Contemporary Caucasus Newsletter · 2019. 12. 18. · backing Ghukasian. Samvel Babaian thus lost...

Contemporary Caucasus NewsletterThe Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies

Issue 9 Spring 2000

Killings in the Armenian Parliament:Coup d’Etat, Political Conspiracy,or Destructive Rage?Stephan Astourian.................................p. 1

No Winners, All Losers:Russia and the War in ChechnyaEdward W. Walker.........................p. 7

Guilt and Agency in theRussian-Chechen WarJohanna Nichols..........................p. 11

Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet StudiesUniversity of California, Berkeley361 Stephens Hall #2304Berkeley, CA 94720-2304http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~bsp

Editor: Edward W. Walker. Layout: DeniseMonczewski. Please send suggestions, corrections,or inquiries to Denise Monczewski at [email protected]. edu.

In This Issue:

Killings in the Armenian Parlaiment: Coup d’Etat,Political Conspiracy, or Destructive Rage?Stephan Astourian

At 5:10 pm on 27 October 1999, at least five terrorists enteredthe building of the National Assembly of Armenia. Within half an hourPrime Minister Vazgen Sargsian, Speaker of Parliament Karen Demirchian,two Deputy Speakers, Yuri Bakhshian and Ruben Miroian, and Ministerfor Operative Affairs and former prime minister of the unrecognized Re-public of Mountainous Karabagh, Leonard Petrossian, were dead. An-other four members of parliament were killed as well (Henrik Abrahamian,Armenak Armenakian, Academician Mikayel Kotanian, and AndranikManukian), while about half a dozen individuals were wounded, includ-ing Armen Khachatrian, the chairman of the foreign affairs commission.The terrorist attack thus came close to decapitating the Armenian state,the only important official left alive being President Robert Kocharian.

Early interpretations of the events covered a broad spectrum ofpossibilities. Most editorials or articles in the Western press linked thesekillings to what looked like a promising turn taken by the Karabagh peaceprocess over the weeks preceding the events (The Economist, 30 Octo-ber, 1999, and articles in The Independent, 29 and 31 October 1999).Some hinted at a Russian role. Mark Almond, distinguished visitingfellow at the Hoover Institution and lecturer in modern history at OrielCollege, Oxford, wrote in the Wall Street Journal (1 November 1999)that Vazgen Sargsian had become “an unlikely ally” for the West, for hehad “shifted his ground and turned against Mr. Kocharian, uniting hispower-base with Mr. Demirchian’s in this May’s parliamentary election.”He added that “suspiciously, key allies of President Kocharian were not inthe chamber for the shooting.” Mr. Almond seemed to point to Russiawhen he stated that “the only beneficiary of political upheaval in thisregion is likely to be Russia.” On the other hand, a New York Timeseditorial on 30 October 1999 accused Armenian nationalists of carryingout the attack.

In Armenia itself, public opinion differed from that prevailing inthe West. A poll conducted by the Center for Sociological Investigationsamong 600 residents of Yerevan revealed that 18.7 percent of respon-dents argued that the killings were the deed of a group of fanatics; 44.3percent believed that unspecified Armenian forces were behind the kill-ers; while only 17 percent attributed responsibility for the events to for-eign forces. Of the latter, 38.4 percent blamed the United States; 24.1percent pointed to Turkey; 14.3 percent blamed Azerbaijan; and 8.9 per-

Two Incurions into Dagestan andTheir Extraordinary ConsequencesJohn Dunlop...............................p. 20

Afghanistan: How to Grow anEthnic ConflictDavid Isao Hoffman.....................p. 25

Stephan Astourian is the William Saroyan Visiting Professor inArmenian Studies for 1999-2000 at UC Berkeley

cent considered Russia the guilty party. Of thosementioning interior forces, 39.4 percent pointed tothe current authorities and 8.9 percent to the formergovernment (Levon Ter-Petrossian’s regime and theArmenian National Movement).

