!" # $ % ! & & ' # $ % ! # $ ! !( # )
* + " ! , - $ ! . / 0 " $ $ ,
! " ! " ! " # $ !% ! & $ ' ' ($ ' # % %) %* % ' $ ' + " % & ' !# $, ( $
- . ! "- ( % . % % % % $ $ $ - - - -
/ / $$$
0 1"1"#23." 4& )*5/ +) * !6 !& 7!8%779:9& % ) - 2 ; !
* &
< " -= %/ & > -%= %# ? . %:@@A
/ - B:@9C4& )*5/ +) "3 " & :@9C Contents
Foreword v Acknowledgments vii A Note on Transliteration ix Tables and Figures x
Chapters 1. Introduction 1
2. Roots of the Conflict 9 Historical Factors 9 Political Factors 15 Socio-Cultural Factors 21 Economic Factors 24 Leadership Factors 29 Summary 34
3. The Chronicle of the Chechen Wars 35 The First Chechen War: 1994-1996 36 Yeltsin’s Policy 36 Negotiations 38 Russian Withdrawal 41 Pursuit of Independence: 1997-1999 43
i
Elections of Chechen President 43 Yeltsin-Maskhadov Peace Accord 43 Deterioration of the Situation 44 The Second Chechen War: 1999-2003 45 Putin’s Policy 46 The OSCE Summit 52 Ultimatum to Grozny 53 Zachistki 55 Theater Siege in Moscow 58 The Future Status of Chechnya 60 Summary 63
4. Responses to the Chechen Wars 65 Responses in Russia to the First Chechen War 65 Military 65 Public Opinion 66 Media 68 Political Parties 69 Yeltsin’s Solution 70 Responses in Russia to the Second Chechen War 72 Military 72 Public Opinion 74 Media 76 Political Parties 77 Foreign Policy Makers 79 Putin’s Solution 80 U.S. Response to the First Chechen War 81 Clinton Administration Response 81 Congressional Response 82 ii
U.S. Response to the Second Chechen War 83 Clinton Administration Response 83 Congressional Response 86 Bush Administration Response 87 Congressional Response 89 Summary 90
5. Conclusion 91
Bibliography 99 Chronology 115
iii
iv
Foreword
On December 4, 2014, as dawn broke, a fierce gun battle between militants and government security forces paralyzed the center of the Chechen capital, Grozny: ten police officers and nine militants were killed and another twenty- eight police officers injured. The New York Times reported that the most brazen attack linked to militant activity in the region in months occurred hours before President Vladimir Putin, unflappable as usual, delivered his State of the Nation Address to the joint session of the Duma in Moscow. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin ally who governs Chechnya, played down the violence. He told the Interfax news agency reporters at the Kremlin that he had managed to fly home, organize a special operation to kill the terrorists, gather the staff needed to restore the damaged Publishing House and a nearby school, and make it back in time to listen to the speech. President Putin made a passing reference to the attack, suggesting once again that the West was behind the insurgency in the restive Caucasus region because it wanted to break up Russia, as it had Yugoslavia. The third major assault last year came on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the first Chechen war on December 11. The attack served as a reminder that despite numerous declarations to the contrary, most recent in 2009, the war in Chechnya never really ended. In fact, it has been a prelude to Russian assertiveness in the “Near Abroad.” Conflicts spilled over across its borders, first into Georgia in August 2008, then Crimea last year in February-March, followed by incursions into eastern Ukraine in April, and v more, no doubt, is to come. In the words of Michael Stürmer, a right-wing German historian and Putin’s biographer, “the West had no idea what was at stake in Chechnya.” A new era of limited confrontation has begun: “the bear had left his den, and things would have to change.” The twenty-year-long drama in the Caucasus has had domestic and international implications. Andrew Foxall, the director of the Russia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based international affairs think tank, recently observed in his World Affairs Journal online feature artile that “Putin came to power on the back of a “small, victorious war” in Chechnya, and he has reasserted his domestic popularity by a similar endeavor in Ukraine. But the lesson from Chechnya is clear: such wars are never small. . . .” The two wars in Chechnya have eroded Russian democracy and strengthened those within the military and security forces who call for a return to the old ways. The Russian military for years has been a source of pride to Russia; it has bolstered Russia’s claim as a world power. In the period of social and political upheaval, the military and security can be the forces that support democratic reform, or they can undermine the hopes for reform with a return to repression and authoritarian rule. The restoration of the lost Soviet empire might be the ultimate objective of today’s Russian elite. The developments in the future deserve the world’s attention.
Victoria A. Malko Fresno, California
vi
Acknowledgments
Many thoughtful people made this publication possible. The work started in a seminar on International Relations during fall 1999 under the late Professor Lyman Heine, to whom I wish to express my sincere gratitude. As a historian, I felt at a disadvantage because the conflict in Chechnya unfolded on a day-to- day basis without allowing sufficient distance in time necessary to write a good history. Another disadvantage was the absence of first-hand observations and field notes from the area of conflict, which makes the researcher an outsider who analyzes the war at a safe distance from a university “ivory tower.” Thanks to Professor Heine for his critical eye and for his suggestions that helped the revision of the manuscript. His colleague at the Department of Political Science, Professor Emeritus Alfred Evans, read the draft from cover to cover and provided much needed insight into the intricate world of Russian politics. My deep appreciation goes to Professor Michelle DenBeste, a respected scholar of Russian history, under whose guidance my thesis gained its focus and shape. As Chair and Graduate Advisor at the Department of History, she encouraged and supported my research work. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor William Skuban, a specialist on nationalism, for his comments on the final draft. I also owe much to Professor Emeritus of History Sidney H. Chang for his advice on research methodology. He called my attention to sources I had overlooked. He not only encouraged me to write this book, but whatever value it has is due in large part to his selfless willingness to read and critique it. Thanks to their comments, the book has become more readable and useful. vii
Above all, my thanks to Professor Malik Simba, the past Chair, as well as faculty at the Department of History, and especially Dean Emeritus of the School of Social Sciences Peter Klassen, who took notice of my modest endeavors and provided their wholehearted moral and financial support. The Division of Graduate Studies at California State University, Fresno supported my research and writing with the Graduate Student Research Merit Award and a travel grant to present my preliminary findings at the Western Social Sciences Association Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, in April 2003. Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Luz Gonzalez, provided ideal working conditions. Two honors, the Dean’s Medalist and the University’s Outstanding Thesis Award, were a great encouragement to the completion of the thesis the following year. The less obvious yet very important help came from Janice Byrd of the Henry Madden Library, who never balked at my piles of interlibrary loan requests. I am especially grateful to Molly Molloy, reference librarian of the Hoover Library, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford, California, for professional guidance given on key citation sources. For his untiring assistance as thesis consultant, I wish to express my appreciation to Charles Radke. His expertise and attention to detail were helpful in preparing the manuscript for publication. Others deserving credit include Ian Fowler, who as editor for Lambert Academic Publishing at Saarbrücken, Germany, believed in this book and was extremely helpful to work with. Needless to say, all shortcomings are my own responsibility. Finally, this work would not have been completed without the support, endless patience, and inspiration of my family. I am grateful to them all. V. M.
viii
A Note on Transliteration
With the exception of certain terms and individuals’ names, for which the most commonly used spelling has been adopted (for example, Chechnya, Grozny, Yeltsin), I have followed the Library of Congress system for transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet. Transliteration from Chechen is without diacritics.
ix
Tables and Figures
Tables 1. Chechen and Ingush Population in the Russian Federation 14 2. Oil Extraction and Refinery in the Chechen Republic 25
Figures 1. Chechnya 11 2. Russia’s Ethnic Republics 17
x
Chapter 1
Introduction
Within five years of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, ethnic conflicts spilled over two hundred hot spots throughout its vast territory, most of them in the Russian Federation.1 An analysis of scope and intensity of a conflict with one of Russia’s one hundred ethnic minorities is the focus of this book. Thomas Remington of Emory University noted that the case of Chechnya stands out for its uniqueness because “in no other ethnic territory has the central government imposed its will by military force.”2 The conflict in Chechnya erupted into two full-scale wars, fought during the decade of Russia’s turbulent transition from communism toward democracy. The literature on ethnic conflicts around the world treats the topic from multidisciplinary perspectives.3 Russian scholars joined the field of modern conflict studies in the late 1990s.4 A number of theories have been advanced in
1 E. I. Stepanov, ed., Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii: Problemy analiza i regulirovaniia (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 228. 2 Thomas F. Remington, Politics in Russia (New York: Longman, 1999), 94. 3 Ted R. Gurr and Barbara Harff, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). See also Ethnic Conflict Research Digest for the reviews of the latest publications, published by the Initiative on Conflict Resolution expert network. 4 Stepanov, Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii. See also Sotsial’nye konflikty: Ekspertiza, prognozirovanie, tekhnologii razresheniia, Vyp. 3: Mezhnatsional’nye konflikty v posttotalitarnom obshchestve, Chast’ 2: Panorama etnicheskikh napriazhenii i protivostoianii (Moscow: RAN, 1993). 1
the field of ethnic conflict studies: the basic human needs theory, the theory of minorities-at-risk, and the state failure theory. According to the author of the basic human needs theory, John Burton of George Mason University, the roots of the social conflict lie in unresolved basic human needs.5 Critics of the basic human needs theory point to its controversial assumption that people would try to satisfy their needs by any means possible, without regard to whether others in the society perceive their actions as criminal or terrorist.6 Social reconstructionists argue that the notion of the perceived needs of an ethnic group is socially constructed. They point out that the humanists fail to explain why the initiators of the ethnic violence are of relatively high socioeconomic status while less well-to-do members of their ethnic group might not understand or support the drive to change the status-quo.7 Ted Gurr of the University of Maryland, the author of the minorities-at- risk theory, postulated that the disparity in the status of minority and majority groups in a given society creates serious social, political, historical, and cultural problems that lead to ethnic conflict.8 Critics of this theory note that the criteria of inclusion of certain minority groups on the list of “minorities at risk” are arbitrary. For instance, the Chechens did not qualify for this designation before 1991.9
5 John W. Burton, Conflict: Human Needs Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 6 D. Sandole, Conflict Resolution in the Post-Cold War Era: Dealing with Ethnic Violence in the New Europe, Working Paper no. 6, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University (Fairfax, 1992), 12. 7 V. A. Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 36. 8 Ted R. Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993). 9 Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 37. 2
The third theory, the state failure theory, evolved in the late 1990s following the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union along ethnic lines.10 The authors of the state failure theory identified four factors that predict collapse or destabilization of the state regime. These factors include (1) absence of democracy, (2) huge external debt, (3) high child mortality rate, and (4) high percentage of young population. The danger of this theoretical approach is that its predicting power can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.11 The Chechen conflict has generated a large number of publications in popular periodicals that centered mostly on the chronology of the war. Only in the aftermath of the first Chechen war of 1994-1996 did comprehensive academic studies of the ethnic conflict appear both in Russia and the United States. On the Russian side, notable publications include a historical and political analysis of the conflict by the Chechen academician Dzhabrail Gakaev and an ethnographic study of the society in an armed conflict by the Russian historian and ethnographer Valerii Tishkov.12 Among the English-language sources, two notable studies by John Dunlop of Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Tracey German of the University of Aberdeen examined the roots of the first war.13 While the secondary literature on the first war, which lasted from December 1994 to August 1996, is extensive, analytical studies of the second
10 For more information on the state failure theory, see Daniel C. Esty, Jack A. Goldstone, Ted R. Gurr, Pamela T. Surko, and Alan N. Unger, Working Papers: State Failure Task Force Report (McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, 30 November, 1995). 11 Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 39. 12 See Dzhabrail Gakaev, Ocherki politicheskoi istorii Chechni (XX vek): V dvukh chastiakh (Moscow: Izd-vo Chechenskii Kul’turny Tsentr, 1997). Dzhabrail Gakaev, an ethnic Chechen, played a pivotal role in the political opposition to Dzhokhar Dudaev’s regime. See V. A. Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte. Valerii Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was appointed Minister of Nationalities in 1992. He participated in negotiations with representatives of the Chechen Republic in 1994 and served on a governmental committee on peaceful resolution of the conflict in 1995-1996. 3
war that began in October 1999 are scarce for several reasons. First, the peace agreement has not been signed by the Chechens yet. Second, the researcher’s access to the verifiable information is limited. Third, the available information to some extent might be distorted for the purposes of propaganda by both sides of the conflict. This book thus employs memoirs of Russian government leaders and generals, reports by human rights groups, Russian and United States’ governmental documents, supplemented by journal and newspaper articles. The war in Chechnya is a timely and rich topic for historians. For instance, from 1996 to 2003, when the military phase ended, the New York Times published 700 articles, the Washington Post published 800 articles, Nezavisimaya gazeta 1,000 articles, and Moskovskie novosti 1,200 articles on this historical issue. Most of the authors of the book-length studies examine politics and government in Russia, focusing on Russian and Chechen policy making. Some scholars approach the conflict from autonomy and independence movement perspective. Others approach ethnic relations between the Russians and the Chechens within the framework of nationalism. Specialized studies deal with the military analysis, social conditions in Russia and Chechnya, the role of Islam, press coverage, casualties, and refugee crisis. Scholars studying the Chechen conflict approach this topic from various explanatory perspectives. They employ concepts from sociology, anthropology, political science, especially international law, and economics in order to analyze the nature of the conflict. Scholars use the terms “conflict” and “war” interchangeably.14 The former appears in works of Russian scholars, who write
13 See John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Tracey German, Russia’s Chechen War (London: Routledge, 2003). 14 The term “interethnic conflict” is defined as a clash of ideas, worldviews, or theories, which can be either agonistic (reconcilable) or antagonistic (irreconcilable). The term “interethnic war” refers to a large-scale socio-political phenomenon, an act of the resolution of territorial, 4
for the Russian audience, treating the issue as an on-going conflict. The latter is used more often by the American, British, and some Russian scholars and journalists. One approach to the analysis of the Chechen conflict is framed as “clash of civilizations,” borrowing the term coined by Samuel Huntington.15 The assumption of scholars who follow this line of thought is that Islamic and Christian civilizations are incompatible, and that historical confrontation between these two social and cultural systems is inevitable.16 The danger of this approach is in its “ethnographic romanticism” that views the Chechen identity as primordial, inherited from the past, and reinvented by modern political leaders and intellectuals.17 Another perspective on the conflict in Chechnya rests on a conspiracy theory. Oil and money are two economic factors that dominate the discourse of those who search for the “true” underlying causes of the war.18 According to this theory, the war broke out to cover up the illegal arms trade, the sale of petroleum, and stolen cars, which involved criminal groups in Chechnya and their protectors in Moscow. Critics of this theory contend that stories about the omnipotent “Chechen mafia” are mostly state-sponsored propaganda, if not a
religious, or other contradictions between nations (including those within a federation) with the use of the military force. See V. D. Dzidzoev, Kavkaz kontsa XX veka: tendentsii etnopoliticheskogo razvitiia (Vladikavkaz: Vladikavkazskii nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 2000), 14. 15 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. 16 Among Russian historians who follow this approach are Aleksei Malashenko of Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Ian Chesnov and Dmitrii Furman, research fellows at the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and anthropologist Sergei Arutiunov, director of the Caucasus Department of the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 17 Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 45. 18 On the role of the “oil factor” see Elaine Holoboff, “Oil and the Burning of Grozny,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 7, no. 6 (June 1995): 253-257. 5
conspiracy on the part of the security forces to end democratic reforms in Russia and to restore authoritarian regime.19 The most controversial concept and the one employed in this thesis deals with self-determination. This concept comes from the field of political theory and international law. Its historical origin dates back to Woodrow Wilson’s interpretation of self-determination as the government by the consent of the people, imposed on the multiethnic empires at the end of World War I. Late in the twentieth century, renewed interest in this concept emerged following the dissolution of multiethnic states of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.20 Analysis of the instruments of international law that govern conflicts within multiethnic sovereign states has revealed that the conflict in Chechnya comes at the intersection of two conflicting principles: respect for the territorial integrity of the state and the right for self-determination of peoples.21 In the case of Chechnya, the territorial sovereign has exercised its right to suppress
19 For Pavel Baev’s criticism of the “criminal regime” concept employed in a publication by the Information Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Kriminal’nyi rezhim: Chechnya, 1991-1995 gg.: Fakty, dokumenty, svidetel’stva (Moscow: Izd-vo “Kodeks,” 1995), see Pavel Baev, Russia’s Policies in the Caucasus, Former Soviet South Project Briefing Paper (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1997), 32. For Egor Gaidar’s views on the conspiracy of the security forces, see Moskovskie novosti, 25 December 1995; quoted in Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 48. 20 More on the concept of self-determination in the context of a new geopolitical situation, see Hurst Hannum, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990) and Thomas D. Musgrave, Self-Determination and National Minorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). For the Russian scholars’ interpretation of self-determination, see S. V. Sokolovskii, Prava men’shinstv: Antropologicheskie, sotsiologicheskie i mezhdunarodno-pravovye aspekty (Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1997) and Galina Starovoitova, National Self-Determination: Approaches and Case Studies, Occasional Paper no. 27 (Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, 1997). 21 Article 1.2 of the Charter of the United Nations provides that one of the UN’s purposes is “respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” while Article 2.7 provides that the UN shall not “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state” but “this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.” See Chapter I, Charter of the United Nations, in Frank Newman and David Weissbrodt, Selected International Human Rights Instruments and Bibliography for Research on International Human Rights Law (Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., 1996), 3-4. 6
the secessionist moves, which threatened to shatter the unity of the Russian Federation. The erosion of the principle of the primacy of the sovereign state in its own territory began with the end of the Cold War, when a series of ethnic conflicts broke out in the former Soviet republics, igniting nationalist sentiments among smaller ethnic groups. The dissolution of the Soviet Union set a precedent that self-determination could be realized under certain conditions even when it disrupted the unity of a state. Following the events in Kosovo and East Timor in 1999, state sovereignty has undergone further erosion. Modern states are considered instruments at the service of their people, and therefore, the international community cannot stand idly by when “death and suffering are being inflicted on large numbers of people, and when the state nominally in charge is unable or unwilling to stop it.”22 President Yeltsin’s administration ridiculed the notion of “humanitarian intervention” and Washington’s interpretation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter23 and opposed criticism from the Western governments for its campaign against “bandits” and “terrorists” in Chechnya.24 After September 11, 2001, President Putin’s government strengthened ties with the United States and convinced the West that the military operation in Chechnya is a part of a global war against terrorism.25
22 Kofi Annan, “Two Concepts of Sovereignty,” The Economist, 18 September 1999, 49. 23 The provisions of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter confer upon the Security Council a broad competence to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to decide upon what measures should be taken to “maintain or restore international peace and security.” See Newman and Weissbrodt, Selected International Human Rights Instruments, 10. 24 John Dunlop pointed out that in late 1994, President Yeltsin revived the demeaning terms “bandits” and “terrorists” that were used by the Imperial and later Soviet Russian rulers to censure their Chechen opponents. See Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 11, 43. 25 Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), 9. 7
The purpose of this book is to analyze the historical roots of the conflict, the nature of Russian federalism, and socio-cultural, economic, and leadership factors that led to the outbreak of the war. This book examines the chronicle of the Chechen wars and analyzes responses to the two wars both in Russia and the United States as reflected in the available scholarly publications, journals, magazines, newspapers, and timely reports. The conclusion will discuss implications for the Russian democracy and U.S.-Russian relations.
8
Chapter 2
Roots of the Conflict
This chapter examines five factors that have been identified in the literature as major causes of the conflict between the Chechen Republic and the Russian center.1 Scholars pointed out that the conflict has centuries-deep historical roots, complicated by the nature of modern Russian federalism as well as a combination of socio-cultural, economic, and leadership factors.2
Historical Factors Any analysis of the Chechen conflict should start with a history of Chechen- Russian relations.3 Chechnya is situated in the Northeastern Caucasus, an area bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, the main Caucasus Mountain range to the south and southwest, and the Kura, Sunzha, and Terek Rivers to the north
1 Parts of this chapter appeared in Victoria A. Malko, “An Analysis of Causes of the Chechen Wars of the 1990s,” Tamkang Journal of International Affairs X, no. III (January 2007): 101-131. 2 For an informed analysis of the roots of the conflict, see John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Tracey German, Russia’s Chechen War (London: Routledge, 2003). The Russian interpretation of the causes of the crisis can be found in V. A. Tishkov, E. L. Beliaeva, and G. V. Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis: Analiticheskoe obozrenie, General’nyi proekt “Rossiia v tret’em tysiacheletii,” vyp. 8 (Moscow: Tsentr kompleksnykh sotsial’nykh issledovanii i marketinga, 1995) and I. N. Kravchenko, Chechenskii krizis: Prichiny, kharakter, posledstviia: 90-e gody XX v. (Vladikavkaz: Izd-vo SOGU, 2004). 3 Historical and cultural roots of the conflict are examined in D. E. Furman, ed., Chechnya i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva (Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999). See also books written by journalists Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 9
and northwest. The historical center of Chechnya Nokhchiymokhka (Nokhchamakhk, “Country of Chechens”) is located in the basin of the Aksaia and Michiga Rivers on the lands along the Terek River. It is also known under its Turkic name Ichkeria (see Figure 1). Russian historian and ethnographer Ian Chesnov suggested that the adoption by Dzhokhar Dudaev’s government of the name Ichkeria as official could be considered a return to the source of Chechen ethnic origins and glorious resistance of the nineteenth century.4 Amjad Jaimoukha, Assistant President of the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan, pointed out that Arabic sources in Georgia referred to the Chechens as far back as the eighth century A.D.5 According to Michael Khodarkovsky, professor of Russian history at Loyola University, the first mention of the Chechens in the Russian chronicles dates back to 1587.6 The word chechenets (Chechen) as an ethnic term was first used in 1708. It appeared on the map of Russia in 1719, three years before Peter the Great annexed the largely Muslim North Caucasus region into the Russian Empire in 1722. Armed Cossacks were the first Russian settlers there.7 Russian historian Dmitrii Furman noted that the conquest of Chechnya lasted from the uprising of Sheikh Mansur in 1785 until Shamil’s surrender in 1859.8 Imam Shamil used Islam to unite mountainous tribes of Chechnya and Dagestan into a theocratic Islamic state. Russians, because of their superiority
4 See Ian Chesnov, “Byt’ chechentsem: lichnost’ i etnicheskie identifikatsii naroda,” in Furman, Chechnya i Rossiia, 96. 5 Amjad Jaimoukha, The Chechens (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 12. 6 See Michael Khodarkovsky, “V korolevstve krivykh zerkal: Osnovy rossiiskoi politiki na Severnom Kavkaze do zavoevatel’nykh voin XIX veka,” in Furman, Chechnya i Rossiia, 23. 7 Ibid. 8 See Dmitrii Furman, “Samyi trudnyi narod dlia Rossii,” in Chechnya i Rossiia, 10. 10
Figure 1. Chechnya. Source: Chechnya maps, produced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin, 1995; available from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/commonwealth/chechnya.jpg
11
in numbers and technology, defeated Shamil. He spent his last days in St. Petersburg and other Russian cities at the mercy of his former enemies. The legacy of the Chechen resistance has created a heroic mythology that served as inspiration for the Chechen rebels.9 After the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin promised self-determination to all ethnic minorities to win their support aimed at mobilizing them against the restoration of the monarchy. However, according to Lenin’s theory, self- determination of national minorities should be subordinated to the interests of the proletariat. Self-determination (and secession) was temporary in nature because all nations would eventually unite under the Soviet state, organized according to regional workers’ and not ethnic autonomy.10 During the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, Chechens attempted unsuccessfully to unify the small nations of the North Caucasus into the Mountainous Republic.11 Furthermore, to win the support of the Muslim minority, the Soviet government recognized the sharia12 as the basis of future Chechen autonomy within the Soviet state.13 As soon as the Bolsheviks won the civil war in 1920, they pursued the korenizatsiia policy that along with the territorial autonomy for the ethnic minorities encouraged literacy in the native languages, promoted education, and advocated the building up of native cadres.
9 For a descriptive account of Russia’s struggle for the Caucasus, see W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) and J. F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London: Longmans, 1908). A more recent book on the subject is Moshe Gammer’s The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule (London: Hurst, 2006). 10 See Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East, 1920-1927: A Documentary Survey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 18-20. 11 See essays by the foreign minister of the Mountainous Republic, Haidar Bammate, “The Caucasus and the Russian Revolution (from a Political Viewpoint), Central Asian Survey 10, no. 4 (1991): 1-29, and by its parliamentary speaker, Vassan-Giray Jabagi, “Revolution and Civil War in the North Caucasus – End of the 19th – Beginning of the 20th Century,” Central Asian Survey 10, no. 1-2 (1991): 119-132. 12 sharia, also spelled shari’a, or shariat – Muslim code of law 12
The struggle for the language was an essential part of the history of the Chechen people. Its development depended on the Imperial and later Soviet Russian policies. According to the Chechen linguist Zulai Khamidova, in 1914 the literacy rate among the Chechens was 0.8 percent, while a decade after the Russian revolution it reached 2.9 percent, the lowest among the North Caucasus peoples. The situation was complicated by the switch from the Chechen language based on the Russian Cyrillic script in the 1860s to the Arabic script between 1910 and 1920. In 1925, the Soviet government considered introducing the Latin script in order “to break the wall between the European and Arabic culture.” In 1938, the Soviet policy of linguistic assimilation forced the Chechens along with seventy other ethnic minority groups to adopt the Cyrillic script.14 Unlike other ethnic groups, the Chechens suffered severe demographic losses. In 1944, within a week from February 23 to 29, Stalin deported the entire Chechen people to Central Asia for their alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany. The Soviet secret police chief Lavretii Beria reported in his account that “by February 29 the number of people loaded onto special trains reached 478,479, of whom 91,250 were Ingush and 387,229 Chechens. . . .”15 One-half
13 Moshe Gammer, The Lone Wolf and the Bear, 129-130. 14 Zulai Khamidova, “Bor’ba za iazyk: Problemy stanovleniia i razvitiia chechenskogo iazyka,” in Furman, Chechnya i Rossiia, 131-136, 139-140. At independence in 1991, President Dudaev established the Institute of Research on the Chechen Language and spearheaded a campaign to change the language in a 1992 parliamentary resolution instituting a new Latin orthography. Zulai Khamidova together with Edward Khachukaev and Vissarion Gugushvili devised the new script that included fifteen specifically Chechen letters. From 1993 to 1996, the script was used to print books and newspapers. Then tentative moves were made to convert Chechen script from Latin to Arabic. After reestablishment of Russian authority in 1999, the Cyrillic script, as well as education in Russian, was restored. In 2002, two language laws made Russian the sole language of instruction in Chechen schools and required all the republics of the Russian Federation to use only Cyrillic script. See Amjad Jaimoukha, The Chechens, 201-202. 15 N. F. Bugai, ed., Repressirovannye narody Rossii: Chechentsy i ingushy: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii (Moscow: Kap’, 1994), 51. 13
of them died either during the journey or after they arrived into the steppes of Kazakhstan in the middle of winter.16 Only during the Khrushchev era were Chechens allowed back to the Caucasus, and in 1957, the Chechen-Ingush Republic was established. The deportation caused severe demographic losses. In the decades following the return from exile in 1957, the population growth in Chechnya rapidly increased and reached 898,999 in the 1989 All-Union census (see Table 1).
Table 1. Chechen and Ingush Population in the Russian Federation Census Total Population Urban (%) Rural (%) 1926 318,373 0.95 99.05 1937 435,922 - - 1939 400,344 7.92 92.08 1959 201,311 14.27 85.73 1970 572,220 20.23 79.77 1979 712,161 24.17 75.83 1989 898,999 26.87 73.13
Source: V. A. Tishkov, E. L. Beliaeva, and G. V. Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis: Analiticheskoe obozrenie (Moscow, 1995), 10, table 2.
