Chechnya

Chechnya has been plagued by two wars and an ongoing insurgency since the fall of the Soviet Union. In recent years, Chechen militants have escalated attacks in the North Caucasus and revived bombings in Moscow.

Chechen separatist Shamil Basayev is one of several rebel leaders to die violently in recent years. His death leaves the future of the movement in doubt.

Andrei Babitsky of RFE/RL, one of the few journalists to have met and interviewed Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, says his death may weaken the Chechen separatist movement, but will not kill it.

This publication is now archived. What is at stake in Chechnya’s elections?The parliamentary elections scheduled for November 27 will be the troubled republic’s first since a 1999 war between Chechen separatist rebels and Russian forces, the second such conflict in ten years. Chechnya’s election commission has approved 356 candidates to run for Parliament: 266 to compete for the forty seats in the Popular Assembly (the lower house) and ninety to run for the eighteen available seats on the Republic’s Council (the upper house). There are some 600,000 registered voters in Chechnya. Most experts say the elections are unlikely to be a legitimate representation of the will of the Chechen people. Regardless, "it’s an important step in that it represents Russia’s efforts to normalize the situation," says Charles King, an expert on Central Asia and the former Soviet Republics and a professor at Georgetown University. Will the elections be free and fair?Unlikely, experts say. "No one, besides Moscow and the local pro-Russia government, believes the elections will be legitimate," King says. Sixty-eight percent of Chechens who responded to a recent poll think the elections will be dishonest and only 8 percent think they will be free and fair, reported the Moscow-based newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Some 73 percent of respondents believed the election results will be decided in advance. Human rights groups agree. Tatiana Lokshina, Moscow representative of human rights group the International Helsinki Federation, told reporters September 14, "There are sufficient reasons to think the parliamentary seats have been distributed in advance." Other rights groups are refusing to send monitors, saying the security and political conditions required for legitimate elections do not exist. What is the history of past elections?The last parliamentary elections in Chechnya were held in January 1997, between the 1995-96 "struggle for national liberation" between Chechen separatists and Moscow and the resumption of conflict in 1999. In May 2000, newly elected President Vladimir Putin declared that Moscow had direct control over Chechnya and appointed Akhmad Kadyrov, a former construction worker and Muslim cleric, to head the government. Kadyrov, who had been a separatist before joining the Russian side, won an allegedly fixed presidential election in October 2003. Seen as a traitor to the cause of Chechen independence, Kadyrov was assassinated by separatists in May 2004. Ramzan Kadyrov, his son, is currently the first deputy premier and head of the security forces. Experts say he wields great power and is widely feared. What is the current security situation in Chechnya?Russian news agencies report some 24,700 Russian troops and about 15,000 policemen from the Chechen interior ministry will guard the polls on election day. Estimates of Russian troops in the region range as high as 80,000, expert Fiona Hill said in an interview. But the streets of Grozny are still effectively a war zone, experts say; with little security, citizens are vulnerable to kidnappings and attacks by armed bandits. Memorial, a human-rights organization, says the Russian army is continuing military operations which are responsible for the "organized disappearances" of as many as 5,000 young men since the latest round of the conflict began in 1999. What are the main parties?The parties in the Chechen elections are the main Russian political parties, says Carol Leff, a Russia expert and associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois. They include United Russia, Putin’s ruling party. Current Chechen President Alu Alkhanov is running on the United Russia slate, which is expected to take the majority of parliamentary seats. Other Russian parties running Chechen candidates include the Communist Party (KPRF), the Union of Rights Forces (SPS), and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR). Leff says local Chechen politicians have been allocated to Russian-led political parties with seemingly little logic. One SPS candidate, Magomed Khambiev, is the former defense minister of the Chechen rebels. Experts say Khambiev was forced to join the SPS slate after Russian forces kidnapped forty of his relatives and held them hostage. "This is a very strange way to engage in political recruitment," Leff says, pointing to the incident as an example of Moscow’s failures to make real efforts to build a political culture in Chechnya. What will be the impact of the elections?Inconsequential, experts say. Chechnya is rich in natural resources, including oil deposits, natural gas, limestone, gypsum, sulfur, and other minerals. But