Report from (post-jihad?) Chechnya

From the New York Times:

Women stroll on sidewalks that did not exist last year. Teenagers cluster under newly installed street lights, chatting on cellphones. At a street corner, young men gather to race cars on a freshly paved road — a scene, considering that this is the capital of Chechnya, that feels out of place and from another time.

Throughout the city, local officials, most of them former rebels who waged a nationalist Islamic insurgency against Russia, lounge in cafes, assault rifles idled beside them.

Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks caused many analysts to say that Russia’s war against Chechen separatists could not be won, the republic has fallen almost fully under the control of the Kremlin and its indigenous proxies, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the Chechen president.

Mr. Kadyrov’s human rights record is chilling, and allegations of his government’s patterns of brutality and impunity are widespread. Yet even his most severe critics say he has developed significant popular support, in part because of the clear changes that have accompanied his firm and fearsome rule.

As one Chechen told the Times:

“I compare how we used to live, and it is like we are in a fairy tale now,” said Zulika Aliyeva, 46, whose home was destroyed when Russia sacked Grozny in 1999 and 2000 and who spent years squatting in a ruined building. The building she moved to recently has been partly repaired.

Even experts are impressed:

Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center who studies Chechnya and recently visited the republic again, said the pace of change was astounding. “I couldn’t believe I was in Grozny,” he said.

The Times sums up what seems to have happened:

Russia’s defeat of the heart of the rebellion in Chechnya appears to flow, in the simplest sense, from a two-stage formula: extraordinary violence, followed by extraordinary investment. One corollary has been that allegations of human rights abuses by both Russia and its local allies have been largely ignored.

The Times credits Kadyrov for all this:

At the center of this formula has been Mr. Kadyrov, the rebel turned Kremlin ally who was widely labeled an illiterate bandit when he entered public life three years ago after his father, then the president, was assassinated.

Mr. Kadyrov, like the republic he leads, has defied the dark projections. As Chechnya’s president since this spring, he has become a populist who has managed to embrace Sufi Islam, Chechen ethnic identity and Kremlin authority simultaneously.

His success has a paradoxical quality to it. Paramilitary units in his government are suspected of kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings. Combat has not fully stopped and sporadic fighting has spread to neighboring republics. Large graves are full of unidentified remains — the victims, human rights advocates say, of a campaign to kill people suspected of being insurgents and punish their families.

So apparently do many locals:

Mr. Kadyrov, they said, has driven his government to work and forced government-hired contractors to meet his harsh deadlines. “They are afraid of Ramzan,” said Linda Saraliyeva, 28, one of Ms. Aliyeva’s neighbors. “What he has done in only one year, no one else has managed to do.”

As for Kadyrov himself, he credits Putin - and his harsh tactics. As he told the Russian GQ in 2005:

"I've already killed who I should have killed. And I will kill all of those standing behind them, as long as I myself am not killed or jailed. I will be killing as long as I live… Putin is a beauty. He thinks more about Chechnya than about any other republic. When my father was murdered, he [Putin] personally came down and went to the cemetery. Putin stopped the war. Putin should be made president for life. Strong rule is needed. Democracy is an American invention… Russians never obey their laws. Everyone stole, and only Khodorkovsky is in jail."

Some experts agree that Putin has been critical in the pacification process:

Mr. Malashenko, at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said he saw the Chechen president differently, saying that Mr. Kadyrov had become an essential national figure. But he added that he worried that Mr. Kadyrov’s standing was connected to his personal relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

If Mr. Putin leaves office next year at the end of his second term, as required by Russia’s Constitution, he said, Mr. Kadyrov’s fortunes, and his life, could be at risk. “He is hated in Moscow by a lot of people,” he said. “Only Ramzan is able to be a national leader. If he disappears, there will be a quarrel between the clans.”