Although some Russian scholars dismiss the historical factors as insufficient to explain the roots of the conflict, the developments in the Chechen-Russian relations over the past centuries contributed to the outbreak of the Chechen war. Two historical events most commonly cited in the literature—Shamil’s resistance to the Russian tsars and Stalin’s deportation of 1944—have created an image of the Chechen people as defiant yet abused
16 The informative works on the subject are Robert Conquest, The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960) and The Nation Killers (New York: Macmillan, 1970) and A. M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978). See also recent works by Russian scholars N. F. Bugai and A. M. Gonov, Kavkaz: Narody v eshelonakh (20-e – 60-e gg.) (Moscow: Insan, 1998). 14
minority in the hands of the Imperial Russia and its successor state Soviet Russia. Critics, however, maintain that the conflict in Chechnya is “a modern- 17 day phenomenon with modern-day actors over present-day problems.”
Political Factors The status of Chechnya within the structure of the Russian Federation has been the main cause of the conflict. It has remained the most difficult issue to resolve. The Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union an “archaic and asymmetrical federalism” that represents a mixture of ethnic and territorial principles.18 Among the autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, named after titular nationalities, the Chechen-Ingush Republic was the one where Chechens outnumbered the ethnic Russians and Ingush (see Figure 2). According to the 1989 census, the population of the Chechen-Ingush Republic was 1.2 million, with 58 percent ethnic Chechens, 13 percent Ingush and 23 percent Russians. Dmitry Mikheyev pointed out that, using harassment and pressure, Chechen leaders forced ethnic Russians to leave Chechnya, and in 1991 more than 120,000 did so.19 The Chechen leadership used the controversial Decree on Delimitation of Power between the USSR and Subjects of Federation issued on April 26, 1990, which elevated the status of autonomous republics to that of the union republics, to its advantage.20 Responding to a proposal made by the Chechen National Congress, which was a public forum without a legislative authority, the Supreme Soviet of the Chechen-Ingush Republic adopted a “Declaration on
17 Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 61. 18 E. I. Stepanov, ed., Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii: Problemy analiza i regulirovaniia (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 234. 19 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 190. 20 For the text of the law, see “O razgranichenii polnomochii mezhdu Soiuzom SSR i sub’ektami federatsii,” in Vedomosti S’ezda narodnykh deputatov SSSR i Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR 19 (9 May 1990): 429-433. 15
the State Sovereignty of the Chechen-Ingush Republic” on November 26, 1990. John Dunlop noted that the declaration was supported by all political factions.21 In June 1991, during the elections of the first Russian president, 80 percent of those who cast ballots in Chechnya voted for Boris Yeltsin; thus, support for Yeltsin in Chechnya was higher than the Russian Federation average.22 Emil Pain and Arkadii Popov commented that the strong support for Yeltsin was the result of the campaign in support of maximum autonomy for Russia’s constituent republics. During the election campaign, Yeltsin avoided polemics about different versions of ethnic sovereignty advocated by leadership in the republics.23 On October 27, 1991, the leader of the “Chechen revolution,” former Soviet Air Force General Dzhokhar Dudaev, held presidential and parliamentary elections in Chechnya. According to the Russian authorities, the elections were unconstitutional.24 On November 1, 1991, the elected president Dzhokhar Dudaev declared the Chechen Republic to be a fully independent state, and the elected Chechen parliament ratified Dudaev’s decree.25 The independence of Chechnya was also proclaimed in the new Chechen Constitution adopted on March 12, 1992. Analysts described the response from the federal center as a “serious political mistake,” because the Russian authorities were engaged in a power struggle with the then Soviet leader and
21 Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 93. 22 Ibid., 96. 23 Emil A. Pain and Arkadii A. Popov, “Chechnya,” in U.S. and Russian Policymaking with Respect to the Use of Force, eds. Jeremy R. Azrael and Emil A. Pain (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996); available from http://www.rand.org/publications/CF/CF129/ 24 Timur Muzaev, Chechenskaia respublika: Organy vlasti i politicheskie sily (Moscow: Panorama, 1995), 167-168. 25 Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 115. 16
17
misread the situation in Chechnya.26 To halt the drive for greater autonomy among the constituent republics, the Russian government signed the Federation Treaty between the “center” and the “subjects of the federation” on March 31, 1992. Although the Federation Treaty recognized republics as sovereign states with the right to self- determination, the right to have their own constitution, and to elect their own executive body, two republics refused to join the treaty. One of them was the Tatar Republic, situated on the Volga, in an oil-rich and industrialized region. Another republic was Chechnya.27 Dunlop noted that in 1992, during one year alone, more than ten meetings were held between representatives of the Russian Supreme Soviet and the Chechen parliament. During the meeting on March 12-14, 1992, the protocols were signed that provided for “the recognition of the political independence and state sovereignty of the Chechen Republic; and the determining of the political-legal form of mutual relations between the Chechen Republic and the Russian Federation.” Despite flexibility demonstrated by the Russian side, the discussions came to nothing. Dunlop concluded that a resolution of the status of Chechnya “with” but not “in” Russia as proposed by the Chechen leaders was not acceptable to the Russian side because it presupposed the recognition of Chechen independence. On the other hand, Dudaev’s rejection of the Russian term “delimitation of powers” as impinging upon the sovereignty of Chechnya meant the rejection of any form of federal agreement.28 After President Yeltsin won over the parliament in October 1993, he began restoration of federal control over the republics. In the new Russian constitution adopted on December 12, 1993, a reference to the republics as
26 Kravchenko, Chechenskii krizis, 26. 27 Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 169. 18
“sovereign states” was dropped.29 Yeltsin’s constitution reaffirmed the right of nations to self-determination, but this excluded the right to secede from Russia. According to the new Russian constitution, the republics have the right to determine their own form of government, presidential or parliamentary. Russia’s Muslims who make up between twelve to twenty million have the right to introduce sharia, political participation and representation. Chechnya boycotted the referendum on the new constitution.30 Two months later, on February 15, 1994, Russia and the Republic of Tatarstan signed a bilateral treaty on the basis of the constitutions of the two states.31 Tatarstan gained the right to establish international and economic relations with foreign states and the right to decide questions of ownership, use, and distribution of land and natural resources within its territory. Anatol Lieven observed that Chechnya’s refusal to sign a treaty similar to the Tatarstan model was one of the major causes of the first Chechen war of 1994-1996.32 To remedy the imbalance of power between the center and the subjects of federation, President Putin signed the Decree No. 849 on May 13, 2000. According to the decree, the country has been divided along economic and territorial lines into seven administrative districts, each under a prefect appointed by the president: Central, North West, South, Volga, Urals, Siberian, and the Far East. Daniel Treisman of the University of California at Los
28 Ibid., 170-171, 181. 29 For the text of the Russian constitution, see Vladimir V. Belyakov and Walter J. Raymonds, eds., Constitution of the Russian Federation (Lawrenceville, VA: Brunswick, 1994). 30 For a discussion of the constitutional and legal issues raised by Chechen separatism, see N. A. Kravchenko, Pravovye aspekty chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara (Moscow: Memorial, 1995). See also Edward W. Walker, “Constitutional Obstacles to Peace in Chechnya,” East European Constitutional Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 55-60. 31 For the discussion of the treaty, see Gail W. Lapidus and Edward W. Walker, “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: Center-Periphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia,” in The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail W. Lapidus (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 107-108. 32 Lieven, Chechnya, 84. 19
Angeles commented that although the balance of power has shifted toward the center, “the foundations of Yeltsin’s neo-feudal system remain.”33 Thomas M. Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College pointed out that the seven regional units, created for presidential oversight, coincide with Russia’s military districts.34 Robert V. Daniels and Matthew Evangelista argued that Putin’s effort to reestablish control over the regions entails risks for democracy, because it threatens a return to the centralized authoritarianism of the Soviet era.35 To date, it is not clear whether President Putin’s move would curb the Chechen resistance. In 2006, the federal center and Chechnya discussed the treaty on the delimitation of powers in its fifth draft during a March 29 meeting in the Kremlin. The major obstacles to signing the treaty were the demands of the Chechen government to grant the republic the right to become a free economic zone and to control its oil, mineral, and water resources.36 Vladimir Mukhin of Nezavisimaia gazeta commented that the arguments between Moscow and Grozny over the treaty on the delimitation of powers between the federal center and Chechnya “are flaring up with new force.”37 Despite the two wars and changes in leadership, the essence of the contradictions has remained unsolvable.
33 Daniel Treisman, “Russia Renewed?” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6(November/December 2002): 62-65. 34 See Thomas M. Nichols, “Putin’s First Two Years: Democracy or Authoritarianism?” Current History (October 2002): 308. 35 See Robert V. Daniels, “Democracy and Federalism in the Former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation,” in Beyond the Monolith: The Emergence of Regionalism in Post-Soviet Russia, ed. Peter J. Stavrakis, et al. (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997). For similar argument, see Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002). 36 “Press Conference with Chechen Parliament Speaker Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov,” Interfax, March 30, 2006. 37 Vladimir Mukhin, “Federalnye sily v Chechne stali lishnimi,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 3, 2006. 20
Socio-Cultural Factors The social, cultural, and religious differences between the Russians and the Chechens contributed to the transformation of the conflict into a war. Some scholars view Russia’s difficulties with Chechnya as rooted in the Chechen’s social organization, which is based on kinship hierarchies and the fact that the Chechens have never had a history of overarching political organization.38 In present-day Chechnya there are about 170 taips,39 or clans, with more than half of them dwelling in the mountains and the rest in the plains.40 The mountain taips have earned a reputation for being the most zealous fighters against any form of foreign domination. Therefore, Russian and subsequently Soviet rulers preferred to deal with the Chechens from the plains. The lack of knowledge about the social and cultural differences within the ethnic group that the Russians encountered in the lowland Chechen-aul41 in the early nineteenth century has complicated the subsequent efforts to establish a viable government in Chechnya. The basic difference is that the Lamaroi (Vainakhs) had a tradition of obeying their elders (taip system), while among the Nakhchoi (Ichkerians) this tradition disappeared with the introduction of Islam. The Sufi Muslim clerics filled the void in political organization of the
38 Sergei Arutiunov, director of the Caucasus Department of the Institute of Ethnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences characterized Chechnya as a “military democracy.” He stated that “like all military democracies—like the Iroquois in America or the Zulu in southern Africa—Chechens retain the institution of military chief. In peacetime, they recognize no sovereign authority and may be fragmented into a hundred rival clans. However, in time of danger, when faced with aggression, the rival clans unite and elect a military leader. This leader may be known to everyone as an unpleasant personality, but is elected nonetheless for being a good general. While the war is on, this leader is obeyed.” See Sergei Arutiunov, “Ethnicity and Conflict in the Caucasus,” in Ethnic Conflict and Russian Intervention in the Caucasus, ed. Fred Wehling, Policy Paper no. 16 (La Jolla, CA: Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego, August 1995), 17. 39 taip – a tribe among the Vainakhs (Chechens and Ingush) 40 On the history of the taip system, see chapter “Chechenskii teip,” in Chechentsy: Istoria i sovremennost’, ed. Iu. A. Aidaev (Moscow: “Mir domu tvoemu”, 1996). For more information about the taip and the nineteenth century Chechen traditions and customs, see Anna Zelkina, In Quest of God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (London: Hurst, 2000). 41 aul – a settlement based on kinship, a territorial formation among nomadic peoples 21
Ichkerians, but their influence never went beyond their religious function among the Vainakhs. For the Ichkerians, the Sufi brotherhood was the organizational basis for the nineteenth century resistance, led by Imam Shamil.42 At the end of the twentieth century, with the collapse of communism, the appeal to Islam has been intensified in order to obtain political legitimacy for resistance against the Russian rule.43 Wahhabism, a form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, was brought to the Caucasus at the end of the first Chechen war by affluent Arab emissaries who sought to fill the spiritual vacuum.44 The fundamentalist views of the Wahhabis caused divisions and violence among the families in the region. In 1997, Wahhabism was outlawed in Dagestan and a number of the leaders of this new movement were arrested. Those who escaped went to neighboring Chechnya, which became their military base.45 Two incursions of Chechen fighters into Dagestan in August 1999 under the banner of Wahhabism, with the purpose of creating Islamic caliphate in the North Caucasus, prompted the second war. During the six years following the start of
42 Isa Tasuev, “Chechenskii ‘tuman’,” Moskovskie novosti, 28 August – 3 September 2001, 5. 43 Aleksei Malashenko, Islamskie orientiry Severnogo Kavkaza (Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001), 260. 44 According to Chechen academician Vakhit Akaev, the term “Wahhabism” refers to “Islamic fundamentalism” and extremism, although authorities in Moscow at first did not recognize it as such. Wahhabism is a branch of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia and named after its founder, Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The eighteenth century movement known as Wahhabism advocated purifying the Muslim faith. The term is used to suggest radicalism and militancy. It is often used pejoratively. The first Wahhabi from Dagestan was invited to Chechnya in August 1996 by Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. Yandarbiev terminated the rule of Russian law and introduced sharia modeled after the Sudanese criminal code. Chechen sharia courts were run by the Wahhabis. The dissatisfaction with the activities of the Wahhabis erupted into a violent clash in Gudermes on July 14, 1998 that cost one hundred lives. See Vakhit Akaev, Sufizm i vakhkhabizm na Severnom Kavkaze (Moscow: RAN, 1999), 8-9, 12-14. More on discussion of the term “Wahhabism,” see Malashenko, Islamskie orientiry Severnogo Kavkaza, 137-164. 45 On the role of Islam in Chechen politics and the discussion of the rise of Wahhabism is Chechnya, see G. M. Yemelianova, Russia and Islam: A Historical Survey (New York: Palgrave, 2002): 177-191. 22
the second Chechen war Wahhabism was considered “an evil that ought to be eliminated.”46 The Kremlin started to modify its policy toward Islam after the massive attack by the Chechen rebels on police and security buildings in Nalchik, the capital of the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria that occurred on October 13, 2005. At a press conference in the Kremlin on January 31, 2006, President Putin stated, “Wahhabism as such presents no threat, but its distortion and distortion of Islamic standards can be interpreted only as calls for terrorism.”47 To gain the sympathy of the Chechen people, Moscow created an image of Ramzan Kadyrov, a pro-Russian leader of Chechnya, as Islamic fundamentalist. Kadyrov banned gambling and the sale of alcohol, and declared that teaching Koran and sharia law should be obligatory at Chechen schools.48 Analyzing the new Russian policy of the Chechnya’s Islamization, Andrei Smirnov, an independent journalist covering the North Caucasus region for the Chechnya Weekly, noted that “it is unlikely to succeed” because the rebels fight “not only for Islamic values, but for freedom and independence.”49 Islam and a traditional clan system have remained strong among the Chechens. The importance of the taip system explains why the Chechen separatist leader, the late Dzhokhar Dudaev, a Vainakh, had broad support among the Chechens. It also explains why the lowland Chechens Doku Zavgaev and the late president Aslan Maskhadov, as well as the Ichkerians Ruslan Khasbulatov and former top Muslim cleric and late head of the pro- Moscow administration in Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, were unable to
46 Andrei Smirnov, “The Kremlin’s New Strategy to Build a Pro-Russian Islamic Chechnya,” Chechnya Weekly, March 6, 2006. 47 “President Putin believes that distortions of Islamic standards can be interpreted as calls for terrorism,” Interfax, January 31, 2006; the English version is available from http://www.interfax- religion.com/?act=news&id=919. 48 Smirnov, “The Kremlin’s New Strategy.” 49 Ibid. 23
command a broad popular support.50 At the same time, the importance of the taip and Islamic affiliation should not be overstated, because the Chechen traditional way of life was challenged by the Soviet atheistic education, inter- ethnic marriages, and economic as well as political interests. Many socio-cultural factors unquestionably contributed to the transformation of the conflict over the status of Chechnya into a war. Shamil Beno, a foreign minister in Dudaev’s government in 1992, pointed out that hampered by a lack of understanding of the national characteristics of the Chechens, Russia’s state institutions failed to meet the challenge and untie the “Chechen knot” in a professional and organized manner.51
Economic Factors Some analysts believe that one of the major economic factors for the conflict in Chechnya was its oil.52 Oil is Chechnya’s strategic raw material. Other natural resources include natural gas, thermal geysers, and timber. The leading industry in Chechnya has been oil refining. The U.S. Department of Energy reported that in 2002, the oil refinery in Grozny, the fourth largest of forty-two oil refineries in Russia, processed 390,000 barrels a day, which is 5.9 percent of Russia’s total 6.6 million barrels a day.53 When Dzhokhar Dudaev took power in Chechnya in October 1991, he promised to turn the republic into a “second Kuwait.”54 Oil extraction, however, declined from a total of 2.6 million tons in 1993 to 1.2 million tons in
50 Tasuev, “Chechenskii ‘tuman’,” 5. 51 Shamil Beno, “Problemy krizisa vokrug Chechni (Tezisy),” in V poiskakh puti: Chechnya 1990-1996 (sbornik materialov obshchestvenno-politicheskogo dvizheniia “Daimokhk”) (Moscow: Rossiiskie informatsionnye tsentry, Triada, 1996), 465. 52 For a discussion of the “oil factor” as the cause of the Russian military campaign in Chechnya in 1994, see Rosemarie Forsythe, The Politics of Oil in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Adelphi Paper 300, (London: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Elaine Holoboff, “Oil and the Burning of Grozny,” Jane’s Intelligence Review 7, no. 6 (1995): 253-257. 53 U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Russia Country Analysis Brief, November 2002; available from http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/russia.html. 24
1994 (see Table 2). By December 1994, only 100 of Chechnya’s 1,500 oil wells were still producing.55 The Moscow News reported that by the mid-June 2001, 70 percent of Chechnya’s entire oil complex had been destroyed.56 Despite the war and destruction, annual oil extraction in Chechnya reached 1.5 million in 2002, with revenue worth of 7.5 billion rubles ($235 million).57
Table 2. Oil Extraction and Refinery in the Chechen Republic Years Extraction Transported from other regions Refinery 1991 4,072,000 11,077,000 14,938,000 1992 3,567,000 6,538,000 9,681,000 1993 2,634,000 1,067,000 3,477,000 1994 1,180,000 89,000 1,250,000
Source: V. A. Tishkov, E. L. Beliaeva, and G. V. Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis: Analiticheskoe obozrenie (Moscow, 1995), 14, table 9.
Oil passing through the republic’s pipelines was either tapped off or stolen. According to Valerii Tishkov, in 1993, “more than 47,000 tons of petroleum product were plundered . . . assessed at 4 billion rubles.”58 Specialists of Grozneftegaz company reported that in 2002, 10 percent of produced oil, or 700,000 tons, went astray.59 Money earned from the sale of stolen oil would be sufficient to purchase weaponry for Chechen rebels. In 1990-1992, Chechnya’s economy constituted 0.5 percent of the Russian Federation gross domestic product, while its population was only 0.8 percent of the total population of the Russian Federation.60 In addition to oil
54 Sanobar Shermatova, “Kuveit nam tol’ko snitsia,” Moskovskie novosti, 3-9 July 2001, 8-9. 55 Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 126. 56 Valery Batuyev, “Chechnya’s Oil Fields to Produce Oil Again,” Moscow News, 6-12 June 2001, 7. 57 Petr Orekhin, “Chechnya stanet ofshorom,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 22 April 2003; available from http://ng.ru/politics/2003-04-22/ 2_chechnia.html. 58 Tishkov, Beliaeva, and Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis, 21. 59 Andrei Riskin, “Armiia podsela na neftianuiu iglu,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 July 2003; available from http://ng.ru/economics/2003-07-01/1_army.html. 60 Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte, 116. 25
refining, Chechnya has an industrial sector that manufactures garments, footwear, and machinery. Valerii Tishkov pointed out that a notable feature of the Chechen economy was its ethnic aspect. The economy has been divided into two spheres, the Russian (oil, machine building) and the native (agriculture, trade), with hidden discrimination against the Chechens. The surplus 20-30 percent labor force contributed to the high percentage of unemployed, seasonal workers, and criminal elements among the Chechen youth. According to Ariel Cohen, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the goal of the Russian attack on Chechnya in December 1994 was to ensure control over Caspian oil, especially the route of the oil pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan via Grozny, the Chechen capital, to the Russian port of Novorossiisk.61 Examining the oil factor in the Russian policy toward Chechnya, Lilia Shevtsova, political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, concluded that the decision to go to war in Chechnya was part of a cover-up of a financial fraud involving the sale of petroleum in Grozny.62 Boris Kagarlitsky, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, observed that the interests behind the Chechen incursion into Dagestan in August 1999 were to control the flow of oil to the West. The shutdown of the oil pipelines through the territory of Dagestan and Chechnya helped bring about an increase in the oil price for the Siberian oil, supplied by Boris Berezovsky’s firm Sibneft. Kagarlitsky further speculated that the competition between the two Russian oil companies, Sibneft and Transneft, which had an interest in
61 See Ariel Cohen, “The New ‘Great Game’: Oil Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia,” Backgrounder no. 1065, The Heritage Foundation, 25 January 1996; available from http://www.heritage.org/heritage/library/categories/forpol/bg1065.html. 62 Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), 115. 26
Azerbaijani oil, spilled into war between the Chechen fighters and the Russian regular army employed by the two sides.63 The oil reserves in Chechnya are adjacent to Georgia, where Russia fought in late 1991 and early 1992 to establish a permanent military presence. In 1992, the Russian army withdrew from Chechnya, leaving 50 percent of its armaments behind, including tanks, armored personnel vehicles, and even several hundred airplanes. In June 1992, the General Staff reported that in one location alone the Russian army left behind 42 tanks, 37 armored personnel carriers, 145 artillery pieces, 15 antiaircraft guns, and 40,000 small arms.64 Pavel Baev, a visiting scholar at the British Royal Institute of International Affairs, commented that there was no neglect on the Russian part, because Chechen paramilitary formations blocked several former Soviet military bases and prevented withdrawal of weapons from Chechnya.65 What Baev overlooked was the fact that it was the minister of defense Pavel Grachev who ordered the commander of the North Caucasus Military District to transfer 50 percent of the weapons that remained on the territory of Chechnya to Dudaev. The federal center made a mistake that allowed Dudaev to build an army equipped with Soviet weapons.66 Soon these weapons were used by the Chechen rebels. Emil Pain, Arkadii Popov, and Boris Kagarlitsky suggested that certain politicians and military commanders, bankers, and ethnically-based mafia
63 Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), 229. 64 See Mikheyev, Russia Transformed, 190, 275. For a detailed description and quantity of weaponry left in Chechnya in June 1992, see Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, 26 September 1996, 2; quoted in German, Russia’s Chechen War, 58. 65 Pavel Baev, Russia’s Policies in the Caucasus, Former Soviet South Project Briefing Paper (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1997), 52. Pavel Baev is the head of the Section for Military-Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 66 Kravchenko, Chechenskii krizis, 20-21, 23. 27
groups have created special relationships between Moscow and the Caucasus.67 In the opinion of Pavel Baev, their activities have had little impact on Russia’s policies.68 On the other hand, as the Moscow News journalist Sanobar Shermatova pointed out, the shadow oil business has far-reaching political implications, because the links between the military and the fighters involved in control over the sale of oil may change the situation in Chechnya.69 Oil remains the most important financial and political resource in Chechnya. However, the war was not fought only for economic reasons. While its oil production represents an insignificant share in Russia’s economy, Chechnya can be self-sufficient without help from the federal center. The deputy head of the Chechen administration Usman Masaev stated that revenues earned from the oil production in Chechnya exceeded the amount of federal budget allocation for the republic. Indeed, in 2002, oil revenues reached 7.5 billion rubles, compared to 4.4 billion rubles in federal budget allocation for the reconstruction of Chechen economy and social sphere.70 At a press conference in March 2006, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, the newly elected chairman of the People’s Assembly, the lower chamber of the Chechen parliament, pointed out that in 2005 the Russian state oil company Rosneft got 18 billion rubles from Chechen oil, the amount equal to federal budget allocations.71 The leaders of the republic called on the federal authorities to grant it the status of a free economic zone and a controlling stake in Grozneftegaz, the local affiliate of the Russian state oil company Rosneft to help rebuild the republic’s economy, the demands unacceptable to the
67 Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, 228. See also Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 130, 186. 68 Baev, Russia’s Policies in the Caucasus, 32. 69 Shermatova, “Kuveit nam tol’ko snitsia,” 8-9. 70 Orekhin, “Chechnya stanet ofshorom.” 71 “Press Conference with Chechen Parliament Speaker,” Interfax, March 31, 2006. 28
Kremlin.72 In sum, despite positive signs of the economic reconstruction in Chechnya, the issue of ownership of oil has remained difficult to resolve.
