Allah's Mountains : The Battle for Chechnya

by Sebastian Smith

Release Date: 21 March, 2001

Edition: Paperback

Price:

More Info

Interesting, but one-sided...

I agree with both Mr. Yin and Leonides. The premise of the book was good, but the book is heavily biased and ultimately unsatisfying if you are a serious student of this and related conflicts. The author admits that the Chenchens are proud, but somewhat thuggish, then goes on to praise how they cherish their knives while at the same time castigating the Russians for acting war-like. War is murderous and both sides in this book play at savagery. The author cannot praise one side and castigate the other - and contradicting himself on many pages - for the same characteristics; he loses all credibility.

And, let us not forget that Chechens are supporting Al-Qaida and related extremist,Islamic groups.

Moving account of an unusual war

I highly recommend this book as a moving account of the wars in Chechnya and the only book to explore all the remote North Caucasus nations. Smith travels deeply among these little known, ancient peoples and in Chechnya he seems to have witnessed just about every major turning point in the first war.

Having enjoyed this book so much and also having read several others on Chechnya(Anatol Lieven, Carlotta Gall, Anna Politkovskaya) I was amazed by the uninformed review already on this site by a previous reader.

This reviewer says Smith is way too pro-Chechen and never shows the Chechens in a bad light, only the Russians. I found Smith was certainly showing sympathy for this people. But then as a people they are the ones hurting. Their capital Grozny, large parts of other towns, and many of the villages have been flattened by aerial bombardment and artillery. Maybe 100,000 people, probably far more (no one bothers counting anymore) have been killed out of the tiny population. Smith points out early on that the entire Chechen ethnic group is smaller than the Russian armed forces alone. Just think about that.

By concentrating on travels with the Chechen guerrillas, not Russian troops, Smith was able to see the frontlines and feel the same effects of war as the people living in the republic. Any journalist knows that trying to get information from a regular army, especially one committing war crimes, is unlikely to result in anything but lies. If Smith is wrong in believing the Chechen side to be suffering by far the greatest, then so is MSF, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the other western journalists who spent time there and wrote books about it (Lieven, Gall etc), not to mention the incredibly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who is one of the very few to dare contradict her government's propaganda.

What has happened in Chechnya makes Kosovo pale in comparison and Milosovic is on trial for war crimes. Even in Bosnia the Serbs did not inflict such massive destruction - they didn't have half the Russian weaponry, after all. If Smith shows admiration for the Chechen guerrillas, then you do have to think about what he says he saw: a few thousand fighters with light infantry weapons tying down up to 100,000 Russian troops armed with helicopters, planes, tanks, artillery etc for several years.

I wonder if that reviewer even read the book. He/she says that the Chechens are not criticised, but on the first page I read Basayev was a terrorist and criminal AS WELL as being a hero to his own entourage. I read of a Chechen father trying to bury his son during a Russian air raid but cursing the Chechen guerrillas who had dragged him into the war. Etc, etc;

And as for there being no irony in writing about Aslan Maskhadov trying to prove he had a "regular" army by obstinately putting his men in unfavourable terrain against the Russian weapons, then that reviewer just doesn't get irony! What I read was just as he had announced this "apocalyptic" policy to Smith, an attack by Russian artillery started and Maskhadov (and Smith we suppose)had to run for their lives. Seems ironic to me.

Then there was some idea that history is given too much play in Allah's Mountains, the reviewer saying that to compare past Chechen-Russian relations so often to the present is like "comparing modern US-Mexican relations to US attempts to kill Pancho Villa".

Now this really IS ludicrous! Surely the whole point Smith was making, and it is one of the main points of the book, was that in a place like Chechnya the past really does sit very heavily on the present.

First you had brutal and long colonial conquest in the 19th century (Chechnya was about the hardest place to conquer in the whole Russian empire); then you moved straight into Soviet repression and Stalin's genocide in the 20th; then you went straight into the chaos and war of the post Soviet period. In other words there was never a moment when people might put the past behind or have any incentive to change their way of thinking. Conflict, conflict, that's all they know in Chechnya.

The reason it's important to understand this is that then you might have an inkling as to why against such ridiculous odds and at such a high price there are still today Chechens going out and blowing up Russian tanks.