Staff Writer-IslamOnline.net
Ramzan Kadyrov, Moscow's protégé, reincarnates Stalin's policies of suppressing his own population, (Reuters photo)
On Apr. 16, 2009, Chechnya's pro-Russia President Ramzan Kadyrov announced the end of the "Chechnya Operation" — 15 years after two brutal wars followed by low-intensity skirmishes have reduced the country to rubble and caused thousands of casualties and forcibly deported people.
Yet, behind such lofty official rhetoric lies the fact that the voice of the Chechen people is still unrecognized.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechens' aspirations for independence were about to be achieved after the Chechens inflicted an ignominious defeat on Russia in the First Chechen War.
With Putin's Russia launching merciless and atrocious second war against Chechnya, Moscow regained de facto control, and installed a puppet regime that established a brutal police state, launched propagandistic media campaign, and employed "divide and rule" tactics aiming at weakening the resistance.
However, "the separatists continue to attract recruits from villages and towns across Chechnya, and the policy of the pro-Moscow authorities has done nothing to slow the stream of young men 'going into the woods', as Chechens refer to those joining the resistance," said Tony Wood, a journalist who has written extensively on Chechnya.
Chechens, who have a distinctive history, culture, and traditions, have sought independence ever since the Tsarist Russia annexed their lands.
IslamOnline.net's Politics in Depth has interviewed Mr. Tony Wood, the deputy editor of the New Left Review and the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence, to have an in-depth analysis and informative background on Chechnya's history, wars, resistance movements, and the reason why international media coverage is no longer addressing Chechnya.
Mr. Wood's book highly criticizes the Russian policies and wars against Chechnya, logically argues for the right of Chechnya to gain independence, and debunks the myth of "nihilist, terrorist Islamic rebels".
The Guardian commented on the book as "a major contribution to the understanding of an ongoing tragedy [. . . ] an ideal primer for anyone wanting to understand the origins and nature of the Chechen conflict."
The History of the Chechen or Vainakh People
Stalin's Deportation Policy in Chechnya
The First and Second Chechen Wars
Origins of the Chechen National Movement
The Role of Sufi Orders Resisting the Russian Occupation
Russia and Islam
The History of the Chechen or Vainakh People
The Chechens actually refer to themselves as "Nokhchi" — "Chechen" is a Russian designation, derived from the name of a village where a battle took place between ethnic Russian settlers and indigenous peoples in the 18th century.
IslamOnline.net (IOL): Who are the "Chechen" or "Vainakh "? What is their ethnic, political, societal, and religious history?
Many mention that the struggle of the people of Chechnya dates back to the early Russian empire. To what extent is it true and how did the conflict historically start and has developed? And do the Vainakh or Chechen people actually have a distinct identity different from the Cossacks'?
Tony Wood: The Chechens are one of a complex patchwork of ethnic groups inhabiting the North Caucasus region.
As the most numerous of these small peoples, they have tended to take a leading role resisting the Russian rule over the centuries — a stance which has earned them both admiration and resentment among their neighbors.
Chechens are closely related to the neighboring Ingush people — the two are in fact known collectively as "Vainakh ", meaning simply "our people"; they speak languages that are mutually comprehensible, and are bound by many clan and family ties.
The Chechens actually refer to themselves as "Nokhchi " — "Chechen" is a Russian designation, derived from the name of a village where a battle took place between ethnic Russian settlers and indigenous peoples in the 18th century.
These settlers have been the Chechens' main historical adversaries — principal among them the Cossacks, who began to arrive in the 16th century.
Cossacks are entirely distinct from the Caucasian peoples, since they are predominantly ethnic Russians who have fled serfdom and state authority in Russia proper; they were former serfs, outlaws, and bandits who went to make a new life on the Russian Empire’s southern frontier.
Initially, they were few in number, but as Russia’s southward expansion gathered pace, the competition over land between Cossacks and native Caucasian peoples intensified.
There are, then, historical antecedents to the present-day conflict between Chechnya and Russia.
