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| Author: | Preeti Bhattacharji, Research Associate |
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Updated: August 5, 2008
The Chechens are an ethnic minority that lives in Russia's Caucasus region. For the past two hundred years, they have generally been governed by Moscow, though they have had varying degrees of de facto autonomy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechen separatists launched a coordinated campaign for independence, which resulted in two devastating wars and an ongoing insurgency in the Chechen region. Chechen terrorists continue to agitate for independence, though the death of separatist leader Shamil Basayev in July 2006 seems to have severely weakened the separatist movement.
The Chechens are a largely Muslim ethnic group that has lived for centuries in the mountainous Caucasus region. For the past two hundred years, Chechens have resisted Russian rule. During World War II, Russian leader Joseph Stalin accused the Chechens of cooperating with the Nazis and forcibly deported the entire population to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Tens of thousands of Chechens died, and the survivors were allowed to return home only after Stalin's death.
Chechnya has experienced several brief periods of de facto independence. In January 1921, four years after the Russian Revolution, Chechnya joined Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia to form the Mountain Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. But the following year, the Soviet Union seized control of Chechnya and turned it into a Soviet province called the Chechen Autonomous Oblast. In January 1934, Soviet officials merged the Chechen Autonomous Oblast with the neighboring Ingush Autonomous Oblast, largely to dilute each region's ethnic identity.
During World War II, as German forces moved into the Soviet Union and toward the Caucasus, many ethnic minority groups subject to Soviet and Russian rule for generations seized on the opportunity presented by the war to try and break free. German forces never reached Chechnya, but Chechen nationalist Khasan Israilov led a revolt against Soviet rule which lasted from 1940 to 1944. After Soviet troops crushed the rebellion, Stalin accused the Chechens of collaborating with Nazi invaders. In 1944, Stalin disbanded the Chechen-Ingush republic altogether and forcibly deported the entire Chechen population to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Chechens were not allowed to return to their homeland until 1957, whenStalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, restored the province amid de-Stalinization.
In the early 1990s, following the Soviet collapse, separatists in the newly formed Russian Federation Republic of Chechnya formed an independence movement called the Chechen All-National Congress. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, opposed Chechen independence, arguing that Chechnya was an integral part of Russia. From 1994 to 1996, Russia fought Chechen guerillas in a devastating conflict that became known as the First Chechen War. Tens of thousands of civilians died, but Russia failed to win control of Chechnya's mountainous terrain, giving Chechnya de facto independence. In May 1996, Yeltsin signed a cease-fire with the Chechen separatists, and they agreed on a peace treaty the following year.
But violence again flared three years later. In August 1999, Chechen militants invaded the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan to support a local separatist movement. The following month, five bombs exploded in Russia over a ten-day period, killing almost three hundred civilians. Moscow blamed Chechen rebels for the explosions, which comprised the largest coordinated terrorist attack in Russian history. The Dagestan invasion and the Russian bombings prompted Russian forces to launch the Second Chechen War, also known as the War in the North Caucasus. In February 2000, Russia recaptured the Chechen capital of Grozny, destroying a good part of the city center in the process, but reasserting direct control over Chechnya. Tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians were killed or wounded in the two wars, and hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced. Since the end of the second war, Chechen separatist activity has diminished, and the July 2006 death of separatist leader Shamil Basayev—in an explosion many see as the work of Russia's internal security services—seems to have stifled the movement.
No, and the connection between terrorists and the Chechen leadership remains unclear. Western governments, including the United States, have said that Russia has tried to portray all Chechens as Islamist terrorists in order to justify the measures Russian forces use to crush Chechen resistance. But it is true that Chechen separatists have employed brutal tactics against civilian targets, including, for example, hospitals and theaters. Richard Boucher, former spokesman of the U.S. State Department, has said that "the lack of a political solution and the number of credible reports of massive human rights violations, we believe, contribute to an environment that is favorable toward terrorism."
Information about groups linked to the conflict in Chechnya is hard to confirm, but experts say the struggle is between local separatists—a loosely organized group, with semi-independent commanders—and the Russian army. According to the U.S. State Department, the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB) is the primary channel for Islamic funding of the Chechen guerillas, in part through links to al-Qaeda-related financiers on the Arabian Peninsula. The United States also defined the Chechnya-based Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR) and the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs as terrorist entities in February 2003.
Chechnya's long and violent guerrilla war has attracted a small number of Islamist militants from outside of Chechnya—some of whom are Arab fighters with possible links to al-Qaeda. Among the Islamist militants, the most prominent was Basayev, Russia's most wanted man. Basayev fought for Chechen independence for more than a decade, and was the mastermind behind the worst terrorist attacks on Russian soil. On July 10, 2006, Basayev was killed in an explosion in neighboring Ingushetia. His death cast doubt on the future of the Chechen separatist movement, and allegedly led to the surrender of five hundred militants. Four months later, Russian security forces killed Abu Hafs al-Urdani, the Jordanian-born commander of foreign fighters in Chechnya. Since then, violence in Chechnya has ebbed, though terrorism in the areas of Dagestan and Ingushetia has increased.
The most notorious and devastating attack came in September 2004, when Basayev ordered an attack on a school in Beslan, a town in North Ossetia. More than three hundred people died in the three-day siege, most of them children. There were thirty-two militants, though only three or four were Chechans. All but one of the militants were reportedly killed during the siege. Since then, violence has generally targeted individual officials and government offices rather than large groups of civilians. Attacks include:
Experts say there are several ties between the al-Qaeda network and Chechen groups. A Chechan warlord known as Khattab is said to have met with Osama bin Laden while both men were fighting the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Alexander Vershbow, a U.S. ambassador to Russia, said shortly after September 11, 2001, "We have long recognized that Osama bin Laden and other international networks have been fueling the flames in Chechnya, including the involvement of foreign commanders like Khattab." Khattab was killed in April 2002.
Zacarias Moussaoui, whom U.S. authorities have charged with being the "20th hijacker" in the September 11 attacks, was reported by the Wall Street Journal to be formerly "a recruiter for al-Qaeda-backed rebels in Chechnya." Chechen militants reportedly fought alongside al-Qaeda and Taliban forces against the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in late 2001. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan was one of the only governments to recognize Chechen independence.
Russian authorities, including former president Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly stressed the involvement of international terrorists and bin Laden associates in Chechnya—in part, experts say, to generate Western sympathy for Russia's military campaign against the Chechen rebels. Russia's former defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, claimed that a videotape of Khattab meeting with bin Laden had been found in Afghanistan, but Russia has not aired the tape publicly.
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