ABSTRACT

This chapter turns to the war zone proper. Outlining the continuous bombing of Chechen territory from early September 1999 until early 2001, it argues that these bombing practices went beyond both legal and social rules. Language is invoked to understand how these practices nevertheless became acceptable. The ground had been well prepared in linguistic representations for a new war against Chechnya. However, the focus is on how linguistic and material practices worked together to strengthen the discourse on Chechnya as an existential terrorist threat, adding ever-new layers and making the war acceptable even as it unfolded in all its cruelty. ‘Emergency measures’ are therefore again studied by exploring the link between two aspects: the linguistic representations in the securitizing narrative and implementation of these in bombing practices which then again serve to constitute and maintain the linguistic identity constructions in the securitizing narrative. This chapter also investigates the discursive handling of potentially ‘shocking events’ on the battlefield (such as gross human rights violations or the killing of civilians). Despite an emerging media blockade on events in Chechnya, news of particularly violent incidents during the Second Chechen War did enter Russian public space. As securitization is never a stable social arrangement, the exposure of such potentially shocking events as the war unfolded could have prompted a return of alternative positions on ‘Chechnya’ and ‘Russia’ in Russian discourse, even a re-emergence of the ‘discourse of reconciliation’. Official statements, as well as those of Federation Assembly members and experts and journalist accounts of such events in the war, will therefore be investigated in this and the next chapter. A key argument throughout these two chapters will be that such shocking events were continuously ‘carried’ and ‘covered’ by references to the initial securitizing narrative.