At the same time, I think it is important to stress the fact that the ongoing war is not the inevitable product of deep-running hatreds; it was the bloody outcome of a deliberate decision by the government of Boris Yeltsin to suppress Chechen aspirations to independence by invading Chechnya in Dec. 1994.
Stalin's Deportation Policy in Chechnya
In Feb. 1943, the Chechens and the Ingush people were packed into cattle trains and sent to the Central Asian steppes by soldiers who had been sent to the Caucasus on the pretext of mending roads and bridges.
IOL: During the Soviet Union's rule, Stalin followed the policy of displacement. Did Stalin and other Soviet leaders use this policy dealing with the Chechen people? And how far this policy has an impact on the conflict nowadays, if any?
Wood: The Soviet Union followed a policy of mass deportation in the case of several ethnic groups living within its borders — starting with the Koreans who were deported from the Far East region to Central Asia in the mid-1930s.
During the Second World War, when part of the North Caucasus region was occupied by advancing German troops, Stalin accused the Muslim peoples of the region of collaborating with Germans, and he sentenced them all — men, women, and children — to deportation en masse.
This, I should add, despite the fact that many of Chechens volunteered for service at the Soviet front — over 15,000 Chechens alone fought in the Red Army against the Nazis.
In addition, there is little evidence of collaboration among Chechens; however, they had been waging a rebellion against Soviet rule as of 1940, led by the former Communist Party member Hassan Israilov, who saw himself as waging a struggle for national liberation, and certainly had no sympathy for the Nazis.
In Feb. 1943, the Chechens and the Ingush people were packed into cattle trains and sent to the Central Asian steppes by soldiers who had been sent to the Caucasus on the pretext of mending roads and bridges.
The soldiers were billeted with Chechen families, but then on 23 Feb., they had to turn against their hosts; in remote mountain areas, where the logistics of deportation were complicated, entire villages were simply burned to the ground with their inhabitants still inside.
Many of those who were packed onto the trains died of disease or of exposure to the cold, and more perished in the harsh conditions into which they were thrown.
The Chechens were only one of the peoples deported — Karachais, Cherkessians, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, and Crimean Tartars were also displaced.
But the Chechens’ losses were far greater than those of their neighbors — they lost 30 per cent of their total population of around 400,000, compared to an average of 20 per cent for the deported peoples as a whole.
Because of their large numbers, the Chechens were therefore affected more both in absolute and in relative terms.
In my view, this explains why the deportation was a galvanizing national trauma for the Chechens in ways it was not for other Caucasian peoples.
It certainly became the traumatic soil for the national movement that was to emerge towards the end of the Soviet era.
The First and Second Chechen Wars
This bloodbath was in every way a humiliation for Russia and the epitome of its 1990s decline from great-power status. So, the Russian invasion in the autumn of 1999 was to a large extent motivated by a desire to avenge the disasters of 1994-96.
IOL: Strategically and politically, what were the reasons for the first and second Chechen wars?
Wood: The two wars were, I think, motivated by somewhat different concerns — the outcome of the first, after all, would necessarily shape the rationale for the second.
The first invasion of Dec. 1994 was termed an "operation to restore constitutional order" by the Yeltsin government.
Its purported aim was to fully reintegrate Chechnya into the Russian Federation: the then Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudaev, after winning free and fair elections in Oct.1991, had declared independence in Nov. of the same year, and refused to sign the new Federal Treaty that Moscow was offering to its various sub-units (republics, oblasts, and the like).
By the spring of 1994, Chechnya was the only region that had failed to do so — on the logical enough basis that as a sovereign state, Chechnya was no longer part of Russia.
The Kremlin’s decision to invade came after several months in which they had armed and funded opponents of Dudaev in an unsuccessful bid to have him overthrown, and after a failed incursion by Russian tanks in late Nov.1994 — dubbed "Yeltsin’s equivalent of the Bay of Pigs" by one Russian analyst.
Russia essentially pursued a strategy towards Chechnya similar to that of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War with respect to small states whose regimes they found uncongenial.
The difference is that Russia regarded Chechnya as part of its own territory, and saw a strategic imperative to retain control over it.
Chechnya possesses significant oil reserves, and it is located at the center of the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas.
