Crawling from the Wreckage (15 page)

More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths—and because the sample is large enough it is 95 percent certain that the true figure is within that range. What the Johns Hopkins team have done in Iraq is a more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology “excellent” and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: “You can’t be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark.”

This is not a political smear job. Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and
MIT
are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect.
The Lancet
, founded
182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. These numbers are real. So what do they mean?

Two-thirds of a million Iraqis have died since the invasion who would be alive if it had not happened. Human Rights Watch has estimated that between 250,000 and 290,000 Iraqis were killed during Saddam Hussein’s twenty-year rule, so perhaps 40,000 people might have died between the invasion and now if he had stayed in power. (Though probably not anything like that many, really, because the great majority of Saddam’s killings happened during crises like the Kurdish rebellion of the late 1980s and the Shia revolt after the 1990–91 Gulf War.)

Of the 655,000 excess deaths since March 2003, only about 50,000 can be attributed to stress, malnutrition, the collapse of medical services as doctors flee abroad, and other side effects of the occupation. All the rest are violent deaths, and 31 percent are directly due to the actions of foreign “coalition forces,” that is, the Americans and British.

The most disturbing thing is the breakdown of the causes of death. Over half the deaths—56 percent—are due to gunshot wounds, but 13 percent are due to air strikes. No terrorists do air strikes. No Iraqi government forces do air strikes, either, because they don’t have combat aircraft. Air strikes are done by coalition forces, and air strikes in Iraq have killed over seventy-five thousand people since the invasion.

Oscar Wilde once observed that “to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To lose seventy-five thousand Iraqis to air strikes looks like carelessness, too.

Well, what else was I going to call it? If I’d said “Commonwealth of Independent States,” everybody would look blank. The CIS includes most of the countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Russia accounts for more than half the population and territory of this space, but the nine full members and two associate members vary widely in language, religion and ethnicity
.

The CIS has no authority over its members, and is mainly a device for maintaining the free trade and free travel among most of the former Soviet republics. (The Baltic states were never part of it, and Georgia quit after the Rose Revolution.) But the countries that occupy this “post-Soviet space” have shared a lot of history, much of it very painful—and their fates remain linked in some ways, mainly because most of them have Russian-speaking minorities and Russia will always be the neighbourhood superpower
.

Russia is an ethnic stew itself—at least 20 percent of its population is non-Russian—and it has done a spectacularly bad job of reconciling the
Muslim nationalities of the north Caucasus to their membership in the Russian state. Especially in Chechnya. So Moscow borrowed a page from Israel’s book
.

What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody’s favourite neoconservative? It was he who, some years ago, came up with the notion that we must “decontextualize terrorism”: that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons why some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill the terrorists. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.

This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends—including the violence that is carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, and causing far more deaths. I’d be quite happy, for instance, to decontextualize nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use. If you want to start decontextualizing things like cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.

Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel. The point of decontextualizing such attacks was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past thirty-seven years and lost almost half their land to Jewish settlements.

Since the Palestinians have no regular armed forces, if we all agree that any resort by them to irregular violence is completely unpardonable and without justification, then there is absolutely nothing they can legitimately do to oppose overwhelming Israeli military force. Decontextualizing terrorism would neatly solve Israel’s problem with the Palestinians—and it would also neatly solve Russia’s problem with the Chechen resistance.

That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin was so quick to describe the rash of terrorist attacks in recent weeks, and above all, the school
massacre in Beslan last Friday, as “a direct intervention against Russia by international terrorism.”
Not
by Chechen terrorism, because that would focus attention on Russian behaviour in Chechnya, where Russia’s main human-rights organization, Memorial, estimates that three thousand innocent people have been “disappeared” by the Russian occupation forces since 1999.

No, this was an act of international terrorism (by crazy, fanatical Muslims who just hate everybody else), and nothing to do with Russian policies in Chechnya. Indeed, the Russian security services let it be known that ten of the twenty militants killed in the school siege in Beslan were “citizens of the Arab world” and that the attack was the work of al-Qaeda.

And how did they know this, since it’s unlikely that the dead attackers were carrying genuine identity documents? It turns out that Federal Security Service “experts” surmised it from the “facial structure” of the dead terrorists. (You know, that unique facial structure that always lets you pick out the Arabs in a crowd.)

Ever since 9/11, countries like Russia and Israel, which face serious challenges from Muslim peoples living under their rule, have been trying to rebrand their local struggles as part of the “global war on terrorism.” For those countries that succeed, the rewards can be great: a flood of money and weapons from Washington, plus an end to Western criticism over the methods they use to suppress their Muslim rebels. Without 9/11, Israel would never have gotten away with building its “security fence” so deep inside Palestinian territory, and Russia would face constant Western criticism over the atrocities committed by its troops in Chechnya.

