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The killing fields of Chechnya

Vladimir Radyuhin

Moscow faces a difficult task in trying to strike a balance between rival power groups in Chechnya. Maintaining this balance is key to returning the region to normality.

THE KILLING of the self-declared Chechen rebel leader, Abdul-Khalim Saidullayev, last week highlighted a deep crisis in the 15-year-old Chechen pro-independence movement. The "President" of Ichkeria, as Chechen separatists call Chechnya, was shot dead by special forces in an operation in his home town of Argun. Saidullayev, 39, took over when President Aslan Maskhadov was killed by Russian forces in March 2005. The previous two rebel leaders, Jokhar Dudayev and Zalimkhan Yandarbiyev, also met a violent end.

Maskhadov's death provoked an outcry in the Western media, which accused Moscow of missing a chance to negotiate peace with the "moderate" rebel leader. No such suggestions were made with regard to Saidullayev, who had been a little known Muslim cleric before becoming a largely nominal leader for the increasingly fragmented rebel movement.

It was, however, under Saidullayev that the Chechen resistance was finally transformed from a fight for independence to Islamic jihad.

For many years, Maskhadov's name was a symbol of the rebels' campaign for an independent Ichkeria. It was he who led the military campaign against Russian forces in the first Chechen war and who signed a peace pact with Russia in 1996 giving Chechnya de facto independence. By contrast, Saidullayev's presidency was marked by a deep erosion of the "freedom fight" spirit. The turning point was the rebel raid on a school in Beslan, in neighbouring North Ossetia, which took place in September 2004, six months before Maskhadov's death.

The death of 331 civilians in Beslan, more than half of them children, destroyed whatever legitimacy the Chechen rebels had in the minds of Western politicians and Russian sympathisers. Under Saidullayev, the rebel movement finally degenerated into disjointed terrorist attacks on Russian troops stationed in Chechnya. These isolated attacks can no longer sustain demands for Chechnya's independence. In fact, such demands are barely audible today.

The Kremlin's strategy of "Chechenisation" of the conflict has paid off. The new pro-Moscow Chechen leaders, some of whom fought Russians in the first Chechen war, have drawn over to their side more rebel warlords. They continue to control territories of their native clans in much the same way they did when they were part of the resistance, but are now legalised as leaders of official security outfits.

The defeat of the "freedom for Ichkeria" cause has prompted an ideological and strategic shift in rebel resistance. Chechen nationalism has given way to international jihadism. The new ideology was articulated most clearly by Movladi Udugov, former Information Minister and chief ideologist in the separatist government who fled Chechnya after Russia launched the second military campaign in 1999 to reassert control over the rebel region.

In a long article posted on a Chechen rebel site earlier this year, Mr. Udugov argued against aspiring for an independent Chechen state because any state in the modern world is a brutal and corrupt instrument of oppression. What Chechens needed, he said, was not classic statehood, but organisation for launching a global jihad with the ultimate goal of establishing a worldwide Islamist caliphate.

This philosophy is consonant with what Al-Qaeda preaches — and also practises in Pakistan's tribal area of North Waziristan where the Taliban earlier this year announced the establishment of an "Islamic state" dedicated to the cause of jihad against NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In a symbolic show of solidarity with Chechen rebels, an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Iraq earlier this month abducted four Russian diplomats and killed one to demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.

In keeping with the new internationalist ideology, Saidullayev had called for extending rebel resistance throughout the Caucasus. Chechen rebels have lately shunned Beslan-type terror strikes against civilians in an effort to win support for their campaign to spread Muslim insurgency across the volatile region. A series of terrorist attacks targeting police, security services, and the military have rocked the predominantly Muslim regions of Russia's Northern Caucasus — Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygeya, and Karachayevo-Cherkessiya. While Chechen rebels have provided moral inspiration and technical assistance to their "brothers in faith," the new insurgency also has local roots.

The collapse of the Soviet Union critically weakened the federal centre's control over ethnically defined regions, precipitating total corruption of local elites, whose sole motive was self-enrichment. This left the majority of the population exposed to abject poverty, widespread unemployment, and police brutality. While elsewhere in Russia living standards have grown substantially in recent years, in the North Caucasus people remain as poor as ever. This created a fertile ground for the growth of extremism.