most observers say the elections will do little to improve life in the war-torn province, afflicted by banditry, lawlessness, and corruption. Chechens also place little hope in the elections. In another recent poll, 43 percent of respondents said the situation in Chechnya would remain unchanged after the vote. What is Moscow’s position on the elections?Putin told a Russian radio show September 27, "I attach very great importance to the upcoming parliamentary elections in Chechnya...It seems to me the people with the most varied political convictions should appear there [in parliament], so that all divisive issues are resolved openly, in a civilized manner, in a political process, and not through the use of force." But experts say Putin, who has cast the Chechen struggle as a fight against a pan-Caucasus Islamic jihad—and who enjoys high approval ratings in Russia—has effectively consigned the goal of resolving the Chechnya conflict to a back burner. He will press on with the current military campaign, experts say. "The Russians have concluded that they’ve reached a level of casualties—losing a few soldiers a week—they can live with," King says. How do Russians feel about the conflict?Experts say Russians have traditionally looked down on people from the North Caucasus, an attitude dating to the nineteenth-century wars of conquest, when the region was forcefully incorporated into the Russian empire. That attitude, in addition to a rash of terrorist incidents blamed on Chechens in the last decade, has ensured that Russians have no love lost for Chechens. "Russians feel quite threatened by violence, but they blame the Chechens, not the army," King says. After each terrorist attack, "there’s always some criticism [of the Russian military’s actions] in the press, but at the end of the day, people tend to blame the perpetrators, not the [Russian] government," he says. What is the history of the conflict?Chechen rebels have long agitated for independence from Russian control over the north Caucasus province, whose population is predominantly Sunni Muslim. Chechens put up some of the bitterest resistance to Russia’s century-long conquest (1818-1917) of the region, rebelling in the 1850s and again in 1919. Some Chechen and Ingush units collaborated with the invading German Army in World War II; after the war, Moscow deported many Chechens to Central Asia as punishment. In 1994, Russian forces arrived in Grozny to crush the independence movement that sprang up after the fall of the Soviet Union, along with similar movements in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other former Soviet republics. The war devastated the city, left tens of thousands dead, and included numerous human rights violations by Russian forces, which watchdog groups like Human Rights Watch say still continue. After several failed attempts to reach a ceasefire, Russian and Chechen authorities negotiated a settlement in August 1996 that included a full withdrawal of Russian troops and elections in Chechnya in January 1997. A peace treaty was finalized in May 1997. However, after a number of terrorist incidents blamed on Chechen rebels, particularly bombings at two Moscow apartment buildings in 1999, the Russian government launched a new military campaign into Chechnya. How has the conflict changed?"Unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to talk about just Chechnya. The conflict has spilled over into neighboring regions," Leff says. Russian forces currently control the majority of Chechen territory, but rebel fighters regularly ambush the Russian military, and are increasingly recruiting suicide bombers and other fighters from neighboring Caucasus provinces to join them. Moscow’s strategy of branding anyone who opposed Russian power in the region an Islamic terrorist pushed opponents toward the influential Islamic networks that proliferated in the region in the late 1990s, experts say. The financing and influence of foreign fighters at that time helped to link the Caucasus struggle to the global war to advance Islam. "Anyone who objects to the government now finds their natural home with Islamic militants," Leff says. This shift is reflected in the leadership of the rebel movement: Former members of the Russian army have given way to a cleric. And given the region’s fractious history with Moscow, "the idea of a larger regional caliphate is attractive to a lot of people," she says. What’s currently happening in the region?"All of Chechnya’s neighbors are now basically destabilized," Leff says. In October, an uprising in Nalchik, the capital of the neighboring republic of Kabardino-Balkariya, left over 138 people dead. Dagestan and Ingushetia, two other nearby regions, have suffered a string of recent bombings and killings. Chechnya and its neighbors, including North Ossetia, are all poor and governed by increasingly dictatorial leaders. In this environment, disaffected young men are easy targets for appeals to join the armed militancy movement. "Many are inspired by their own religious fervor, and boredom," King says. In societies ruined by war, and with little hope for the future, "there’s not much else for them to do," he says. What kinds of terror attacks have Chechen rebels led against Russia?Since 