Moreover, its independence would set an example for other peoples of the region to follow, potentially sparking a series of separatist moves — and, in the minds of Russian strategists, possibly prompting the unraveling of Russia altogether.
I would argue that this latter threat has been exaggerated, and that Chechen independence and peaceful coexistence with Russia would have set a far better example for the region than the war Yeltsin launched.
Incidentally, Moscow itself recently undermined its own arguments about the threat of a separatist avalanche by recognizing Abkhazia's and South Ossetia's independence.
The First Chechen War lasted until Aug. 1996 and ended in a stalemate after the vastly outnumbered Chechen guerrilla forces fought the demoralized Russian army to a standstill.
The number of casualties remains unclear to this day, but the most conservative estimates give a figure of 45,000 civilians and soldiers; others suggest that the total may be nearer to 100,000.
This bloodbath was in every way a humiliation for Russia and the epitome of its 1990s decline from great-power status. So, the Russian invasion in the autumn of 1999 was to a large extent motivated by a desire to avenge the disasters of 1994-96.
The pretext for the war this time was provided by an incursion into Dagestan by Islamist militants led by Shamil Basaev in Aug.1999, and by a series of bombings of apartment buildings across Russia — in which no Chechen involvement has ever been proved.
Indeed, there have been troubling indications that the Russian security services themselves might have known about or even been involved in these bombings.
Nevertheless, Putin announced the start of an "anti-terrorist operation" to bring the perpetrators to justice; massive aerial bombardment of Chechen civilians began, with untold casualties.
The unspoken premise of this second war was in fact that all Chechens were "terrorists".
Many of the same tactics deployed in the first war — targeting civilians, internment of all males between the ages of 10 and 60 in "filtration camps", and widespread torture — were then applied with even greater intensity.
The appearance of success gave tremendous popularity to the prime minister who launched it, and played a central role in the initial consolidation of his power.
Thus the two wars have been very different in their strategic and political character. If the first had been motivated by erroneous, but comprehensible, strategic calculations, the second was far more cynical and brutal, using the military pulverization and demonization of an entire people to build a new regime around Putin.
Origins of the Chechen National Movement
Over 1990-91, as nationalist currents came to prominence in the periphery of the USSR, Chechnya was no exception.
IOL:What are the origins of the Chechen national movement?
Wood: The Chechen national movement emerged during perestroika, towards the end of the Soviet era.
As with national movements elsewhere in the former the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Chechen national movement's origins lay in the "informal associations" formed in the late 1980s.
These initially focused on discussions of history, but soon joined forces with the early stirrings of environmental protest — like the demonstrations against a planned chemical plant in the town of Gudermes in 1988 followed by mass meetings across the republic, as concerns over nature merged with notions of national renewal.
Over 1990-91, as nationalist currents came to prominence in the periphery of the USSR, Chechnya was no exception. An independent nationalist party was formed in the spring of 1990, and in late 1990 the first Chechen National Congress was held.
Over the course of 1991, as more Soviet republics sought to leave the Union fold, the centrifugal momentum gathered pace.
It is significant that Dzhokhar Dudaev, the elected leader of the Chechen National Congress in March 1991, returned to Chechnya after serving in the Soviet Air Force in Estonia.
Dudaev noticed that Estonia's population of 1.6 million — slightly larger than that of Chechnya — had just voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union.
Many in Chechnya saw their country’s situation as comparable to that of the Baltic States, as small nations annexed by Russia who then sought sovereign status; the Chechen nationalists even borrowed from their Baltic counterparts, modeling their 1992 constitution on that of Estonia.
In a stark contrast, while the Baltic States have been accepted into the international community and the European Union, also gaining NATO membership, Chechnya has faced almost two decades of war and suffering.
The contrast becomes even more painful when we consider that the nationalist movements in each place emerged from similar sources, and had comparable popular legitimacy.
The Role of Sufi Orders Resisting the Russian Occupation
The principal historical example is, of course, that of Imam Shamil, a Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh from neighboring Dagestan who waged guerrilla war against the Russian Empire for 20 years in the mid-19th century.