Leadership Factors Analysts who study leadership politics and personalities of the rulers view the first war in Chechnya as Boris Yeltsin’s war, while the second round of war with Chechnya as rooted in the political instincts of Vladimir Putin.73 On the Russian side, the decision-makers in Moscow hoped that the “small, victorious war” would boost the rating of weak, ill, and unpopular President Yeltsin. The late chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, Sergei Yushenkov, stated that the “power ministries” and president’s aides were people who decided that the time had come for “a show of force.”74 But the final decision to go to war had been made by Yeltsin himself, and the Security Council merely ratified it.75 On the Chechen side, leadership-based explanations for the outbreak of the first Chechen war focus on the erratic character of General Dzhokhar Dudaev.76 Shamil Beno, Chechen foreign minister in Dudaev’s government, admitted that “the legitimate demand for self-determination coupled with national characteristics, plus complete ignorance about the international principles and norms that govern the achievement of sovereignty” led the Chechen leadership to opt for a “simple” scenario: declare complete independence from Russia. Having broad popular support, the late Chechen
72 Musa Muradov and Alla Barakhova, “Chechnya Gives Itself a Tax Break and Keeps All Its Oil Too,” Kommersant, March 31, 2006. 73 See Evangelista, The Chechen Wars; Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia; Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003); and V. A. Tishkov, “Chechenskii krizis: Sotsial’no-kul’turnyi analiz,” in Ocherki teorii i politiki etnichnosti v Rossii (Moscow: RAN, Institut etnologii i antropologii, 1997), 405-477. 74 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 112-113. 75 For an in-depth examination of the role of the Russian Security Council and the November 29, 1994 meeting, see German, Russia’s Chechen War, 123-124. 76 For an informed analysis of Dudaev’s regime, see a book written by his minister of economics and finance Taimaz Abubakarov, Rezhim Dzhokhara Dudaeva: Pravda i vymysel: Zapiski 29
leader Dzhokhar Dudaev, rejected the only legitimate method of achieving sovereignty, through a referendum.77 Analyzing Yeltsin’s and Dudaev’s leadership styles, Dmitrii Furman pointed out that Yeltsin’s policy toward Chechnya was “contradictory, split between liberal democratic impulses that dictated to grant Chechnya independence versus great power impulses to preserve the integrity of the state.”78 Both Yeltsin and Dudaev were charismatic leaders. Both came to power on the wave of the anti-Communist tide. In a parallel way, each strove to strengthen his power through authoritarian, not constitutional means. Yeltsin used “great and indivisible Russia” rhetoric, while Dudaev assumed a heroic resistance role and appealed to the taip tradition, the image of Shamil and Islam.79 Analysts who studied the period prior to the first Russian military campaign differ in their viewpoints on the readiness of the Russian and Chechen leaders to reach political compromise. Anatol Lieven, John Dunlop, and Valerii Tishkov suggested that a face-to-face meeting between the two presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Dzhokhar Dudaev, could turn things for the better. On the contrary, Emil Pain and Arkadii Popov argued that such a meeting would only have strengthened Dudaev’s position.80 Examining a possibility to resolve the conflict in Chechnya within the framework of Russian federalism, Bruno Coppieters of the Free University of Brussels concluded that both sides were ready for the use of force, not compromise, to achieve their aims. For the Russian leaders, to build relationships with Chechnya on a confederate basis was unacceptable, because
Dudaevskogo ministra ekonomiki i finansov (Moscow: Insan, 1998). See also Gall and de Waal, Chechnya; and Lieven, Chechnya. 77 Beno, “Problemy krizisa vokrug Chechni,” 464. 78 Furman, Chechnya i Rossiia, 13. 79 Ibid., 7. 80 Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya, 184, Lieven, Chechnya, 67. 30
it would set a precedent for new separatist conflicts. The Chechen side feared that radical compromise with the Russian leaders would be to their disadvantage and that would mean they have to abandon any hope for independence.81 Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Chechen general staff during the first war of 1994-1996, emerged as a moderate leader who could conduct negotiations with the Russian side.82 In January 1997, he was elected president of Chechnya.83 A year later, in 1998, his fellow fighters accused him of being too conciliatory toward Moscow. Despite divisions among the Chechens and Moscow’s claims that the leader of Chechnya’s separatist government, Aslan Maskhadov, did not control the warlords, Maskhadov remained the legitimately elected president until his death on March 8, 2005.84 He advocated conditional independence of Chechnya under an international administration, a position unacceptable to the Russian side.85 The leadership-based explanations for the second military campaign in Chechnya cited in the literature focused on the electoral ambitions of Vladimir
81 Bruno Coppieters, Federalizm i konflikt na Kavkaze (Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), 21; available from http://pubs.carnegie.ru/workpapers/2002/wp0202.pdf. 82 In August 1996, Chechen chief of staff Aslan Maskhadov and General Alexander Lebed conducted negotiations in a village of Khasavyurt, Dagestan. The two sides signed a Joint Statement and Principles Governing Mutual Relations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic that provided for a Russian pullout, deferring the issue of Chechen sovereignty until December 2001. 83 On January 27, 1997, Aslan Maskhadov was elected president with almost 65 percent of the vote. The second-place contender was Shamil Basaev, who received nearly 23 percent of the vote. On May 12, 1997, the then-Russian President Yeltsin and then-President of Chechnya Maskhadov signed the Agreement on Peace and the Principles of Interrelations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic. 84 For more on the circumstances of Maskhadov’s death and analysis of contradictory press reports, see “How Maskhadov was Killed: Yet Another Russian Mystery,” Chechnya Weekly, March 16, 2005 and Chechnya Weekly, September 22, 2005. 85 See Maskhadov’s “Liechtenstein proposal” of August 2002 that calls for the Chechen Republic to be given a “special status” within Russia protected by international guarantees, Chechnya Weekly, 9 September 2002. This condition was reitereted in Maskhadov’s Foreign Ministry peace proposal that demands withdrawal of all Russian troops and seeks temporary administration of Chechnya by a UN force, Chechnya Weekly, 20 March 2003. The complete text of the ministry’s proposal is available from http://www.chechnya-mfa.info/paper/en_text.pdf. 31
Putin. His popularity rating was fueled by the second war since the moment he was appointed Prime Minister and heir apparent to President Yeltsin and has been high throughout his presidency. Justifying the renewal of the warfare in the North Caucasus, President Putin stated, “I was convinced that if we didn’t stop the extremists right away, we would be facing a second Yugoslavia on the entire territory of the Russian Federation—the Yugoslavization of Russia.”86 The Chechen conflict helped the Russian political establishment to mobilize public support and consolidate President Putin’s power. In an attempt to normalize the situation in the war-torn republic, President Putin threw his hope for a referendum on a new Chechen constitution on March 23, 2003. Critics argued that a referendum would be meaningless without an end to the fighting and that the results would likely be falsified.87 Late in 2002, the Kremlin started the policy of “Chechenization” by building up the local cadre and transferring power to loyal Chechens. The head of Chechnya’s provisional administration Akhmad Kadyrov, former Muslim cleric, appointed by Putin in June 2000, was the first Chechen president elected under the pro-Russian constitution on October 5, 2003. Military leaders were unhappy, because the Kremlin favored the head of the civilian government. The generals believed he helped to cover up the fellow Chechen bandits who penetrated the ranks of the local militia. Despite his authoritarian leadership style and a lack of broad support among the Chechens, Kadyrov remained the Kremlin’s partner until his assassination during the Victory Day parade on May 9, 2004. Three months later, Moscow installed Chechnya’s Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov as a new president. Two years later, on March 4, 2006, Ramzan Kadyrov, 29, the son of an assassinated Chechen president, was unanimously
86 Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self- Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 141. 87 Dmitrii Furman, “S Chechnei ne spravitsia bez vrania?” Moskovskie novosti, 29 January - 4 February 2003; available from http://www.mn.ru/issue.php?2003-2-23. 32
approved as the prime minister, fifth during the past five years, by the republic’s People’s Assembly. Kadyrov, who commanded a paramilitary force of more than 7,000 Chechens, and who was implicated in violence and abductions, rose to presidency of Chechnya a year later after he turned 30, the constitutionally mandated minimum age for becoming president.88 Unlike President Yeltsin, Putin rejected negotiations and pursued resolution of the conflict through constitutional means. The purpose of Putin’s referendum was achieved to keep Chechnya permanently as part of the Russian Federation. There is hope that with the elections for the organs of local government and transfer of power from the federal forces to Chechnya’s civil administration, the situation will improve. Yet, there is a growing concern that the policy of “Chechenization” will not work.89 Some observers argued that the process of “Chechenization” was completed with the election of a new parliament, and that Ramzan Kadyrov’s elevation to the post of Chechen prime minister marked the transition to a policy of “Kadyrization.”90 Besides, the separatists are not conciliatory toward the pro-Russian leadership in the republic and will continue to fight.91
88 Ilya Barabanov, “Kadyrov poshel v goru,” Gazeta.ru, February 28, 2006; available from http://www.gazeta.ru/2006/02/28/oa_190416.shtml. See also Peter Finn, “Leader of Pro-Kremlin Militia is New Chechen Premier,” Washington Post, March 5, 2006, A15. In an interview with Izvestia on October 5, his birthday, Ramzan Kadyrov told the reporter that he is not ready to become president. However, very few in Chechnya doubted that he would be the sole leader of the republic. See Aleksandr Stepanov, “Premier Chechni Ramzan Kadyrov v den svoego 30-letiia: ‘Mne poka rano byt prezidentom,’ Izvestia, October 5, 2005. 89 See Andrei Smirnov, “Russian Security Officials Want to End Chechenization,” Chechnya Weekly, February 23, 2005 and John Dunlop, “Why Chechenization Will Likely Fail,” Chechnya Weekly, March 9, 2005. 90 Andrei Riskin, “Odin shazhok do prezidentstva,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 6, 2006. See also “Ramzan Confirmed as Prime Minister,” Chechnya Weekly, March 9, 2006. 91 According to Mairbek Vachagaev, the author of the book, Chechnya in the Nineteenth Century Caucasian Wars, Maskhadov’s assassination will lead to spreading of the war beyond Chechnya’s borders, which is becoming a main objective of the Chechen resistance. See Chechnya Weekly, March 16, 2005. Indeed, Maskhadov’s successor Abdul Khalim Sadulaev, a Muslim cleric, in his last interview with a Bulgarian journalist pointed out that the strategy of the Chechen separatist leadership is to broaden the war beyond the borders of Chechnya and establish six Caucasian fronts in the neighboring republics. After the killing of Sadulaev on June 17, 2006, Doku Umarov, a rebel 33
Summary A combination of the historical, political, socio-cultural, economic, and leadership factors led to the outbreak of the Chechen wars. Without having democratic institutions to mitigate the dispute over the status of Chechnya, leaders in Moscow and Grozny reverted to the traditional way of resolving conflicts, through the use of force. The Chechen leadership approach was rooted in historical tradition of armed struggle for self-determination. The Russian executive power proved the effectiveness of the use of force in the confrontation with the parliament in October 1993. Russia’s difficulties in keeping Chechnya within its federative structure contained a potential threat to the territorial integrity. Thus, the use of force was justified to restore the order.
field commander became the president and appointed Shamil Basaev vice president. On July 10, few weeks following the Sadulaev’s death, Shamil Basaev, the notorious mastermind of numerous terrorist acts was eliminated. Whether or not his death means an end to the Chechen resistance movement remains to be seen. See Mairbek Vachagaev, “The Chechen Resistance: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” paper presented at the North Caucasus Conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 14, 2006; available from http://www.jamestown.org/nccp-91406.php 34
Chapter 3
The Chronicle of the Chechen Wars
After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian society found itself in an armed conflict over the small portion of its territory that opted for complete independence. Because of the factors outlined in Chapter 2, the resolution of the conflict through a war became seemingly inevitable. Russia fought the first war from December 1994 to August 1996 to prevent the Chechen Republic from secession. The first war did not solve the issue of the status of Chechnya, and after a brief inter-war period, when Chechens unsuccessfully pursued independence, the second war broke out in October 1999 to route out terrorists and radical Islamists. After fighting two wars in Chechnya, Russia’s casualties reached numbers comparable to its losses in Afghanistan.1
1 During a ten-year war in Afghanistan, 1979-1989, the USSR lost 14,500 men. According to a senior fellow of Stanford University Hoover Institution John Dunlop, it is possible that Russia lost as many men during the two wars in Chechnya. From December 1994 to August 1996, estimated 7,500 troops of the Russian military and Ministry of the Internal Affairs, 4,000 Chechen separatist fighters and approximately 35,000 civilians, yielding a total of 46,500, died during the first Chechen war. During the second war, from October 1999 to October 2001, estimated 8,000 Russia’s military and interior troops, 8,000 Chechen separatist fighters, and 20,000-25,000 civilians, yielding a total of 36,000-41,000, perished. See John B. Dunlop, “How Many Soldiers and Civilians Died during the Russo-Chechen War of 1994-1996?” Central Asian Survey 19, no. 3-4 (2000): 329-339, and “The Second Russo-Chechen War Two Years On,” Presentation at U.S. and World Affairs Seminar, Hoover Institution, October 17, 2001, available from http://www.peaceinchechnya.org/reports/paper_dunlop.htm. In August 2005, Taus Dzhabrailov, Chechen State Council Chairman, stated that approximately 160,000 people were killed in the two Chechen wars. Critics questioned Dzhabrailov’s estimates in connection with the parliamentary elections in Chechnya in November 2005. They argued that exaggerating the losses was a way to put 35
The First Chechen War: 1994-1996 The analysis of the chronicle of the first Chechen war focuses on three issues: Yeltsin’s military and political strategies, attempts at negotiations between Moscow and Grozny, and withdrawal of Russian federal forces after conclusion of the Khasavyurt treaty.
Yeltsin’s Policy In October 1991, a former Soviet Air Force General, Dzhokhar Dudayev, became the Chechen president in the local elections, the results of which the Russian Supreme Soviet, at that time headed by fellow Chechen Ruslan Khabulatov, annulled. The Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in the Chechen-Ingush Republic. In response, Dudayev threatened to unleash a “holy war” on Russia if she intervened.2 Until 1994, President Yeltsin hoped that economic difficulties and human rights violations in Chechnya would result in popular resentment and the emergence of an anti-separatist leader. This did not happen. Heeding the suggestions of his advisors, Yeltsin decided to use the tactics of his Soviet predecessors in creating an anti-Dudayev opposition group. Russia’s Federal Counter-Intelligence Service (FSK), under the personal supervision of Sergei Stepashin, assembled a force of anti-Dudaev volunteers. The plan was to take over Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and install a puppet regime, which would legitimize the introduction of Russian troops. On November 26, 1994, the
pressure on the Kremlin to sign the treaty on the delimitation of power between the federal center and the republic. See Izvestia, August 16, 2005, available from http://www.izvestia.ru/community/article2515033 and Chechnya Weekly, August 18, 2005, available from the Jamestown Foundation’s web site at http://www.jamestown.org. 2 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 190. 36
volunteers marched on Grozny. They were routed out by Chechen troops loyal to Dudaev.3 After the collapse of the operation, Yeltsin issued a decree ordering the Chechens to lay down their arms, but the Chechen leader Dudaev refused to do so. Yeltsin took it as a personal challenge to his constitutional authority. On November 29, 1994, the Security Council of the Russian Federation approved a plan to use the Russian army against the rebellious republic. A General Staff report presented to the Security Council by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev stated that “a small, victorious war against the republic was out of the question.” The report also stated that Dudaev was well prepared for resistance, that federal forces could suffer severe losses, and that a successful assault on Grozny would require twenty thousand men. The actual attempt was made with three thousand federal forces.4 On December 2, 1994, the Russian military began air strikes against targets on the Chechen territory. Four days before the ultimatum deadline, on December 11, 1994, approximately 23,800 Russian troops, including 4,800 Interior Ministry troops, with 80 tanks and 200 armored personnel vehicles entered Chechnya.5 The Russian generals began the assault on Grozny during the night of December 31, 1994. This New Year’s eve operation was a birthday present to one of the generals, who expected a small, victorious war.6
3 Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), 111. 4 Ibid., 111, 305 fn10. 5 See Pavel Baev, The Russian Army in a Time of Troubles (London: Sage, 1996), 143; quoted in Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 106. John Dunlop quotes the invasion force of 23,700 men, supported by 80 tanks and 208 armored vehicles. Dunlop’s estimation has been based on Pavel Felgenhauer, “The Chechen Campaign,” Conference on the War in Chechnya: Implications for Russian Security Policy, 7-8 November 1995, sponsored by the Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, unpublished paper. See John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 209. 6 Izvestiya, 12 January 1995; quoted in Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 116. For a detailed analysis of the Russian invasion, see Pontus Sirén, “The Battle for Grozny: The Russian Invasion of 37
Negotiations During a period of intense combat, on April 11, 1995, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Assistance Group to Chechnya was established.7 The OSCE Assistance Group to Chechnya was the first mission of long duration to operate inside the Russian Federation. It received a mandate to “promote the peaceful resolution of the crisis and the stabilization of the situation in the Chechen Republic in conformity with the principle of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation and in accordance with OSCE principles. . . .” It monitored compliance with human rights, including the return of refugees to their homes. It was also responsible for guaranteeing the safety and security of international humanitarian organizations personnel working in Chechnya. Ambassador Tim Guldimann of Switzerland, Head of the OSCE Assistance Group, assumed the role of a mediator and made thirty “shuttle diplomacy” trips between the Russian leadership in Moscow and the Chechen leadership in Grozny.8 Negotiations between the federal government and the Chechen leaders remained unproductive until June 15, 1995, when about one hundred Chechen fighters, led by Shamil Basaev, conducted a raid deep into Russian territory to the small town of Budennovsk. They seized a local hospital, taking more than one thousand hostages. The Chechens demanded the withdrawal of the Russian troops and recognition of Chechen independence. Yeltsin, while attending a meeting of the G-7 Group (group of seven leaders of the major industrialized nations) in Halifax, Canada, on June 15-17, 1995, approved military action by elite Russian troops to free the hostages. This operation failed, and both sides
Chechnia, December 1994–December 1996,” in Russia and Chechnya: The Permanent Crisis, ed. Ben Fowkes (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 87-169. 7 The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is Europe’s security organization, which includes Russia and the United States among its 55 members. 8 P. Terrence Hopmann, “Building Security in Post-Cold War Eurasia,” Peaceworks no. 31 (1999): 31-32. 38
suffered heavy losses. Television viewers saw the hostages waving white sheets and begging the Russian military not to shoot, while the Chechens placed Russian women at the windows of the building to use them as living shields.9 On June 18, 1995, Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin began to negotiate with the rebels. He succeeded in reaching an agreement for the release of the hostages in exchange for giving Basaev safe passage back to Chechnya. The two sides also agreed to a cease-fire between federal forces and the Chechen rebels. Chernomyrdin’s efforts to negotiate with separatists were met with criticism and led to dismissal of the director of the Federal Counter- Intelligence Service Sergei Stepashin and Interior Minister Viktor Yerin.10 From June 1995 until August 1996, the Russian government conducted a series of secret negotiations with the Chechen side. In June 1995, the Russian and Chechen delegations met in Grozny. The issues for the discussion were related to the conclusion of the war and the status of Chechnya. The Chechens sought only one thing: the creation of a sovereign state. For the Kremlin, however, the most important thing was to guarantee the primacy of law of the Russian Federation on Chechen territory. In the middle of July 1995, the Dudaev delegation agreed to a formula stating, “The status of Chechnya after the elections will be determined on the basis of the Russian and new Chechen constitutions in the framework of the Federation Treaty.”11 Both sides agreed to a new transition status for Chechnya. The agreement limited Chechnya’s independence. It attempted to delineate powers between Moscow and Grozny through a federal agreement similar to the Tatarstan formula (see Chapter 2). On July 31, 1995, Tim Guldimann, Head of the OSCE Assistance Group, arranged a secret meeting in the Kremlin, at which a military agreement calling
9 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 123-124. 10 Ibid., 124. 39
for a cease-fire was negotiated and signed.12 Most of the Russian troops were to be withdrawn from Chechen territory, while Chechen fighters were to be disarmed. However, Dudaev was not prepared to disarm his fighters. Moreover, he unilaterally proposed a change to the agreement itself, stating that “Chechnya was and would remain a sovereign and independent state.”13 Soon it became clear that neither side would accept the results of the negotiations and continue the war. The approaching presidential elections put pressure on Yeltsin to resolve the Chechen question. On March 31, 1996, in a televised speech, President Yeltsin revealed a plan for the settlement of the problem in Chechnya. He expressed his readiness to engage in a dialogue with Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudaev, through an intermediary. Yeltsin promised to end all military operations in Chechnya by midnight of March 31 and begin withdrawal of federal forces from Chechen territory. He also promised that after demilitarization, the assembling of a representative body and amnesty for the separatists would begin.14 The military’s reaction to the peace plan was negative because they were afraid that Chechen fighters would use this time to regroup. General Aslan Maskhadov, the then chief of the Chechen general staff, was skeptical about Yeltsin’s plan, because the situation in the Caucasus seemed to be out of Moscow’s control.15 Despite Yeltsin’s peace initiatives the war continued. When on April 21, 1996 the Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudaev was killed in a rocket attack, while speaking on a cellular phone to his intermediary in Moscow about conditions for the negotiations, Dudaev’s deputy Zelimkhan
11 Ibid., 127. 12 Hopmann, “Building Security in Post-Cold War Eurasia,” 32. 13 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 128. 14 Ibid., 180-181. 15 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 18 April 1996; quoted in ibid., 181. 40
Yandarbiev took over. Moscow hoped that Dudaev’s death would bring chaos in Chechnya, but the Chechens continued the war.16 On May 27, 1996, Tim Guldimann of the OSCE Assistance Group arranged a meeting between Zelimhkan Yandarbiev, the new Chechen president, and Yeltsin in Moscow.17 The two sides concluded an agreement ending military actions in Chechnya. This step showed that Yeltsin was seeking peace at the critical moment in his election campaign, while the Chechens achieved direct negotiations, which they had long sought.18 The agreement was signed in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia. Under this agreement, the Russian forces would have to withdraw by the end of August 1996 and free elections would be allowed. The truce lasted for six weeks until the presidential poll scheduled for July 3, 1996, which Yeltsin won.
Russian Withdrawal In early August 1996, rebels led by Aslan Maskhadov seized Grozny. On August 10, 1996, Yeltsin appointed General Aleksandr Lebed his representative in Chechnya. Yeltsin gave his newly appointed national security advisor General Lebed full powers to resolve the crisis. With the mediation of the head of the OSCE Assistance Group Tim Guldimann, General Lebed and the chief of the Chechen general staff Aslan Maskhadov conducted negotiations in a village of Khasavyurt, in neighboring Dagestan.19 On August 31, 1996, Lebed and Maskhadov signed a “Joint Statement” and “Principles Governing Mutual Relations between the Russian Federation
16 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 182. 17 Hopmann, “Building Security in Post-Cold War Eurasia,” 32. 18 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 182. 19 Ibid. 41
and the Chechen Republic.” The truce provided for a Russian pullout, deferring the issue of Chechen sovereignty for five years until December 2001.20 In September 1996, Russia started withdrawal of its soldiers. In October, Aslan Maskhadov, former rebel chief of staff, was named Prime Minister of an interim government. His platform included independence and some elements of Islamic sharia law. Russia’s political and intellectual elite, the military and security forces expressed their disapproval about the Khasavyurt agreement. They considered it a “defeat” for Russia and a threat to the federal structure. Minister of Internal Affairs Anatoly Kulikov publicly criticized the agreement, saying “behind this tactical victory we may have suffered a strategic defeat for the future. If we lose Chechnya, we lay the foundation for the creation of an Islamic belt to the south of the country.”21 On November 5, 1996, a Chechen delegation headed by Aslan Maskhadov met with Chernomyrdin in Moscow and signed an agreement. Before this meeting, President Yeltsin signed a decree removing the remaining two brigades of Russian troops from Chechnya. The government sought to engage the Chechens in negotiations on the creation of an economic free-trade zone and a security zone around the oil pipeline planned to transport Azerbaijan oil to the Russian port of Novorossiisk. This agreement symbolized the end of the military conflict in Chechnya. The Chechens began to prepare for elections set for January 27, 1997.22
20 The English translation of the text of the “Joint Statement” and “Principles Governing Mutual Relations between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic” can be found in “Lebed-Maskhadov Statement and Principles,” CSCE Digest 19, no. 9 (September 1996): 5-6; available from http://www.csce.gov/pdf/sept96d/pdf. 21 Moskovskie novosti, 8-15 August 1996; quoted in Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 199. 22 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 203. 42
Pursuit of Independence: 1997-1999 With the OSCE mediation, Chechnya conducted elections of its president. Following the withdrawal of Russian troops, the Russian and Chechen presidents signed a peace treaty. However, as a result of power struggle among the Chechens, the situation began to deteriorate.
Elections of Chechen President On January 27, 1997, General Aslan Maskhadov was elected president with almost 65 percent of the vote. The second-place contender was Shamil Basaev, wanted by the Russian authorities for the Budennovsk hostage crisis. He received nearly 23 percent of the vote. Anatol Lieven commented that the OSCE declared the elections free and fair. Moscow recognized Maskhadov as legally elected president of the “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.”23 Chechnya’s final status remained unresolved. Moscow insisted that Chechnya must stay part of the Russian Federation. Lilia Shevtsova observed that the presidential elections in Chechnya created an independent state within Russian borders, which was not recognized by Russian authorities or the international community.24
Yeltsin-Maskhadov Peace Accord In March 1997, Russia’s Parliament approved amnesty for most Chechen rebel fighters. On May 12, 1997, Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a “Treaty on Peace and Principles for Mutual Relations” in Moscow. The treaty stipulated that both parties “renounce the use of threat of force in resolving whatever differences that may arise.” Galina Starovoitova, the late member of the State Duma and former President Yeltsin’s adviser on ethnopolitical issues, noted that both
23 Lieven, Chechnya, 145. 24 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 210. 43
Russia and Chechnya agreed to build their relationship “on the basis of universally recognized principles and norms of international law.”25 The new peace agreement opened the way for the resolution of the economic issues between Moscow and Grozny, especially the fate of oil and its transportation.26 Despite the reference to international law as a framework for mutual relations, which signaled willingness of the Russian side to reach compromise on the issue, a complete settlement remained difficult to achieve.
Deterioration of the Situation By the end of 1997, the OSCE Assistance Group remained as the only international organization operating in Chechnya. The OSCE mission continued to report from Chechnya and tried to assist in the release of a number of international aid workers who had been kidnapped. Since 1996, the practice of kidnapping became one of the Chechen’s principal industries. More than thirteen hundred Westerners and Russians, including women and children, were taken hostages.27 They were held under brutal conditions for exorbitant ransoms. Hostages were subsequently bought and sold among Chechen clans. The President of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov was trying to fight the kidnappings since he came to power. But even during the time in which he tried to repair relations with Russia, five Russian journalists were kidnapped. Although they were rescued, some said that in fact they had been ransomed.28
25 Galina Starovoitova, National Self-Determination: Approaches and Case Studies, Occasional Paper no. 27 (Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, 1997), 37. 26 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 210. 27 According to Deputy Interior Minister Ivan Golubev, as of November 1999, more than five hundred hostages remained in captivity in Chechnya, and were used as forced labor in building fortifications for Chechen guerillas. See Lyoma Turpalov, “Russians Continue Bombing,” Associated Press, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 21 November 1999, A22. 28 Ahmet Sik, “The War without End in Chechnya,” Radikal (Turkey), 30 November 1999. 44
In May 1998, gunmen seized the main government building in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala. The tensions widened in the North Caucasus region. In August 1998, Dagestan’s top Muslim cleric, his brother and a driver were killed in a bomb attack. In September 1998, Chechen warlords demanded the resignation of President Maskhadov, saying he was too conciliatory toward Moscow. Moscow also criticized Maskhadov for failing to combat organized criminal gangs. In October 1998, four employees of the British Granger Telecom, which was building a cellular phone communication system, were kidnapped. Chechens demanded $4 million in ransom, but in two months during the abortive operation to free the hostages, Chechens slit their throats.29 The kidnapping and killing of the four British engineers put the Chechens in a bad state before world opinion. By the end of 1998, the situation in Chechnya sunk into anarchy. The clan rivalries among the Chechen military commanders, drug trafficking, sharp decline of oil extraction and refining, worsening of the economic situation, and kidnappings as a main industry showed that on the territory of the Russian Federation developed a statehood incapable of governing.
The Second Chechen War: 1999-2003 The analysis of the chronicle of the second Chechen war focuses on Putin’s military and political strategies, Russia’s defiance of Western criticism for its military campaign in Chechnya, brutal tactics of zachistki, and terrorist acts by the radical Chechen fighters. Various views on the future status of Chechnya will also be discussed.