Western and Armenian explanations for theevents are based not on hard evidence but on suspi-cions, ideological inclinations, or national biases.While the truth may remain elusive forever, it ishighly likely that the killings had something to dowith one or more of the key internal and externalpolitical developments in Armenia over the six pre-ceding months. The context, then, may shed somediffuse light on these events.

The ContextThree internal developments require cursory

comments. First, the parliamentary elections thattook place on 30 May 1999 reshaped the balance ofpower in the country. Won easily by the Unity Coa-lition led by Vazgen Sargsian and the People’s Partyof Armenia led by Karen Demirchian, these elec-tions left President Kocharian without any controlover the parliamentary majority, or for that matterover any party, except perhaps Country of Laws,which is widely viewed as the creation of the thenNational Security and Interior Minister, SerjSargsian. The president’s influence was further re-duced when Vazgen Sargsian, newly elected primeminister, formed the government in mid-June 1999.He removed Serj Sargsian, a Karabagh Armenianlike the president and Kocharian’s closest ally, asthe Minister of the Interior, leaving him as NationalSecurity Minister only. Suren Abrahamian was ap-pointed Minister of the Interior in his place.

The crisis that erupted between ArkadyGhukasian, president of the unrecognized Republicof Artsakh (as Karabaugh Armenians have renamedthe region after its medieval Armenian name), andDefense Minister Samvel Babaian, the strongmanof that republic, from late spring 1999 on consti-tutes the second major internal development. InArtsakh, Ghukasian had a firm grip neither on theparliament nor on the army. He claimed that Babaianhindered the establishment of a legal-rational typeof authority in Artsakh and the development of amodicum of democracy.

In this case, Vazgen Sargsian was able to di-minish Babaian’s influence to a certain extent bybacking Ghukasian. Samvel Babaian thus lost theBPS Caucasus Newsletter / 2

defense ministry and was reduced in mid-August 1999to the status of commander-in-chief of the Artsakharmy. President Kocharian seems to have backedSargsian and Ghukasian in this matter, even though herisked losing the support of the still powerful Babaianas a result. Babaian’s meddling into Armenia’s poli-tics during the parliamentary elections through the for-mation and financing of the Right and Accord partymay also have something to do with Vazgen Sargsian’sdecision to back Ghukasian. As that party essentiallyrejects any kind of compromise on MountainousKarabagh, it constitutes a hindrance to a peace agree-ment that might be acceptable to both Yerevan andBaku.

The third important development was VazgenSargsian’s speech on 28 July 1999 in which he statedthat he was determined to attack tax evasion, corrup-tion, and the shadow economy. Although the speechwas received with skepticism in Armenia, there areindications that within the limits of what is possible inthat country, he meant what he said. Indeed, on 13October Sargsian announced in parliament that thegovernment would soon present an anti-corruptionplan. This was not good news for some elements ofthe economic elite who had made their fortune in du-bious circumstances during President Ter-Petrossian’sregime and were subsequently left out of Sargsian’sruling circles.

On the international front, one factor standsout: U.S. pressures on both Armenia and Azerbaijanto settle the Karabagh conflict. These intensified fromthe spring of 1999, especially during the summer andfall. They led to meetings between Kocharian andHeydar Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, in Wash-ington on 27 April during the NATO jubilee, and inGeneva on 16 July and 22 August. Both sides, per-haps with a view to positioning their countries favor-ably for the forthcoming summit of the Organizationfor Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),scheduled to take place in Istanbul on 18-19 Novem-ber, suggested that these meetings were helpful. Itwould seem that the “common state” formula, aimedat preserving Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity while ac-commodating somehow the de facto independence ofMountainous Karabagh within Azerbaijan’s borders,served as a framework for the negotiations and thatsome progress had been made. Several hours beforehis death, Vazgen Sargsian had been discussing theKarabagh issue with U.S. Deputy Secretary of StateStrobe Talbott. The gap between the perceptions of

the events in Armenia and in the West is such that noless a knowledgeable and cool-headed analyst ofArmenia’s political life than Davit Petrossian, colum-nist of the weekly “Noyan Tapan Highlights” and rep-resentative in Armenia of the newly founded Swed-ish journal, Central Asia and the Caucasus, believesthat the killings were organized by the intelligenceservices of certain unnamed countries hostile to Ar-menia—the first stage of a coup aimed at implement-ing the American mediation plan in MountainousKarabagh.

