#4
Chicago Tribune
October 28, 2001
A Soviet general and nation building
By Georgi M. Derluguian.
Georgi M. Derluguian is an assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern and
a Carnegie Scholar of Vision
As a former Soviet-trained officer, in recent weeks I have often been called for interviews about the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
Journalists seem endlessly curious about technical details: Can Osama bin Laden be found through tips from locals? Would vacuum bombs incinerate caves? What kind of hiking boots are required in Afghanistan's mountains, where the Special Forces would have to fight literally on equal footing with their foes?
I'm sorry, but this conversation is for adolescent war game buffs and Washington pundits.
If we are to defeat terrorism permanently, rather than fortifying the skyscrapers, insulating the mailrooms and chasing the fluid roster of Al Qaeda's militants around the globe, then we must learn differently.
Look, for example, toward those who have already succeeded.
Consider Gen. Ruslan Aushev, the most distinguished Soviet war hero in Afghanistan and a Muslim from Russia's North Caucasus. In his native republic of Ingushetia, Aushev has fought and defeated Al Qaeda. More importantly, he won peace without the dirty methods professionals of espionage portray as necessary evils.
Ingushetia, one of the ethnic republics within the Russian Federation, is a tiny mountainous place along the frontier of the rebellious Chechnya. In contrast to Chechnya, Ingushetia remains in obscurity because only wars in distant lands make global headlines.
In Ingushetia, peace is the lesson.
Since 1997, Aushev, who became president of Ingushetia after the dissolution of the USSR, has been loudly warning that young Muslims from Russia were traveling to "summer camps" in the Middle East. But the inner circle around former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was too preoccupied with its own political survival.
Besides, in Moscow, Aushev was privately regarded as controversial and too friendly with his Chechen neighbors.
Shortly after the beginning of the Chechen war in 1995, volunteers from Arab states, including veterans of the Afghan war, arrived in the Caucasus with money, the ideology of jihad and terrorist tactics.
The Arabs themselves rarely fought. Rather, they converted the local youths to their militant brand of Islam. These splendidly equipped and religiously inspired battalions of young Chechens soon became a very assertive internal force challenging Chechnya's secular nationalists. What started as welcome help from abroad grew into a major internal problem for Chechnya.
Aushev saw the promise of cooperation between Russia and secular Chechen separatists against the common threat of foreign-inspired terrorist militancy.
But Russia was already locked into the vicious logic of all-out war.
The leader of Ingushetia was left to wage his struggle in isolation. It was not the first time Aushev was abandoned by his superiors. In 1982 he received the gold star of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest combat decoration, for a battle he won despite grievous miscalculations by army planners.
Pinned down by mujahedeen fire for three long days and nights, Aushev, then a young army captain, lost a third of his company and was badly wounded. But he held the bridge he was assigned to seize long enough for Soviet tanks to pass. Those tanks now are likely among the wrecks littering the Afghan landscape.
Today Aushev thinks about that war quite differently. He has learned the limitations of weapons.
In 1997, facing the spread of Islamic extremism to Ingushetia and Moscow's inattention to his warnings, Aushev began acting on his own.
He convened Ingush village elders and asked for their consent to close new mosques funded by Arab dollars, and his police escorted Arab recruiters out of Ingushetia.
Aushev also firmly ruled out detaining young Ingush returning from the battlefronts of Chechnya and Afghanistan. Their families were protected from harassment.
Standing firm
In Moscow they scoffed, but Aushev was steadfast. He used his charismatic authority to plead with families of the born-again Islamic puritans to take good care of their sons, to keep them busy, to get them married. He implored their communities to help them build houses and to purchase farmland, livestock, taxicabs and trucks. Finding jobs for the young men was not easy. The rate of unemployment in Ingushetia reaches 90 percent.
Few venture capitalists would consider investing in a high-risk, remote and backward place such as Ingushetia. Aushev had to accept all investments, reportedly including money from shady origins. Aushev stretched his limited budget to employ as many men as possible to work for the local police, to start a new state university from scratch, to repair and extend roads.
Being a general, he called on trusted comrades from the Afghan war to come to Ingushetia as advisers and teachers at the Cadet Corps. An elite school, the Cadet Corps teaches students history and military discipline as well as ballroom dancing.
In highly controversial moves, Aushev also legalized polygamy in Ingushetia and the ancient highlander tradition of clan vendetta.
Both are strictly against the legal codes of the Russian Federation, and at one point Aushev came close to being removed by Russia's Constitutional Court. Undeterred, he insisted that because polygamy existed anyway, in recent years becoming the last resort for socially unprotected women, it should be regulated by the strictures of Islamic law.
The highlander's vendetta (prohibited by Islamic law) reappeared in the last decade of disorder. Many desperate relatives of victims of crimes, especially hostages abducted for ransom, bought guns on the black market and sought abductors on their own.
Aushev decided to let them operate in conjunction with Ingushetia's state police. In many cases the hostage-takers tried to justify their pecuniary crimes with the fatwa, or Islamic ruling, issued by an Arab warlord in Chechnya who reportedly blessed the abduction of infidels to finance the operations of self-proclaimed righteous warriors. The counter-threat of vendetta reduced the abductions by making the criminal business too risky.
Today hardly a home in Ingushetia is without a small private arsenal. But those guns remain mostly silent. Many Ingushes are even beginning to contemplate a time when they will sell their Kalashnikovs to buy a cow or a television. They trust their president who stubbornly keeps preaching that Ingushetia will not become like Afghanistan or Chechnya.
Desire for peace
Aushev's improvised policies may seem dubious from the Western perspective, but they are driven by his desperate desire to win peace.
Moreover, Ingushetia's peace has been won without excessive repression. As with many Muslim countries facing limited prospects in the world of globalization, Ingushetia needs recognition and help.
Aushev essentially mobilized the patriarchal ethnic traditions against the threat of Islamic militancy. We--the scholars, policymakers and conscientious public--must listen to the Ingush leader and learn from his actions.
Not only the Soviets' best in Afghanistan, Aushev is probably the world's only Muslim warrior to have routed Al Qaeda in an honest and open battle.
