Albert

A Genocide, A Political Coup; Some Democracy

Will Vladimir Putin be Russia 's Milosevic or its Pinochet? A great deal rides on the answer, for Russia and for the world. President Slobodan Milosevic took Yugoslavia down the road to nationalist adventurism, bringing bloodshed and a series of historic defeats. In Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet imposed brutal order in the wake of anarchy, unleashed a free-market economy and eventually paved the way for democracy.

The initial auguries for Russia under Mr. Putin are not encouraging. Boris Yeltsin's resignation was a political coup, reflecting the interests of a small cabal of oligarchs and army security chiefs. In order to exploit Mr. Putin's current popularity, and thus pre-empt any genuine democratic contest in the presidential election originally scheduled for June, the infirm and unstable Mr. Yeltsin was given a deal he could not refuse: quit promptly and be assured of immunity for any crimes committed while in office.

Mr. Putin's takeover was engineered with evident contempt for Russia 's new constitution. Since the election must now be held by March, there will be little time for any serious alternative to emerge. The vote will be a plebiscite defined largely in nationalistic terms: If you are a true Russian patriot, you must vote for Mr. Putin; a vote against him is a vote against Russia. It is particularly dismaying that Mr. Putin's popularity has been primarily generated by the genocidal assault on the small Chechen nation. Mr. Putin himself has defined that assault as a war that redeems Russia 's honor and global standing. All the Chechen freedom fighters, without any qualification, have been labeled "bandits" and "terrorists" -- deserving of elimination. Mr. Putin's current popularity thus has little basis in democracy.

To make matters worse, Washington's indifference to the slaughter of the Chechens has convinced many Russians that a policy of assertive nationalism has no cost. U.S. President Bill Clinton's callous remark last month that "I have no sympathy for the Chechen rebels" has been a green light for Mr. Putin to pursue the war until the last Chechen has been liquidated. Going even further, Mr. Clinton, writing in Time magazine, this week repeated the Kremlin's claim that the war is "to liberate Grozny." Mr. Clinton declared that the question is "whether this war becomes a model for how to deal with other problems involving terrorists and separatists."

The West has strategic as well as humanitarian reasons to care what happens in Chechnya. The war there might in its wake destabilize Georgia and threaten the stability of the southern Caucasus. It will jeopardize Western access to the energy resources of the Caspian region and is likely to impose progressively heavier burdens on Russia 's economy.

So far, then, Mr. Putin seems more reminiscent of Milosevic than of Gen. Pinochet. Senior U.S. officials once thought they could deal rationally with the Serbian dictator too. The calamities that Serbia suffered might have been avoided if the West's policies had been based on fewer self-delusions.

Initial Western reactions to Mr. Putin's ascendancy are eerily similar to the earlier romancing of Milosevic. They may encourage the worst tendencies in Russia 's volatile political moods. Despite the prevailing tendency to describe Russia as a functioning democracy, Mr. Putin's emergence reflects the constitutionally manipulative self-assertion of Russia 's antidemocratic forces: the kleptocratic oligarchs, the old KGB apparatus, and the military commanders. It is a measure of how badly Russia 's democratic experiment has fared that even to express the hope that Mr. Putin will become Russia 's Pinochet is the equivalent of wishing Russia well.

By Zbigniew Brzezinski. Mr. Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security adviser, is author, most recently, of "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" (Basic Books, 1997).
Date: January 5, 2000
Source: The Wall Street Journal Europe Page 10

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