What is known about the events in parliamentand about the personality of the killers and of theirpresumed accomplices sheds a rather different lighton the events.

Events, Presumed Killers and AccomplicesThe starting point for a short chronological de-

scription must be that the terrorists, five of whom werearrested, succeeded in entering and seizing the Arme-nian parliament without hindrance. Security, it seems,was extremely lax. Based on reports from eyewitnessesand a tape recording of the first hour of the events, theshooting started immediately. Robert Kocharian enteredthe building of the parliament at 6:50 pm. Slightly morethan three hours later, the “Ar” television companybroadcast the first interview by phone of the presumedringleader, Nairi Hunanian. Negotiations betweenKocharian and Hunanian, the format of which is un-clear, started at some point during the night of 27 Octo-ber and continued until the morning of 28 October. Theterrorists then agreed to surrender and release their hos-tages at 10:15 am, having received assurances fromKocharian that their trial would be fair and that theywould not be killed or mistreated by the security forces.Meanwhile, the morning newscast of the Armenian Na-tional Television broadcast statements by both the presi-dent and Hunanian. The broadcast was the latter’s sec-ond condition for surrendering. The mood of the killersinside parliament was one of fury during the killings anduntil about 7 pm, followed by more than sixteen hoursof subdued behavior. During that first hour, Hunanian’srecorded words and eyewitness reports about one ofhis accomplices suggest that a mixture of rage, grandi-ose fantasy, readiness for martyrdom, and even someself-pity prevailed among the terrorists. Here are someof Hunanian’s statements:

“Dear compatriots! People! Those who were suckingyour blood, I have killed all their kind. I have killed

them like dogs.”

“Everyone to the National Assembly. We shall conquer.”

“They took all our wealth. That’s enough. All dogsmust be destroyed without exception. Everyone to theNational Assembly.”

“What, have you forgotten the Armenian people have aboss? Whose blood were you sucking for 10 years?”

“People, friends, aren’t you sorry for the nation? Youare gathered here and you are silent. If I am killed here—that is not important. The main thing is that I lived formy people. The people I killed were not Armenians.”

Asked by a group of journalists that he knewhow they could leave the building, Hunanian replied:“Through the central entrance. We have our peoplethere.” Another terrorist was overheard saying onthe phone to an unknown accomplice outside theParliament, “Please also bring the weapons that arehidden in Yeghegnadzor.” These, as well as otherdetails, suggest that Hunanian and the others expectedoutside armed help and thought that the Parliamentbuilding was surrounded by their armed supporters.They were mistaken and most probably misled. Theavailable evidence also indicates that none of thesemen made any statement about Karabagh.

The background of the five terrorists arrestedin the Parliament also deserves some attention. Theirleader, Nairi Hunanian, was born in 1965 and is agraduate of the Philology Department of YerevanState University (YSU). A supporter of the Arme-nian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, orDashnaktsutiun in Armenian) in the late Soviet pe-riod, he was one of the founders of the Union of Ar-menian Students and is said to have become the YSUstudent representative on the Karabagh Committee.In 1991, he joined the ARF. He was expelled fromthat party a year later for misbehavior, according toone of its current officials. However, an acquain-tance of his from his years at Yerevan State Univer-sity places that expulsion in 1994. During his ARFyears, he founded and managed the “Horizon” infor-mation agency affiliated with that party. From 1994to 1997, he lived in Yevpatoria in the Crimea where,some sources state, he was involved, among otherthings, in trade with Turkey. After returning to Ar-menia, he had no known stable occupation besides a

BPS Caucasus Newsletter / 3


short-lived talk show. The above-mentioned acquain-tance of his reports that when she chanced upon himnear the Opera Square in the summer, Hunanian toldher that he was planning bloodshed in Armenia be-cause “this is the only way to force the people incharge to stop sucking the blood of the nation.”