IOL: Throughout the history of the conflict between the Chechen people and the Russians, Sufi orders played a significant role in resisting Russian occupation of Chechnya. How do you see the role of Sufi orders? How far did and do they succeed? And why?
Wood: When the Chechens converted to Islam in a gradual process stretching from the 17th to 19th centuries, they combined Sufism with remnants of their old pagan traditions (the Chechen word for God is not "Allah" but "Dela ", after the main god in their pre-Islamic pantheon).
The result was a very particular fusion of Islam and local practices, which has been a potent unifying force in times of conflict — combining the universalism of religion with the particularism of local custom.
A further important factor to note is that the network of Sufi brotherhoods in Chechnya mapped closely onto the clan structure of Chechen society.
Sufism in that sense became fused with the overall sense of Chechen identity, which has made it a central part of their struggle to resist Russian rule.
The principal historical example is, of course, that of Imam Shamil, a Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh from neighboring Dagestan who waged guerrilla war against the Russian Empire for 20 years in the mid-19th century.
The struggle involved several different Caucasian peoples, but the bulk of the fighting took place in Chechnya, and large numbers of Shamil’s fighters were Chechens.
Later in the 19th century, the Qadiri Sufi orders of Chechnya, led by Sheikh Kunta Hadji, were more prominent in rebelling against Tsarist rule.
In the early 20th century, during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the two main Sufi orders were divided. The Naqshbandi brotherhoods fought against Soviet power while many of the Qadiris initially welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, seeing it as the best way for Chechens to obtain the land they so desperately needed.
In part, this reflected the different social composition of Sufi adherents — Naqshbandis generally coming from more prosperous backgrounds in the lowlands, and Qadiris from the highlands where villagers were overall poorer.
This difference was also apparent in the early 1990s, when the nationalist appeal of Djokhar Dudaev found more resonance among Qadiri Sufis than Naqshbandis — the lowlands had been more closely connected with and had benefited more from the Soviet system.
Hence, it was the loud zikr of the Qadiris that became one of the main symbolic markers of the Chechen national movement in the early 1990s. This is another example of the interweaving of national and religious identity I referred to.
The Sufi orders were, then, central both to Chechens' identity and to their struggle against Russian rule.
However, the two wars Russia has launched against Chechnya since 1994 have significantly altered this picture, with "Salafist" groups becoming an increasingly prominent part of the military resistance after 1995, and playing a highly visible role in public life in the period between the wars (1997-99).
Since the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, the division within the Chechen resistance between traditional Sufis and the more recently emerged "Salafists" has widened.
Today, many adherents of the main Sufi orders in Chechnya seem to see Russian troops as their best defense against what they call "Wahhabism", and large numbers of them have for this reason worked with the Russian occupation; the most obvious example of this was of course Ahmed Kadyrov, former chief mufti of the separatist movement and a prominent figure among the Qadiris, whom Moscow chose to head their puppet government in 2000.
Russia and Islam
Since the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, Moscow has made concerted attempts to woo the Muslim clergy to its side.
IOL: Do you think that the attempts of Russia to make a friendly Islam are succeeding in Chechnya?
Wood: Even from Tsarist times, the Russian authorities have sought to bring Islam under their control by gaining power over the clergy.
Popular forms of religion, however, in the Soviet period gave rise to what has been called "parallel Islam". The Sufi brotherhoods in Chechnya continued to operate outside the supervision of the official "Spiritual Board of Muslims of the North Caucasus".
Since the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, Moscow has made concerted attempts to woo the Muslim clergy to its side, starting with Akhmad Kadyrov, the father of the current pro-Moscow President of Chechnya, who brought with him a large portion of Sufi adherents.
This gained Russia the support of many Muslim clerics, but it turned these clerics into targets for the resistance, which contains both Sufi and "Salafist " currents.
As a result, the war has produced a new and menacing split within Chechen society, potentially laying the basis for a long-running civil war, even if Russian forces were to withdraw.
To follow: The second part of the interview about: Chechnya and oil, the current Russian policy in Chechnya, Beslan attacks, the US and European policies towards Chechnya, and other issues
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