1999, Chechen separatists have been increasingly unable to fight Russian forces openly, experts say. Instead, they have launched or inspired terrorist attacks and violence throughout the Caucasus region and in Russia proper. These include: September 1999: Two apartment buildings on the outskirts of Moscow are bombed, killing some 213 people. The incident prompts then-Prime Minister Putin to send Russian troops back into Chechnya. October 2002: Some forty Chechen rebels, including women strapped with explosives, take 900 hostages at a Moscow theater. They demand the withdrawal of all Russian forces from Chechnya. On the third day of the standoff, Russian forces storm the theater, using a powerful gas to subdue the terrorists. The incident left 129 hostages dead, all but two of them due to the gas. All the Chechens were killed.July 2003: Two female suicide bombers detonate themselves in the midst of a crowd at a Moscow rock concert, killing fifteen people.December 2003: A suicide bomber said to be a Chechen woman kills six people in an explosion outside the National Hotel in central Moscow.February 2004: An alleged suicide bomber kills some forty people and injures dozens of others in an explosion on a subway car in southeastern Moscow.September 2004: Chechen extremists take hundreds of parents and children hostage on the first day of school in Beslan, North Ossetia. On the third day of the standoff, shooting erupted between the hostage-takers and Russian security forces, who stormed the building. The incident left 331 people dead, including 186 children. October 13, 2005: Dozens of men, frustrated by the harassment of Muslims and the closing of mosques, take up arms in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkariya. In two days of violence, at least 138 people are killed.

Fiona Hill, a leading expert on Russia and the Caucasus, says this weekend’s parliamentary elections in Chechnya could have been a significant step forward if Chechens had been encouraged to broaden their leadership. But she says the direction of the campaigning "has been in the hands of the Kremlin, which is managing this whole process extremely carefully."Hill, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says war-torn Chechnya, which has sought independence since the breakup of the Soviet Union, is now "a failed region; one that has been completely devastated and needs to be put together again from scratch." She says Islamist jihadi groups have moved into the region.Chechnya is "a black hole and a lawless area where there’s incredible corruption. Everyone is making money out of this war, and the atrocities that are committed there by the Russian troops and Moscow-backed authorities—including disappearances, massive human rights abuses, and torture—are having a broader impact in recruiting more people to the various groups that are fighting against the Russian Federation just as Palestine and Iraq continue to attract the attention of the Muslim world," Hill says. "People in Washington, DC, may not be paying that much attention to what’s happening in Chechnya, but people in Riyadh and Amman and elsewhere are."She was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on November 21, 2005. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held in Chechnya this weekend. Is this a significant step forward?It could have been a significant step forward had there been a really genuine attempt to bring groups that had not been involved in the political process in Chechnya into these elections by encouraging Chechens to really start choosing a broader group of leadership. However, what we’ve seen instead is that the direction of the campaigning, such as it has been over the last couple of months, has been in the hands of the Kremlin, which is managing this whole process extremely carefully; making deals with individuals who are participating in the election and instructing Russia’s political parties to go out there and manage groups of candidates. I interviewed one member of the Russian ruling party while I was in Moscow in September and asked him about what their plans were for this and he essentially told me quite openly that nobody would be allowed to participate in elections that hadn’t already had negotiations with Moscow on what their role was going to be. This is another example of a very heavy-handed approach to the democratic process from Moscow, leaving very little to chance.What is Chechnya like today? My image of it is of just a war-torn place.It is a war-torn society. And the problem with running elections in a place like this is that, as many of the Russian human rights groups—like Memorial, which is operating on the ground in the region—have made clear, that most of the basic social ties between people have been completely destroyed by the war. Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed. Extended families have been torn to pieces, with many people killed and missing; others have gone into internal exile within the Russian Federation; many people have moved to Moscow. Chechens, until the last year or so, were the largest group of people seeking asylum in Europe. So you really have a region that’s been blown to bits in many respects by the war, just as we would have seen in Bosnia at the end of events there ten years ago.How many people lived in Chechnya before these wars started?You’ve got to go back to the late part of the Soviet period. In the last Soviet census of 1989, there were well over a million people living there.And about how many people are living there now, roughly?We really don’t know. There was a census again in 2002 that suggested there were still over a million people, but there are also many much lower estimates. This population issue is so contentious. There are arguments over how many people have died in the war, how many people have been displaced. There have been various attempts to make counts, but nobody’s really sure whether they are really counting the people who are there permanently or people who also go back and forth. Because, obviously, many people feel that it’s unsafe to live there. They may be registered there and living somewhere else.Remind people, what started the trouble there?It was really very much a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the same way that we saw other regions, republics of the Soviet Union that are now independent states—Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states—pull away from Moscow. Chechnya was part of that whole wave of entities of the Soviet Union that had a very separate sense of identity, of political and social history, that set them apart from the rest of Russia. Chechnya was in fact the last part of the Russian empire that was really incorporated. If you take the whole region of the North Caucasus, it took sixty years to pacify this region and the territory that we consider to be Chechnya today wasn’t fully part of the Russian empire until long after places like Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan had been incorporated.So from the Chechens’ point of view, given their size and their location on the edge of the Soviet Union, when the south Caucasus states on their borders—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia—declared their independence, Chechens thought they should, too. This is rather crudely put, but according to their reading of Soviet law, they had a population of more than a million; they’d been on an international frontier; and they had a distinct history. They demanded that they should be considered the same kind of political entity as the other republics. However, the Chechen Republic at that period was not a full "union republic" like the others on their borders. These were the complexities of the administrative structure of the Soviet Union, so for many technical reasons they didn’t have the same case for independence. So we really had a political dispute that was very much part of the whole range of disputes that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union at the root of the conflict between Chechnya and Moscow. From there, it’s morphed into many different phases, becoming something of an ethnic conflict: Chechens pitted against Russians, although that was never quite as acute as it was depicted at times. And now, of course, with very strong international terrorist overtones, the creeping in of political Islam and international jihadist networks, we’ve got a very different conflict on our hands from what we had in the late 1980s and early 1990s.President [Boris] Yeltsin who was head of Russia at the time this started—he tried to end this war, didn’t he?Yes. But he also began it. The problem with Yeltsin was that there was a lot of personal animus with some key Chechens, both in Chechnya itself and in the broader Russian Federation. Remember, in October 1993, Yeltsin had a famous standoff with the Russian parliament, which he saw as a reconstituted Soviet Parliament, or the Congress of People’s Deputies, and the speaker of the parliament was Ruslan Khasbulatov. Khasbulatov was an ethnic Chechen and a relatively famous professor and economist, who had become a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies. In the new Russian parliament, he became speaker and Yeltsin disliked him. So Khasbulatov becomes a protagonist in the whole dispute between the Kremlin and the Russian Parliament. Yeltsin also got into a personal spat with the president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who had been a general in the Soviet Army, head of a Soviet military garrison in Tartu, Estonia, and had been very much sympathetic to the independence movement of the Baltic states, which were the main instigators in the sequence of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Basically, misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding in the series of events that led to Moscow’s [1994] declaration of war on Chechnya. Chechnya had already declared itself seceded from Russia in the immediate period of the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Russian military had been encouraged to pullout; Yeltsin had pulled them out. And then Yeltsin in tried and true Russian fashion still attempted to have a hand in Chechen politics by encouraging coup attempts against Dudayev. And there was actually something of a civil war going on in Chechnya itself—lots of disputes. Again, based on the political culture of Chechens, which is rather decentralized and not really well-suited to