Figuring out who's winning the war in Chechnya, or who the good guys and bad guys are, has not been easy - especially if you compare Western and Russian media, and particularly if you study the recent history of the area.

The Western press stresses the horrors-of-war angle. That's easy. Wars by definition are all about breaking things and killing people. The Russian take on the situation, however, is a lot more accurate.

How can that be? Simple, let's check the record.

When Chechnya first declared independence from Russia in 1993, the Russians promptly invaded. They quickly tired of getting a lot of their troops killed for what appeared to be little gain. In the wake of subsequent withdrawal from Chechnya, Russia simultaneously declared Chechnya still a part of Russia (paying pensions and government salaries there) and left the Chechens to their own devices.

But the Chechens could not govern themselves. The central government in the province controlled little beyond the capital Grozny. At least six warlords held sway - quite loosely - over the rest of the province. Criminal activity ran rampant

Little of this was reported by the Western press, although it was sometimes acknowledged that Chechnya was "lawless." The details are rather more grim and illuminating. Since 1997, some 1300 Russian civilians have been kidnapped for ransom. When the money did not appear to be forthcoming, the victims were murdered. Hundreds of these captives were rescued as Russian troops advanced into Chechnya. A few of these were reported in the Western press, but only on a slow news day.

Kidnapping wasn't the only racket. There was also theft, rustling, drug running and diverting oil from pipelines running through the province. This last scam was abetted by gangsters taking over local oil refineries and going into the fuel business. Add to this the usual gambling, extortion and prostitution rackets and you have a pretty grim place. For while a lot of the victims were fellow Chechens (who didn't belong to a particular gang's clan). most were in neighboring countries.

But what really mobilized public support for an invasion of Chechnya was one gang that specialized in religious fanaticism. Not content with just turning Chechnya into crime central, the Besayev gang decided to turn all the southern Caucasus into an Islamic republic. Most Chechens practiced the more laid back Sufi form of Islam, but Besayev and his followers managed to convert a few thousand Chechens to the more hard-nosed Wahhabi form of Islam. Non-Chechen fundamentalists came in to join the jihad. A few hundred converts were made in neighboring Dagestan.

In the summer of 1999, Besayev and company decided it was time to stop preaching and start fighting. Several thousand holy warriors invaded Dagestan. The Chechen criminals were bad enough, but this was too much for the Dagestanis, and they fought back. The Western press made little of this local resistance, but it was widely reported in Russia. Also reported was why the 32,000 Dagestani civilians who fled the invasion, and the 1,500 locals, were killed in the fighting, sometimes massacred by the holy warriors for resisting. Twice the Russians drove Besayev's warriors back. But after the third invasion, the new prime minister of Russia decided to retake control of Chechenya.

At this point the reporting by the Western media got decidedly odd. By not making much of all the mayhem the Chechen gangsters were inflicting on the Caucasus, it was made to look as if those mean and nasty Russian storm troopers were invading the peaceful province of Chechnya. The valiant Chechen freedom fighters fought back. For a moment it was forgotten that the people with the most guns in Chechnya were gangsters and that most Chechens wished things would just settle down. Many Chechens said as much, often to Russian TV cameras.

Western reporters apparently thought this was all a setup. Western news editors tripped over their own cynicism when they ignored the public announcement (in February 2000) of the senior Islamic cleric of Chechnya, Mufti Akhmed Khadzhi Kadyrov, that Russian occupation of Chechnya was the only way the people were ever going to be free from all the criminal activity. No, the Western media had tagged this one as "innocent Chechens versus the Evil Empire" and there was no way any news director was going to switch to another perspective. Besides, the images of Russian artillery, warplanes and tanks pounding Grozny into dust was too good to pass up.

But then, those same images played to appreciative audiences in Russia. Since 1997, the Russian government had basically ignored the pleas of Chechnya's neighbors for relief from the increasing criminal activity. Reassuring press releases and more border guards were all that was sent to paper over the situation. But the local resentments built up, not just in the Caucasus, but throughout Russia. What was going on in Chechnya was symbolic of the lesser degree of lawlessness throughout the country. Russians were waiting for someone to do something. But no one wanted a lot of Russian troops killed in the process. The 1993 battles in Chechnya had been humiliating for the Russian military, and people as a whole. So borrowing a page from the American playbook, the Russians used firepower instead of Russian lives when they went after Chechnya in late 1999.

This approach played well with the American people when it was U.S. casualties that were being kept down in World War II, and for the rest of the century. But for some odd reason, the Western media expected the Russians to get a lot of their soldiers killed in order to minimize damage to Chechen civilians and their real estate. The Russian public, and press, caught this double standard, but few in the West did.

War is hell, as a noted American general said while burning down much of Georgia during our civil war, and there's no way to put a pretty face on it. But it makes more salable news if you spin the situation just so. Just as they do in the movies. If reality doesn't generate the right emotions, and sufficient box office, then you make a few alterations.

But that doesn't make it real, that just makes it entertainment. And the war in Chechnya isn't entertainment, it's a tragedy with a past more meaningful than the one created for the evening news.

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