya is operating and that alleged crimes by his forces are being investigated and prosecuted; in fact, only one Russian soldier has been convicted, even though Russian human rights investigators have documented abundant war crimes -- including three large massacres, a dump of at least 51 bodies outside Russia's principal military base, scores of cases of torture and more than 100 disappearances.

Mr. Bush's apparent acceptance of the Chechen campaign can only be explained by his equally evident zeal to conclude a deal with Mr. Putin on missile defense. In the weeks since Mr. Bush ended his first meeting with the Russian president with the startling observation that he had looked into his soul and found him trustworthy, it has become clear that the administration is in a great hurry to win Moscow's acquiescence to a modification or abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty within months. We still don't understand why such haste is necessary; and it's also not sure that Mr. Putin will go along, despite Mr. Bush's sweet-talk. But one price of this hasty diplomatic campaign is already obvious: Mr. Bush has abdicated U.S. authority to speak out about human rights in Russia and given Mr. Putin a free pass to pursue the most bloody and criminal campaign of military repression now in the world.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company