Russia Chechnya

Russia Chechnya Population: 1,200,000 (Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Russian Federation, 2007, Inter-Agency Transitional Workplan for the North Caucasus. The population of Chechnya according to the 2002 Russian census was approximately 1,100,000.) Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 7 Status: Not Free Overview: Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov was promoted to the Chechen premiership in March 2006 and continued to strengthen his hold on power in the republic. Critics like investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in October, have claimed that Kadyrov and his security forces torture suspected rebels, many of whom disappear without a trace. Rebel violence declined as Kadyrov consolidated his position, and two important rebel leaders were killed during the year, but the larger region remained unstable. Chechnya, a small, partly mountainous North Caucasus republic, has a history of armed resistance to Russian rule dating to the czarist period. In February 1944, the Chechens were deported en masse to Kazakhstan after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused them of collaborating with Nazi German forces. Officially rehabilitated in 1957 and allowed to return to their homeland, they remained politically suspect and were excluded from the region’s administration. After winning election as Chechnya’s president in October 1991, former Soviet air force Major General Dzhokhar Dudayev proclaimed Chechnya’s independence. Moscow responded with an economic blockade. In 1994, Russia began assisting Chechens opposed to Dudayev, whose rule was marked by growing corruption and the rise of powerful clans and criminal gangs. Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent 40,000 troops into Chechnya by mid-December of that year and attacked the capital, Grozny. As casualties mounted in the widening conflict, Russian public opposition increased, fueled by criticism from much of the country’s then-independent media. In April 1996, Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile. A peace deal that was signed in August 1996 resulted in the withdrawal of most Russian forces from Chechnya. However, a final settlement on the republic’s status was put off until 2001. In May 1997, Russia and Chechnya reached an accord recognizing the newly elected president, Aslan Maskhadov, as Chechnya’s legitimate leader. Following incursions into neighboring Dagestan by renegade Chechen guerrillas and deadly apartment bombings in Russia that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen militants, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched a second military offensive in Chechnya in September 1999. Russian troops conquered the flat terrain in the north of the republic, but progress slowed considerably as they neared heavily defended Grozny. During the hostilities, Moscow withdrew its recognition of Maskhadov as president. Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets caused some 200,000 people to flee Chechnya, with most heading to the tiny neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia. After federal troops finally captured Grozny in February 2000, the Russian military focused on rebel strongholds in the mountainous southern areas. Russian security sweeps led to regular atrocities in which civilians were beaten, raped, or killed, while Russian forces were subject to almost daily bombings and sniper attacks by rebels. The renewed campaign enjoyed broad popular support in Russia, fueled by the media’s now one-sided reporting in favor of the official government position. As the war persisted and atrocities increased, some Chechen fighters engaged in terrorist acts. In a crisis covered live by Russian television, a group of Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater in October 2002, taking 750 people hostage. Ultimately, more than 120 hostages died, most from the effects of a sedative gas that Russian troops used to incapacitate the rebels. Russian authorities reported that all 41 of the rebels had been killed. A March 2003 referendum on a new Chechen constitution took place in the absence of free media and public debate. Chechnya’s Moscow-appointed administration claimed a voter turnout of 85 percent, with 96 percent of participants backing the new charter. However, an independent survey of voter sentiments by the Russian human rights group Memorial found that 80 percent of the indigenous population opposed the referendum. Memorial and a number of other human rights groups pointed to a variety of irregularities in the voting, including intimidation by Russian troops, grenade attacks, multiple votes cast by some individuals, and tens of thousands of Russian troops being allowed to vote. Accordingly, the outcome did not reflect the real intentions of the local population. Kremlin-backed candidate Akhmad Kadyrov won the Chechen presidency in October 2003 elections. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the elections had not offered voters a significant choice, and the U.S. government deemed them “seriously flawed.” Chechen rebels assassinated Kadyrov in a May 2004 stadium bombing. In subsequent elections in August, Alu Alkhanov, Chechnya’s interior minister since 2003, won with a reported 74 percent of the vote. The official voter turnout was 85 percent, but journalists observing the process called that figure wildly inflated. Despite Alkhanov’s election, a great deal of de facto control remained in the hands of Kadyrov’s son, Ramzan Kadyrov, who could not become president until he turned 30. In September 2004, Chechen and other anti-Russian guerrillas carried out a terrorist attack in the neighboring republic of North Ossetia, capturing a school in the town of Beslan. More than 330 people—half of them children— died when the hostage standoff ended in chaotic violence. Putin, who had succeeded Yeltsin as president in 2000, used the attack to justify the further centralization of power in Russia as a whole, replacing the direct election of regional governors with a system of presidential appointments. Meanwhile, some families of the Beslan victims criticized the government in Moscow for its inability to prevent terrorist attacks and for covering up the negligence and corruption that contributed to the debacle. In March 2005, Maskhadov, the separatist leader, was killed in an operation conducted by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). His death came weeks after the rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire in February, in an unsuccessful bid to convince the Russian government to enter peace negotiations. Putin responded to the ceasefire by ordering an expansion of the conflict. The assassination of Maskhadov, who had been elected in a relatively fair ballot in 1997, was a serious blow to the more moderate faction in the separatist leadership and significantly reduced the chances for a negotiated settlement. Maskhadov’s replacement as rebel leader was the little-known Abdul- Khalim Saidulayev, the former head of a religious court. During his tenure, the conflict increasingly spread beyond Chechnya’s borders into the surrounding North Caucasus region. Separatist forces launched a two-day attack on Nalchik, capital of the republic of Kabardino-Balkariya, in October 2005. According to official estimates, 33 police officers and 12 civilians were killed in the fighting, along with 92 guerrillas. Saidulayev was killed on June 17, 2006; his vice president, Doku Umarov, then became the rebel leader. Umarov vowed to continue Saidulayev’s effort to spread the fight to other regions of Russia while continuing to target Grozny’s pro-Moscow regime. The rebels suffered a major loss with the death of infamous guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev in a July 10 explosion, which the Russian government claimed was part of a special forces operation. Basayev, who had taken responsibility for the Moscow and Beslan hostage raids among other attacks, was the key link between many of the disparate Islamist, terrorist, and criminal elements within the rebel movement. Despite Russian assertions to the contrary, the vast majority of the rebels’ financing came from criminal activity inside Russia, not foreign sponsors. By the end of 2006, the rebels controlled only small areas in the republic’s mountainous south, and major guerrilla actions within Chechnya had become less common as Kadyrov sought to crush or co-opt the remaining rebel fighters. Political Rights and Civil Liberties: While the 1997 presidential elections—conducted by the republic’s separatist authorities—were characterized by international observers as reasonably free and fair, the resumption of war in 1999 led to the total evisceration of Chechens’ political rights. President Maskhadov fled the capital in December 1999, and the parliament elected in 1997 ceased to function. In June 2000, Russian president Putin enacted a decree establishing direct presidential rule over Chechnya. There is no party pluralism and politicians who advocate Chechen independence are unable to work openly and freely. The Russian government’s claims to have returned the republic to democratic rule with a March 2003 constitutional referendum lacked credibility. The referendum was orchestrated by the Kremlin with no opportunity for debate, and widespread vote rigging was reported. In the subsequent presidential and parliamentary elections of October 2003, candidates representing a genuine alternative were not on the ballot, and debate was stifled in an atmosphere of repression and censorship. The Russian president recommends a candidate for the Chechen presidency, who then must be approved

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