29 Yefim Barban, “Chechens Just Slit Their Throats,” Moscow News, 10-16 November 1999, 2. 45
Putin’s Policy NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in early 1999 emboldened Chechen separatists and gave them hope that they might get help from outside to fight against Russia. On August 7, 1999, rebel fighters made incursions into Dagestan and proclaimed an independent Islamic republic. The new state comprised eleven villages. The next day, the Islamists began to form “new power bodies,” and the Sharia Court and Islamic television went on the air. The leaders of the Russian government and power structures announced readiness for armed action. Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo stated that “all bandits must be exterminated.” The Interior Ministry recognized the fact that the fighting was going to be heavy: the rebels had organized strong defense positions and in addition to small arms they had antitank and antiaircraft systems, including U.S. Stingers.30 Beginning August 31, 1999 and within the following two weeks a wave of terrorist attacks swept Russian cities. A powerful blast rocked Moscow’s western-style “Manezh” shopping center, and forty-one were injured.31 It provoked speculations that Islamic militants might have begun terrorist attacks against the seat of Russian power. After explosions in apartment buildings in two residential areas in Moscow, in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, and the army officers’ quarters in Buinaksk, Dagestan, killed more than three hundred people, Russian officials arrested two suspects, but the investigators could not say for sure what caused the explosions. Russian officials and some
30 Mikhail Chernyak and Alexander Raskin, “Second Caucasian Front,” Moscow News, 11-17 August 1999, 3. 31 Maura Reynolds, “Blast at Mall Near Kremlin Hurts 41,” Los Angeles Times, 1 September 1999, A9. Manezh was opened in 1997 during celebrations of Moscow’s 850th anniversary. It has become a symbol of Russia’s new freedoms and excesses. Umar Dzhabrailov, an ethnic Chechen, close to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, managed the mall. The series of explosions in Moscow prompted police to detain “persons of Caucasian nationality.” Reported in Michael R. Gordon, “Explosion in Moscow Injures 30, Provokes Fears of Terrorism,” New York Times on the Web, 1 46
American terrorism experts blamed international terrorists. They suspected that Osama bin Laden was operating training camps in Chechnya. However, no evidence could prove bin Laden’s involvement in the blasts. Mairbek Vachagaev, Chechnya’s representative in Moscow, believed that the Russian leadership “cooked up” the idea of a Saudi connection to engage American sympathy. There was also a conspiracy theory that the terrorist acts might be used (1) to prepare public opinion for a state of emergency, (2) to harm Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a leading adversary of President Yeltsin, or (3) to distract public attention from allegations of top- level money laundering.32 The Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo linked explosions to the Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev and a Jordanian Khattab. According to Michael Reynolds, an Ottoman historian from Princeton University, the leader of Chechen Islamists was not Shamil Basaev but a Saudi Arab named Khattab. Basaev allied himself with Khattab because Khattab had access to arms and money. Like Basaev, Khattab wanted to drive the Russians out completely.33 Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and Chechen guerilla leader Shamil Basaev denied involvement in the wave of bombings. An incident in which FSB34 officers allegedly planted explosives in a Ryazan apartment building raised suspicions about the role of Russia’s Federal Security Service in a series of mysterious apartment bombings. The local Ryazan police was blocked from investigating that incident. The Duma deputy and an outspoken human rights activist Sergei Kovalev requested the FSB to
September 1999; available from http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/russia- dagestan.html. 32 See “Explosive Politics,” The Economist, 17 September 1999; available from http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/eu5156.html. 33 Interview with Michael Reynolds by Sahin Alpay, “The Russians Must be Stopped,” Milliyet (Istanbul), 4 November 1999, 20. 34 FSB – acronym of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB 47
release internal documents about the episode on the grounds that it was an “exercise” as the FSB claimed. However, on April 2, 2003, Moscow’s court denied the order.35 The Russian government ordered massive security sweeps in Moscow and other cities. Police checked identity papers in subway stations, on the markets or other crowded areas, and detained tens of thousands dark-skinned people from the Caucasus.36 Anna Politkovskaya of the Novaya gazeta reported that between September 14 and 20, 1999, more than 15,000 were expelled from Moscow and 69,200 made to register during the “Operation Foreigner.”37 Amid massive security sweeps in the capital and other Russian cities, on September 16, 1999, President Yeltsin announced that authorities had “enough will and enough resources for the struggle against terrorism.”38 The following day, after a closed-door meeting of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was given carte blanche for the “government’s toughest measures.”39 On September 18, 1999, Moscow dispatched fresh armor and troops to the North Caucasus and bombed guerilla positions inside Chechnya along the border with Dagestan. The Russian commanders planned air strikes as a part of their major offensive since hostilities resumed in early August. Soldiers were dispatched to set up a cordon along the 650-kilometer (400-mile) border with Chechnya to isolate the republic from the rest of Russia.40
35 Chechnya Weekly, 10 April 2003, 6. 36 See Fred Weir, “Chechens in Moscow Abused, Rights Groups Say,” USA Today, 8 October 1999, 17A. 37 Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, trans. by John Crowfoot with an introduction by Thomas de Waal (London: Harvill, 2001), 325. 38 Sergei Venyavsky, “Russia Strong Enough to Fight Bomb Terrorists, Yeltsin Says,” Associated Press, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 17 September 1999, A11. 39 Judith Ingram, “Thousands Held in Moscow Sweep,” Associated Press, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 18 September 1999, A6. 40 David Hoffman, “Russia Drops Bombs on Chechen Rebels,” Washington Post, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 19 September 1999, A14. 48
In response to the air raids and artillery strikes Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev threatened to unleash a wave of Islamic suicide attacks on Russia. Russia’s Deputy Chief of Staff General Valery Manilov said that thirty thousand government troops had amassed on the Chechen border to “root out Islamic rebels led by Basaev.” He called the ten thousand rebels a “professional terrorist army.” The general warned that the strikes were carried out not against Chechnya but against the bases, warehouses, camps, and terrorist columns. He accused the overseas extremists, including Osama bin Laden, for providing $51 million to finance the rebels.41 According to Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America and director of the U.S. Congress task force on terrorism, bin Laden had a long relationship with Basaev, dating to early 1994, several months before the war over Chechen independence began. Bodansky stated that bin Laden’s control of the Afghan drug trade enabled him to channel large amounts of money and equipment to Chechnya. The analyst credited bin Laden’s network with transforming the Chechen conflict, which began as a separatist struggle, into a fundamentalist Islamic jihad aiming to establish Islamic rule throughout the Caucasus. Bodansky stated “It’s a perpetual jihad that cannot stop and will not stop. . . . It’s going to be a long, long war. It’s a historical tidal wave.”42 The ground offensive started on October 1, 1999 with troops moving from three directions, the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia and from Stavropol region, to seize the northern part of Chechnya. The Russian Security Council at the October 5 meeting adopted a “Concept of National
41 “Chechen Warlord Threatens Islamic Suicide Attacks Against Russia,” Agence France Press, 20 September 1999; available from http://asia.yahoo.com.headlines/200900/news/937841880- 90920153852.newsasia.html. 42 Robyn Dixon, “Russia Says bin Laden Backs Foes,” Los Angeles Times, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 27 September 1999, A1, A10. 49
Security of the Russian Federation.” The document reaffirmed the state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Russia and declared the defense of individual, society, and state from international terrorism as one of the major national interests. In the words of Chapter 3 of this policy directive, the international terrorists opened a campaign at destabilizing the situation in the Northern Caucasus aimed at alienating the region from Russia, which presents a direct threat to the territorial integrity of the state. Chapter 4 provides justification for the use of military force within the country, when there is a threat of the forcible change of the constitutional order, the territorial integrity of the state as well as life and health of the citizens.43 On October 7, 1999, the European Court criticized Russia’s actions in the North Caucasus and the refusal of Prime Minister Putin to set up negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov. Moscow rejected the offer of mediation from the European Union for the negotiations with Chechnya, insisting that Chechnya was an internal Russian matter, but welcomed foreign aid for more than a hundred thousand Chechen refugees. The head of the European Union delegation, Finland’s Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen, responded that the EU recognized Russia’s sovereignty but was concerned about excessive force.44 In an attempt to stir up the world’s awareness of the human rights violation in Chechnya and bring attention to the Chechen separatist cause, on October 8, 1999, Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov asked George Robertson, General Secretary of NATO, to be a mediator for the Russian-
43 For the full text of the “Concept of National Security of the Russian Federation,” see “Kontseptsia natsional’snoi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii”, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 November 1999; available from http://nvo.ng.ru/concepts/1999-11-26/1_cons1.html. 44 Bill Nichols, “Russia Rejects Mediation Offers,” USA Today, 8 October 1999, 17A. 50
Chechen negotiations.45 The Russian side refused the participation of a third party in the conflict. Despite increasing criticism in the western mass media of the Russian federal authorities for the actions in Chechnya, President Yeltsin endorsed the tactics and strategy in Northern Caucasus, which were determined by the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and were being implemented by the power structures. First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Igor Shabdurasulov told a briefing in Moscow that the “president’s and government’s stands on the situation in the Northern Caucasus are identical.”46 On October 19, 1999, President Yeltsin sent a message to President Clinton explaining Russia’s approaches to restore constitutional order and to fight terrorism. Yeltsin wrote that his goal was to “suppress the nest of terrorism” emerging in the Chechen Republic, and prevent violence and casualties among law abiding civilians in Chechnya and neighboring territories. Regarding the status of Chechnya, Yeltsin stated that this issue should be and will be resolved through negotiations with Chechen leaders who do not accept violence and terror. Yeltsin called for cooperation between Russian and American intelligence agencies in “meeting the challenge of global terrorism.”47 On October 29, 1999, Aslan Maskhadov appealed to Pope John Paul II on behalf of Chechnya’s civilian population. In his message he stated that 3,600 persons, mostly women and children, were killed and more than 5,500 wounded by Russian bombing and shelling. Elena Bonner, Chairman of the Andrei
45 “Chechen President Appeals for NATO Help,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline 3, no. 197, Part I, 8 October 1999; available from http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/news/omri/ 1999/10/001008I.html. 46 “Yeltsin Backs Federal Strategy in Northern Caucasus,” ITAR-TASS, 11 October 1999; available from Comtex Scientific Corp. electronic collection, RN A56185747. 47 “Soobshchenie Press-Sluzhby Prezidenta Possiiskoi Federatsii,” ITAR-TASS, 19 October 1999; available from http://www.maindir.gov.ru/ASPScripts/PressDocs.asp?MONTH=10&YEAR =1999&DAY=19&NUM=6. 51
Sakharov Foundation, supported the plea during the hearings of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held on November 4, 1999. Bonner stated that Russian generals aimed at annihilating a large part of the Chechen nation, which she called “genocide” and a crime against humanity. She concluded that the war in Chechnya could no longer be “exclusively the internal affair of Russia.”48 On the eve of the OSCE Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, in November 1999, the Russian newspaper Izvestiya reported that Defense Minister Igor Sergeev, with the tacit approval of the Foreign Ministry, openly accused the United States of an attempt to install control over the North Caucasus. In his address to the meeting of the Armed Forces Chief Staff he stated that the United States were playing the “Afghanistan game” but on the territory of Chechnya by financing guerilla war in the Caucasus.49
The OSCE Summit During the OSCE Summit in Istanbul on November 18 and 19, 1999, Russia and the United States openly clashed over the Chechen war. President Yeltsin said that the West had no right to criticize Russia for its campaign against “bandits and murderers.” Western leaders, however, declared that Russia’s indiscriminate rocket attacks and bombings of Chechnya needlessly killed and wounded Russia’s own citizens. Yeltsin ridiculed the notion of “humanitarian
48 Elena Bonner, “The Second Chechen War,” Statement for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 4 November 1999, in U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Chechnya: Implications for Russia and the Caucasus, 106th Cong., 1st Sess., 4 November 1999 (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2000). 49 Vladimir Yermolin, “U Rossii vnov’ poiavilsia veroiatnyi protivnik,” Izvestiya, 13 November 1999, 1. 52
intervention” in another nation’s affairs: military action in the case of Kosovo and public criticism in case of Chechnya.50 The dispute over Chechnya delayed the signing of a new Charter on European Security for one day. The Istanbul Summit Declaration signed on November 19, 1999 by the participating states of the OSCE acknowledged the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.51 The Russian Federation also reaffirmed the existing mandate of the OSCE Assistance Group in Chechnya and reluctantly agreed to a visit by the Chairman-in-Office Knut Vollebaek to the region. On the eve of the arrival of Norway’s Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek to Moscow, the Russian mass media raised a scandal around separate negotiations between the OSCE and the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov. The media qualified these contacts between the international organization and the constituent part of the Russian Federation as interference into the internal affairs of a sovereign state.52
Ultimatum to Grozny Defying Western criticism, the federal forces intensified fighting against Chechnya on November 26, 1999, with the aim of wiping out Islamic rebels in Grozny. Major General Vladimir Shamanov, head of the Russian western command in Chechnya, expressed “one hundred percent confidence in victory.”53 In Grozny, hundreds of houses and several industrial enterprises were burned and leveled. There was no water or electricity, no bread or food
50 Michael R. Gordon, “Yeltsin and West Clash at Summit over Chechen War,” New York Times on the Web, 19 November 1999; available from http://nytimes.com/library/world/europe/ 111999summit-rdp.html. 51 Istanbul Summit Declaration 1999, 19 November 1999; available from http://www.osce.org/e/docs/summits/istadec199e.htm. 52 “Grozny i OBSE vedut perepisku za spinoi Moskvy,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 27 November 1999; available from http://www.ng.ru/world/1999-11-27/1_correspondence.html. 53 “In Fiercest Assualt Yet, Scores of Russian Rockets Strike Chechen Capital,” New York Times, 26 November 1999, A16. 53
supply, and constant danger of bombardments. Hospitals did not operate and wounded soldiers or civilians died on the spot.54 On December 3, 1999, NATO made a statement that war in Chechnya went beyond the “internal affairs” of Russia. Because NATO’s statement showed its willingness to support Chechen separatist fighters, it disturbed Russia.55 In response, President Yeltsin promised to restore the power structure in the region, to create conditions for the return of refugees, and to uphold amnesty to rebels not involved in grave crimes. That same day, Prime Minister Putin in his article published in the Times stated that the OSCE pressed Russia to conduct negotiations with Chechnya, which had no political authority to represent it. He wrote the war in Chechnya was not a struggle for independence but expansion aimed to seize the territory and destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus region. Answering the question why Russia was fighting in Chechnya, he replied that the war on the territory of Chechnya was against the “murderers, kidnappers, and drug dealers,” and was aimed at liquidation of the bases of international terrorism.56 The military pledged to destroy Grozny to rubble. On December 6, 1999, they dropped leaflets on Grozny, promising a corridor for the safe passage for civilians who wished to evacuate and for rebels who wanted to surrender by December 11. The Human Rights Watch reported that nearly forty thousand civilians remained in the city.57 Civilians, hunkered in basements and bunkers, could not learn within five days about the warning. Many elderly, infirm,
54 David Hoffman, “Grozny Casualty Rate Rises After Russian Bombardment, Washington Post, 28 November 1999, A27. 55 Dmitrii Gornostaev, “Vollebek pozhalovalsia Olbrait na Rossiiu: MID RF obespokoen zaiavleniem Soveta NATO po Severnomu Kavkazu,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 4 December 1999; available from http://www.ng.ru/world/1999-12-04/1_vollebek.html. 56 Vladimir Putin, “Why Are We Fighting in Chechnya,” Times (London), 3 December 1999, 27. 57 Richard C. Paddock, “Chechens Warned to Flee City or Die,” Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1999, A1, A12. 54
injured, and women with children, even if they learned about the deadline, would have to travel a long distance to get out of the city. Under pressure from the West, the Russian government leaders and military commanders denied the ultimatum to Grozny, saying it was a warning, a psychological pressure to squeeze four thousand rebel fighters out of Grozny. General Valery Manilov, deputy chief of Russia’s general staff, stated that “This is an act of humanity taken towards the civilian population by the Russian military. The federal command is doing everything possible to avoid civilian deaths in Grozny.”58 Amid warnings from President Clinton and threats of sanctions from the European Union, Russian forces by mid-December reached the rebel-held mountains in southern Chechnya. Despite rapid advances, the campaign to secure Grozny was delayed until the end of February. Federal-controlled areas in Chechnya received aide from Russian regions to rebuild the economy and social sphere in Chechnya. On December 19, 1999, during elections to the State Duma, the new “Unity” Party, built around the figure of Putin, received almost as many votes as the Communists.
Zachistki Twice General Gennadii Troshev, Russia’s deputy chief commander in Chechnya, announced that the “military phase” of the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya was over. On January 19, 2000 he promised the war would end by February 26, and on June 25, 2000 Troshev declared the war was over. The war propelled Prime Minister Putin to power, and on March 26, Putin won the presidential election, taking 52.9 percent of the vote. On May 7, 2000, he was inaugurated Russian president.
58 David Filipov, “Russia Gives Chechens Life-or-Death Ultimatum,” Boston Globe, 7 December 1999, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 7 December 1999, A6. 55
Although the military considered that the major battles were over, Chechen fighters did not surrender and showed determination to fight. The conflict since then has become a war of attrition with the rebels, who set off mines and launch hit-and-run or sniper attacks nearly daily, killing a dozen Russian servicemen a week. The Russians responded with a non-combat tactics known as zachistki, or cleansing operations. During zachistki suspected rebels were detained in order to determine whether they had ties with the rebel fighters. Often the detainees disappeared without a trace or their bodies were found far from the place of their detention. In an attempt to increase accountability and reduce reports of military misconduct, President Putin transferred operational control of the Chechen campaign from the military to the FSB on January 22, 2001. As the lists of dead and missing grew longer, Chechen guerrilla fighters grew bolder. On July 1, 2001, a vehicle carrying Internal Ministry troops exploded on a mine near Sernovodsk. The following day, a military vehicle exploded on a mine near Assinovskaia. Zachistki in these two peaceful villages adjacent to Ingushetia started with an interval of one day. Lidia Grafova, a journalist with the Moskovskie novosti, described the cruelty of zachistki. The military surrounded the villages in vehicles with mud- covered license plates. Masked soldiers demanded money. Then marauders pillaged the homes and took everything they could carry and destroyed whatever they could not take with them. They took seven hundred men from Sernovodsk and eight hundred men from Assinovskaia into the open fields for interrogation. They verbally and physically assaulted men, women, and children. A school and a hospital were sacked, safes blown open, and medicine was looted.59
59 Lidia Grafova, “Nam pokazali, kak nas nenavidiat,” Moskovskie novosti, 31 July – 6 August 2001, 2-3. 56
Zachistki in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaia stirred up public outcry because of the scale of roundups and their location at the border with Ingushetia, which was not a war zone. Akhmad Kadyrov, a Muslim cleric appointed by the Kremlin in June 2000 to lead Chechnya’s interim civilian administration, accused the military of “criminal acts.”60 General Vladimir Moltenskoi, commander of Russian forces in the North Caucasus, denied accusations and insisted that the roundups of Chechen men in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaia were correctly executed. He admitted that some individual rank-and-file soldiers and policemen committed violations. Pro- Moscow Chechen administrators in those villages tendered their resignations because they were denied the right to intervene.61 At a governmental meeting in Chechnya, General Viktor Kazantsev, President Putin’s plenipotentiary in Southern federal district that includes Chechnya, apologized for the actions of the military. Head of Presidential Administration Sergei Yastrzhembsky announced that the investigation would open six cases against the officers responsible for zachistki. However, not a single officer was arrested.62 Maura Reynolds, a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, in her article “A War Shrouded in Silence,” criticized Russia’s new tactics. Reynolds reported that in mid-July 2001, the Human Rights Watch documented more than 130 disappearances. Russian military and civilian prosecutors opened 110 criminal cases concerning disappearances. Of these cases, twenty-three were under investigation, six transferred, and seventy-nine suspended because a suspect could not be identified.63
60 Maura Reynolds, “Top Chechen Leader Decries Abuses by Troops,” Los Angeles Times, 10 July 2001, A3. 61 Maura Reynolds, “Russia Probes Chechnya Abuses,” Los Angeles Times, 12 July 2001, A3. 62 Grafova, “Nam pokazali, kak nas nenavidiat,” 3. 63 See Maura Reynolds, “A War Shrouded in Silence,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2001, A5. 57
One year later, Russia as America’s partner in global war against terrorism, was welcomed to G-7 group of seven leaders of major industrialized countries, making it G-8. On the eve of the summit of G-8 group in Kananaskis, Canada on June 26-27, 2002, Aslan Maskhadov, a leader of Chechen separatists, sent an open letter to President Putin and G-8 leaders, in which he suggested to stop the “meaningless war” in Chechnya by July 15, 2002.64 During the first war, the two sides conducted negotiations frequently. But this time, the situation had changed. Russian leaders ruled out any negotiations because they believed the rebels would use them as a pretext to regroup. The Russian side insisted on Maskhadov’s surrender, a position unacceptable to the Chechen leader.
Theater Siege in Moscow The more Russia dragged on with the political solution to the problem, the greater was the danger of a terrorist attack. On October 23, 2002 a squad of forty Chechen rebel fighters, including eighteen women, took eight hundred hostages in a Moscow theater during a musical show, demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. The musical show, Nord-Ost, an epic of war, betrayal, and love that spans four decades of Soviet history, celebrated the triumph of the Soviet army in the Great Patriotic War. The show’s finale included a Soviet fighter plane with a forty-nine-foot wingspan descending onto the stage. The rebels targeted this popular show because of its spirit of Russian patriotism in a time when Russia’s air assaults on Chechnya killed their own citizens.65
64 For the full text of the letter, see “Tekst otkrytogo pis’ma Maskhadova,” Gareta.Ru, 25 June 2002; available from http://gazeta.ru/print/2002/06/25/tekstotkryto.shtml. 65 Anna Badkhen, “Freed Moscow Hostages Agree the Show Must Go On,” San Francisco Chronicle, 7 November 2002, A15. 58
In televised remarks, President Putin described the attack as one of the largest terrorist acts in history and claimed that it was planned “in one of the foreign terrorist centers.”66 The timing of the attack coincided with the International Chechen Congress and subverted a planned referendum on a new Chechen constitution.67 The crisis ended with the deaths of 129 hostages, most from a gas used by Russian special forces to subdue the explosive-laden Chechen guerrillas. Two months later, on December 27, 2002, two suicide bombers, in a heavy truck and a car, blew up a four-story headquarters of the Russian- installed government in Grozny. According to Chechnya’s Prime Minister Mikhail Babich, more than 170 were injured and 71 killed in the attack.68 Akhmad Kadyrov, Kremlin-appointed head of Chechnya’s administration, considered that Aslan Maskhadov was behind the terrorist act. Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, head of the FSB’s Chechnya operations, blamed the attack on a radical Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev and an Arab, Abu al-Walid, linked to an Islamic militant group, believed to be a rival of the official commander of the Chechen militants, Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s last elected president.69 In an interview on Russian radio, Akhmed Zakaev, the top envoy for Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, said that the separatist movement does not engage in suicide bombings as a tactic and called the attacks “an act of terrorism.” At the same time he pointed out that in light of atrocities committed against Chechens by Russian soldiers, this attack was an act of retribution
66 Jim Heintz, “Plan to Free 75 Hostages Falters,” Associated Press, reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2002, A20. 67 John Daniszewski, “Russia Says Turkey, Qatar Aid Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, 1 November 2002, A3. 68 “Chechen Rebel Attacks Kill 4 People in Grozny: Death Toll from Suicide Blasts at Headquarters Rises to 83,” Associated Press, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 31 December 2002, A8. 69 Michael Wines, “Terrorists Tied to Deadly Blasts,” New York Times, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 29 December 2002, A14. 59
because it targeted the strategic compound, housing “the most ardent promoters of the anti-Chechen extermination war.”70 The theater siege in Moscow in October 2002 put Chechnya back on the top of Russia’s agenda. Known as Russia’s September 11, a tragedy at a Moscow theater in October and a suicide attack on a headquarters of the Kremlin-backed government in Grozny in late December 2002 demonstrated that the Chechen “united front for independence” had fallen apart. After the Moscow theater siege, the Russian president declared there will be no “second Khasavyurt,” meaning Russia will not sign any peace treaty with Chechnya. Analyzing the outcome of the second Chechen war, Boris Kagarlitsky noted that the war reached a stalemate, when it became impossible either to continue the war or to end the war. If the war continues, the new generation of Chechen young men who grew up seeing the war, bombardments and zachistki, would join the ranks of the fighters. If the federal troops pull out of Chechnya, the main condition that the Chechen side sets out as necessary to begin negotiations, the civil war would break out.71
The Future Status of Chechnya Within Russian political circles, there were different points of view concerning the future status of Chechnya. First, some voices in Russia, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, advocated Chechnya’s separation from Russia.72 Second, Valerii Tishkov, Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, proposed that self-determination must be guaranteed to Chechnya, including its status of a state associated with the Russian state and high degree of self-government with the possible external
70 Alex Rodriguez, “Dozens Killed in Truck Blasts,” Chicago Tribune, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 28 December 2002, A12. 71 Boris Kagarlitsky, “Topor proigrannoi voiny,” Novaya gazeta, 14 January 2002, available from http://2002.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2002/02n/n02n-s02.shtml. 72 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 127. 60
ties. Tishkov also suggested that the Chechen Constitution with the exception of the preamble should be acceptable to the Russian government even if it is not congruent with the Constitution of the Russian Federation.73 The proponents of the third scenario suggested that it is impossible to unite the pro- Russian pacified urban Northern Chechnya and the rebellious mountainous Southern Chechnya. Therefore, they proposed that Chechnya must be divided into two: Northern, within the Russian Federation, and the independent Southern Chechnya.74 Fourth, the official side continued to insist on keeping Chechnya in the Russian Federation. Marking Russia’s Constitution Day, on December 12, 2002, President Putin signed a decree calling for a referendum on a constitution and elections in Chechnya.75 The decree gave Chechnya’s Moscow-backed administration one month to organize a plebiscite in which voters would be asked to approve a draft constitution and bills on electing the republic’s president and parliament.76 In a March 16, 2003 television speech devoted to a constitutional referendum in Chechnya, President Putin stated that Chechnya would have “broad autonomy, within the structure of Russia.” He further said that a special treaty between the federation and the republic would be jointly prepared and concluded. He offered no details about the provisions of the treaty. In his speech, President Putin avoided any clear acknowledgement that the Russian state under his and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin’s leadership was responsible for any atrocities in Chechnya. President Putin said:
73 V. A. Tishkov, Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 532-533. 74 See Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, Vedeno ili Vashington? (Moscow: “Arktogeia-tsentr”, 2001), 209-210. 75 For a full text of President Putin’s radio address, see “Putin Announces Chechnya Referendum in Constitution Day Speech,” Johnson’s Russia List, December 13, 2002; available from http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6598-4.cfm. 76 “Putin Decree Calls for Elections in Chechnya,” Los Angeles Times, 13 December 2002, A6. 61
Simple Chechen people have paid with their sufferings for the prolonged period of clan warfare, of struggles for power and for money. . . . Your fathers and grandfathers endured the injustice and tragedy of the Stalinist deportation. All the weight of forced migration fell on the shoulders of the people—an exile that cost many Chechen lives. Ordinary Chechens must now restore their destroyed economy, revive national culture.77
Apart from the reference to Stalin, Putin avoided linking mass suffering or economic destruction to recent Kremlin actions. On January 25, 2003 at the Security Council meeting devoted to the military reform, Putin announced that the number of checkpoints (blokposty) in Chechnya should be optimal. Twelve checkpoints out of a current sixty would be eliminated, which would bring the number down from 192 at the beginning of the second military campaign. All checkpoints around the center of Grozny would be eliminated by the beginning of March 2003. Akhmad Kadyrov welcomed the decision and commented that after the meeting of the Security Council the situation in Chechnya would become “visibly healthier.”78 In the weeks before a referendum, Russian authorities announced that modest troop withdrawals would start on March 5, 2003. General Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of Russia’s general staff, told reporters in Grozny that about one thousand Russian soldiers were due to pull out from Chechnya without being replaced by fresh troops. Disputing critics who said it was impossible to hold a referendum during a war, Kvashnin insisted that the situation was “stable, normal and favorable for holding the referendum.”79
77 Chechnya Weekly, 20 March 2003, 2-3. 78 Ksenia Solanskaya, “Putin podaril chechentsam 12 blokpostov,” Gazeta.Ru, 26 February 2003; available from http://www.gazeta.ru/2003/02/26/putinpodaril.shtml. 79 David Holley, “Russia to Cut Back Troops in Chechnya,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2003, A3. 62
Despite threats from the Chechen rebels to disrupt the referendum, it took place as scheduled on March 23, 2003. As the results of the referendum showed, 95 percent of the 540,000 eligible voters approved a draft constitution that cemented Chechnya as an integral part of the Russian Federation. The number of voters excluded refugees and the Chechens in other parts of Russia, but included twenty-three thousand Defense Ministry servicemen, nine thousand Interior Ministry troops and four thousand border guards stationed in the province.80 Observers have suggested that the referendum on the new Chechen constitution was part of an effort by President Putin to undermine the legitimacy of Aslan Maskhadov, a separatist leader who was elected Chechnya’s president in 1997. The vote also aimed to strip the separatist guerrillas of the status of a “national liberation movement.”81 Whether or not the new Chechen Constitution will work, there is hope that with the elections for the organs of local government and transfer of power from the federal forces to Chechnya’s interior ministry, the situation will improve. However, there is also concern that the Kremlin-backed head of Chechnya’s administration Ramzan Kadyrov is ruling the ravaged republic through intimidation. Currently, Kadyrov’s countrymen seem to be playing an important supporting role in the fighting in eastern Ukraine.82
Summary Putin and Yeltsin took similar steps to prevent the country from disintegration. Both presidents had two strategies: military and political. After the first war,
80 “Chechnya Votes on Constitution,” United Press International, 23 March 2003; available from http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20030323-094712-6639r. 81 Holley, “Russia to Cut Back Troops in Chechnya,” A3. 82 Andrew S. Weiss, “The Improviser,” Wall Street Journal, 21-22 February 2015, C2. 63
which lasted from December 1994 to August 1996, interrupted by a series of negotiations, Yeltsin concluded the Khasavyurt treaty and pulled out troops from Chechnya. In 1997, Chechnya won a de facto independence, but it did not bring lasting peace and economic prosperity to the region. The second war started when Yeltsin was still Russian president. Prime Minister Putin, later Yeltsin’s successor, took charge of the military campaign against “bandits and terrorists,” which started in October 1999. In his political strategy, Putin rejected negotiations and pursued resolution of the conflict through constitutional means. The purpose of Putin’s referendum was achieved to keep Chechnya as part of the Russian Federation. The chronicle of the two Chechen wars provides a background for understanding differences in responses to the first war and the second war in Russia and the United States.