having one single leader, there were many people with aspirations to rule the country. Dudayev had gotten rid of the Chechen parliament—there were lots of machinations going on—and Yeltsin encouraged the use of Russian mercenaries, who were really still active in the Russian military, to help bring about a coup. They were captured by Dudayev’s forces and paraded on television—completely humiliating Yeltsin. This is very obviously a compressed and simplified version of what happened—but the next thing was a meeting of the Russian government and the Russian Security Council, in which Yeltsin was persuaded that a quick Russian military intervention, and, of course, we all know how those always turn out, should be affected to get rid of Dudayev and that would be the end of that. It would be done very quickly—the backdrop for this was the seemingly successful U.S. intervention in Haiti. The idea from the Russian military at the time came from the head of the Russian military, [Defense Minister] Pavel Grachev, who is said to have told Yeltsin it could be done in a couple of days.This is in 1994?December 1994. So Yeltsin thought that this would be over in a couple of days and nothing went as planned. The Russian troops were woefully ill-equipped; they didn’t go in with up-to-date maps; there was immediately an upsurge of protest from ordinary people. If you remember, there were images of elderly women all linking hands along the roads from the borders into Chechnya through the rest of Russia pleading with the soldiers to turn back. And they just went from there into what became the largest military action on Russian soil since World War II and a military catastrophe comparable to the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan. And add to that the fact that the Russian military basically were not prepared, that they were still fighting a World War II-type military engagement, and the fact that Yeltsin had very little money to draw on in the Russian budget. He couldn’t afford what [President Vladimir] Putin can today because the Russian economy was still in its nadir—after the collapse of the Soviet Union, oil prices were still down around ten dollars to sixteen dollars per barrel and Russian oil production had basically bottomed out. Yeltsin was just not in the place in the 1990s that Putin is now, with plenty of money to keep a war going. And the pressure to end it eventually came: It was seen as an unjust war, it was too expensive; it’s kind of reminiscent of the controversy now about Iraq. We had then General Alexander Lebed, who had been an important commander and hero in the Afghan war, along with many other people within and outside the Russian military, and in the political opposition, and in civil society who pushed Russia to end it quickly.And so in 1997, after a series of escalating terrorist attacks on the part of the Chechens, the Russians and Yeltsin pulled out of the war. But it started again in 1999. So in the interim, did the Chechens get their act together?No, that’s really the problem. But then again, it would be hard to expect them to do so. They didn’t get a lot of assistance from the outside. It was basically like the anticipated similar situation in the Middle East if, after an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, everyone went away and left the Palestinians to their own devices. We can all imagine that that would not turn out too well, either. That’s exactly the same kind of problem you had in Chechnya. No political preparation or sophistication, a highly decentralized, fractured political society, no formal institutions, and you’ve got the rule of the gun. And many of the rebel fighters, like Shamil Basayev, the most notorious of the Chechen warlords, came in to take the positions like deputy prime minister/ vice president. These were people who were used to shooting people in a guerilla war, not to being in the position of making decisions about the sanitation and education systems. And so did the troops go back in when Putin became president?No, Putin was still prime minister. Unfortunately, Chechnya has played a role as a political actor in its own right over the last decade. And many people, both in Russia and outside, see Chechnya as being the vehicle that brought Putin into power, with the re-ignition of the war in Chechnya in 1999. What you had then was Putin responding to the terrorist blasts in the apartment buildings in Moscow, which were blamed on the Chechens, and responding as a law and order leader who would go in and clean it all up again. So we started off on another round of war, very similar to the one before—even perhaps more ruinous than the first, not so much in civilian casualties but in the impact it’s had on Russia in terms of creating the same kind of recruiting grounds for international terrorism and drawing more people in as we see happening in Iraq. It was really in that waning part of the first war, the interwar period, and at in the beginning of the second war, that we started to see the international jihadist movements moving into Chechnya and focusing on it.About how many Russian troops are there?To be honest, I’m not entirely sure at this point because the Russians have different kinds of calculations. The