The other four direct participants wereDerenik Bejanian, Edvard Grigorian, Karen Unanian,and Vram Galstian, the first of whom seems to havebeen the most active during the action. Bejanian, arefugee from the city of Kirovabad in Azerbaijan,joined the “Zoravar Andranik” detachment to fightfor the independence of Mountainous Karabagh anddistinguished himself as a marksman. He is said tobe a member of the “Yerkrapah” union of veterans inthe district of Shengavit and to have been living in aYerevan hostel for years prior to the killings. As adoctor in the department of orthopaedics and trau-matology at the Yerevan emergency clinic for chil-dren, Edvard Grigorian seems to be an unlikely ter-rorist— all the more so since he was not involved inpolitics. Grigorian is married to another physicianand has two children. His colleagues describe him asa polite, kind, and modest man. The last two terror-ists were relatives of Nairi Hunanian, Karen beinghis younger brother and Vram Galstian his uncle.

By the beginning of January 2000, twelveother individuals had been arrested besides these men.Three of them deserve some attention. The unaffili-ated MP from Armavir, Mushegh Movsisian, was ar-rested on 6 November. Four days later, the NationalAssembly complied with the request of the Prosecu-tor-General, Aghvan Hovsepian, to strip the deputyof his immunity. According to Hovsepian, the MPheld a grudge against Prime Minister Sargsian forforcing him to withdraw his candidacy in the 1995parliamentary elections. Movsisian was also con-vinced that the late prime minister was responsiblefor the dire socioeconomic situation in the country.The prosecutor-general stated that it was Movsisianwho chose the date for the terrorist action and or-dered the killers to win time in the Parliament so thathe might organize a coup. Two newspapers reportedthat the terrorists met in the deputy’s home to planthe attack. Subsequently, Chief Military ProsecutorGagik Jhangirian announced that the raid on the par-liament was planned for 13 October.

Something else, however, may have motivatedMovsisian for his presumed actions: the fate of hisbrother. General Arakel Movsisian was a former

commander of the Ararat Division and a participantin the Karabagh war who was said to be close toSamvel Babaian. He was arrested last summer andcharged with appropriation of property, forgery, andillegal possession of weapons and drugs. GeneralMovsisian may also have been involved in the assas-sination of former Deputy Defense Minister VahramKhorkhoruni. During the three weeks preceding thetragic events in parliament, Mushegh Movsisian metwith Karen Demirchian and then Vazgen Sargsian inwhat appears to have been a vain attempt to have hisbrother liberated.

In the second half of December it was the turnof Aleksan Harutiunian, President Kocharian’s some-time chief of staff and at that time his foreign policyadvisor, to be arrested by Jhangirian on the basis ofNairi Hunanian’s testimony. Supporters of Kocharianhave accused the influential leadership of theYerkrapah Union of Karabagh veterans, especiallyMinister for Industrial Infrastructures VahanShirkhanian, of manipulating both the Armenian mili-tary and the inquiry in an effort to undermine the presi-dency. Similar claims were made less than a monthlater upon the arrest of Harutiun Harutiunian, thedeputy chief of the National Television of Armenia,for allegedly promising Nairi Hunanian access to thenational television station. As that station is the onlyone that provides positive coverage of Kocharian’sactivities, some have claimed that Harutiunian’s ar-rest was aimed at stifling the media. Harutiunian isalso said to be a member of the Armenian Revolu-tionary Federation.

It is difficult at this point to assess the extentto which the investigation of the chief military pros-ecutor is detached from political considerations. Twothings are clear, though—Mr. Jhangirian will at somepoint have to present convincing evidence in a courtof law, and that evidence will have to be more thanNairi Hunanian’s testimony.