64
Chapter 4
Responses to the Chechen Wars
In Russia, the military, public, media, and political parties reacted differently to the first and to the second war in Chechnya. The U.S. response also changed from the “do nothing”attitude to pressing criticism, tough diplomacy, and economic threats.
Responses in Russia to the First Chechen War Within Russia, responses to the first Chechen war were sharply negative. The Yeltsin administration’s decision to use military force was unpopular among the high-ranking military leaders, general public, local elite, media, and political parties. The withdrawal of Russian federal forces further compounded the domestic impact of the war.
Military Within the military, there were different attitudes toward the war in Chechnya, which erupted in December 1994. Stuart Goldman and Jim Nichol with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress observed that some Russian officers expressed moral and legal opposition to the use of force
65
against the civilians, while others feared the war would increase hostility toward the military.1 Lilia Shevtsova, political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, noted that the first deputy commander of Russian ground forces Colonel General Eduard Vorobyov refused to take command of the operation and tendered his resignation. General Boris Gromov, a hero of the Afghan war, criticized the government’s use of the military force.2 Shevtsova asserted that the first Chechen war exposed the incompetence of the Russian military command and poor coordination among the military units. Inexperienced and poorly equipped Russian draftees were unprepared for fighting in winter conditions high in the mountains. Moreover, soldiers had to go to war against their own citizens. All of these issues damaged morale in the army.3 Goldman and Nichol concluded that the outcome of the conflict in Chechnya was viewed as “a life-and-death matter for the Yeltsin regime.”4 They indicated that the danger of war in Chechnya was that it would make the military and the security forces more influential in decision making of the Russian government.
Public Opinion Russian public opinion polls showed that the invasion of Chechnya had limited support. In a poll conducted in 1995, 27 percent supported sending in troops, while 54 percent supported withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya.5
1 Stuart D. Goldman and Jim Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya and Implications for the United States (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 1995), 8. 2 Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), 117. 3 Ibid., 116. 4 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 8. 5 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 117. 66
Popular disapproval of President Yeltsin’s policy in the Northern Caucasus led to a further drop in his popularity rating: 63 percent of respondents disapproved of Yeltsin’s actions, while only 8 percent approved of them.6 Goldman and Nichol commented that Yeltsin was unprepared for the lack of public support. Before the war, the Dudaev regime had little support in Russia because of Dudaev’s extreme drive for independence and growing lawlessness in Chechnya. Goldman and Nichol noted that “these considerations may have led Yeltsin’s advisors to underestimate the potential for a strongly negative public reaction to the Chechen operation.”7 Goldman and Nichol observed that the use of force in Chechnya gained disfavor in public opinion as casualties among Russian troops continued to mount in what appeared to be an “unwinnable” war. It became obvious that the Russian army might capture territory in Chechnya, but not break the will of the rebel fighters. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an independent advocacy group, criticized the military for concealing the casualties; however, they were more concerned about the deaths among their sons than among Chechen civilians.8 According to Shevtsova, local elites in the republics and regions disapproved of President Yeltsin’s Chechen policy. In January 1995, several representatives of Russia’s autonomous republics gathered in Cheboksary, the capital of Udmurtia, to voice their protest against the war. However, leaders of the ethnically Russian regions nearest to the Caucasus supported the president. They downplayed their demand for autonomy in exchange for economic aid from the federal center.9
6 Ibid. 7 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 7. 8 Ibid. 9 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 122. 67
Media Analyzing Russian mass media responses to the first Chechen war, Dmitry Mikheyev, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, noted that the Russian mass media criticized President Yeltsin’s administration and the military for the destruction of Grozny and for the violation of human rights. The presidential administration attacked the media for being one-sided. Deputy Nationalities Minister Aleksandr Kotenkov accused Dudaev of spending $10 million to bribe the Russian media.10 The media denied the accusation. In turn, Yeltsin repeated the allegations about the payment of Chechen money to the media.11 Goldman and Nichol observed that the Russian media undermined the government’s efforts to present the war in Chechnya as a “legitimate and limited use of force against implacable, well-armed criminal gangs.”12 The state-controlled ORT and independent NTV and TV-6 stations broadcasted conflicting views, showed images of war and interviews with civilian victims and Russian soldiers, revealing contradictions between the official propaganda and the reality of war.13 Anatol Lieven, a journalist of the Times, commented that during the first Chechen war, the Russian military lost the propaganda campaign.14 Apart from military and government newspapers, such as Krasnaya zvezda and Rossiiskaya gazeta, there was no attempt to organize favorable press coverage. Officials in charge of media had little experience working with the military and did not understand the importance of positive press coverage.
10 Izvestiya, 22 December 1994, 2; quoted in Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 276 fn70. 11 Ibid., 191. 12 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 7. 13 Ibid. 14 Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 120-121. 68
Political Parties Russian democratic, ultra-nationalist and communist politicians reacted differently to the first war in Chechnya. Opposition to the military action in Chechnya appeared to be strong. However, as Shevtsova observed, at that time “few people or political forces posed a serious threat to Yeltsin.”15 Democratic reformers were split over the war in Chechnya. Yegor Gaidar of the pro-government Russia’s Choice, Grigorii Yavlinsky of the moderate Yabloko faction, and Galina Starovoitova of Democratic Russia denounced the invasion of Chechnya.16 Other democrats justified the necessity of the use of force to restore order in Chechnya. Vladimir Lukin, a former Russian ambassador to the United States and a leading Yabloko member wrote:
At the time of the Chechen war, the executive branch showed itself and society that it could act independently, without regard for political pressures and in spite of them. . . . In an ideal world, the absurd and dangerous notion that the army should not be used for internal conflicts should be pounded out of the heads of our military. . . . Using the army inside the country in extreme situations, when threats to the state appear, is the norm in democratic states.17
The only major party supporting Yeltsin’s use of force was the ultra- nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Nationalists believed that the use of force was necessary to restore the territorial integrity of Russia. Sergei Baburin’s Russia’s Way and Aleksandr Barkashov’s neo-fascist group also supported Yeltsin’s military policy.18
15 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 119. 16 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 9. 17 Vladimir Lukin, “The Last Chance,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 24 January 1995; quoted in Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 118. 18 Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 119. 69
The Russian Left initiated the impeachment of President Yeltsin on two occasions and brought the issue of the president’s responsibility for the use of force to the Constitutional Court. After the hostage drama in Budennovsk, the communists drafted an impeachment resolution. On June 21, 1995, the resolution won only 172 votes of the 300 needed to pass it.19 When the military action was nearing its conclusion in 1996, a group of Communist parliamentarians brought the issue of the president’s edicts launching the war in Chechnya to the Constitutional Court. The court held hearings on the actions of the president in Chechnya and ruled that the president had been entitled to use force against illegal formations, although it did criticize his methods.20 The “Chechen charge” became one of the five charges against President Yeltsin in the impeachment proceedings held on May 15, 1999, several months before the second war started. The charge for unleashing the war in Chechnya failed to win the required three hundred votes, falling seventeen votes short. It was fully supported by communists, agrarians, and the majority of Yabloko faction.21 These moves had little impact on Yeltsin’s policy in Chechnya, because the Russian Constitution vests greater power with the president, rather than the parliament.
Yeltsin’s Solution Analyzing the constitutionality of President Yeltsin’s solution, Goldman and Nichol stated that critics of Yeltsin’s decision to invade Chechnya maintained that the use of armed forces on the Russian territory was unconstitutional, because the president did not declare a state of emergency or martial law in
19 Ibid., 124. 20 Mikheyev, Russia Transformed, 192. 21 Darya Korsunskaya, Svetlana Lolayeva, and Gleb Cherkasov, “Game’s Over,” Vremya MN, 17 May 1999, 1-2; quoted in the Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 16 June 1999, 1. 70
Chechnya. In support of their argument critics asserted that President Yeltsin failed to consult the parliament as stipulated by Article 102 of the Constitution.22 On the contrary, supporters of the military action in Chechnya maintained that the government’s use of force to prevent the Chechen Republic from secession was legitimate. They appealed to Article 86 of the Russian Constitution that designates the president the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and to Article 80 that charges the president to “safeguard the sovereignty” and “state integrity” of the Russian Federation.23 The issue of human rights, which involves the state’s treatment of its own citizens in its own territory, was not important to the Russian leaders. Article 55.3 of the Constitution stipulates that “Human and civil rights and liberties may be restricted by the federal law to the extent required for the protection of the fundamentals of the constitutional system, . . . for ensuring the defense of the country and the security of the state.”24 Sergei Kovalev, an outspoken human rights activist and a member of the State Duma, in his report to the deputies of the Duma, condemned the federal executive power acting in a “legal vacuum.” He stated that the conflict lacked a defined legal status, especially the use of forces of the Ministry of Defense to resolve an internal conflict. On the issue of human rights, Kovalev admitted that both sides were guilty of violations, but “the scale of their violations cannot be compared.” He concluded that Russia would have to pay the moral,
22 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 10. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Section One Chapter 2 “Rights and Liberties of Man and Citizen,” Constitution of the Russian Federation as Approved by RF President Boris Yeltsin and Submitted to National Referendum in December 1993, 23; available from http://friend-partners.org/oldfriends/ constitution/russia-constitution.html. 71
political, and economic price for its attempt to solve the Chechen problem by force.25 In February 1996, half a year before the Khasavyurt treaty was signed, Yeltsin acknowledged that waging war to resolve the conflict was a grave mistake. This was one of the steps toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict proposed by Valerii Tishkov, Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.26 President Yeltsin, however, did not take responsibility for the government’s actions in Chechnya.
Responses in Russia to the Second Chechen War The military, public opinion, media, and political parties reacted differently to the second military campaign. A better organized military, the government’s greater skill in media manipulation, and the turn in public opinion due to the terrorist actions made the second war quite different from the first.
Military For the Russian military, the second Chechen war, which started in October 1999, gave an opportunity to take revenge for their humiliating withdrawal after the Khasavyurt treaty, which ended the first Chechen war in August 1996.27 The military adopted a new strategy called “non-contact” offensive, modeled on NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia, in order to limit their casualties by relying on an aerial bombing and increased use of artillery and rockets. In
25 “Sergei Kovalev’s Report to the Deputies of the State Duma,” 126, in U.S. Congress, Hearings before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on Crisis in Chechnya, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., 19 and 27 January 1995 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1995). 26 For the full text of the policy recommendations drafted by Valerii Tishkov, see Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 522- 524. 27 For a more detailed analysis of the differences between the first and the second war and lessons learned, see Dale R. Herspring, The Kremlin and the High Command: Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 72
contrast to the first war in Chechnya, the Russians were using more experienced soldiers, riot police, and kontraktniki, or hired soldiers.28 As Boris Kagarlitsky, a senior research fellow in the Institute for Comparative Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, observed in his article in Novaya gazeta, without analyzing reasons of the military defeat in the first war, the military hoped that the second campaign would be successful. However, the past four years of fighting have shown that, on the one hand, the Russian army is unable to suppress the guerrilla war, while on the other hand, the Chechen side is unable to mount a coordinated operation to strike a decisive blow to stop the Russian army. As a result, the war has become “protracted and stagnated.”29 Jim Nichol, foreign affairs analyst of the Congressional Research Service, pointed out that there were serious concerns that the generals would not obey an order from the political leadership to retreat, if it were issued.30 Generals felt nervous because they understood the politicians might sacrifice them for the second time.31 For the generals, it was preferable to be seen as betrayed by politicians than as incapable of winning the war. Analyzing the second military campaign, Kagarlitsky concluded that hopes of the military were based on two assumptions. First, they believed that the first war was unsuccessful because of the insufficient number of combat troops. Second, generals believed they lost the war because of the journalists and criticism in the media coverage. This time, the military dispatched one
28 David Hoffman, “In Russia, a General Reassertion,” Washington Post, 13 December 1999, 15. 29 Boris Kagarlitsky, “Topor proigrannoi voiny,” Novaya gazeta 14 January 2002; available from http://2002.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2002/02n/n02n-s02.shtml. 30 Jim Nichol, Chechnya Conflict: Recent Developments (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2000), 11. 31 More on the views of the generals and description of the military operation in Chechnya, see memoirs of Gennadii Troshev, Moia voina: Chechenskii dnevnik okopnogo generala (Moscow: Vagrius, 2001). 73
hundred thousand troops to the region and won the “information” campaign to secure its rear.32
Public Opinion Apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities in August and September 1999, claiming more than three hundred lives, created the necessary public support for the anti-terrorist operation. David Hoffman, writing for the Washington Post, observed that despite Western criticism, the tide of refugees, hints that Russian military losses were being concealed, and because of a “strident propaganda campaign,” the war proved popular with the Russian public.33 On the eve of the election season, the military campaign boosted the rating of Prime Minister Putin. According to a Fund for Public Opinion survey, Putin’s approval rating was higher than for any other politician including Yeltsin at the peak of his popularity in 1991.34 The country’s focus on the war distracted the public from serious domestic social and economic problems. Now, instead of the Jews, the new enemy to blame was the Chechens. The All-Russia Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM) conducted monthly polls of sixteen hundred respondents in eighty-three cities. In December 1999, three months into the war, the polls showed that 17 percent of respondents were against the war, 45 percent supported peace negotiations, and 38 percent supported the war “whatever the price.”35 Another poll
32 Kagarlitsky, “Topor proigrannoi voiny.” 33 David Hoffman, “Russians Put Their Hopes in Putin,” Washington Post, 29 November 1999, A17. 34 Ibid. 35 Sophie Lambroschini, “Russia: Public Opinion Edges Toward Peace in Chechnya,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 8 December 1999; available from http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/12/F.RU.991208142723.html. 74
conducted at that time showed that 60 percent of Russians felt hatred and longing for revenge against the Chechens.36 Anton Lerner, an analyst with the VTsIOM, stated that Chechnya became a symbol, a reflection of the situation of lawlessness and corruption in Russia; therefore, “restoring order in Chechnya . . . means restoring order in Russia. Public opinion doesn’t support the war so much as [the idea] of restoring order.”37 A poll on January 21-24, 2000 confirmed this observation: 55 percent answered that the use of the army, artillery, aviation, and tanks to restore order in Chechnya was seen as strength of the state, not weakness.38 Since January 2001 supporters of peace talks outnumbered supporters of war; their number peaked at 57 percent in September 2002, before Chechen fighters seized hostages in a Moscow theater in late October. One month after the tragic event, in a November 2002 poll, the difference between supporters and opponents of war was not significant: 45 percent of the public voted for peace, while 49 percent called for war.39 The analysis of the statistics shows that the results should be viewed with a grain of salt. The findings are not generalizable to all regions in Russia. Usually, more people vote in favor of the use of force during the initial stage of war, but soon “war fatigue” sets in and they change their opinion. Analysts observed that the hostage crisis in Moscow in October 2002 bolstered support for President Putin’s policy in Chechnya.40
36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 VTsIOM, 21-24 January 2000; available from http://www.yabloko.ru/News/Votes/VTSIOM/ex_4_20009.html. 39 Nabi Abdullaev, “Poll Shows Support for Peace Talks,” Moscow Times, 10 January 2003, 11. 40 Susan B. Glasser, “A Mandate for Putin? The Government’s Response to the Hostage Crisis May Bolster Support for His Policy in Chechnya,” Washington Post, 4-10 November 2002, 17. 75
Media The Russian media have supported the second war and, in contrast to the battles of 1994-1996, have not shown the Chechen side. Most Russian and foreign reporters have been banned from the region.41 The newly re-established Ministry of the Press gave firm guidelines to journalists, which had been lacking in 1994-1995.42 Thomas Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College reported that Russian independent television stations, NTV and TV-6, and liberal newspapers, Novaya gazeta and Nezavisimaya gazeta, came under attack. The Russian government took “business” actions to silence the media for the critical coverage of the Chechen war. The pressure on the media went beyond financial harassment to physical threats against journalists if they continued to report on war in Chechnya.43 The Moscow theater siege in late October 2002 further exposed a heavy state control over the media and a lack of information about Chechnya. Amendments to the law limiting media coverage of terrorism, approved on November 1, 2002 by the State Duma, barred broadcasts of “propaganda” or “justification of extremist activity.” A defender of the measure, Viktor Ozerov, a member of the Federation Council, said that it was not a limitation of democratic freedom and “only information from official sources should be used.”44 Liberals expressed concern that the security services might use the siege as an excuse to tighten state control over many aspects of Russian life. Oleg
41 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 9. 42 Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002), 231. 43 Thomas M. Nichols, “Putin’s First Two Years: Democracy or Authoritarianism?” Current History (October 2002): 310-311. 44 John Daniszewski, “Russian Lawmakers OK Media Limits,” Los Angeles Times, 2 November 2002, A3. 76
Panfilov of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations commented that the amendments manifest “the revival of the institution of censorship and Soviet-style propaganda in the Russian media.”45 Tatyana Kasatkina of the Memorial feared that “with the new rules being enforced, the world may lose Chechnya from its sight altogether.”46 On November 25, 2002, in an attempt to burnish his image as a defender of free speech, President Putin vetoed media legislation that restricted terrorism coverage. Putin criticized the press for acting irresponsibly to “boost their ratings” during the Moscow hostage crisis. “The main weapon of terrorists is not grenades and submachine guns and bullets, but blackmail, and the best means of such blackmail is to turn a terrorist act into a public show,” President Putin said.47 Overall, the confidence of the public in the press coverage of the war in Chechnya declined. A poll conducted on January 28-31, 2000 showed that only 14 percent believed the press coverage was objective, 38 percent considered the news insufficient or superficial, while 40 percent believed media reports were biased, and concealed the real problems and the number of casualties.48
Political Parties Across the political spectrum, the second military campaign won unanimous support. Those politicians who suggested that the tactics might be excessive were denounced as traitors. Russian liberals like Grigorii Yavlinsky of the Yabloko party, who criticized the campaign in Chechnya, risked being
45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 “Putin Vetoes Proposed Restrictions on News Media,” Washington Post, 26 November 2002, A20. 48 VTsIOM, 28-31 January 2000; available from http://www.yabloko.ru/News/Votes/VTSIOM/ex_57.html. 77
considered non-patriotic.49 The liberals, communists, and ultra-nationalists endorsed Putin’s policy. According to Kagarlitsky, when Yegor Gaidar’s party Russia’s Democratic Choice returned to the parliament in 1999 under the banner of the Union of Right Forces (SPS), Grigorii Yavlinsky remained the only leader of the “democratic opposition.”50 While endorsing President Putin’s view that terrorism posed a threat to Russia’s security, Yavlinsky called for halting ground operations and opening negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov.51 During the first Chechen war, the Russian Communist Party (KPRF) challenged the president and the government for their course on Chechnya. However, as Kagarlitsky observed, after the 1999 parliamentary elections and 2000 presidential elections, the KPRF ceased to be a leftist party because of its inability to organize social protest. In the words of Kagarlitsky, it turned from the opposition party into a “pocket party” of the Kremlin.52 Kagarlitsky further noted that nationalists suffered a heavy defeat in the 1999 parliamentary elections. Enthusiasm for the war in Chechnya among its prominent leaders, such as Sergei Baburin, did not help them to win seats in the parliament.53 Dmitry Rogozin was among the few nationalists who kept the support of his voters. As a co-chair of the Joint Working Group for Chechnya of the State Duma and the Council of Europe, Rogozin became a staunch supporter of President Putin’s policy. Kagarlitsky observed that while public opinion called for beginning of peace talks with the Chechens, politicians, with the exception of Yavlinsky, demanded a “war until final victory.” On the whole, Kagarlitsky concluded that
49 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 10. 50 Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, 263. 51 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 10. 52 Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, 268. 53 Ibid., 258. 78
the “political class” discredited itself by showing no “will to swim against the current.”54
Foreign Policy Makers Susan Glasser and Peter Baker in their article in the Washington Post wrote that since September 11, 2001 President Putin has made a series of concessions that have reshaped the U.S.-Russian relationship. President Putin closed Russia’s spy base in Cuba and allowed the presence of the U.S. military in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. He supported America’s strikes in Afghanistan and expressed readiness to “cut a deal” on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.55 Inside Russia, Cold War-era generals and diplomats have not fully embraced President Putin’s pro-Western policy. Andrei Riabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center pointed out that Putin might face the same threat as Gorbachev did because there is a rift between the president’s new direction and the persistent anti-American sentiments among the elite. Riabov commented that Putin’s position is shaky, “unless he can create a strong and stable coalition within Russia for his policy. Right now, this policy is simply his personal choice.”56 Masha Lipman, deputy editor of Ezhenedel’ny Zhurnal, a Russian newsmagazine, noted that although members of the Russian conservative elite, including the military and foreign policy makers, have expressed concerns about Putin’s pro-Western policies, Putin’s popularity keeps them from uniting against him.57
54 Ibid., 241. 55 Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, “Putin Pushes for U.S. Concessions,” Washington Post, reprinted in the Fresno Bee, 4 November 2001, A26. 56 Glasser and Baker, “Putin Pushes for U.S. Concessions,” A26. 57 Masha Lipman, “In Russia, a Grudging Consensus,” Washington Post, 3-9 June 2002, 27. 79
Putin’s Solution President Putin has persistently tried to “normalize” the situation in Chechnya. In 2001, Putin transferred power from the military to the republic’s civil authorities. The president promoted the creation of the new constitution of the Chechen Republic, and the March 2003 referendum showed support for the new constitution that cemented Chechnya as part of Russia. The next step in Putin’s political strategy was to create an elected Chechen government. In Russia, Emil Pain, director of Moscow’s Center for Ethnopolitical and Regional Studies, and onetime advisor to former President Yeltsin, expressed his doubt that those who live in Chechnya would believe in the results of the March referendum. Pain warned that the referendum “won’t be a step toward legitimization. . . . Instead of holding a referendum, Russia should start peaceful negotiations.”58 Aleksei Malashenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center also expressed concern that the results of the referendum might be skewed. He mentioned two reasons. First, Russian troops were ordered to vote. Second, the exact number of civilians currently living in Chechnya was not accurate; thus, the official figure of 530,000 far exceeded 350,000 in the unofficial count. Under those circumstances, he concluded, the pro-Moscow administration could adopt any text it wanted as a new constitution.59 The participants of the All-Russian Democratic Assembly held in Moscow on March 17, 2003 warned that the ill-timed and unprepared referendum could be “a political mistake.” They called for a cease-fire and a peace conference that involves all warring parties of the conflict. In the vote for the statement “On the attitude toward holding a referendum on Constitution in
58 David Holley, “Russia to Cut Back Troops in Chechnya,” Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2003, A3. 59 Chechnya Weekly, 22 January 2003; available from http://www.jamestown.org/pubs/view/chw_004_001_010.htm. 80
Chechnya and the necessity to convoke a peace conference” the Yabloko party abstained, because their condition that President Putin must chair a peace conference was rejected.60 To sum up, the response in Russia to the Chechen wars changed from criticism of the government’s actions among all strata of the society, including military leaders, public, media, and opposition parties during the first campaign to unanimous support of the government’s toughest measures during the second military campaign.
U.S. Response to the First Chechen War The U.S. response changed from the “do nothing” attitude to pressing criticism, tough diplomacy, and economic threats. The analysis of the U.S. response to the first Chechen war will focus mainly on the Clinton administration policy and the congressional response.
Clinton Administration Response The initial U.S. response to the war in Chechnya was rather restrained. The Clinton administration characterized the conflict as an “internal matter” of Russia.61 The administration feared that Chechen separatism could precipitate the fragmentation of the Russian Federation. On the other hand, they feared that a re-conquest of Chechnya with tacit U.S. support might encourage a remilitarization of Russian policy.62 Some analysts, such as Zbiegniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, suggested that the U.S. should support Chechnya’s right to
60 For a full text of the Statement, see Yabloko’s web site at http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/2003/documents/statement_170303.html. 61 Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 15. 62 Goldman and Nichol, 16. 81
self-determination.63 On the contrary, Jim Hoagland, senior foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, believed that America had no stake in the Chechen conflict, and “the Clinton administration has wisely stayed on the sidelines.”64 Only after continuous reports about casualties among the civilian population did the Clinton administration officials criticize Russian tactics in Chechnya more openly for violating international law and the OSCE guidelines. The guidelines require forty-eight-hour prior notification of movement of more than nine thousand troops or large number of tanks and heavy military equipment. The guidelines, however, provide no enforcement mechanism or sanctions.65 Gail Lapidus of Stanford University commented that the Clinton administration treated the invasion of Chechnya as an internal matter of Russia for two reasons. First, there was concern about the threat of Russia’s possible disintegration. Second, Yeltsin was considered a guarantor of democratic and market reforms in Russia. Lapidus concluded that the United States leaders’ failure to raise the Chechen issue in high-level discussions with their Russian counterparts gave President Yeltsin a free hand in politics in the Caucasus.66
Congressional Response The congressional response mainly focused on the issue of foreign aid to Russia. Congress acknowledged Russia’s right to maintain its territorial
63 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Moscow’s Accomplice: Official U.S. Spokesmen Have Actually Joined in Vilifying the Chechen Victims,” Washington Post, 8 January 1995, C7; quoted in ibid. 64 Jim Hoagland, “Russia’s Quagmire,” Washington Post, 5 January 1995, A29; quoted in ibid. 65 Goldman and Nichol, 16. 66 Gail Lapidus, “The War in Chechnya: Opportunities Missed, Lessons to be Learned,” 1998; quoted in Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia, 123. 82
integrity. However, concern over the brutal conduct of the Russian military in Chechnya led members of both parties to reconsider U.S. aid to Russia. On December 11, 1994, the first day of the Russian assault on Grozny, U.S. Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman called upon the Congress to reassess aid to Russia.67 On the other hand, Senator Alfonse D’Amato said during a news conference on January 3, 1995 that while the killing of civilians is disturbing, cutting off aid to Russia “would send the wrong signal, but certainly we should express our concern.”68
U.S. Response to the Second Chechen War Because the second Chechen war started when President Clinton was still in office and continued during President Bush’s tenure, the analysis of the U.S. response to the war will focus on the Clinton and Bush administration policies and the congressional response.