point to bear in mind is that the actual Russian military—as in the Ministry of Defense of forces—have been scaled back and replaced by Ministry of Interior forces, so it’s essentially a kind of police force. At the peak, it was about 100,000 Russian servicemen; certain reports suggest 80,000 at this point, but it could be less and the point is that they’re not all based in Chechnya itself. You have the headquarters of one of the various Russian military districts, the military district that covers the North Caucasus, next door in North Ossetia, which of course is where you had the Beslan terrorist attack in September 2004.So you have troops stationed permanently in the region, but how many are physically in Chechnya, I don’t know. The Russian government has some kind of sense, but on the outside it’s very hard to figure out. There’s different police, people who were brought in; there are also contract forces—people who are there as paid, professional forces. It’s a bit like we have in Iraq regarding how many troops we are really talking about, with independent contractors, etc. There was a president elected and he was assassinated?We’ve had several presidents elected in Chechnya. The first was Dzhokhar Dudayev, the former general who became the first elected president of Chechnya. When he was killed in April 1996, there were subsequent elections and his deputy, another of the military commanders who had been a member of the Soviet armed forces, Aslan Maskhadov, was elected as president and it was Maskhadov who was killed this year. Actually, he was—after the second war was launched—discredited and declared to be illegitimate as a president. There were new presidential elections in Chechnya and the president who was elected there was Akhmad Kadyrov, the former mufti, or spiritual leader of Chechnya, who had been a rebel commander, but had then basically thrown in his lot with Moscow. He was assassinated in May 2004. He was the one who was blown up in the stadium. And there were elections again with a candidate very much selected by Moscow, Alu Alkhanov, who had been a member of the security forces. And this parliamentary election, are there real parties?What has happened is the main Russian parties from the center, which did not really have branches in Chechnya and were not really well established in the regions—from the Russian ruling party, United Russia, to the nationalist party to the liberal democratic parties—they have all been instructed to participate in the elections and virtually develop candidates. But if you look at all of the main players in the Chechen government, they are all members of the party in power in Russia itself, United Russia. So we’re not really seeing any spontaneous, grass-roots politics. Chechnya is a fractured, devastated society and it would have taken a lot of work on the part of the Russians to really reach out to the various interest groups. This was one of the things that people have really been pushing them to do for some time—to create a genuine political process. But if they’re not doing this across the board in the Russian Federation, it’s hard to imagine that they would do it in Chechnya itself. Does the United States care about what’s going on in Chechnya?We do care, actually, because, unfortunately, the situation is such in Chechnya right now that you have the "Afghanistization" of a piece of Russian territory. You have an area that is incredibly destabilizing for the rest of the Russian Federation; a conflict that has pulled in and attracted to it all kinds of nefarious groups—groups that we’re very concerned about in terms of people being in there being able to cut their teeth in terrorist activities in Chechnya. The tactics that have been adopted by the Chechens have been circulating around on the internet and many of the things we are seeing in Iraq now with these improvised personnel devices and suicide bombings have been done in Chechnya before, obviously not to the scale that we are seeing now.So unfortunately, this iconography and the tactics of terror, of international terror, is a shared one, even though the roots of the conflict in Chechnya are very much within Russia itself. The Russian government tends to exaggerate the role of international terrorist groups in Chechnya , but let’s just say there certainly is one and we’ve linked many incidents within Europe through the various groups who have been watching the Jihadist networks. We know that many of them have got some ties in Chechnya. It’s a black hole and a lawless area where there’s incredible corruption. Everyone is making money out of this war and the atrocities that are committed there by the Russian troops and Moscow-backed authorities—including disappearances, massive human rights abuses, and torture—are having a broader impact in recruiting more people to the various groups that are fighting against the Russian Federation just as Palestine and Iraq continue to attract the attention of the Muslim world. People in Washington, DC, may not be paying that much attention to what’s happening in Chechnya, but people in Riyadh and Amman and elsewhere are. Does anyone have a solution in mind?Any solution is a very long-term one. It’s a process. It’s rebuilding Chechnya. It’s the same