Chechnya was a thorn in Russia’s side—and the Russians were an almost unlimited curse for the Chechens—long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden. The Chechens, less than a million strong even now, were the last of the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus to be conquered by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, holding out for an entire generation, and they never accepted that they had a duty of loyalty to the Russian state.

When the old Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Chechnya immediately declared independence, and successfully fought off a Russian attempt to reconquer it in 1994–96, though the fighting left tens of thousands dead and Grozny, the capital, in ruins. That should have been the end of it,
but Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya in 1999, just after Boris Yeltsin chose him as his successor.

The deal was that Putin could be president if he promised to protect Yeltsin from corruption charges after his retirement. But the practically unknown Putin still had to persuade the Russians to vote for him in a more or less honest election, so he restarted the war in Chechnya in order to build his image as a strong man with Russian voters.

Five years later, Chechnya is a war-torn landscape patrolled by about a hundred thousand Russian soldiers, many thousands are dead, and the Chechen resistance is carrying out terrorist attacks in Russian cities. There may be a few foreign volunteers from other Muslim countries involved in the struggle, but this is not part of some international terrorist conspiracy. It is not even a Russian-Chechen war, really. It is Putin’s war, and you can’t decontextualize that.

The fighting in Chechnya has died down, and a Russian-backed local warlord now ensures that almost everybody in Chechnya stays quiet and does what they are told. There are still guerrillas in the hills, but not many
.

The terrorist attacks on Russian territory have not stopped, however, and Moscow still gets very cross if you question its line that they are the product of some international Islamist conspiracy against Holy Russia. When it was first published, the above piece brought a shower of protests from Russian embassies in various countries; five years later, when Chechen suicide bombers caused carnage on the Moscow subway system in early 2010, I made essentially the same points in another article, and had to deal with identical protests from the same Russian embassies
.

But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not followed by war in most places. In fact, it was a remarkably non-violent process. Apart from the Caucasus, where Armenians fought Azerbaijanis, Georgians fought their own minorities, and Chechens fought Russians, the whole transformation was accomplished with only a few hundred lives lost. If only the aftermath had been as well managed
.

The ten million citizens of Belarus don’t go to the polls until March 19, but the outcome is already certain: Alexander Lukashenko will win a third term as president. Most other governments in Europe will express their dismay and claim that the election was unfair. They will be right in the sense that the opposition has been mercilessly harassed and that the counting of the votes probably won’t meet international standards. But they will be wrong if they really think that Lukashenko would have lost a fair election.

“It is necessary … to take a stand against this post-Soviet autocrat and his efforts to totally suppress what remains of independent initiatives in Belarus,” said former Czech president Vaclav Havel last year, but Lukashenko does not see autocracy as a bad thing. As he told Belarusian radio early this month: “An authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. Why? … You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people’s lives.”

Belarus has more policemen per capita than any other country in the world, and a few of Lukashenko’s harshest critics have simply “disappeared.” Opposition politicians are regularly beaten up or jailed, and people can go to jail for up to two years simply for openly criticizing the president. It is an ugly, petty, oppressive regime that is reminiscent in many ways of the old Communist tyrannies—but Lukashenko has won two elections and a referendum in the past dozen years, all with more than 70 percent of the vote.

Although many people in Belarus feel intimidated by his rule, if they were really a majority then the tool for their liberation would be readily available. In the last five years, disciplined crowds of non-violent protestors have overthrown similar “post-Soviet autocrats” in several other post-Soviet states, and if the problems are just unfree elections and intimidation, why don’t Belarusians get rid of their faintly Chaplinesque dictator that way?

The answer is to be found in the results of an international opinion poll published last week by the Social Research Institute in Budapest. The survey was conducted last year in eleven Central and Eastern European countries that were ruled by Communist tyrannies for at least a generation until the revolutions of 1989–91. The only country where a
majority of the people polled preferred the “democratic” systems (some real, some sham) that they have lived in since then was the Czech Republic, where 52 percent actively supported democracy and only a small minority longed to have Communism back.

In most of the former Soviet-bloc countries, the nostalgia for Communist rule remained strong, peaking at 38 percent in Bulgaria and 36 percent in Russia (where only 13 percent favoured democracy). But this is hardly surprising when you consider that most people’s experience, in most of these countries, was that the end of Communist rule brought a steep fall in living standards and a sharp rise in insecurity and inequality. For Russia, it also brought the loss of a centuries-old empire, the “exile” of tens of millions of Russians as minorities in newly independent countries, and a huge decline in the country’s power and influence in the world.

These things are not what normally accompanies the advent of democracy elsewhere. They happened in Central and Eastern Europe partly because the social and economic costs of converting from a centrally planned economy to a free market were bound to be very high, and partly because the former Communist elite seized the opportunity to “privatize” the state’s former assets (that is, almost everything) into their own pockets. It was an experience that has given democracy a very bad name in the former Soviet bloc, and only time and the rise of a new generation will erase these attitudes.