With “last week’s Moscow subway bombings”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/03/29/GA2010032900867.html and then the subsequent “suicide bombing in Ingushetia”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hpi7t1Fh0QS4w8EMaN65mDObRiOAD9EST7PG0, “Jason Lyall”:http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/jlyall.html sends along the following thoughts:
bq. In war, as in political life, today’s solution is often tomorrow’s problem. The twin Moscow Metro bombings offer a graphic example of this principle at work. While commentators have been quick to cite these attacks as evidence of the bankruptcy of the Kremlin’s counterinsurgency campaign in Chechnya, the reality is perhaps the exact opposite.
bq. Perversely, it is the very success of Kremlin-backed efforts by local actors — most notably, Ramzan Kadyrov, the 33-year-old now ruling Chechnya — in weakening the power, appeal, and geographic scope of the insurgency, that has prompted a radical about-face in tactics by its embattled leader, Doku Umarov.
bq. This downturn in rebel fortunes is directly attributable to twin efforts by the Kremlin and Kadyrov to induce Chechen rebels to switch sides and join militia formations (collectively known as the Kadyrovtsi) designed to hunt their former colleagues and their supporters.
bq. Driven by a mixture of disillusionment, greed, and intimidation, some 20,000 men have defected to the Russian side, leaving the insurgency a hollow shell of its former self.
bq. Indeed, given the advantages of coethnicity, these militia groups have proven extremely, and lethally, effective at identifying and killing insurgents, while also cutting a wide swatch of fear and intimidation among the general public through forced disappearances, targeted home burnings, and extrajudicial killings. Yet the stability purchased by these militia in Chechnya is fragile, for three reasons.
bq. First, suicide terrorism has reemerged as a effective, and perhaps the only, means for the insurgency’s nominal leader, Umarov, to influence Russian audiences and within the internecine struggle for control among the fragmented leadership.
bq. Second, while the brutality of these militia has sharply degraded the insurgency’s effectiveness, it has also created widespread grievances among victimized populations within Chechnya, ensuring a trickle of new recruits that disappear into the forests each summer.
bq. Finally, remaining insurgents have been forced to seek freedom of action in the neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, mixing in with homegrown groups to diffuse the conflict throughout the Northern Caucasus.
bq. The choice facing the Kremlin and Kadyrov is a stark one. A comprehensive settlement to the now decade-long war would mean substantial political and economic reforms across the region, threatening the rule of the Kremlin’s hand-picked strongmen without the guarantee of achieving any measure of stability, let alone peace. Yet a further tightening of the screws in Chechnya may preserve stability for a time but carries the risk of continually fueling a low-grade intra-Chechen civil war while pushing the war beyond Chechnya’s boundaries. In the latter case, the attacks of 29 March may only be a harbinger of things to come.”
Lyall’s comments regarding coethnicity and anti-insurgent tactics are based on his recent “APSR article”:http://journals.cambridge.org/lyall on the subject of ethnic identity and insurgent violence. Cambridge University Press, the publisher of the APSR, has issued the following press release concerning the article:
In the wake of the Moscow bombings, new research in the latest edition of the American Political Science Review published by Cambridge University Press highlights the crucial role that ethnic identity plays in conflicts, such as the one in Chechnya.
In particular, soldiers of the same ethnic identity as the local populace appear to be much more effective at stemming insurgent violence than soldiers from outside forces.
A study from Yale University of the second Chechen War (2000-2005) reveals that Chechens fighting on behalf of the Russian invaders were able to prevent insurgency attacks with much greater success than the technically superior Russian military. Soldiers of the same ethnic origins as the local populace were able to identify insurgents more accurately and threaten them and their families with more credibility than the Russians.
Researcher Jason Lyall, a Postdoctoral Research Associate from Yale’s Department of Political Science, studied Russian-only and Chechen-only raids on communities, or ‘sweep’ operations, throughout the war, concluding that:
bq. There is substantial evidence to support the claim that insurgent violence is conditional on the ethnicity of the sweeping soldiers.
Insurgency attacks were much lower after Chechen soldiers carried out sweeps of settlements. Lyall found a 40% average decrease in the number of insurgent attacks following Chechen-only sweeps compared with similar Russian-only operations. By contrast, insurgent attacks rose by 7% after Russian raids and Russian sweeps were also met by much swifter retaliation.
A sweep is defined as an operation to separate insurgents from the non-combatant population by isolating a specific location, surrounding it with armed forces and detaining, killing, or forcing the withdrawal of suspected insurgents through armed patrols, identification checks, and house searches.
Lyall found that the Chechen soldiers
bq. enmeshed in dense intra-ethnic networks, are better positioned to identify insurgents within the population and to issue credible threats against civilians for non co-operation.
These threats typically included the kidnapping and torture of family members if the suspected insurgents did not desist from their activities. The local populace was more likely to believe the threats of a Chechen than a Russian soldier and co-operate with their demands.
Many Chechens crossed ‘ethnic lines’ to collaborate with Russian forces in the second war in Chechnya. Chechen-only combat units were set up to conduct sweep operations, of which the best known are Special Battalions Vostok and Zapad. Their extremely effective sweeps typically involved several hundred soldiers and lasted between three and five days.
Lyall states that Chechen soldiers had two unique weapons: they had access to information-rich local networks that helped them to identify insurgents accurately and they were prepared to “unravel insurgent networks by exerting tremendous pressure on rebels to quit the insurgency out of fear that family members will be tortured.”
He concludes that, although effective in ending the war, this strategy leaves Chechnya wth a sinister and potentially lethal legacy:
bq. These sweep operations have changed the conflict from an open Russian-Chechen war of secession to a muted, but still deadly, intra-Chechen struggle. Now Chechens are mostly pitted against fellow Chechens, a state of affairs due largely to the rise of, and continued reliance on, these militia.
Examining how and why ethnicity shapes patterns of wartime violence is important, Lyall believes, because a substantial number of civil wars are ethnic in nature. More than two thirds of the 127 civil wars fought since 1945 have been fought entirely or partially between warring ethnic groups.