exercise that we see in Afghanistan and Iraq, unfortunately. It’s on a much smaller scale, which is why it’s getting less attention. But if we think of comparable cases in Gaza and the West Bank, Iraq, or Afghanistan, Chechnya may not be a state, but it’s a failed region; one that has been completely devastated and needs to be put together again from scratch. Chechens need to be able to develop their own viable political society and regional economy whether they remain part of Russia or not.In Moscow and big cities in Russia, does the Chechen war get a lot of coverage?Russian television doesn’t cover it so much. But the events of Beslan last year were covered a great deal on all the international TV channels. I saw it happen; I was actually there in Russia, but it wasn’t on Russian television. There are lots of current reports on Chechnya that are very one-sided. The Russian and Western investigative journalism there has dwindled down, although there is quite a lot of information filtering around in various ways on what’s happening. Unfortunately, people have Chechnya fatigue. There’s not a great deal of sympathy for the Chechens within the Russian Federation, although there is a desire to have an end to this conflict, even if that means, for some people, Russia pulling out again. But frankly at this stage of the game that’s just like saying Israel should pull entirely out of the Palestinian areas and leave them to their own devices. We know that can’t happen there, and it can’t happen in Chechnya. There has really to be some focused international effort on rebuilding, reconstructing, and putting this place back together again

One year after thirty-two militants from the Caucasus region seized a school full of hostages in Beslan, a town in Northern Ossetia, the security situation in the region remains “out of control” and violence may spread further, says Aslan Doukaev, director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s North Caucasus Service. He discusses Russia’s bungling of the Beslan massacre, its ongoing war in Chechnya, and the impact of both on U.S.-Russian relations. What’s the mood in Russia one year after the Beslan tragedy? Are Russians blaming the authorities or the hostage-takers?The Russians, in general, seem to approve the government’s actions in Beslan, but at the same time, they believe they don’t know the whole truth. Of course, those who suffered from that attack—the parents of those children and loved ones—are clearly outraged at how the government handled the whole situation and are demanding the truth. The government is not telling them everything. On [September 2], a group of mothers of those who died are going to Moscow to talk to President [Vladimir] Putin, and I believe they’ll demand some answers there. What’s Putin likely to tell them?It’s very difficult to say. Putin always refuses to comment and give his assessment of what happened. I believe he’ll try to justify what the Russian secret services and police did there. But I don’t really think the mothers are going to be satisfied with those answers.What’s their chief complaint: The cover-up or the crime? Do these mothers believe the Russian forces were the ones doing the actual shooting?They complain about several things. First, the secrecy that surrounded the whole operation. Second, they were told during the hostage crisis that no force would be used to free the hostages. And the government reneged on its promise. Then, a lot of lies have been told; for example, what kinds of weapons have been used. There’s a lot of evidence the troops that stormed the building used tanks, helicopters, and flame-throwers. And what the mothers are saying is: “We want to know how our children died.” That’s what the government is failing to tell them.Has the Kremlin’s handling of Beslan hurt Putin’s popularity?I don’t really think so. He’s got an image as a very tough leader and this is something that is appreciated in Russian culture. So I don’t believe his popularity depends on the way he handles situations like Beslan.Putin is reported to have used the Beslan massacre to rein in Russia’s regional governors. Was this the case?Beslan was a formal pretext for scrapping regional elections. Nobody believes that appointed governors can handle terrorism and separatism better than elected ones. The real reason is Putin’s attempt to exert tighter political control over the regions and the whole country.Also, it’s rumored the Beslan attackers bribed their way past security guards. What’s been done to prevent this from occurring again?I’m not aware of any particular steps to curb corruption among Russian police. The situation is, in many ways, the same. I’m not surprised these accusations surfaced because you can bribe almost anyone there. There are lots of checkpoints in and around Chechnya. All you have to do is put around ten rubles [less than a dollar] into your passport and you’re allowed through. Chechen field commanders boast they can bribe their way anywhere, even to Moscow. You can bribe anyone if you know the right price. So then are future Beslan-type attacks possible?We can’t rule out that possibility. In his recent interviews, the guy who ordered the attack, [Chechen militant leader] Shamil Basayev, actually