Clinton Administration Response Apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities in August and early September 1999 drew international sympathy. But the U.S. administration became critical of Russia’s actions when the shelling of Chechen villages began. The issue of “ethnic cleansing” was brought to the world’s attention. On November 2, 1999, the Clinton White House stressed that Russia’s behavior did not meet the Geneva Conventions and its OSCE commitments.69 A.P.V. Rogers, international legal expert, qualified the anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya as an armed conflict.70 The armed conflicts are governed
67 Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1994, A33; quoted in Goldman and Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya, 17. 68 Federal News Service, 3 January 1995; quoted in ibid. 69 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 16. 70 Ibid. 83
by the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Additional Protocol II of 1997 and call for protecting civilians. Thus, the U.S. experts argued that Russia violated Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, which states that “persons taking no part in hostilities . . . shall be treated humanely.”71 The Clinton administration appealed to international norms and human rights and included the issue of Chechnya in the agenda of the OSCE summit, held in Istanbul on November 17-18, 1999. In his address to the OSCE summit in Istanbul, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, stated,
We are all determined to fight terrorism. But the force we use to fight it should always be proportional, and focused on the actual terrorists. We cannot and must not fight them by using their own methods, by inflicting indiscriminate violence and terror on innocent civilians.72
On December 6, 1999, President Clinton warned that Russia will pay a “heavy price” for human rights violations in Chechnya, because such abuses will “intensify extremism” within Russia and “diminish its own standing in the world.”73 Laurence Eagleburger, former U.S. Secretary of State, commented that Russia was doing what it was doing to its people for a long time. “If Russia lost the war,” he said, “it would jeopardize the stability of the Russian Federation.”74 In contrast, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, emphasized the moral issue of how the state should treat its own people. After the events in Kosovo and East Timor, the war in Chechnya, in his opinion, was “another carnage, if not genocide. It highlighted the indifference
71 Ibid. 72 Michael R. Gordon, “Yeltsin and West Clash at Summit over Chechen War,” New York Times on the Web, 22 November 1999; available from http://nytimes.com/library/world/europe/111999summit-rdp.html. 73 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 16. 74 PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, 8 December 1999, television program. 84
of the Russian government to its own people and ignorance of the historical roots of the conflict.” Brzezinski further stated, “if the war goes on and Russia succeeds, it would be a celebration of Russian chauvinism at worst. It would bring greater instability to the North Caucasus subjected to Russian authority.” He proposed to put pressure on Russia through economic and diplomatic measures, because Russia was attracted to the IMF credits, export-import operations and participation in the G-8 Group.75 In 2000, a series of reports from human rights groups drew world attention to atrocities committed by Russian forces in Chechnya.76 In response to these growing reports, President Clinton called for Russia to facilitate a “thorough and transparent” inquiry in what really went on and to allow journalists and the appropriate international agencies to work in the region unrestrained.77 The U.S. State Department officials and congressmen met with Chechen “foreign minister” Ilyas Akhmadov in mid-January 2000. A month later, in
75 Ibid. 76 See the Human Rights Watch web site http://www.hrw.org. In addition to many press releases, Human Rights Watch has issued thirteen reports. The first four of these reports were issued in 1995. They include “Russia’s War in Chechnya: Victims Speak Out” (January 1995); “War in Chechnya: New Report from the Field” (January 1995); “Three Months of War in Chechnya” (February 1995); and “Partisan War in Chechnya on the Eve of the WWII Commemoration” (May 1995). Nine reports have been issued since the resumption of hostilities in Chechnya. Four of these reports were issued in 2000. They included “Civilian Killings in Staropromyslovski District of Grozny” (February 2000); “ ‘No Happiness Remains’: Civilian Killings, Pillage, and Rape in Alkhan- Yurt, Chechnya” (April 2000); “February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldi” (June 2000); and “ ‘Welcome to Hell’: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Extortion in Chechnya” (October 2000). In 2001, two more reports were issued, including “The ‘Dirty War’ in Chechnya: Forced Disappearances, Torture, and Summary Executions” (March 2001) and “Burying the Evidence: The Botched Investigation into a Mass Grave in Chechnya” (May 2001). Two reports were issued in 2002, including “Swept Under: Torture, Forced Disappearances, and Extrajudicial Killings during Sweep Operations in Chechnya” (February 2002) and “Last Seen . . . : Continued ‘Disappearances’ in Chechnya” (April 2002). A report, issued in January 2003, entitled “Into Harm’s Way” documented forced return of displaced people to Chechnya. These reports are available in English and Russian. For an evocative account of crimes perpetrated in Chechnya during the second war and reactions from Russian civil society and international human rights organizations, see Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 77 Nichol, Chechnya Conflict, 16. 85
mid-February, another meeting between U.S. human rights officials and Chechnya’s deputy legislative speaker was held. The Russian foreign ministry condemned these meetings as implying U.S. encouragement of Chechen separatism.78 President Clinton’s statement on February 14, 2000 about Russia’s operation against the “paramilitary forces who were practicing terrorist tactics” in Chechnya was viewed as conciliatory by Russian officials. Although President Clinton criticized Russia’s tactics as grievous, he said that the Chechen guerillas “bear some of the responsibility for what happened.”79 This statement showed support for Russia. The Clinton administration was concerned about three issues, namely foreign aid, terrorism, and human rights violations. Despite criticism of Russia’s military actions, the Clinton administration sought to establish working relations with Russia’s new leaders.
Congressional Response The Chechnya-related activities in the U.S. Congress included hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bills and resolutions calling for Russia to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. U.S. Senators Jesse Helms and Mitch McConnell criticized the Clinton administration for sending Russia “mixed signals” on Chechnya and taking little action. They advocated the “tangible measures” such as freeze on summitry, IMF, World Bank, and investment loans as well as suspension of Russia from the G-8 Group.80 Both the Clinton administration and the Congress supported aid to Russia. President Clinton argued that the U.S. aid was devoted to nuclear non-
78 Ibid., 17. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 19-21. 86
proliferation programs, and that terminating such programs was not in the U.S. interest.
Bush Administration Response The second Chechen war coincided with the transfer of power from President Clinton to President Bush. As James Goldgeier of George Washington University and Michael McFaul of Stanford University observed, the Bush administration pledged to take a “tough realism” line on Russia and end a “happy talk” of the Clinton years.81 Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, was especially critical of Putin’s role in the Chechen war. Rice wrote in her Foreign Affairs article:
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has used the war to stir nationalism at home while fueling his own political fortunes. The Russian military has been uncharacteristically blunt and vocal in asserting its duty to defend the integrity of the Russian Federation—an unwelcome development in civil- military relations. The long-term effect on Russia’s political culture should not be underestimated. And the war has affected relations between Russia and its neighbors in the Caucasus, as the Kremlin hurls charges of harboring and abetting Chechen terrorists against states as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The war is a reminder of the vulnerability of the small, new states around Russia and of America’s interest in their independence.82
81 James Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, “George W. Bush and Russia,” Current History (October 2002): 316. 82 Condoleezza Rice, “Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January/February 2000): 60. 87
Goldgeier and McFaul noted that in early 2001, the Bush administration departed from the engagement policies of the Clinton administration.83 Foreign policy officials demonstrated support for the Chechen cause by arranging a high-level meeting between the Chechen foreign minister Ilias Akhmadov and the acting head of the State Department’s Bureau of Newly Independent States, John Beyrle.84 However, the confrontational approach gave way to a policy of engagement, which was evident in the June 2001 meeting with President Putin in Slovenia, when President Bush discussed Chechnya privately. The reason for not mentioning Russia’s internal problem publicly had little to do with concern for the success of Russian reforms. Rather, the security issue of abrogating the ABM treaty was on the top of President Bush’s agenda.85 Goldgeier and McFaul further asserted that Putin’s embrace of American policy after September 11, 2001 changed the way Bush spoke about Russia’s “war against terrorism.” Bush accepted Russia’s definition of the war on terrorism to include Chechnya. Therefore, in spring 2002, on the eve of Bush’s visit to Moscow, the Chechen foreign minister Ilias Akhmadov could not meet with any senior U.S. government representative.86 Although President Bush has not criticized the Russian military operation in Chechnya, Condoleezza Rice expressed a “nuanced” view of the war, saying that “not every Chechen is a terrorist and that the Chechens’ legitimate aspiration for a political solution should be pursued by the Russian government. And we have been very actively pressing the Russian government to move on the political front with Chechnya.”87
83 Goldgeier and McFaul, “George W. Bush and Russia,” 316. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 317. 86 Ibid., 318. 87 Ibid., 319. 88
Goldgeier and McFaul concluded that the U.S. policy on Chechnya has remained unchanged. Chechnya is recognized as part of Russia. Russia is urged to find ways to begin a dialogue and reach a political settlement, because there is no military solution to the problem. The Bush administration has not pursued more active policy initiatives in the region such as those proposed by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.88
Congressional Response On the eve of the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) criticized President Putin’s domestic policy on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Senator Helms proposed to exclude the Russian president from the elite club of the developed democracies. In the Senator’s opinion, President Putin’s policy in Chechnya was more destructive than the policy of the former president of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo.89 Nevertheless, as a consequence of the September 11 attacks, Russia became one of America’s most important allies in the campaign against the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The Cold War adversaries just half a century ago have become strategic partners. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remarked about this historic change, “No Russian leader since Peter the Great has cast his lot as much with the West as Putin has.”90 A decade later, opinion columnists and the Putinologists have been struggling to explain the thinking of the man who, in the words of Andrew
88 Ibid. 89 Jesse Helms, “Putin Shouldn’t Be at the G-8 Summit,” Wall Street Journal, 19 July 2001, A22. 90 Robin Wright, “Ties That Terrorism Transformed,” Los Angeles Times, 13 March 2002, A4. 89
S. Weiss, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, “almost single- handedly, seems to be dragging much of the West into a new Cold War.”91
Summary Despite the change in presidential administrations from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, the U.S. policy toward Russia followed the same path, that of engagement, not confrontation, but for different reasons. Strengthening democratic institutions in Russia was the Clinton administration priority, while for the Bush administration, the issue of security came into the forefront. The U.S. response highlights the two conflicting principles in modern politics: respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination of people. State sovereignty is supported but not ethnic nationalism, which threatens the territorial integrity and the constitutional order of the state. The human rights instruments to deal with the state are weak, especially when it is under terrorist attack.
91 Andrew S. Weiss, “The Improviser,” Wall Street Journal, 21-22 February 2015, C1-C2. During the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Andrew S. Weiss worked on Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department. 90
Chapter 5
Conclusion
A combination of the historical, political, socio-cultural, economic, and leadership factors led to the resolution of the Chechen crisis with the use of the military force. Historically, the Chechen side contends that the memory of genocide during Russia’s wars in the Caucasus in the nineteenth century and Stalin’s deportation of 1944 could not but lead the Chechen people to exercise the right to self-determination. The possibility came in 1991, when the Soviet Union was falling apart and Chechnya joined “the parade of sovereignties.” Yet, from the Russian point of view, the two historical events in themselves were insufficient to explain the conflict that flared up over the modern-day issues. The most important political factor, which is considered the key to the resolution of the Chechen crisis, has been the status of the republic within the Russian Federation. From the Chechen point of view, any radical compromise with the Russian leaders would be to their disadvantage, meaning they have to abandon any hope for independence. From the Russian point of view, to build relationships with Chechnya on a confederate basis was unacceptable because it would destabilize the federation and set up a precedent for new separatist conflicts. Therefore, President Putin promised that a special treaty between the federation and the republic would be jointly prepared and concluded. However,
91
there is no consensus of opinion between Moscow and Grozny concerning the text of the treaty. Although many experts view the Chechens as culturally and religiously different from the Russians, many Chechens were, in fact, brought up on the Russian culture and can speak Russian without accent. The leveling of cultural differences was largely due to the Soviet atheistic education and inter-ethnic marriages. The ideology of the radical wing of the Chechen resistance to create an independent Islamic caliphate in the Northern Caucasus has collapsed. However, the Russian policy of employing Islam to win the hearts of the Chechen people is unlikely to succeed, because the separatists fight not only for Islamic values. The issue of independence has not died, and for the Chechens, relations with the Russians will remain unresolved. One of the leading economic factors for the conflict in Chechnya was its oil. It remains the most important financial and political resource in Chechnya. All successive Chechen leaders demanded that revenues from oil extraction and refinery be given back to the republic to rebuild its economy, without relying on the subsidies from the federal center. Precisely for this reason, it is impossible for the federal center to meet the demand of the Chechen side to grant the republic the status of a free economic zone and a controlling stake in a local Chechen oil company. Inevitably, the leadership factors contributed to the outbreak of the two wars. On the Russian side, despite the changes in leadership from President Yeltsin to President Putin, the strategy toward Chechnya has remained the same, that is, to keep Chechnya permanently as part of the Russian Federation. On the Chechen side, the leadership changed, in chronological order, from Dzhokhar Dudaev to Aslan Maskhadov to Akhmad Kadyrov to Alu Alkhanov to Ramzan Kadyrov. Yet, the demands of the Chechen opposition leaders have consistently remained the same, greater political and economic independence. 92
Whether Russia’s policy of “Chechenization” will succeed or fail or whether Chechen demands will be acceptable or not depends on the conditions under which Chechens live today. And it is evident that despite positive signs of rebuilding the economic and social spheres, there is desperate poverty and high unemployment rate. Some Russian analysts have suggested that there is no historical analogy to the recent tragic events in Chechnya. Historian Vladimir Degoyev in his analytical essay on the pages of the Nezavisimaya gazeta noted that it is too early to draw conclusions and parallels between the Russian war in the Caucasus, fought during the nineteenth century, and the recent Chechen wars. The nineteenth century war in the Caucasus symbolized the end of an era of Russia’s southward colonial expansion. It achieved the geopolitical goal of integrating Chechnya into the Russian Empire and heralded a new stage in the development of the Chechen society. In contrast, the recent Chechen wars were a result of a systemic crisis in Russia.1 In 1995, both the U.S. State Department and the Kremlin officials drew analogies between the war in Chechnya and the American Civil War.2 Zbigniew Brzezinski noted that the comparison overlooked the fact that Russians were not fighting Russians, but Chechens.3 Former commander of federal forces in Chechnya, Anatoly Kulikov, in his interview with the newspaper Pravda commented that the war in Chechnya “cannot be regarded as classical.” In Anatoly Kulikov’s opinion, the war in Chechnya “is neither a civil war nor an
1 Vladimir Degoyev, “Chechenskaia voina: retsidiv ili fenomen?” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 September 1999; available from http://www.ng.ru/ideas/1999-09-17/war.html. 2 State Department briefing of January 3, 1995 made this point; see Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Moscow’s Accomplice: Official U.S. Spokesmen Have Actually Joined in Vilifying the Chechen Victims,” Washington Post, 8 January 1995, C7; quoted in Stuart D. Goldman and Jim Nichol, Russian Conflict in Chechnya and Implications for the United States (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 1995), 16. 3 Ibid. 93
armed opposition to an external foreign aggressor.”4 Vladimir Degoyev added to this argument his observation that concepts of anti-colonial war or national liberation movement do not apply to the Chechen circumstances. He further stated that the war in Chechnya could not easily fit into any typology, thus making the Chechen conflict a “separatist variety of a civil war within a state that has a unitary political, economic, and social structure.”5 A combination of the following factors led to the first Chechen war of 1994-1996: the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the power struggle between the Russian center and the subjects of the federation, and complications caused by the characteristics of the respective leaders. Russia invaded the small Caucasian republic with massive ground and air forces, but was unable to bring about a defeat of the pro-independence Chechen fighters. The war reached a stalemate, with neither side able to achieve its full objective, and federal forces withdrew in fall 1996. The withdrawal of the Russian troops in accordance with the Khasavyurt treaty, the presidential elections in 1997 in Chechnya, and the de-facto independence did not bring lasting peace and prosperity in the republic. The clan rivalries among the Chechen military commanders, the drug trafficking and kidnappings, the sharp decline in oil extraction and refining, and the worsening of the economic situation showed that the Chechen leadership could not offer any agenda for social and economic organization. Two incursions of Chechen fighters into Dagestan, under the banner of Wahhabism, with the purpose of creating Islamic caliphate in the North Caucasus, and three hundred people killed in apartment house bombings in
4 “Former Commander of Federal Forces in Chechnya Anatoliy Kulikov: The Chechen Campaign Brought Us Great Trouble. We Should Bring the War to Its Final. Exclusive Interview to Pravda.Ru,” Pravda.Ru, 9 July 2001; available from http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/09/9693.html. 5 Degoyev, “Chechenskaia voina.” 94
Moscow and other Russian cities in August and early part of September 1999 prompted the second war. Because of these local events and their confluence with international events, the war has been transformed into a war against bandits and Islamic terrorists. Although this time the federal army adopted new tactics similar to those of NATO air strikes in Kosovo, trying to minimize the losses during the ground assault, the resistance was not easy to break. After four years of fighting, the military operation turned into a war of attrition. The issue of independence has not died. However, hampered by a lack of effective political organization, Chechen separatist leaders do not have a political program beyond the desire of independence from Russia. During the first war in Chechnya, Russia was willing to negotiate with the Chechen side. Russia welcomed the OSCE Assistance Group to Chechnya, which brokered the truce that ended the war. But during the second war, Russia and the OSCE failed to reach a conclusion on the scope of its activities, and on December 31, 2002 the OSCE monitoring mission in Chechnya ended. Russia believed the group should not try to arrange a political settlement in Chechnya. It viewed the OSCE human rights concerns as interference in Russia’s internal affairs.6 Russia rejected negotiations, saying there were no negotiating partners on the Chechen side. Instead, Russia’s leaders pursued resolution of the conflict through constitutional means. This purpose was achieved at the March 2003 referendum on the new constitution of Chechnya that cemented its status within
6 Jill Dougherty, “Russia Ends OSCE Chechnya Mission,” CNN, 31 December 2002; available from http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/12/31/russia.chechnya.osce/ 95
the Russian Federation. The OSCE representatives observed the referendum but did not issue any final statement about the results.7 Russia will stand firm on preserving territorial integrity and safeguarding sovereignty. Russia’s complex mix of nationalities combined with the federalist structure inherited from the Soviet Union posed a threat that the “Chechnya phenomenon” might reemerge in other republics. However, the disintegration similar to that in Yugoslavia is hardly possible because the titular nationalities in Russia’s autonomous republics do not constitute the majority in their own territory. In an attempt to remedy the federalist structure that was linked to ethnicity, President Putin has re-divided the country along economic and territorial lines into seven administrative districts, each under a governor general appointed by the president. Critics of Putin’s effort point out that building “a vertical of power” may entail risks for democracy because it threatens a return to the Soviet era authoritarianism.8 Chechnya tried hard to win recognition from international organizations such as the Council of Europe to acquire the most decisive criterion for its statehood. Chechnya opened an embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan and commenced the process of appointing its first ambassador.9 Chechnya sent delegations to Iceland (it was the first country to recognize the three Baltic
7 The Jamestown Foundation web site commented that they have obtained a four-page document, reflecting an “oral report” from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which is based on the visit to the area, see Chechnya Weekly, 3 April 2003, 3. 8 See Robert V. Daniels, “Democracy and Federalism in the Former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation,” in Beyond the Monolith: The Emergence of Regionalism in Post-Soviet Russia, ed. Peter J. Stavrakis et al. (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997). For a similar argument, see Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002). 9 See William R. Slomanson, Fundamental Perspectives on International Law, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson/West, 2003), 60. 96
states), to London, even to Taiwan.10 Chechen statehood has not been recognized by members of the international community. Thomas Nichols of the Naval War College in his article in Current History summarized the U.S. response to the war in Chechnya:
No Russian president would have had much choice about fighting the Chechen war; the Russian public would never accept a violent defection from the federation, and it remains in no one’s interest (including America’s) to see the creation of what would almost certainly become yet another Islamic terrorist state. While Russian conduct of the war is deplorable, the need to fight it was unavoidable.11
The U.S. response emphasized state sovereignty but not ethnic nationalism, which threatens the territorial integrity and the constitutional order of the state. The human rights instruments to deal with the state are weak, especially when the state is under terrorist attack. In his recent study of the two conflicting principles in modern politics, respect for state sovereignty and the right to self-determination of people, Thomas Musgrave of the University of Sydney wrote:
Ethnic self-determination does not fit easily into the system of international law. The theory of ethnic self-determination elevates the ethnic group to a position of supreme importance. The goal of ethnic self- determination is to create a ‘nation-state’ for the ethnic group, whose role
10 When the Democratic Progressive Party invited Chechen representatives to the international conference sponsored by the Unrepresented Nations and People’s Organization, scheduled for September 1998 in Taipei, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at first agreed. Later, due to Moscow’s threat to close Taiwan’s representative office if Chechens attend the conference, Taipei denied visas to the Chechen delegates. See Czeslaw Tubilewicz, “The Little Dragon and the Bear: Russian-Taiwanese Relations in the Post-Cold War Period,” Russian Review 61 (April 2002): 294. 11 Thomas M. Nichols, “Putin’s First Two Years: Democracy or Authoritarianism?” Current History (October 2002): 311. 97
will be to serve the ends of that group. International law, by contrast, is essentially a system of interstate relations. . . . The primacy of the state in international law has meant that a state’s population has been considered simply as an attribute of that state. The traditional primacy of the state in international law is . . . fundamentally at odds with claims of ethnic groups seeking self-determination, because such groups in effect seek to subordinate the position of the state to that of the group.12
Ethnic nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism pose challenges to liberalism in Russia. Russian scholars have suggested that these issues are impossible to resolve within the framework of democracy.13 The voice of the opposition is weak. The Chechen wars have demonstrated the limits of the concept of self-determination for an abused minority population. To this particular issue, human rights are not important to Russian leaders. Pressure must be exerted from the outside; however, so long as the American war on terrorism continues, this is doubtful. The two wars in Chechnya have eroded Russian democracy and strengthened those within the military and security forces who call for a return to the old ways. The Russian military for years has been a source of pride to Russia; it has bolstered Russia’s claim as a world power. In the period of social and political upheaval, the military can be the force that supports democratic reform, or it can undermine the hopes for democratic reform with a return to repression and authoritarian rule. The restoration of the lost Soviet empire might be the ultimate objective of today’s Russian elite. The developments in the future deserve the world’s attention.
12 Thomas D. Musgrave, Self-Determination and National Minorities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 256-257. 13 Vladimir B. Pastukhov, “Balkanskii sindrom: Istoriia bolezni,” POLIS 2 (1999): 116. 98
Bibliography
Bibliographies Abdulaeva, Kh.R., Z.Zh. Gakaev, and A.D. Iandarov. Kratkaia annotirovannaia bibliografiia chechenskogo konflikta. Moscow: RAN, 2002.
Governmental Documents Beno, Shamil. “Problemy krizisa vokrug Chechni (Tezisy).” In V poiskakh puti: Chechnya 1990-1996 (sbornik materialov obshchestvenno-politicheskogo dvizheniia “Daimokhk”), 463-466. Moscow: Rossiiskie informatsionnye tsentry, Triada, 1996. Bonner, Elena. “The Second Chechen War.” Statement for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 4 November 1999. In U.S. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Hearings on Chechnya: Implications for Russia and the Caucasus. 106th Cong., 1st Sess., 4 November 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2000. “O razgranichenii polnomochii mezhdu Soiuzom SSR i sub’ektami federatsii.” In Vedomosti S’ezda narodnykh deputatov SSSR i Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR 19 (9 May 1990): 429-433.
99
“Sergei Kovalev’s Report to the Deputies of the State Duma.” In U.S. Congress. Hearings before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on Crisis in Chechnya, 124-127. 104th Cong., 1st Sess., 19 and 27 January, 1995. Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1995. U.S. Congress. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Chechen Crisis and Its Implications for Russian Democracy: Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. 106th Cong., 1st Sess., 3 November 1999. Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2000. U.S. Congress. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Developments in the Chechen Conflict: Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.107th Cong., 2nd Sess., 9 May 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 2002.
Reports “Burying the Evidence: The Botched Investigation into a Mass Grave in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Report, May 2001. “Civilian Killings in Staropromyslovski District of Grozny.” Human Rights Watch Report, February 2000. “The ‘Dirty War’ in Chechnya: Forced Disappearances, Torture, and Summary Executions.” Human Rights Watch Report, March 2001. “February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldi.” Human Rights Watch Report, June 2000. Goldman, Stuart D., and Jim Nichol. Russian Conflict in Chechnya and Implications for the United States. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 1995. “Into Harm’s Way: Forced Return of Displaced People to Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Report, January 2003.
100
“Last Seen . . . : Continued ‘Disappearances’ in Chechnia.” Human Rights Watch Report, April 2002. Nichol, Jim. Chechnya Conflict: Recent Developments. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2000. “ ‘No Happiness Remains’: Civilian Killings, Pillage, and Rape in Alkhan- Yurt, Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Short Report, April 2000. “Partisan War in Chechnya on the Eve of WWII Commemoration.” Human Rights Watch Report, May 1995. “Russia/Chechnya: A Report to the 1996 OSCE Review Conference.” Human Rights Watch Report, November 1996. “Russia’s War in Chechnya: Victims Speak Out.” Human Rights Watch Report, January 1995. “Swept Under: Torture, Forced Disappearances, and Extrajudicial Killings during Sweep Operations in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Report, February 2002. “Three Months of War in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Report, February 1995. “War in Chechnya: New Report from the Field.” Human Rights Watch Report, January 1995. “ ‘Welcome to Hell’: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Extortion in Chechnya.” Human Rights Watch Report, October 2000.
Memoirs Abubakarov, Taimaz. Rezhim Dzhokhara Dudaeva: Pravda i vymysel: Zapiski Dudaevskogo ministra ekonomiki i finansov. Moscow: Insan, 1998. Muzaev, Timur. Chechenskaia Respublika: Organy vlasti i politicheskie sily. Moscow: Panorama, 1995.
101
Putin, Vladimir. First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self- Portrait by Russia’s President. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. Troshev, Gennadii. Moia voina: Chechenskii dnevnik okopnogo generala. Moscow: Vagrius, 2001.
Newspapers Chechnya Weekly, 2000-2006, electronic version. Fresno Bee, 1999-2003. Gazeta.Ru, 1999-2006, electronic version. Izvestiya, 1999-2005. Los Angeles Times, 1999-2003. Moskovskie novosti, 1999-2003. Moscow News, 1999-2003. New York Times, 1999-2014. Nezavisimaya gazeta, 2000-2006. Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, 2000-2003. Novaya gazeta, 1999-2003. Wall Street Journal, 1999-2015. Washington Post, 1999-2006.
Books Aidaev, Iu. A. “Chechenskii teip.” In Chechentsy: Istoria i sovremennost’. Moscow: “Mir domu tvoemu,” 1996. Akaev, Vakhit. Sufizm i vakhkhabizm na Severnom Kavkaze. Moscow: RAN, 1999. Allen, W. E. D., and Paul Muratoff. Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.
102
Baddeley, J. F. The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. London: Longmans, 1908. Belyakov, Vladimir V., and Walter J. Raymonds, eds. Constitution of the Russian Federation. Lawrenceville, VA: Brunswick, 1994. Bugai, N. F., ed. Repressirovannye narody Rossii: Chechentsy i ingushy: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii. Moscow: Kap’, 1994. Bugai, N. F., and A. M. Gonov. Kavkaz: Narody v eshelonakh (20-e – 60-e gg.). Moscow: Insan, 1998. Burton, John W. Conflict: Human Needs Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Conquest, Robert. The Nation Killers. New York: Macmillan, 1970. _____. The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960. Daniels, Robert V. “Democracy and Federalism in the Former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.” In Beyond the Monolith: The Emergence of Regionalism in Post-Soviet Russia, ed. Peter J. Stavrakis, Joan DeBardeleben, Joseph L. Black, and Jodi Koehn. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997. Dunlop, John B. Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Dzidzoev, V. D. Kavkaz kontsa XX veka: tendentsii etnopoliticheskogo razvitiia. Vladikavkaz: Vladikavkazskii nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 2000. Eudin, Xenia Joukoff, and Robert C. North. Soviet Russia and the East, 1920- 1927: A Documentary Survey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957. Evangelista, Matthew. The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002.
103
Furman, D. E., ed. Chechnia i Rossiia: Obshchestva i gosudarstva. Moscow: Polinform-Talburi, 1999. Gakaev, Dzhabrail. Ocherki politicheskoi istorii Chechni (XX vek): V dvukh chastiakh. Moscow: Izd-vo Chechenskii kul’turny tsentr, 1997. Gall, Carlotta, and Thomas de Waal. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Gammer, Moshe. The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule. London: Hurst, 2006. German, Tracey. Russia’s Chechen War. London: Routledge, 2003. Gilligan, Emma. Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Gorlov, A. G., ed. Kriminal’nyi rezhim: Chechnya, 1991-1995 gg.: Fakty, dokumenty, svidetel’stva. Moscow: Izd-vo “Kodeks,” 1995. Gurr, Ted R. Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1993. Gurr, Ted R., and Barbara Harff. Ethnic Conflict in World Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Hannum, Hurst. Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Herspring, Dale R. The Kremlin and the High Command: Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Horowitz, Donald. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Jaimoukha, Amjad. The Chechens. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Kagarlitsky, Boris. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002. 104
Kravchenko, I. N. Chechenskii krizis: Prichiny, kharakter, posledstviia: 90-e gody XX v. Vladikavkaz: Izd-vo SOGU, 2004. Kravchenko, N. A., ed. Pravovye aspekty chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara. Moscow: Memorial, 1995. Lapidus, Gail W., and Edward W. Walker. “Nationalism, Regionalism, and Federalism: Center-Periphery Relations in Post-Communist Russia.” In The New Russia: Troubled Transformation, ed. Gail W. Lapidus. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Lieven, Anatol. Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Malashenko, Aleksei. Islamskie orientiry Severnogo Kavkaza. Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001. Mikheyev, Dmitry. Russia Transformed. Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996. Musgrave, Thomas D. Self-Determination and National Minorities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Nekrich, A. M. The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978. Newman, Frank, and David Weissbrodt. Selected International Human Rights Instruments and Bibliography for Research on International Human Rights Law. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co., 1996. Nukhaev, Khozh-Akhmed. Vedeno ili Vashington? Moscow: “Arktogeia- tsentr,” 2001. Politkovskaya, Anna. A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya. Translated by John Crowfoot with an introduction by Thomas de Waal. London: Harvill, 2001. Remington, Thomas F. Politics in Russia. New York: Longman, 1999.