The ConsequencesThe tragic events of 27 October have already

had significant consequences. The following day, thedefense ministry made public a statement about theevents in which it referred to previous assassinationsthat had remained unresolved:

“It was a plot directed against Armenian statehoodand the future of the Armenian people. Those whoare responsible for this careless negligence are to be


(Continued on page 19)

called to account…”

“With deep anger we re-confirm that the demandsmade public through the statement of the army’s gen-eral staff with respect to killings of Major-GeneralArtsrun Margarian and Deputy Defense MinisterVahram Khorkhoruni were ignored by the law-en-forcement bodies. As a result, a chain of crimes iscontinuing. So, we demand that the chief prosecu-tor, national security and internal ministers be releasedfrom their posts.”

Within two weeks, Interior Minister SurenAbrahamian, Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian,and National Security Minister Serj Sargsian had re-signed. President Kocharian then appointed Sargsianchief of the presidential staff and later secretary ofthe National Security Council. Indeed, the presidentwill need Sargsian’s support in Parliament throughthe Country of Laws party, as well as his knowledgeof both the security apparatus of the country and the“dirty laundry” of the Armenian political and eco-nomic elite.

Before resigning, Prosecutor-GeneralHovsepian let the investigation be carried out by theoffice of the chief military prosecutor, another indi-cation of the pressure put on civilian authorities bythe army. Jhangirian, who holds that office, has apast, however: he was the deputy chairman of theCentral Electoral Commission that “organized” thenotorious 1995 parliamentary elections and referen-dum on the constitution and then doctored their re-sults. It is also unclear on what legal grounds, if any,the investigation was given to the military prosecu-tor.

During the crisis itself, Defense MinisterVagharshak Harutiunian emerged as a leader. Heseems to have successfully put a brake on the angerand excitement of the generals. It would also seemthat he, as well as his deputy defense minister, tooksome preventive measures against possible foreigninterventions when they learned that the militaryforces of Azerbaijan and of another country, mostprobably Turkey, had been brought up to the highestlevel of combat readiness. Harutiunian may becomea key figure in Kocharian’s regime, at the very leastin his capacity as a buffer between the army and thepresident. His rising influence was also made clearin mid-December when he supported Artsakh Presi-dent Ghukasian in the course of yet another crisis

with Samvel Babaian. Harutiunian’s crucial backingallowed Ghukasian to sack Babaian as commander-in-chief of Artsakh’s armed forces on 17 December,three days after he had assaulted the prime ministerof that unrecognized republic near the governmentbuilding of its capital, Stepanakert.

Political polarization also resulted from thecrisis as the talks on the formation of the new gov-ernment amply demonstrated. Kocharian was forcedby the Unity bloc and the military to accept VahanShirkhanian in the government, even though the lat-ter reportedly initiated the statement of the defenseministry demanding that the top security officials re-sign. Even after his re-appointment as a minister,Shirkhanian did not hesitate at the Congress of theYerkrapah Union of Volunteers on 4 December tocall on the president to resign.

The killings left the two ruling parties with-out their historic and unquestioned leaders. Whetherthese organizations will survive in the medium-run isa moot point. In order to prevent the nascent, thoughalready intense, struggle for succession from destroy-ing their parties, the respective leaderships resortedto the dynastic principle. Aram Sargsian, Vazgen’sbrother, was chosen as the new prime minister andde facto leader of the Republican Party, while StepanDemirchian, Karen’s son, was appointed acting chair-man of the People’s Party of Armenia. Both the ide-ology of martyrdom espoused by Nairi Hunanian andthis dynastic principle of succession reflect the conti-nuity in Armenian political life of medieval mentali-ties and institutions, particularly those of the Churchand the Armenian nobility, or nakharars.

The Karabagh negotiations have stalled as aresult of these tragic events. In particular, the OSCEsummit in Istanbul produced little of substance. Moregenerally, strong leaders such as Vazgen Sargsian andKaren Demirchian could better afford to make diffi-cult, unpalatable choices during negotiations thanweaker ones whose position in the political life ofArmenia is less secure.

