Caucasus Hell

IN SEPTEMBER, the papal nuncio in the former Soviet republic of Georgia warned that the entire region of the Caucasus could become a powder keg because of the poverty and instability that are breeding grounds for terrorism. Referring to the 52-hour school siege in Beslan, which resulted in the deaths of almost 350 hostages, many of whom were young children, Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, Apostolic Nuncio in Georgia and Armenia, said The massacre of the innocents in North Ossetia shook the world.
Russian president Vladimir Putin was quick to blame the Beslan massacre on Chechen separatists, but the question must be asked: What drove these people to mercilessly slaughter women and children in this way?

Oil & arms

The southern Russian Republic of Chechnya is surrounded on nearly all sides by Russian territory but also shares with neighbouring Georgia a remote border high in the Caucasus mountains. This mountainous terrain forms the boundary between West and East, between Europe and Asia, and between the Christian and Islamic worlds. They have lain for centuries on the frontiers of empires, and their rugged highland peoples have never been completely subdued by conquering armies. The linguistic and ethnic map of the region is a complex mosaic.
Along with its geographic significance, Chechnya sits on substantial oil reserves, discovered and developed in the late 19th century. Grozny, the state's capital, founded in 1818 as a Russian fort, was second only to Baku (now the capital of Azerbaijan) as the biggest oil town in the Russian empire. In 1980, more than 7 million barrels of crude oil were extracted from more than 1,500 Chechen oil wells. Grozny was also the centre of a major network of pipelines linking Siberia, Kazakhstan and Baku. In 1993, oil accounted for two-thirds of all Chechen revenue, bringing an estimated $900 million into the struggling economy. But the instant wealth brought with it corruption and a black market that flourished in the lawless republic, allowing the Russian mafia to infiltrate the oil business. Chechnya's economy and infrastructure are now in ruins after years of war between local separatists and Russian forces, combined with armed banditry and organised crime.

Roots of hatred

Chechnya has been a thorn in Russia's mountainous southern border for nearly two centuries. The Russians finally overcame the resistance of Imam Shamil and his fighters (who had aimed to establish an Islamic state) in 1858, claiming the Caucasus region for the empire after a long and bloody campaign. Then, following the First World War, an autonomous Chechen region was established in 1922. During the Second World War, though, Josef Stalin, the Russian dictator, accused the entire Chechen and Ingush populations of collaborating with Nazi Germany, and in 1944 deported them, en masse, to Siberia. Those who managed to stay behind in inaccessible mountain villages died in bombing raids. Of the deportees, nearly 500,000 were left without protection in the unbearable cold of the Kazakh steppe, where more than 150,000 died. The resulting hatred of Russians goes far to explain the Chechens' bitter resistance against Russians today. It was not until 1957 that Nikita Khruschev allowed the Chechens and Ingush to return to their homes.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a general of the Soviet Air Force, won a presidential poll and proclaimed Chechnya independent of Russia. In 1992 the country adopted a constitution defining it as an independent, secular state governed by a president and parliament. Chechen leaders negotiated a withdrawal of all Russian troops from the republic and, by the summer of 1992, not a single Russian soldier remained on Chechen soil. But the fledgling democracy soon saw more bloodshed as Russian troops moved in to quash the independence movement in 1994. Many analysts believe this invasion was motivated by a Russian desire to cash in on oil transit fees through a major pipeline from Baku to the Russian Black Sea Port of Novorossiisk, which runs straight across Chechnya. Though Russian president Boris Yeltsin publicly envisioned a small victorious war, what ensued was a 20-month bloodbath that killed more than 60,000 people, most of whom were Chechen civilians. The assassination of President Dudayev by a Russian missile that homed in on signals from his satellite phone only served to make him a martyr. As the death toll climbed, the war became less popular in Russia, and the Kremlin asked the rebels' chief-of -staff Aslan Maskhadov for a cease-fire in 1996, before withdrawing Russian troops in November. With Russian military forces out of the country, Chechens elected Maskhadov as president in January 1997 but, under the peace deal negotiated with Moscow, a decision on Chechnya's final political status was delayed for five years.