105
Shevtsova, Lilia. Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999. _____. Putin’s Russia. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003. Sirén, Pontus. “The Battle for Grozny: The Russian Invasion of Chechnia, December 1994–December 1996.” In Russia and Chechnya: The Permanent Crisis, ed. Ben Fowkes. London: Macmillan Press, 1998. Slomanson, William R. Fundamental Perspectives on International Law, 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/West, 2003. Sokolovskii, S. V. Prava men’shinstv: Antropologicheskie, sotsiologicheskie i mezhdunarodno-pravovye aspekty. Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1997. Sotsial’nye konflikty: Ekspertiza, prognozirovanie, tekhnologii razresheniia. Vyp. 3: Mezhnatsional’nye konflikty v posttotalitarnom obshchestve. Chast’ 2: Panorama etnicheskikh napriazhenii i protivostoianii. Moscow: RAN, 1993. Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Stepanov, E. I., ed. Konflikty v sovremennoi Rossii: Problemy analiza i regulirovaniia. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999. Stürmer, Michael. Putin and the Rise of Russia. New York: Pegasus Books, 2009. Tishkov, V. A. “Chechenskii krizis: Sotsial’no-kul’turnyi analiz.” In Ocherki teorii i politiki etnichnosti v Rossii. Moscow: RAN, Institut etnologii i antropologii, 1997. _____. Obshchestvo v vooruzhennom konflikte: Etnografiia chechenskoi voiny. Moscow: Nauka, 2001.
106
Tishkov, V. A., E. L. Beliaeva, and G. V. Marchenko. Chechenskii krizis: Analiticheskoe obozrenie. General’nyi proekt “Rossiia v tret’em tysiacheletii.” Vyp. 8, Moscow: Tsentr kompleksnykh sotsial’nykh issledovanii i marketinga, 1995. Yemelianova, G. M. Russia and Islam: A Historical Survey. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Zaurbekova, G. V. Separatizm v Chechne. Moscow: RAN, Institut etnologii i antropologii, 2000. Zelkina, Anna. In Quest of God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus. London: Hurst, 2000.
Working Papers Esty, Daniel C., Jack A. Goldstone, Ted R. Gurr, Pamela T. Surko, and Alan N. Unger. Working Papers: State Failure Task Force Report. McLean, VA: Science Applications International Corporation, 30 November 1995. Sandole, D. Conflict Resolution in the Post-Cold War Era: Dealing with Ethnic Violence in the New Europe. Working Paper no. 6. Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, Fairfax, 1992.
Monographs Arutiunov, Sergei. “Ethnicity and Conflict in the Caucasus,” In Ethnic Conflict and Russian Intervention in the Caucasus, ed. Fred Wehling. Policy Paper no. 16. La Jolla, CA: Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California, San Diego, August 1995. Baev, Pavel. Russia’s Policies in the Caucasus. Former Soviet South Project Briefing Paper. London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1997. Forsythe, Rosemarie. The Politics of Oil in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Adelphi Paper 300. London: Oxford University Press, 1996.
107
Starovoitova, Galina. National Self-Determination: Approaches and Case Studies. Occasional Paper no. 27. Providence, RI: Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, 1997. Walker, Edward W. No Peace, No War in the Caucasus: Secessionist Conflicts in Chechnya, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Cambridge, MA: Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1998.
Journal Articles Bammate, Haidar. “The Caucasus and the Russian Revolution (from a Political Viewpoint).” Central Asian Survey 10, no. 4 (1991): 1-29. Dunlop, John B. “How Many Soldiers and Civilians Died during the Russo- Chechen War of 1994-1996?” Central Asian Survey 19, no. 3-4 (2000): 329-339. Goldgeier, James, and Michael McFaul. “George W. Bush and Russia.” Current History (October 2002): 313-324. Holoboff, Elaine. “Oil and the Burning of Grozny.” Jane’s Intelligence Review 7, no. 6 (1995): 253-257. Hopmann, P. Terrence. “Building Security in Post-Cold War Eurasia.” Peaceworks no. 31 (September 1999): 31-33. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22-49. Jabagi, Vassan-Giray. “Revolution and Civil War in the North Caucasus – End of the 19th – Beginning of the 20th Century.” Central Asian Survey 10, no. 1-2 (1991): 119-132. Malashenko, Aleksei V. “Islam v Rossii.” Svobodnaia mysl'-XXI 10 (1999): 44- 50.
108
Nichols, Thomas M. “Putin’s First Two Years: Democracy or Authoritarianism?” Current History (October 2002): 307-312. Pastukhov, Vladimir. “Balkanskii sindrom: Istoriia bolezni.” POLIS 2 (1999): 114-121. Rice, Condoleezza. “Promoting the National Interest.” Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (January/February 2000): 45-62. Treisman, Daniel. “Russia Renewed?” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 6 (November/December 2002): 58-72. Tubilewicz, Czeslaw. “The Little Dragon and the Bear: Russian-Taiwanese Relations in the Post-Cold War Period.” Russian Review 61 (April 2002): 276-297. Walker, Edward W. “Constitutional Obstacles to Peace in Chechnya.” East European Constitutional Review 6, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 55-60.
Magazine Articles Annan, Kofi. “Two Concepts of Sovereignty.” The Economist, 18 September 1999, 49-50.
Television Programs
PBS. News Hour with Jim Lehrer. 8 December 1999. Television program.
Electronic Documents Barabanov, Ilya. “Kadyrov poshel v goru.” Gazeta.ru, 28 February 2006. Available from http://www.gazeta.ru/2006/02/28/oa_190416.shtml “Chechen President Appeals for NATO Help.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline 3, no. 197, Part I, 8 October 1999. Available from http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/news/omri/1999/10/001008I.html.
109
“Chechen Warlord Threatens Islamic Suicide Attacks Against Russia.” Agence France Press, 20 September 1999. Available from http://asia.yahoo.com.headlines/200900/ news/937841880- 90920153852.newsasia.html. “Chechnya Votes on Constitution.” United Press International, 23 March 2003. Available from http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20030323- 094712-6639r. Cohen, Ariel. “The New ‘Great Game’: Oil Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.” Backgrounder no. 1065. The Heritage Foundation, 25 January 1996. Available from http://www.heritage.org/heritage/library/categories/forpol/bg1065.html. Constitution of the Russian Federation as Approved by RF President Boris Yeltsin and Submitted to National Referendum in December 1993. Available from http://friend-partners.org/oldfriends/constitution/ russia- constitution.html. Coppieters, Bruno. Federalizm i konflikt na Kavkaze. Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002. Available from http://pubs.carnegie.ru/workpapers/2002/wp0202.pdf. Degoyev, Vladimir. “Chechenskaia voina: Retsidiv ili fenomen?” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 17 September 1999. Available from http://www.ng.ru/ideas/1999-09-17/war.html. Dougherty, Jill. “Russia Ends OSCE Chechnya Mission.” CNN, 31 December 2002. Available from http://edition.cnn.com/ 2002/WORLD/europe/12/31/russia.chechnya.osce/ Dunlop, John B. “The Second Russo-Chechen War Two Years On.” Presentation at U.S. and World Affairs Seminar. Hoover Institution, 17 October 2001. Available from http://www.peaceinchechnya.org/reports/paper_dunlop.htm. 110
“Explosive politics.” The Economist, 17 September 1999. Available from http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/eu5156.html. “Former Commander of Federal Forces in Chechnya Anatoliy Kulikov: The Chechen Campaign Brought Us Great Trouble. We Should Bring the War to Its Final. Exclusive Interview to Pravda.Ru.” Pravda.Ru, 9 July 2001. Available from http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/ 09/9693.html. Foxall, Andrew. “Chechnya, Russia’s Forgotten War.” World Affairs Journal Online Features, 8 October 2014. Available from http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/chechnya-russia-forgotten-war Furman, Dmitrii. “S Chechnei ne spravitsia bez vrania?” Moskovskie novosti, 29 January - 4 February 2003. Available from http://www.mn.ru/issue.php?2003-2-23. Gordon, Michael R. “Explosion in Moscow Injures 30, Provokes Fears of Terrorism.” New York Times on the Web, 1 September 1999. Available from http://www.nytimes.com/ yr/mo/day/news/world/russia- dagestan.html. Gordon, Michael R. “Yeltsin and West Clash at Summit over Chechen War.” New York Times on the Web, 19 November 1999. Available from http://nytimes.com/libraryworld/europe/111999summit-rdp.html. Gornostaev, Dmitrii. “Vollebek pozhalovalsia Olbrait na Rossiiu: MID RF obespokoen zaiavleniem Soveta NATO po Severnomu Kavkazu.” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 4 December 1999. Available from http://www.ng.ru/world/1999-12-04/1_vollebek.html. Istanbul Summit Declaration 1999. 19 November 1999. Available from http://www.osce.org/e/docs/summit/istadec199e.htm. “Kontseptsiia natsional’noi bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii.” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 26 November 1999. Available from http://nvo.ng.ru/concepts/1999-11-26/1_cons1.html. 111
Kramer, Andrew E., and Neil MacFarquhar. “Fierce Attack by Islamist Militants in Chechen Capital Kills at Least 20.” New York Times, 4 December 2014. Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/world/europe/grozny-chechnya- attack.html Lambroschini, Sophie. “Russia: Public Opinion Edges Toward Peace in Chechnya.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 8 December 1999. Available from http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1999/12/ F.RU.991208142723.html. “Lebed-Maskhadov Statement and Principles.” CSCE Digest 19, no. 9 (September 1996): 5-6. Available from http://www.csce.gov/pdf/sept96d/pdf. Malashenko, Aleksei, and Dmitrii Trenin. Vremia iuga: Rossiia v Chechne, Chechnya v Rossii [book on-line]. Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002. Electronic version of the book in Russian with summary in English is available from http://pubs.carnegie.ru/books/2002/09am-dt. Mirovalev, Mansur. “Chechnya, Russia and 20 years of Conflict: How the Tiny Region Shaped Post-Soviet Russia on the 20th Anniversary of the Start of First Chechnya War.” Al Jazeera, 11 December 2014. Available from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/12/chechnya-russia-20- years-conflict-2014121161310580523.html Orekhin, Petr. “Chechnya stanet ofshorom.” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 22 April 2003. Available from http://ng.ru/ politics/2003-04-22/2_chechnia.html. Pain, Emil A., and Arkadii A. Popov. “Chechnya.” In U.S. and Russian Policymaking with Respect to the Use of Force, eds. Jeremy R. Azrael and Emil A. Pain. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996. Available from http://www.rand.org/publications/CF/CF129/ 112
“Putin Announces Chechnya Referendum in Constitution Day Speech.” Johnson’s Russia List, December 13, 2002. Available from http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6598-4.cfm. Riskin, Andrei. “Armiia podsela na neftianuiu iglu.” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 July 2003. Available from http://ng.ru/economics/2003-07- 01/1_army.html. “Russia’s Ethnic Republics.” Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin, 1994. Available from http://www.lib.utexas.edu//maps/commonwealth/russia_ethnic94.jpg Solanskaya, Ksenia. “Putin podaril chechentsam 12 blokpostov.” Gazeta.Ru, 26 February 2003. Available from http://www.gazeta.ru/2003/02/26/putinpodaril.shtml. “Soobshchenie Press-Sluzhby Prezidenta Possiiskoi Federatsii.” ITAR-TASS, 19 October 1999. Available from http://www.maindir.gov.ru/ASPScripts/PressDocs.asp?MONTH=10&YE AR=1999&DAY=19&NUM=6. Statement “On the attitude towards holding a referendum on Constitution in Chechnya and the necessity to convoke a peace conference.” Available from Yabloko’s web site at www.eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/2003/documents/statement_170303.html. “Tekst otkrytogo pis’ma Maskhadova.” Gareta.Ru, 25 June 2002. Available from http://gazeta.ru/print/2002/06/25/tekstotkryto.shtml. Uncopyrighted maps, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency. Perry- Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin. Available from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/ U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Information Administration. Russia Country Analysis Brief, November 2002. Available from http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/russia.html. 113
Vachagaev, Mairbek. “The Chechen Resistance: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” Paper presented at the North Caucasus Conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 September 2006. Available from http://www.jamestown.org/nccp-91406.php VTsIOM, 21-24 January 2000. Available from http://www.yabloko.ru/News/Votes/VTSIOM/ex_4_20009.html. VTsIOM, 28-31 January 2000. Available from http://www.yabloko.ru/News/Votes/VTSIOM/ex_57.html. “Yeltsin Backs Federal Strategy in Northern Caucasus.” ITAR-TASS, 11 October 1999. Available from Comtex Scientific Corp. electronic collection, RN A56185747.
114
Chronology
Background
1990
November 25 The Chechen National Congress declares independence.
November 26 The Supreme Soviet of the Chechen-Ingush Republic declares state sovereignty and drops the word “autonomous” in the republic’s name.
1991
October 27 Following the overthrow of local Communist ruler Doku Zavgaev, former Soviet air force general Dzhokhar Dudaev, an ethnic Chechen, wins regional presidential poll.
November 1 Dzhokhar Dudaev, elected president, declares independence from Russia. Russia rejects any talk of independence but takes no action against Dudaev.
November 2 The Chechen parliament passes a resolution ratifying Dudaev’s decree; however, the Fifth Congress of RSFSR Deputies, meeting in Moscow under Khasbulatov’s chairmanship, decrees that the elections in Chechnya have been unlawful.
November 7 Yeltsin issues a presidential decree “On the Introduction of Emergency Rule into the Chechen-Ingush Republic” and sends troops to the Chechen capital Grozny. They pull out after three days.
November 9 Dudayev takes an oath as the Chechen president.
1992
March 12 Constitution of the Chechen Republic is adopted.
March 12-14 At a meeting between representatives of the Russian Supreme Soviet and the Chechen parliament protocols are signed that provide for the recognition of the political independence of Chechnya.
June 6 President Dudaev demands that Russian troops withdraw from Chechnya within 24 hours, leaving their military equipment behind.
115
1993
October 3 Forces loyal to Yeltsin storm the parliament.
December 12 A new Russian Constitution is adopted.
First Chechen War
1994
November 26 A force of anti-Dudaev volunteers assembled by Russia’s Federal Counter- Intelligence Service (FSK), under the supervision of Sergei Stepashin, march on Grozny, but they are routed out by Chechen troops loyal to Dudaev.
November 29 Security Council of the Russian Federation approves a plan to use the Russian army against the rebellious republic, if the conditions of an ultimatum to lay down arms are not met within forty-eight hours.
December 1 Yeltsin issues a decree demanding that the Chechen forces lay down their weapons by December 15.
December 2 Russian military begins air strikes against targets on the Chechen territory.
December 11 Russian troops enter Chechnya to “restore constitutional order.”
December 12 Chechen representatives meet Russian negotiators, but the negotiations are broken after two days.
December 17 After the deadline to lay down arms passes, the bombardment of Grozny intensifies.
December 21 The bombardment of Grozny becomes massive as troops aim at encircling the city.
December 22 Defense Minister Grachev dismisses officers who opposed the Chechen operation. Deputy Commander of Ground Forces Colonel General Eduard Vorobyov tenders his resignation.
December 27 The military defies Yeltsin’s publicly announced order to holt aerial bombing of Grozny.
December 31 Russian troops, led by tanks and armored personnel carriers, begin the second assault on Grozny. Russian forces suffer heavy casualties. They fail to seize the center of the city and the presidential palace.
1995
January 7 Russian troops move into central Grozny after intense artillery and bombardments reduce the Chechen capital to ruins.
January 10 The Russian government announces a forty-eight-hour unilateral cease-fire but reiterates earlier demands that Dudaev’s forces lay down their arms prior to 116
withdrawal of Russian troops.
January 17 Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin “unofficially” meets with Dudaev emissaries. He reiterates that Dudaev’s forces must lay down arms.
January 19 Russian forces capture the presidential palace in Grozny, but fighting continues inside and outside of the capital.
January 20 Yeltsin stresses that Russia would not negotiate with Dudaev’s government.
February 15 Separatists abandon Grozny, reduced to ruins by artillery and rocket attacks over a month of fighting.
March 6 Russian military leaders claim full control of Grozny achieved.
March 30 Russian troops capture Gudermes, the second largest city in Chechnya.
April 11 The OSCE Assistance Group to Chechnya is established.
April 26 Yeltsin signs a decree “On Additional Measures for Normalization of the Situation in the Chechen Republic” and declares moratorium on the use of military force.
May 1 Chechen rebel fighters break back into Grozny.
May 31 Russian troops push the Chechen fighters south to mountain gorges near Shatoi and Vedeno.
June 3 Russian troops seize Vedeno, an ancient capital of Chechnya. Shamil Basaev’s Abkhaz battalion is routed. During the attack, a bomb hits Basaev’s home, and 11 members of his family, his wife and children are killed.
June 15 About one hundred Basayev-led Chechen fighters conduct a raid into Russian town of Budennovsk and seize a local hospital, taking more than one thousand hostages.
June 15-17 Yeltsin, while attending a meeting of the G-7 Group in Halifax, Canada, approves military operation by elite Russian troops to free the hostages. The attempt fails, and over one hundred people die.
June 18 Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin negotiates with the terrorists by telephone and reaches agreement for the release of the hostages in exchange for giving Basaev safe passage back to Chechnya.
June 19 Gunmen leave Budennovsk in a convoy of buses with some of the hostages and return to Chechnya in triumph.
June 29 At a meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation devoted to the events in Budennovsk, Yeltsin replaces the director of the FSK Sergei Stepashin and Interior Minister, Viktor Yerin.
June 30 Russian and Chechen delegations meet in Grozny and begin negotiations
117
regarding the issues related to the conclusion of the war and the status of Chechnya.
July 31 During a secret meeting in the Kremlin, a military accord calling for a cease-fire is negotiated and signed.
December 14 Rebels take Gudermes, Chechnya’s second city, but are forced out about a week later by Russian troops, with hundreds reported killed.
1996
January 9 Approximately three hundred Chechen fighters led by Salman Raduev, Dudaev’s son-in-law, attack a military airfield, seize three thousand hostages in a local hospital in Kizliar, Dagestan, then move to the village of Pervomaiskoe just outside Chechnya. Russian forces flatten the village with Grad missiles, but most rebels escape. Over one hundred people injured and seventy-eight killed in the attack on Kizliar.
February 15 Yeltsin, announcing his candidacy for a second term, says the Chechnya campaign was “maybe one of our mistakes” but rules out withdrawal of Russian forces.
March 6 Rebels attack Grozny, holding some areas for several days. The army begins air and artillery assaults on suspected rebel villages.
March 31 Yeltsin in a televised speech, on the eve of the elections, announces a plan for a peace settlement.
April 21 Dudaev is killed in a rocket attack. Rebel vice-president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev takes over.
April 25 Yandarbiev pledges at a news conference to avenge Dudaev vows to press on with independence drive.
May 27 In Moscow, Yeltsin and Yandarbiev agree to conclude an agreement ending military actions in Chechnya.
May 28 Yeltsin visits Russian troops in Grozny and addresses them saying, “The war is over. The victory is yours. You have defeated a rebellious Dudaev’s regime.”
June 18 Yeltsin appoints General Aleksandr Lebed as National Security Advisor and dismisses Minister of Defense, General Pavel Grachev.
July 3 Yeltsin re-elected for a second term as Russian president.
August 6 Some fifteen hundred Chechen rebels, led by Aslan Maskhadov, seize Grozny, triggering a heavy fighting. A Russian counter-offensive fails.
August 10 Yeltsin appoints General Aleksandr Lebed his representative in Chechnya.
August 12 Lebed flies to Chechnya and agrees with rebel chief of staff Aslan Maskhadov to arrange cease-fire.
118
August 14 Yeltsin dissolves the State Commission on Chechnya, headed by Chernomyrdin, and gives Lebed full powers to resolve the conflict.
August 15 Lebed meets Yandarbiev in Chechnya. The two say they would seek an end to military confrontation.
August 19 Russian military commander in Chechnya General Konstantin Pulikovsky gives civilians forty-eight hours to leave Grozny and threatens all-out bombardment to drive out rebels. Yeltsin orders Lebed to restore Russian control over Grozny before the end of the month.
August 20 The Security Council says it doubts the authenticity of Yeltsin’s orders in Chechnya. Aides say the president is taking a short break in northwest Russia.
August 31 General Lebed and chief of the Chechen general staff Aslan Maskhadov, in the presence of Tim Guldimann, head of the OSCE mission in Chechnya, conduct negotiations in a village of Khasavyurt, Dagestan. Lebed and Maskhadov sign a “Joint Statement” and “Principles Governing Mutual Relations Between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic.” The truce provides for a Russian pullout, deferring the issue of Chechen sovereignty for five years until December 2001.
September Russia starts withdrawal of its troops from Chechnya.
October Aslan Maskhadov is named prime minister of an interim government. His platform includes independence and some elements of Islamic sharia law.
November 5 A Chechen delegation, headed by Maskhadov, meets with Chernomyrdin in Moscow. The two sign an agreement on troops withdrawal.
December 14 Rebels under the command of Salman Raduev kidnap twenty-two Russian Interior Ministry troops.
December 16 Six foreign Red Cross workers are murdered in Chechnya, casting a shadow over the election campaign.
1997
January 27 Last Russian troops leave. Thirteen candidates run for president, but Aslan Maskhadov is elected with almost 65 percent of the vote.
January Unidentified kidnappers seize two Russian journalists in Chechnya, first in a long series of abductions for ransom which fuel tensions with Moscow.
March Russia’s parliament approves amnesty for most Chechen rebel fighters.
May 12 Yeltsin and Maskhadov sign peace accord opening way for the resolution of the economic issues between them. Chechnya’s final status still unresolved. Moscow insists that Chechnya must stay part of Russia.
July 3 Moscow signs agreement with Azerbaijan for the transit of oil pipeline through
119
Chechnya. The operator of the transit is the British Petroleum. Two British teachers John James and Camilla Carr kidnapped in Chechnya. The intent of kidnapping is to wreck the oil transport deal and thwart Chechnya’s integration into the oil market. Maskhadov orders his loyalists to storm the headquarters of warlord Arbi Baraev in Urus-Martan, where the captives are being held. The operation fails.
December 21 Approximately forty to sixty armed Chechen fighters conduct a night raid on a military camp in Buinaksk, Dagestan.
1998
March President of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov visits London. The British Petroleum declares that investment and transit of oil are contingent upon the release of the two British citizens. Maskhadov’s loyalists attempt to rescue the hostages from Arbi Baraev’s captivity.
May 1 Opponents of Maskhadov kidnap Valentin Vlasov, Yeltsin’s envoy to Chechnya.
July 13 Arbi Baraev-led Wahhabis clash with loyal to the Chechen president national guards in Gudermes. Maskhadov disbands the “Islamic regiment,” strips Baraev of military rank and honors.
July 23 Ten days later, Maskhadov escapes an assassination attempt organized by Arbi Baraev.
August Dagestan’s top Muslim cleric, his brother and a driver killed in a bomb attack.
September Chechen warlords demand the resignation of President Maskhadov, saying he is too conciliatory toward Moscow. Moscow criticizes Maskhadov for failing to combat organized criminal gangs.
September 20 The British couple John James and Camilla Carr released after fourteen months in captivity.
October Yandarbiyev, Udugov, and Basaev in an attempt to frustrate Maskhadov’s plans for cooperation with London, kidnap four employees (three British citizens and one New Zealander) of the British Telecom, which was building a cellular phone communication system. Chechens demand $4 million in ransom, but in two months during the abortive operation to free the hostages, Chechens slit their throats.
November 13 Presidential envoy to Chechnya Valentin Vlasov released after six months in captivity.
December 24 Chechnya’s Supreme Sharia court calls on President Maskhadov to dissolve the Chechen parliament because its legislative activities contradict Islamic law.
120
Second Chechen War
1999
February In an attempt to prevent a split with opposition, Maskhadov suspends the Chechen parliament and orders the introduction of Sharia law throughout Chechnya. The rebel field commanders form an alternative governing body – Shura and elect Basaev as its head.
March 5 General Gennadii Shpigun of the Russian Interior Ministry is abducted in Grozny.
March 9 Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin threatens that Russia would intervene and destroy the “criminal formations’ bases.”
March More than fifty die in a bomb blast in Vladikavkaz, capital of North Ossetia, which borders Chechnya.
April 27 Interior Minister Stepashin declares border with Chechnya closed “for gangsters, not for civilians.”
April The Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan advocates “the creation of an independent Islamic state.”
May 27 A fighting breaks out on the Dagestan-Chechen border. Russia sends helicopters to attack rebels.
July 25 Russian troops clash with Chechen fighters near Chechnya’s border with Dagestan.
July 27 Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov appoints Ruslan Gelaev first deputy premier with responsibility to reduce kidnapping, theft of oil, and other crimes.
August 7 Rebel fighters make incursions into Dagestan and proclaim an independent Islamic republic. The new state comprised eleven villages. Prime Minister Stepashin arrives in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, to supervise Russian counter-offensive.
August 9 Vladimir Putin, Head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) is nominated Prime Minister by Yeltsin. The Duma confirms the appointment in the first vote.
August 13 Moscow warns that it will strike Islamic bases “wherever they are, including Chechnya.”
August 15 Chechen President Maskhadov declares a state of emergency.
August 29 An attack is launched against the Dagestani villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi that had been run for a year by the Wahhabis.
August 31 The powerful blast rocks Moscow’s western-style Manezh shopping center, killing one person and wounding forty.
121
September 4 Federal planes bomb Chechen villages next to the Dagestan border. An explosion at army officers’ apartment building in Buinaksk, Dagestan, kills sixty-four people, including twenty-three children.
September 8 An explosion wrecks a nine-story apartment building in southeast Moscow. At least 153 people are injured and 93 people die under the rubble.
September 12 Federal forces capture two Islamic villages Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi in northern Dagestan.
September 13 Another bomb attack in Moscow claims 116 lives. Yeltsin announces a nationwide “anti-terrorist campaign.”
September 16 Another bomb shears off the front of a nine-story apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk, in Rostov region, close to the North Caucasus. At least 17 people are killed and 184 wounded.
September 17 After a closed-door meeting of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, Prime Minister Putin is given carte blanche for the “government’s toughest measures.”
September 18 Moscow dispatches fresh armor and troops to the North Caucasus and bombs guerrilla positions inside Chechnya along the border with Dagestan.
September 20 More than 15,000 are expelled from Moscow and 69,200 made to re-register in the “Operation Foreigner.”
September 20 “Unity” Party, backing Putin, formed to contest parliamentary elections in two months’ time.
September 23 The Russian air force launches bombing raids on the Chechen capital Grozny for the first time since the end of the Chechen war in August 1996.
September 29 Russian Prime Minister Putin expresses willingness to negotiate with the Chechen leader on condition that Maskhadov condemn terrorism, rid Chechen territory of armed bands, and be willing to extradite “criminals” to Moscow.
October 1 The ground offensive starts with troops moving from the neighboring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia and from Stavropol region to seize the northern part of Chechnya. Prime Minister Putin announces that he no longer recognizes the legitimacy of Maskhadov’s government.
October 5 Russian Security Council adopts a “Concept of National Security of the Russian Federation.” Moscow announces that the northern third of Chechnya is under Russian control. Maskhadov imposes martial law in Chechnya.
October 6 Chechen forces withdraw from the north of the republic.
October 7 The European Court condemns Russian actions in Chechnya and the refusal of Prime Minister Putin to set up negotiations with Aslan Maskhadov. Moscow rejects the offer of mediation from the European Union, saying that Chechnya is an internal Russian matter, but welcomes foreign aid for Chechen refugees.
122
October 8 President of Chechnya Maskhadov asks George Robertson, General Secretary of NATO, to be a mediator for the Russian-Chechen negotiations.