In the coming months, Aram Sargsian willhave to demonstrate that his main asset is not merelybeing Vazgen’s brother. The president will also facedifficult times ahead. The Republican Party, someelements of which were unable to force Kocharian toresign, has created a working group within the Unityalliance to speed up constitutional amendments aimedat curtailing the powers of the presidency. Indeed,

institutions, identity, and ethnic conflict:international experience and its implications for the caucasus

1997 caucasus conference report

mother tongue: linguistic nationalismand the cult of translation in postcommunist armenia

prisoners of the caucasus: literary mythsand media representations of the chechen conflict

harsha ram


Working papers are available in pdf format on our website: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~bspContact BPS at 510-643-6737 or [email protected] for ordering hard copies

1999 caucasus conference reportstate building and the reconstruction of shattered societies

the geopolitics of oil, gas, and ecology in the caucasus and caspian basin1998 caucasus conference report

levon hm. abrahamian

ghia nodiacauses and visions of the conflict in abkhazia

leila alievareshaping eurasia: foreign policy strategies andleadership assets in post-soviet south caucasus

edward w. walker

victoria bonnell and george breslauersoviet and post-soviet area studies

papersbps

russia’s soft underbelly:the stability of instability in dagestan

The following is based on a presentation made at a special panel discus-sion on October 1, 1999 at UC Berkeley entitled, “Crisis in the NorthCaucasus: Chechnya, Dagestan, and Russia’s Territorial Integrity.” Thesummary was prepared and edited by the author. Substantially revised andelaborated versions of presentations made by Johanna Nichols and JohnDunlop follow.

I have only ten minutes and ten points to make, so I will be blunt.My first point is that I do not see the conflict as a simply two-party conflict

between the Russians and Chechens or as a Manichean struggle pitting good againstevil, with the Chechens as heroic freedom fighters and Russians as evil aggressorsintent upon destroying a hated minority on the one hand, or with radical Islamicfundamentalists and terrorists being confronted by a law-governed Russian statetrying to preserve its territorial integrity and defend its internationally recognizedborders. Rather, it strikes me as a great tragedy for all peoples involved, with agreat many innocent victims on all sides, and all sides responsible for terrible atroci-ties, and irresponsibility, stupidity and aggression by political actors and militantson all sides. That being said, it is of course also true that the burden of the tragedyis not being equally shared, that the number of innocent victims, in terms of deaths,injuries, and material losses, is much greater among the Chechens than among theRussians in absolute terms, and is greater yet when you consider that there are farfewer Chechens than Russians. Still, the conflict has been a terrible blow for Rus-sia, not only because of the servicemen killed and wounded or the many ethnicRussian civilians who were resident in Chechnya who were killed, wounded, anddriven from their homes by the fighting, but also because of the damage the con-flict has inflicted on the Russian national psyche and the prospects for Russia’sstill precarious democracy, as well as its contribution to the powerful anti-Westernbacklash underway now in Russia that will make normalization and stability in thecountry even more problematic. Sadly, all parties are caught up in what I considera tragic cycle of violence that is going to be very difficult to stop.

Second, Chechnya presents Moscow with a profound political dilemma thatwould be difficult for any political elite to manage, even one in a mature and self-confident democracy. But Russia’s political elite, unfortunately, is neither par-ticularly mature nor self-confident. Still, how would the American governmentreact if that there was a region in this country where a secessionist governmenthad established itself, where there was generalized lawlessness, and where so manyforeigners have been kidnapped and killed that foreign journalists and humanitar-ian aid workers, who in most cases show tremendous courage in traveling to ex-tremely dangerous parts of the world, would no longer operate? By the time thislatest round of fighting broke out in August 1999, Chechnya had acquired thereputation of being the most dangerous place in the world for foreigners. In addi-

Edward W. Walker is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at UC Berkeley

No Winners, All Losers: Russia and the War in ChechnyaEdward W. Walker


Crisis in the North Caucasus: Chechnya, Dagestan, and Russia’s Territorial IntegrityOctober 1, 1999 Panel Discussion


tion, militants in Chechnya had repeatedly, andopenly, made irredentist claims on neighboringregions that are part of the Russian Federation—most notably Dagestan—even before last August.And the leaders of the August incursion an-nounced from Grozny that their aim was to es-tablish an “Islamic state” in the areas that cameunder their control, despite the fact that the lo-cal population was overwhelmingly hostile to themilitants. Finally, how would the American gov-ernment react if it became convinced (regardlessof the validity of that conviction) that a series ofterrorist bombings, which together killed morepeople than the Oklahoma City bombing, wascarried out by terrorists based in a neighboringcountry where the government was unable to ar-rest them or to prevent them from carrying outterrorist acts on U.S. territory?