"Today the forces opposed to Russia, not finding other ways of fighting tyranny, come to us and that is a great help for us," Saidullayev said last year commenting on an armed uprising in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, when about 200 men staged simultaneous attacks on police stations, and the headquarters of the security and prison services.

The Nalchik revolt, one of the biggest in the Northern Caucasus, was crushed within hours, leaving about a 100 people dead. Investigation revealed that most attackers were linked to local jamaats. These Islamic councils sprang up in the region to preach the return to "pure" Islam as opposed to the official Islam of their corrupt rulers.

The local authorities' clumsy attempts to suppress Muslim extremism with the help of violent police raids and mosque closures only served to further alienate thousands of believers. Before long, jamaats evolved into a network of clandestine militant outfits led by Chechen and Al-Qaeda emissaries.

"Kabardino-Balkariya is a wonderful country, all it needs is to be awakened," Chechnya's most notorious warlord Shamil Basayev once said. "And when it wakes up, the entire Caucasus will burn."

Russia's Deputy Prosecutor-General Nikolai Shepel admitted that an "international terrorist organisation" operates in Russia's South. "Its goal is to tear [the] Northern Caucasus from Russia and set up the so-called Islamic state — khalifah," he said a few months ago. "This underground network has a fairly large membership and poses great danger."

Russia's reaction

While vowing to suppress ruthlessly armed revolt, Moscow is also trying to address the social and economic roots of Islamic insurgency. A year ago, President Vladimir Putin appointed his right-hand man, Dmitry Kozak, as special envoy to North Caucasus to break the hold of corrupt ethnic clans on the region. Eight months after the Nalchik uprising, the Government of Kabardino-Balkaria was sacked and an ethnic Russian was appointed Prime Minister. The process of government change has also begun in other provinces.

Even as the thrust of rebel activity has moved outside Chechnya, the region is still Moscow's biggest headache in North Caucasus. But the nature of the problem has changed.

Russian forces based in Chechnya have been steadily tightening the noose, killing one rebel leader after another. In fact, only two well-known warlords are still at large — Basayev and Doku Umarov, 42, who succeeded Saidullayev.

Russia's main problem now is not rebels but Chechnya's de facto ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the Moscow-installed President Akhmad Kadyrov, assassinated in a rebel bomb attack in 2004.

Mr. Ramzan Kadyrov has since had a meteoric career, rising to the post of Chechnya's Prime Minister earlier this year. The Kremlin has apparently decided he is the best option in its plan to pacify the region, and is encouraging his presidential ambitions.

Decorated by Mr. Putin with Russia's top award, Order of the Hero of Russia, Mr. Ramzan Kadyrov has mounted a massive propaganda campaign to glorify himself and has been pressing President Alu Alkhanov to step down after October 30, when he turns 30, the minimum age to qualify for Chechnya's top job. In an incident last month, the bodyguards of the two leaders staged a shootout in the government compound in the capital Grozny.

Tension between the two leaders has grown so intense that they were recently summoned to the Kremlin by President Putin. Alkhanov has the support of several Chechen "battalion commanders" who are unhappy with Mr. Ramzan Kadyrov's attempts to put them down. Mr. Ramzan Kadyrov's thuggish methods of ruling Chechnya with the help of a personal army of several thousand bodyguards and paramilitary police have also antagonised large sections of the Chechen people. His men are accused of committing three out of four crimes that take place in Chechnya, abducting and terrorising members of rival clans.

Moscow, which still deploys an armed force of 80,000 in Chechnya, has so far been able to keep Mr. Ramzan Kadyrov in rein, forcing him recently to disband one of his armed outfits, the Anti-Terrorist Centre, after numerous complaints about human rights abuses. But the measure has left thousands of former militants jobless, raising the possibility of them going back to the rebels.

The incident highlighted the difficult choices Moscow faces in trying to strike a balance between rival power groups in Chechnya. Maintaining this balance is key to returning the region to normality, which in turn is a crucial condition for defeating insurgency across the Northern Caucasus.

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