October 19 President Yeltsin sends a message to President Clinton explaining Russia’s approaches to fighting terrorism.
October 29 Federal forces bomb refugee column fleeing toward Ingushetia. Maskhadov appeals to Pope John Paul II on behalf of Chechnya’s civilian population.
November 1 Russian Prime Minister Putin rules out a compromise with Chechen “terrorists.”
November 18 The OSCE Summit in Istanbul demands that Russia seek a political solution to the conflict.
November 19 The Istanbul Summit Declaration signed by the participating states of the OSCE acknowledges the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.
December 3 Prime Minister Putin’s article “Why are we fighting in Chechnya” is published in the Times.
December 6 Civilians in Grozny are given an ultimatum, promising a corridor for the safe passage for civilians who wish to evacuate and for rebels who want to surrender.
December 10 The European Union threatens Moscow with sanctions. Moscow repeats its ultimatum.
December 14 Federal military sources report the first skirmishes between Russian troops and Chechen fighters in Grozny. A senior Russian general, Valery Manilov, says Grozny will be captured by the end of February.
December 17 Russian forces strike into the rebel-held mountains in southern Chechnya.
December 19 During the elections to the State Duma, the new “Unity” Party, backing Putin, gets almost as many votes as the Communists.
December 21 Federal troops penetrate several areas of Grozny and announce the capture of the city’s airports.
December 26 Russian forces meet stiff resistance but reach Minutka Square in the center of Grozny.
December 27 Maskhadov declares that Grozny will be defended to the last.
December 29 Generals Gennadii Troshev, Viktor Kazantsev, and Vladimir Shamanov receive awards “Hero of Russia.”
December 31 President Yeltsin resigns and Prime Minister Putin takes over as acting president.
123
2000
January 7 Moscow announces the suspension of operations in Grozny. General Shamanov is replaced by Major General Aleksei Verbitsky as a new commander of forces in Chechnya.
January 10 Moscow revokes the truce in response to Chechen attacks in different localities.
January 12 A Russian commander orders the detention of all Chechen males between ages ten and sixty.
January 16 Federal troops launch a new offensive to capture Grozny.
January 21 General Mikhail Malofeyev, deputy commander of the forces spearheading the Russian offensive in Chechnya, is killed while visiting troops in Grozny.
January 23 Acting President Putin dismisses General Viacheslav Ovchnnikov, the third commander to lose his job since January 1, for doing a poor job of stopping Chechen rebels from infiltrating Russian-occupied towns.
January 27 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopts a resolution calling on Moscow immediately to holt military operations in Chechnya and to open a political dialogue with the Chechens.
February 1 Chechen fighters withdraw from the capital.
February 6 Putin announces on television that “the operation to liberate Grozny is over.” Fighting continues in mountainous south of the country where the Chechen fighters have regrouped.
March 5 Putin visits Grozny and announces there will be a reduction of a permanent garrison stationed in the republic.
March 26 In the Russian presidential election, Putin wins the first round, taking 52.9 percent of the vote.
April 6 PACE suspends voting rights of the Russian delegation and demands that the Council of Ministers begin procedure to expel Russia.
April 10 In an interview with the Russian daily newspaper, Chechen President Maskhadov declares himself ready to enter a dialogue without prior conditions.
April 13 Kremlin indicates it is ready to enter discussions with Chechen representatives.
May 7 Putin inaugurated as Russian president.
May 13 Putin signs Decree No. 849 and appoints seven presidential plenipotentiaries to govern in the Russian regions. General Viktor Kazantsev is put in charge of the Southern administrative region that includes Chechnya.
June 8 Putin signs an order to establish an interim civilian administration in Chechnya, with Mufti of Chechnya Akhmad Kadyrov as its head.
124
June 25 Gennadii Troshev, a military commander for the North Caucasus Military District, claims that the war is over.
July 2-3 Five suicide-bombing attacks, total of forty-two soldiers die at Argun, Gudermes, Urus-Martan and two other localities.
July 9 Bombs in Vladikavkaz and Rostov kill eight.
August 8 Bomb in central Moscow underpass kills 12, injuries 97.
August 20 In the by-election for Duma seat in Chechnya, retired Interior Ministry general Aslanbek Aslakhanov beats eleven other candidates and gets 31 percent of the vote.
December 3 Federal aviation bombed suspected concentrations of Chechen armed groups in Shali district and Vedeno Gorge.
2001
January 22 Putin announces cuts in armed presence in Chechnya and transfers the anti- terrorist operation to the FSB.
January 25 PACE restores voting rights of the Russian delegation, claiming a change in heart by the federal administration.
April The Chechen government relocates from Gudermes, the second largest city, to the capital city of Grozny.
June 19-24 As a result of a special operation by Internal Ministry and FSB troops, Arbi Baraev’s group is liquidated. His band was responsible for kidnappings of journalists, presidential envoy in Chechnya Vlasov, and beheading of four engineers of the British Telecom.
June The OSCE office in Chechnya reopens.
June 16 First meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President George Bush in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
July 1 A vehicle carrying Internal Ministry troops explodes on a mine near Sernovodsk, triggering a first zachistka.
July 2 A military vehicle explodes on a mine near Assinovskaia, triggering a second zachistka.
July 3-4 Zachistki in Sernovodsk and Assinovskaia, in a region adjacent to Ingushetia, spark a furor. At a meeting of the government in Chechnya, General Kazantsev, Putin’s plenipotentiary in Southern federal district, apologizes for the actions of the military.
August 15 Military helicopter Mi-24 crashes near the village of Tsa-Vedeno. The Chechen rebel command says it shot down the helicopter with a Russian-made ground-to-
125
air Strela missile. The Russian side denies the report and suggests that only a Stinger could be used to hit the helicopter.
August 28 The Security Council of the Russian Federation discusses the problem of the return of Chechen refugees from Ingushetia.
August 29 A Russian military commandant’s vehicle and an armored personnel carrier transporting Interior Ministry troops are ambushed in the Chechen village of Oktiabr’skoe, killing twelve people.
August 31 On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Khasavyurt peace agreement between Russia and Chechnya, the head of the Chechen Civil Administration Akhmad Kadyrov says that a Chechen Interior Ministry should be established to combat the rebels.
September 24 Putin goes on national television and gives the Chechen rebels seventy-two hours to turn in their weapons.
October 24 Kazantsev, Putin’s representative in the Southern administrative region that includes Chechnya, says Akhmed Zakaev, representative of the rebel leader Maskhadov, has contacted him about holding discussions of Putin’s proposal to disarm.
November 13 President Putin’s first visit to the United States. Bush and Putin meet in Crawford, Texas.
November 18 Kazantsev, President Putin’s envoy for Chechnya and Zakaev, a representative of Chechnya’s rebel president Maskhadov, hold the first face-to-face talks on ending hostilities since the second Chechen war broke out. They meet for two hours behind the closed doors at the Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
November 26 A Moscow court orders the dissolution of TV-6, the country’s last independent television station that provided the most critical reporting about President Putin and the Chechen war.
November 28 During the night, two airplanes drop five bombs in Pankisi Gorge on the Russian–Georgian border, targeting hideouts of the Chechen fighters.
December 7 Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov joins the NATO conference in Brussels, Belgium, making it “NATO at 20.”
December 10 US Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Moscow’s Pushkin Square to commemorate victims of an August 2000 bombing.
December 25 The trial of Salman Raduev ends in Makhachkala. The rebel fighter is sentenced to life in prison for terrorism and murder.
2002
January Federal troops beat, robbed, and tortured civilians in the Chechen village of Tsotsin-Yurt over the four-day New Year’s holiday, killing at least three
126
villagers, according to a report by the Memorial. The report says that six other villagers arrested by the troops were missing. Government officials say civilians were not harmed.
January 23 PACE adopts a resolution on Chechnya.
January 27 Fourteen passengers and crewmembers aboard a military helicopter Mi-8 are killed when their helicopter explodes in midair and crashes in Chechnya. Among the victims are two generals, three senior officers, and their security teams. The Chechen rebel command says it shot down the helicopter with a Russian-made ground-to-air Igla missile, but the official cause of the crash has not been determined.
February 13 Akhmad Kadyrov submits his version of the republic’s constitution to the consultative council of Chechnya.
February 27 The Security Council of the Russian Federation discusses the military, socio- economic, political situation in Chechnya, and the return of refugees.
March The military new operational guidelines Order No. 80 are imposed in an effort to raise accountability among Russian troops. Service personnel are required to identify themselves when entering a house, make sure the registration number on their vehicles is visible, keep public records of detained persons, and inform their families about the place of detention.
March 8 Zakayev, representative of the Chechen rebel leader Maskhadov, announces that he had a meeting with Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Tribunal on former Yugoslavia, in the Hague to discuss the establishment of an international tribunal that would prosecute Russia’s atrocities in Chechnya.
March 18 About two hundred US military personnel are dispatched to train the Georgian special operations troops to fight Chechen guerrillas hiding in the Pankisi Gorge, a territory in northeast Georgia.
April Aleksander Lebed, former Yeltsin’s security council secretary, later governor of the Krasnoiarsk region, dies in a helicopter crash.
May 9 At least 34 people are killed and 130 injured when a bomb explodes in the town of Kaspiisk, Dagestan, during a parade commemorating the end of Word War II. Although no one claims the responsibility for the attack, President Putin says Chechen rebels are to blame.
May 17 Putin issued a decree giving wider authority to Kadyrov to appoint heads of district administrations and members of the republic’s government.
May 21 A border clash between a group of twenty fighters and Russian troops on the border with Georgia. According to the Georgian security service, approximately six hundred separatist fighters hide in the Pankisi Gorge.
May 28 An agreement on the NATO-Russia Council is signed in Rome. The new body has replaced the five-year-old Permanent Joint Council.
127
June 26-27 A meeting of the G-8 Group in Kananaskis, Canada, among other issues focuses on fighting terrorism. At a press conference Bush says he considers Putin “a strong ally in the war on terrorism, whose actions speak louder than words.”
August 6 A radio-controlled mine explodes under a truck carrying thirty Chechen conscripts for the Russian army in Shatoi, killing eleven soldiers and injuring seven. Rudnik Dudaev, secretary of Chechnya’s Russian-appointed security council says separatist rebels are responsible for the attack that comes as the Russian army tightens security around Grozny to block possible rebel attacks to mark the sixth anniversary of their storming of the city.
August 19 Rebels use a Russian-made Igla shoulder-held missile to down a military helicopter Mi-26, killing 121 Russian servicemen just outside the main Russian military base in Chechnya. The incident is the sixth helicopter crash in the region this year and the country’s worst military air disaster.
August 23 Russian military aircraft bomb villages in northern Georgia in an attempt to “squeeze out” terrorists from the Pankisi Gorge.
August 16-19 The Chechen peace proposal, known as “Liechtenstein Plan”, calls on Russia to give the republic a “special status” within Russia, protected by international guarantees.
September 3 Lord Frank Judd of Britain, co-chair of the Joint Working Group for Chechnya of the State Duma and the Council of Europe, arrives in Moscow and heads for Grozny to investigate the situation with the returnees.
September 11 Putin threatens military strikes against “reliably known bases of the terrorists” along the border between Georgia and Chechnya. Putin declares that Russia has the same right to self-defense under the international law to root out terrorists in the Pankisi Gorge that the US invoked in its strike against Afghanistan.
September 16 Nineteen people are killed and more than twenty injured when a bomb is detonated alongside a passenger bus in the Chechen capital Grozny. Officials blame Chechen militants.
September 20 The Interior Ministry sends additional 1,200 troops to Chechnya, while already 80,000 soldiers are deployed in the region. President Putin says he will station troops in Chechnya “forever.”
October 4 Georgia agrees to extradite five of thirteen Chechen fighters detained near the Russian border in August.
October 23 A squad of forty Chechen rebels, including eighteen masked women strapped with explosives, takes eight hundred hostages during a performance of a popular musical drama “Nord-Ost” in a Moscow theater. Government officials say the group describes itself as a suicide death squad and demands the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya.
October 26 The crisis ends with the deaths of 129 hostages, among them 17 cast members and stage crew, most from a gas used by Russian special forces to subdue the explosive-laden Chechen guerrillas. Government officials say they were forced
128
to launch the assault after rebels started killing hostages, but do not reveal the type of gas used or explain how most of the hostages died. President Putin declares that there will be “no second Khasavyurt.”
October 27 FSB and Interior Ministry are ordered to launch a special operation in Chechnya. President Putin promises a broader, US-style war on terrorism that can extend beyond Russia’s borders.
October 28 An International Chechen Congress opens in Copenhagen, Denmark. More than one hundred participants arrive from Chechnya, Russia, the USA and some European countries.
October 30 In Denmark, at Moscow’s request, police arrest Zakaev, a top aide to Chechnya’s fugitive president Maskhadov, for allegedly helping plot the attack. Danish authorities say Zakaev may be extradited if Moscow promises not to impose the death penalty. Zakaev and Maskhadov, who were attending a Chechen exiles’ meeting in Copenhagen, have condemned the Moscow raid, saying an extremist faction outside their control was responsible.
November 2 Defense Minister Ivanov announces that he has suspended long-planned withdrawal of troops and that the military is ready to start a “special operation” in Chechnya.
November 3 Russia launches a massive retaliatory military operation in Chechnya to avenge the seizure of a Moscow theater. Chechen guerrillas respond by shooting down another Russian military helicopter Mi-8, killing nine aboard, including a deputy commander. This is the second helicopter shot down in a week and the latest of a half-dozen in three months.
November 11 A summit with European Union leaders, originally planned for Copenhagen, is moved to Brussels in response to Russian protests over an international Chechen conference in Copenhagen few days after the end of the Moscow theater siege.
November 25 Russian President Putin vetoes media legislation that would have restricted terrorism coverage but criticizes the country’s press for handling of the hostage crisis at a Moscow theater.
December 12 President Putin signs a decree calling for a referendum on a constitution and elections in Chechnya.
December 18 Putin dismisses his top general in Chechnya Gennadii Troshev a day after Troshev publicly rebuffed Russia’s defense minister by announcing his refusal of a new assignment in Siberia. Troshev is replaced by General Vladimir Boldyrev, previously the commander of the Siberian military district.
December 18 For the first time since rebels led a hostage-taking raid on a Moscow theater in October, the Kremlin suggests talks with Chechen separatists are possible. The lower house of parliament appeals to Putin to develop a comprehensive plan for bringing peace to Chechnya and to resume partial troop withdrawals.
December 19 President Putin during a televised question-and-answer session with the nation repeats his refusal to negotiate with armed separatists in Chechnya.
129
December 27 Three suicide bombers, in a heavy truck and a car, blew up a four-story government building in the center of Grozny. More than 170 were injured and 72 were killed in the attack.
2003
January 1 A military court clears a Russian colonel Yuri Budanov of criminal responsibility for killing a young Chechen woman Elza Kungayeva, ruling that he was mentally ill at the time of the death.
February 10 Shamil Basaev claims responsibility for the terrorist acts on December 27 that leveled the Chechen government headquarters in Grozny.
February 25 At the Security Council meeting devoted to the military reform, President Putin announces that the number of checkpoints in Chechnya should be optimal.
February 27 Chechen fighters shot down another Russian military helicopter Mi-8 that was sent on a rescue mission. All three crewmembers and sixteen military personnel survived. This is the first helicopter shot down this year. More than ten helicopters were downed last year.
March 3 In the weeks before a referendum, Russian authorities announce that about one thousand soldiers are due to pull out from Chechnya this month without being replaced by fresh troops.
March 16 In a television speech devoted to the referendum in Chechnya, President Putin says that Chechnya would have “broad autonomy” within Russia, and for this goal a special treaty between the Federation and the Republic will be jointly concluded.
March 18 Peace proposal of Maskhadov’s Foreign Ministry demands withdrawal of all Russian troops and calls for temporary administration of Chechnya by a UN force.
March 23 At a referendum in Chechnya, more than 95 percent of the 540,000 eligible voters approve a draft constitution that certifies the separatist republic’s status as a permanent part of the Russian Federation. The number of voters includes 23,000 Defense Ministry servicemen, 9,000 Interior Ministry troops, and 4,000 border guards stationed in the province.
April 30 Federal prosecutors announce they have closed their investigation into three apartment bombings in September 1999 that killed 243 people and wounded 1,742 in Moscow and the southern city of Volgodonsk. According to prosecutors, nine Russian and foreign Islamic fighters carried out the bombings to advance the separatist movement in the Republic of Chechnya; five of the accused are deseased, two are in custody, and two remain at large. None of the alleged bombers are Chechen.
May 12 At least 41 people are killed and 269 injured after a suicide bomber drives an explosives-filled truck into regional and federal government buildings in the Chechen town of Znamenskoye. President Vladimir Putin says the operation was
130
carried out by Chechen rebels.
May 14 A suicide bomber kills 14 people and wounds dozens more during a religious festival in the Chechen village of Iliskhan-Yurt. The leader of the Moscow- supported Chechen government, Akhmad Kadyrov, the likely target of the attack, is not injured.
June 5 A woman blows up a bus carrying military workers in Mozdok, near the Chechen border, killing at least 19. It is the Chechen rebels’ third attack in the region in three weeks.
July 5 In an apparent suicide attack by Chechen rebels, two bombs go off at a suburban Moscow rock festival, killing at least 16 people and wounding dozens more.
August 1 A suicide truck bombing attributed to Chechen separatists destroys a military hospital in Mozdok, in southern Russia, killing at least 35 people and wounding dozens.
October 5 Akhmad Kadyrov, the acting president of Chechnya who was installed by the Kremlin three years ago, wins an election with 81 percent of the vote, or 315,305 out of 562,676 registered voters. The election is marked by intimidation, censorship, and fraud. Among the voters are 30,000 Russian troops permanently stationed in Chechnya. International observers, such as the Council of Europe, decline to send monitors to the election because of the security concerns. Nominally presiding over a republic wracked by violence, poverty, crime, and continued warfare between Russian forces and Chechen separatists, Kadyrov says he is in no hurry to hold parliamentary elections.
November 7 The UN Commission on Human Rights issues a report criticizing Russia for abuses in its war with Chechnya—including torture, disappearance, summary executions, and rape—and for its attempts to intimidate and censor independent media.
December 5 A suicide bomber sets off explosives on a crowded commuter train in southern Russia near Chechnya, killing 41 people and injuring 150.
December 7 Parliamentary elections bolster Putin’s political dominance as his party, United Russia, wins 36 percent of the vote—more than double that of any other party. The Communists win 12.7 percent of the vote, down from 24 percent four years ago.
December 9 A suicide bomber kills five people in Moscow near Red Square. Authorities suspect Chechen rebel ties and say the bomber, a woman, may have beed headed for the Russian Parliament.
2004
January 26 US Secretary of State Colin Powell on a visit to Moscow airs growing concerns that Putin is stifling democracy and resuming traditionally heavy-handed dealings with neighbors. In a front-page article in the newspaper Izvestiia, Powell cites the executive’s growing power in relation to the news media, political parties, the judiciary, and the legislature. He obliquely complains about
131
Russian pressure on former Soviet lands such as Georgia, where Moscow has refused to remove its troops.
March 14 Russian President Vladimir Putin sweeps to victory as expected, winning another four-year term with 69 percent of the vote. Aiding his reelection are a stable economy, Putin’s personal popularity, and his control of most of the media.
May 9 During the Victory Day parade, a bomb in a Chechnya stadium kills the Chechen President, Akhmad Kadyrov, and 13 others, and wounds more than 50, including the Russian commander for the region. The assassination is seen as a severe blow to President Putin’s efforts to end the conflict in the region.
June 21-22 Under the cover of the night, nearly 200 Chechen rebels launch massive overnight attacks on police facilities in the city of Nazran, Karabulak, and Sleptsovskaya in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, killing 92 people.
August 29 Kremlin-backed candidate Major General Alu Alkhanov, head of Chechnya Interior Ministry, wins special elections of the Chechen president with 73.9 percent of the vote with voter turnout in excess of 85 percent. In addition to 587,000 registered voters, 12,000 Internal Ministry troops and 3,000 Defense Ministry troops cast their vote.
September 1-3 During the September 1st ceremony, a group of 32 Chechen fighters, including two female suicide bombers, take more than 1,200 students, teachers and parents hostage in a secondary school #1 in Beslan, 30 kilometers from the capital city of Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia, the region neighboring Ingushetia and Chechnya. Terrorists demand withdrawal of the federal troops from Chechnya and release of 27 fighters jailed in Vladikavkaz after attacks on police posts in June in Ingushetia. The bloody siege ends on September 3, when Russian commandos storm the school; 331 people died, including 186 children, and 1,343 were injured.
September 5 Russian authorities admit on state television that they lied to the public in an effort to minimize the magnitude of the hostage crisis involving about 1,200 people in the school in Beslan.
September 7 Tens of thousands of people gather near Red Square in Moscow to mourn the children killed in the school siege.
September 13 Calling for a stronger government in the face of terrorist threats, President Putin orders an overhaul of Russia’s political system that, if enacted as expected, would further consolidate his power and stifle opposition. Seats in the lower house of parliament, the Duma, would be elected entirely on national party slates; this would eliminate district races that have elected all the liberals and independents now serving. Also, governors or presidents of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote; local legislators would appoint them on Putin’s recommendation.
September 15 President Bush expresses “concern” that Putin’s efforts to strengthen the Kremlin’s already pervasive control over the legislative branch and regional governments could undermine democracy in Russia.
132
December 29 President Putin gives the Hero of Russia medal, the country’s highest award, to Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen leader accused by human rights organizations of kidnappings, torture, and other abuses in his pursuit of suspected separatist rebels.
2005
February 21 At the start of a four-day trip to Europe, President Bush warns that Russia “must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law.” He also says he believes Russia’s future lies “within the family of Europe and the transatlantic community.”
February 22 Nine Russian soldiers are killed and three wounded by Chechen separatist rebels in an attack on the outskirts of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
February 24 At a joint press conference with Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin says debating “whether we have more or less democracy is not the right thing to do.”
March 8 The nominal leader of Chechnya’s separatist government and the republic’s former president, Aslan Maskhadov, is killed. Russian security forces used explosives to penetrate the bunker beneath a house in the village of Tolstoi-Yurt in which Maskhadov was hiding with three associates.
August 2 In the first expulsion of a foreign news organization since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin bars ABC News from working in Russia in retaliation for its broadcast of an interview with Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader.
August 18 Russia begins its first-ever joint military exercises with China, simulating a mission to stabilize a restive country. Officials of both countries say the war games suggest no threat to the region, but are a response to mutual concerns about terrorism and extremism in Central Asia.
October 13 In coordinated daylight raids, an estimated 80 or 100 Chechen rebels attack nine police and security buildings in Nalchik, the capital of the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, spreading the war beyond its roots in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Most of the attacks, including raids on the airport and border patrol, are rebuffed, but one police district office is overrun and seven gunmen remain inside with hostages. Authorities report that at least 61 insurgents as well as 12 police officers and 12 civilians are among those killed.
November 27 In their first parliamentary elections since 1997, Chechens elect 18 deputies of the Council of the Republic (upper chamber) and 40 deputies of the People’s Assembly (lower chamber). A turnout in the most populated areas is less than 10 percent of registered voters, which is interpreted by observers as the election boycott. The United Russia faction wins 24 of the 40 seats, with United Russia member Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, former minister of agriculture, elected head of the People’s Assembly.
2006
March 4 Ramzan Kadyrov, 29, the son of assassinated Chechen president Akhmad
133
Kadyrov, is unanimously approved as the prime minister, fifth during the past five years, by the republic’s People’s Assembly.
March 29 The federal center and Chechnya discuss the treaty on the delimitation of powers in its fifth draft during a meeting in the Kremlin. The major obstacles to signing the treaty are the demands of the Chechen government to grant the republic the right to become a free economic zone and to control its oil, mineral, and water resources.
May 4 US Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech to European leaders gathered in Lithuania, harshly criticizes Kremlin policies. He says Russia “has unfairly and improperly restricted” citizens’ rights and used the country’s vast energy resources as “tools of intimidation or blackmail” against its neighbors.
July 10 Russian forces kill Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel who organized deadly hostage-taking and terrorist attacks. These included the seizure of a hospital in southern Russia, a theater in Moscow, and, in 2004, a school in Beslan, where 331 people died, most of them schoolchildren.
October 7 A veteran investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, is found shot to death in her apartment building in Moscow. She had been a prominent critic of human rights abuses in Russia’s war against Chechen separatists.
October 21 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a visit to Moscow criticizes Kremlin policies, including limits on the press, a restrictive new law on foreign NGOs, and tense relations with neighboring Georgia.
2007
April 5 Ramzan Kadyrov is inaugurated as president of Chechnya.
2008
August 8 After months of escalating Georgia-Russia tensions concerning the separatist Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Georgian military makes a major push into South Ossetia, a region that broke off from Georgia in the 1990s and has long been patrolled by Russian military units, characterized by Moscow as peacekeepers. The same day, Russian forces enter South Ossetia and Russian aircraft bomb targets within non-disputed Georgia. Accounts differ as to which advance, the Georgian or Russian, was ordered first. The South Caucasus region, where Georgia lies, is strategically significant because of the energy that flows through it in pipelines, and because of its geographical position between the Black and Caspain Seas. Russia considers the South Caucasus to be within its sphere of influence and has reacted harshly to Georgia’s proposed membership in NATO.
August 9 The conflict worsens, with Russia expanding its bombing campaign deeper into non-disputed Georgia and hitting targets near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Russia delivers troops via ship to Abkhazia.
August 10 Russian troops reach the strategic Georgian city of Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, at the ourskirts of Tbilisi. Earlier in the day, Georgia had offered a cease-fire and
134
said it had withdrawn its forces from South Ossetia. In coming days, breakaway forces in Abkhazia, with air assistance presumably provided by Russia, take control of the Kodori Gorge, the only part of the region that before the conflict had still been administered by the Georgian government.
August 13 After negotiations facilitated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russia and Georgia agree on a cease-fire according to which their militaries are to pull back to the positions they occupied before the violence erupted. Russia is also allowed to occupy an ill-defined “security zone.” Russian airstrikes and tank advances continue despite the ceased-fire, with Moscow arguing that these actions are permissible under the agreement. Georgia announces its withdrawing from the Commonwealth of Independent States. The US announces it is sending forces to Georgia to assist in providing humanitarian aid.
August 23 Russia says it has completed its pullback from all areas it occupied during the current conflict. Nonetheless, it still holds some sections of non-disputed Georgia. The Georgian military reports that 170 of its soldiers have been killed during the conflict.
August 24 Russia formally recognizes the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. No other major power does so. Moscow’s action is seen in part as retribution for Western recognition in February of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.
2009
April The Kremlin announces an end to its decade-long counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya. During this year alone, more Russian forces are killed in Chechnya than US soldiers in Iraq.
2010
March 29 At least 38 people are killed in Moscow when female suicide bombers detonate explosives in two subway stations. Responsibility for planning the attacks is later claimed by Doku Umarov, a former Chechen separatist who is now a global jihadist. Observers speculate that Russia may now reemphasize law-and-order policies associated with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and back away from mildly liberalizing ideas expressed in the rhetoric of President Dmitri Medvedev.
2011
January 24 Insurgents of the Caucasus Emirate, led by Chechen separatist Doku Umarov, attack Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport, killing 75 people and injuring 180.
2014
March 18 Doku Umarov, the longtime leader of the Chechen militants, is killed.
April A land mine explosion destroys a government armored personnel carrier, in which four soldiers are killed and seven wounded.
135
October 5 A suicide bombing in Grozny kills five people.
December 4 Islamist militants traveling in three cars infiltrate Grozny around 1 a.m., killing three traffick police officers at a checkpoint and then occupying a 10-story House of Publishing at the center of the city. Six of the gunmen are killed by security officers inside the building, which is gutted by fire that spread to a nearby market. The rest of the attackers are found near the House of Publishing in School No. 20, where fighting continued later that day. Neither teachers nor students were at the school when it was seized. Ten police officers and nine militants are killed and another twenty-eight police officers are injured.
136