State of emergency

Although the suffering of the Chechen population from 1994-1996 had stirred considerable compassion in the West, Maskhadov could not capitalise on this good will in peacetime. Unable to control his more radical field commanders, the breakaway republic descended into anarchy. In the succeeding years, many Chechen leaders have been involved in the kidnappings and murders of Western journalists, engineers, and aid workers. The destruction of the Chechen economy from 1994 to 1996 laid much of the ground for the explosion of criminality that followed. The Russian failure to provide Maskhadov - a moderate perceived by many to be the best Chechen leader with whom the Russians could deal - with reconstruction aid doomed his attempts to stabilise his regime. The problematic issue of Chechen independence was never fully resolved and, amid growing lawlessness in 1998, Maskhadov declared a state of emergency.
In the autumn of 1999 Chechen rebels attacked villages in neighbouring Dagestan, and Moscow was rocked by horrific bomb blasts that left hundreds dead. The Russian government quickly pinned the blame for these attacks on Chechen separatists, and an ailing President Yeltsin was encouraged by his Prime Minister and successor, Vladimir Putin, to invade. Grozny was bombed relentlessly, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and the Chechen leadership fled into the mountains to fight a guerrilla war. Putin declared direct Chechen rule from Moscow, and in June 2000 appointed former Chechen cleric Akhmat Kadyrov as head of its administration in Chechnya. In early 2001, the Kremlin officially declared the secessionist republic pacified and called upon refugees to return to their homes.
Strife continues as human rights violations - including the discovery of what purported to be a mass grave - are reported by NGOs, but the 11 September attacks gave Putin more opportunity to take a hard-line on Chechen separatists, urging them to halt all contacts with international terrorists. Peace talks with Maskhadov started in November 2001, but terrorist attacks - such as the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002, where Chechen rebels and 120 of their 800 hostages were killed when Russian forces stormed the building - continued.
Russia, however, pushed ahead with plans for a referendum, and a March 2003 vote supported a new constitution stipulating that Chechnya was part of the Russian federation. After several attempts on his life, President Kadyrov was killed in a Grozny bomb blast in May this year. Kremlin-backed former Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov was selected to replace him, and Putin blamed ongoing attacks on Maskhadov whom in July vowed to carry on fighting. When in September the school-siege in Beslan ended in a bloodbath, Putin blamed Chechen separatist fighters with links to international terrorists. Maskhadov condemned the seizure of the school, saying it was carried out by madmen wanting to avenge the deaths of their Chechen loved ones at the hands of Russian forces in Chechnya.

Resurgence of Islam

Islam has traditionally played an important role in the life of Chechen society. It has been a part of its ethnic identity for more than two centuries, and at critical times of national history it was a powerful source of social mobilisation. In the mid 19th century, Islamic Shar'ia law became the basis of the legal system, nearly replacing customary adat law as the social code of conduct. Nevertheless, pre-Islamic customs and standards are still observed up to this day. In many cases they have merged with Islam, and in the beliefs of Chechens they are today closely associated with religion.
Islam in Chechnya is represented mainly by the Sunni Shafia tradition. During the Soviet era, despite all efforts, the authorities failed to uproot Islam from the Northern Caucasus. According to a 1991 sociological survey, 94 percent of Chechnya's population (of around 1 million) considered themselves Muslims. The Islamic renaissance of the late 1980s and early 1990s was intensified by the fears of Russian aggression in Chechen society. The beginning of the Russian-Chechen war (1994 - 1996) was a powerful impetus for increasing ethnic consciousness among the Chechens, and resulted in a genuine Islamisation of the national identity. As Russian analyst K. Khanbabayev points out, After the Russian army entered the republic in 1991, Islam played an integrating role in uniting Chechens into a single force opposing the Russian troops.
In 1999 there were about 500 active mosques in Chechnya, the majority of which were built or reconstructed after 1991. Shar'ia and the Arabic language were introduced as compulsory subjects in all secondary schools in the country, while consumption of spirits was strictly forbidden, and public punishments and executions became commonplace in certain regions. The intention of the government was that Islam and Shar'ia law, which had undisputed authority among the people, were supposed to unify the traditionally disunited Chechen society that was divided into family-clan units: teips.

Bleak prospects

More recently, the Chechen commander, Shamil Basayev, has allied himself with Arab-led radical Islamists, known as Wahabis, in an effort to drive Russia out of the neighbouring republic of Daghestan. It has been reported that Muslim volunteers trained in camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan have travelled to Chechnya to fight against the Russians. In October 2002 a man suspected of helping to carry out the 11 September attack told a German court that the alleged leader of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had wanted to fight in Chechnya. Chechen rebel leaders are reported to have been in direct telephone contact with Osama bin Laden.
Regional expert Anatol Lieven paints a bleak prospect for the future of Chechnya. Historical, geographical and cultural precedents, he believes, do not bode well for the prospects of any peaceful accommodation between Russians and Chechens. Traditional Chechen culture embodies the blood feud as a key mechanism of social restraint. Thus the intense bitterness felt by Chechens over their conquest by Russia in the nineteenth century, and their deportation by Stalin, could be argued to have left the whole Chechen nation with a blood feud against Russia.
The Chechens seem incapable of creating effective modern state institutions - in part because of their particular social traditions, in part because the modern state has always shown itself to them in such an ugly guise. This means that Chechnya is continually liable to sink into anarchy and to generate a variety of attacks on Russian territory and people, in a way that continually provokes a savage Russian response.