ABSTRACT
On 9 August 1999, President Yeltsin decided to sack Stepashin and appoint Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister. Putin later recalled that, in relation to his appointment and the incursion into Dagestan, he saw it as his mission ‘to bang the hell out of those bandits’.1 When meeting with Russian journalists the day before the Duma was to vote over Putin’s candidacy, Yeltsin confirmed his support for Putin and promised that emergency rule would not be introduced, but added that ‘the toughest measures possible were necessary to install order in the North Caucasus’. He believed that Putin was the right man to achieve this goal.2 In his speech to the Duma the following day, Putin underlined his intention to introduce ‘the toughest measures possible’ to deal with the violent conflict in Dagestan.3 Among Putin’s first moves as Prime Minister was to arrange a meeting on Dagestan in the Russian Security Council. He also summoned a meeting of the Federal Antiterrorist Commission and opened the meeting in the Commission, where all heads of Russia’s power ministries and departments were present, by declaring, ‘In the Caucasus and in Dagestan specifically we are facing lawlessness and terrorism. This is a situation we cannot tolerate on Russian territory.’4 Further: ‘Yesterday I ordered the Ministry for Internal Affairs to establish order and discipline there.’5 A plan for a military operation in Dagestan, subsequently approved by Yeltsin, was worked out, and Putin announced that ‘the situation in Dagestan would be straightened out in one-and-a-half to two weeks’.6 After a meeting with Putin, Minister for Internal Affairs Vladimir Rushaylo confirmed, ‘we will make it within the deadlines set for the counterterrorist operation’.7 Thus, in the course of only a few days, the threat facing Russia in the North Caucasus became the top issue in Russian politics. It was clearly represented as ‘lawlessness’ and ‘terrorism’, in turn making the ‘toughest possible measures’ the most logical response. And Putin was projected as the man capable of launching such a response. Much has been said and written about Vladimir Putin’s masterful propagation of the Second Chechen War. Indeed, observing this process and the transformation of Russia that ensued through media reports and personal encounters was what got me started on this project. It was remarkable how
Vladimir Putin’s powerful talk, presenting Russia as faced with a terrible Chechen terrorist threat, became a driving force in Russian politics. In securitization theory, such powerful security talk is identified as the starting point of enquiry and the centre of analysis. This chapter maps out the emergence and strengthening of an official position that served to discursively reconstruct and normalize ‘Chechnya’ as a ‘terrorist threat’, by analysing statement after statement during summer and autumn 1999. In the first part, I review the official statements immediately following the appointment of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister, looking at the key statements on the incursion into Dagestan in August 1999 and the terrorist bombings in Russian cities in late August and early September 1999 – in chronological order, so that it is possible to follow the official contribution to the emerging securitizing move. Some analysis of the statements is presented, but the deeper analysis of the linguistic aspect of the discourse of war follows at the end of this chapter. In the second part, I examine and then organize these official statements according to the analytical template, ‘the securitizing narrative’, introduced in the theory chapter. Going through the details of the official securitizing narrative will make it possible to determine the level of threat linked to ‘Chechnya’, how Russia was represented in the face of this threat, and what policies were suggested to be undertaken against Chechnya. The linguistic practices presented in this chapter acquired a logical material expression in the emergency practices undertaken against Chechnya that are represented in Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and will be revisited in those chapters to demonstrate the co-constitutive nature of linguistic and material practices in a process of securitization. In concluding this chapter, I compare the 1999 narrative to the official narrative that accompanied the launching of the First Chechen War in 1994 and discuss the wider implications of official representations of Chechnya, not only for the republic but also for the Chechens as a people.
