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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 5 (April 2002)
By: Anssi Kullberg, 2nd Dec. 2001
In reports of Chechnya, a regularly ignored aspect has been the own views, motives, disagreements and connections of the Chechens. If they have been researched at all, it has been done usually through the Russian point of view, trying to explain the Russian war in Chechnya with myths on Islamic extremism, terrorism and crime. Studies on Chechnya have either been a carelessly studied little branch of Russian studies, or that of the studies emphasising the radical Islamic factor. Both views, employed in the case of Chechnya, distort the general picture of the Chechen struggle for national independence.
It has often been expressed that the start of the present Chechen War II was the incursion of one thousand fighters into Dagestan in summer 1999. Only a small part of the group were Chechens. The St. Petersburg born analyst of Caucasian affairs, Miriam Lanskoy, has pointed out that it was not Chechnya that destabilised Dagestan in 1998-1999, but rather the other way round. Dagestani opposition leaders, who had been driven into the border zone by internal power struggle of Dagestan, incited the Chechen Islamist opposition, led by Shamil Basayev, to participate in a provocation, where at the beginning only Dagestanis took part.
There were also some, although few, foreign extremists in Chechnya, like the mysterious Mr. Hattab, since these professional jihadists always appear wherever there is a war going on in Muslim territory. They are still permanent favourites of the myths spreading in the media. In November 2001 Hattab was simultaneously claimed to have resided in Chechnya, Abkhazia as well as in the besieged Afghan city of Kunduz. When Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance, the news agencies that had been spreading wrong information, forgot the whole issue very rapidly, without making a correction. The French journalist Anne Nivat, who has published a book about the years she spent in Chechnya, managed to see only two Arabs in Chechnya, one of whom was Hattab himself.
Usually the internationalist Islamists are against forces advocating national independence. Usama bin Ladin and his Arab fellows in Peshawar never helped Afghanistan in its fight for independence against the Soviet occupation. The small but visible Islamist extreme groups in Kashmir are not defending the Kashmiri majority’s idea of an independent Kashmir. Chechnya makes no exception. Also the Chechen Islamists have from the beginning been rebelling first against President Djokhar Dudayev, then against the present President Aslan Maskhadov. The Islamists got closest to power in Chechnya when the Russians killed Dudayev in April 1996, and the vice president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev took over. Later Yandarbiyev imported the sharia in Chechnya and established an "embassy" in Kabul. The latter attracted a lot of negative attention willingly stressed by Russians, but still Yandarbiyev acted as a private person and Maskhadov’s government never approved any diplomatic relations with Taliban Afghanistan.
Islamism and organised crime both arrived in Chechnya with the persuasion of money. In an isolated country, the Arab agents as well as the Russian mafia offered easy income. They both came through Moscow, and they also shared common interests from armament trade to oil, drugs and destabilising Chechnya. The esteemed researcher of organised crime, Dr. Mark Galeotti, has remarked that Chechnya’s independence was against the interests of both Russian and Chechen mafias.
Appealing to the excuse of Chechen crime is quite inconsequent, as in the ocean of Russian organised crime the Chechens contribute a drop or two. According to the Muscovite researcher of security affairs, Pavel Felgenhauer, the weapons of the Chechens do not originate in Arab countries but in Russia, whereas the financing of their guerrilla war comes mostly from the Diaspora – from the descendants of the Chechens and other Caucasians who have fled abroad from the tsarist times up to our days. Arabs have been financing something quite different from the Chechen struggle for independence.
Like in Afghanistan, also in Chechnya the Islamist circles are dominated by former communists, who have traditionally opposed the pro-independence circles. It is worth of noticing that Russia has in fact exploited the Islamists as her agents quite a few times both in the Caucasus and elsewhere. The professional criminal Bislan Gantemirov once founded an "Islamic Party", led armed rebellion against Dudayev, and was imprisoned for fraud, until Putin released him to lead another rebellion against Maskhadov. Also the present Quisling in Chechnya, Ahmed Kadyrov, was known as an Islamist who strongly opposed Maskhadov, as remembered by the Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov.
The notorious Basayev brothers Shamil and Shirvani were recruited by the Russian military intelligence GRU to participate a war in Abkhazia against Georgia, the only friendly state toward Chechnya. It was in Abkhazia, where also Hattab entered the picture. Later they formed the core of the Wahhabi movement that set against Maskhadov and the pro-independence Chechen regime. Besides Yandarbiyev, the Islamists’ civilian leadership included the former communist newspaper’s head editor Movladi Udugov, who is today running the Islamist web pages in Qatar.
The Islamists have very low support in Chechnya. Most Chechens are strongly in favour of independence, and support the nationalists, who prefer a pro-Western and secular Muslim state closer to Turkish model than Arabic.
A more traditional subgroup of the nationalists is constituted by the "Dudayevites", whose thinking is dominated by the rising national feelings of perestroika, and a romantic image of the Western countries, which were believed to rush into the help of Caucasians when freedom was demanded. Dudayev gave several speeches where he expressed admiration for the Finnish Winter War, and absorbed influences of the Estonian independence struggle while living in Tartu. Both Dudayev and Maskhadov were unpolitical professional soldiers. The intellectuals, moreover, tended more towards Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa or the first Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, than any Islamic leader.
Another openly pro-Western group is constituted by mostly younger, educated and more international persons who have gathered in the Maskhadov regime around the foreign minister Ilias Ahmadov, the parliament chairman Ahyad Idigov, and the vice premier Ahmed Zakayev. They have learned that the romantic ideals of freedom, democracy and nationalism did not bring support for Chechnya from the West. Instead, they want to advocate realist and strictly rational policy.
A good example of the new generation of Chechen politicians is the head of the political department of the Chechen foreign ministry, 29-year-old Roman Khalilov, who has studied in Britain, and reminds that the West would now have all the good reasons to persuade Russia to negotiate, and to end the war, so that efforts could be made to handle what is in every party’s interests: to drive Islamist extreme groups out of Chechnya. As long as the Chechens have to fight the Russian army that is raging at large and terrorising civil population, President Maskhadov cannot do that.
Slight rays of light might be visible, as Russia has finally agreed on at least minimal negotiations with Maskhadov’s government. The Chechen negotiator has been Zakayev, who represents the moderate pro-Western Chechens. Time would be ripe for paying some more attention on what the Chechens think about their own future.
Anssi Kullberg, kullberg@hot.ee