#13 - JRL 8167 - JRL Home
From: "Robert Bruce Ware" <rware@siue.edu>
Subject: Ambassador Vershbow/ Chechnya/ 8163
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004
Congratulations to Peter Lavelle for another excellent interview, this time with Ambassador Vershbow (JRL 8163), who has contributed much to our understanding of Russia. Ambassador Vershbow has helpfully shifted the discussion of a political solution in Chechnya away from negotiations with the militants, and toward the establishment of a legitimately representative political system. The former was always a non-starter: What militant leader ever had sufficient control to guarantee any settlement that might be reached? On the other hand, the latter could become a way forward if authorities in Moscow and Grozny would give it a chance, as they failed to do in the pivotal year of 2003.
Unfortunately, Ambassador Vershbow was not as helpful in discussing the causes of the Chechen wars. With reference to the first war, he remarked: “as time passed and the war escalated and human right violations were committed by Russian forces, and also by the Chechens, this contributed to a radicalization of the population and created fertile ground for radical Islamic ideas, which in turn attracted foreign terrorist and foreign Islamist elements to enter Chechnya. Thus, we saw a region with no Islamic fundamentalism to speak of when the Soviet Union broke up suddenly become a breeding ground for radical ideas. In that sense, we have indeed recognized that there is a danger that Chechnya could be a link in the chain of international terrorism.”
This is not quite correct. Islamic fundamentalism appeared in Tajikistan prior to 1989, when the Islamic Party of Revival (IPR) attracted attention with its publication of a tract titled “Are We Muslims?”. An ethnic Avar from Dagestan named Akmed-Kadji Aktaev, who was residing in Tajikistan at the time became a leader in the IPR. Aktaev was a physician and self-trained theologian. In 1990, the IPR was organized at the Union level following a conference in Astrakhan. At that time, Aktaev returned to Dagestan, where he founded the organization “Islamia”. Aktaev and his Dagestani proteges, such as Bagudin Kebedov (a.k.a. Magomedov) quickly attracted the attention of Chechen leaders, such as Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev and Movladi Udugov, who regarded them as spiritual authorities.
Thus, Islamist elements appeared in Chechnya years before the first war, and had acquired influence by the spring of 1994 when Shamil Basaev and his followers trained in Afghanistan. Four years later, Islamists were competing for control of Chechnya and were a serious destabilizing force in Dagestan, where they were involved in numerous violent confrontations, and where they established an enclave that rejected the authority of Dagestani and Russian officials. In February 1999, President Aslan Maskhadov placed Chechnya under the rule of Sharia’ law, an indication that he had effectively surrendered Chechnya to Islamist control. At that time, there were hundreds of Arab gunmen in Chechnya, especially near Urus-Martan and at a military training camp in Serzhen-Yurt. Many of these fighters had Al Qaida connections, and Al Qaida-connected money underwrote the camp’s expenses.
It is clearly true that the economic devastation and social dislocation of both Chechen wars have contributed to the proliferation of Islamism and terrorism in Chechnya. Yet while war must be regarded as a contributory cause of this proliferation, there are two reasons why it cannot be regarded as a necessary cause: First, both Islamism and terrorism preceded the first war in Chechnya. Second, both Islamism and terrorism proliferated in Dagestan, where there was no war with Russia. Indeed in the early 1990s, Islamist extremism arrived first in Dagestan and spread across the border to Chechnya. Moreover, the proliferation of Islamist extremism in Dagestan has been directly connected with numerous terrorist acts, despite the absence of hostilities with Russia. While problems of Islamism and terrorism would probably have been less severe in the absence of Russo-Chechen conflicts, it is likely that such problems would still have been substantial, and probable that they would, in any case, have led to war with Russia in much the way that they did in 1999. During the period from August 1996 to August 1999, Dagestani officials made numerous efforts, and offered substantial concessions, in order to avoid conflict with Islamists. Yet they found that their efforts came to nothing, and that war was the inevitable consequence.