says he hasn’t renounced terrorism; so attacks like that can theoretically happen.What was the ethnic makeup of the Beslan attackers?There were a lot of non-Chechens there [all but one of whom were reportedly killed during the siege]. Actually, Chechens were the minority. The majority were ethnic Ingush, who are ethnic cousins of the Chechens. There were only three or four Chechens. The Russian government also said some foreign mercenaries were in that particular group and released a photograph of one person who looked Middle Eastern, but it never released names or identities of those people. Has the security situation in the region improved one year after Beslan?No. On the contrary, it’s getting worse. We are seeing a spate of attacks in Dagestan [a province bordering Chechnya], where dozens of people have died, and occasional clashes in neighboring Russian republics like Ingushetia. The attacks are mainly perpetuated by underground groups that oppose the local authorities and organize explosions, attack police cars, etc. So the situation remains pretty dire with no signs of improvement whatsoever.What’s Russia’s modus operandi in Dagestan versus Chechnya?There are two main Islamic insurgency groups there—one is Shariat, the other is Jennet—that are behind a number of recent attacks aimed at mostly government officials, police, and the Russian military. There were several clashes as well in the capital of Dagestan. The situation is getting somewhat out of control there, and the attacks are getting more and more frequent. Is there evidence of human-rights abuses?There’s a very unpopular government in power [in Dagestan]. The current leader [Magomedali Magomedov] has been in power, I believe, for the past twenty years. It’s a very corrupt government, police brutality is quite rampant, and we have credible reports police are abusing people in detention. Where does the war in Chechnya stand?It’s still raging on. [Russians are] kind of getting used to it. There’s still heavy fighting going on, especially in the south of Chechnya. The war is the main catalyst for instability in the whole region, and I believe unless this problem has been sorted out some way, instability is going to spread to neighboring republics.What do Russians think of the war in Chechnya?Public opinion is firmly for a political solution to the conflict. I’ve seen several polls recently showing that more than 60 percent [of Russians] are calling for an end of the war. But the problem is the Russian government has been unwilling to seek a political solution to the conflict. It seems to be relying solely on the use of force, which causes [further Chechen] resistance and a vicious circle that nobody can break now.Is there danger of the Chechen conflict spreading further?The war has been spreading for maybe a couple of years now. You remember the attack at the Dubrovka Theater [when some 140 hostages died after Russian authorities pumped a narcotic gas into the building] in Moscow three years ago. So it’s no longer contained to Chechnya. The Chechen resistance is organizing so-called fronts—the Caucasian fronts—[to be] armed groups subordinate to the Chechen leadership; it’s clearly no longer simply a Chechen conflict. It seems the Russian authorities haven’t learned their lesson from the Kursk submarine tragedy, the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis, and now Beslan, which were all public-relations disasters for the Kremlin. I don’t really remember any lessons learned by the Russian government, frankly, [and] I’ve lived in Russia more than thirty years. There are several lessons that could be learned from the Beslan crisis, and not only for the Russian government but also for the Chechen resistance. For example, [the Chechen militants] clearly damaged their cause and gave an opportunity for the Russian government to brand them as terrorists, like al-Qaeda or whatever. But the Russian government should have learned its lesson too, that the war is spreading. It’s no longer confined to Chechnya but includes Dagestan, Northern Ossetia, and Ingushetia. And also, the international community should have learned its lesson, but nobody seems to have learned anything from the Beslan crisis.How can the international community become more involved?It should pay more attention to that area; first, because of the terrorism issue, and second, because the situation is getting out of control in many ways. There are always ways to influence the situation. Chechnya is bordering on Georgia, and there’s an American military presence in Georgia. But Georgians are in a very peculiar situation because of the sizable Chechen community in Georgia. Russians have been accusing Georgians of harboring Chechen insurgents, so Georgians feel uncomfortable sitting next to a belligerent Russia and won’t interfere [in the Chechen conflict].What role can the U.S. government play?International terrorism cannot be the internal matter of one country. And that’s a point the U.S.government could raise with the Kremlin. Clearly, the United States could pressure the Kremlin to seek a political solution to these problems, but though the White House and State Department have been insisting on this, their statements should be matched by actions.