Indeed, it is worth asking in this regardwhether it would have made any difference ifChechnya had been recognized as an independentstate by Moscow when the bombings took placelast summer. The Russian government would inany case have been under great political pres-sure to react to the incursions into Dagestan andthe terrorist attacks with force. Most govern-ments, not just the Russian government, wouldhave considered the invasion of Dagestan alone,irrespective of the subsequent bombings, an actof war.

I should emphasize that we do not in factknow who carried out those bombings, and it mayeven turn out that they were organized by Rus-sian officials or economic interests that, for somereason, wanted to precipitate another invasionof Chechnya by the Russian military. I shouldalso add that there is absolutely no evidence thata majority of the Chechen people supported theincursions or approved the bombings. On thecontrary, Western journalists who returned toChechnya after the Russian military began tomove in reported that most Chechens they spokewith were highly critical of the Chechen warlord,and hero of the 1994-96 war, Shamil’ Basaev, forhaving led the strikes into Dagestan. Moreover,while many consider themselves Muslim in a waythat they did not prior to the 1994-96 war, it alsoappears that most Chechens are hostile to themilitant and “Arabic” (as in, not Turkic) form of“Wahhabi” fundamentalism that is being pushed

on them by people like Khatab (who is ethni-cally an Arab and reportedly a Jordanian citi-zen). But the fact is that most of the Russianpolitical elite, media, and public were con-vinced in August and September, when the de-cision to invade was made, that the terroristbombings were carried out by militants of onesort or another who were based in Chechnyaand who the Chechen government was unable,or unwilling, to control.

My third point relates to the reactionand mood of the Russian people. To theircredit, the Russian people overwhelmingly op-posed the invasion of Chechnya and the warthe Russian military conducted there betweenDecember 1994 and the summer of 1996. MostRussians seem to have felt that the war waswrong, and most would doubtless have beenperfectly happy to recognize Chechen indepen-dence as long as doing so did not lead to thedissolution of the country as a whole. Whenthe militants led by Basaev and Khatab enteredDagestan in force, the public mood changed.It was now the Chechens who were seen as ag-gressors, and Russians felt that their soldierswere finally fighting on the side of the “people,”in part because, as I noted earlier, the greatmajority of local Dagestanis, including most ofthe ethnic Chechens resident in Dagestan – theso-called Chechen-Akkins—opposed the mili-tants. The public mood then changed fromrighteous indignation to fear and rage after theterrorist bombings. The authorities in Moscow,at the direction of Yuri Luzhkov, the city’smayor, began stepping up their harassment ofall peoples from the Caucasus, to the pointwhere they have been rounding up and some-times beating and deporting them from the capi-tal. These acts, unfortunately, are apparentlyapproved of by the great majority of Musco-vites, even ones who oppose the Russian of-fensive is now underway in Chechnya.

Fourth, Chechnya is going to be an acuteproblem for any future government in Moscow,no matter its composition or political orienta-tion. The Russian people might hope thatsomeone like Lebed, should he become presi-dent, would be able to bring an end to the con-flict, but I seriously doubt that, especially nowthat there is so much public anger and hatred


directed at Chechens from average Russians.Politically, it will be all but impossible to mus-ter a political coalition large enough to amendthe Russian constitution in order to recognizeChechen independence. With the Chechens notwilling to accept anything less than indepen-dence, and given the fact that the Russians haveput themselves in a corner by suggesting thatMaskhadov is not the legitimate leader of theChechens, Moscow now has no one it can ne-gotiate with. All this makes it very difficult toimagine a political settlement in the comingmonths.

Fifth, even if someone, whether it beYeltsin, Lebed, or anyone else, were to meetwith Maskhadov and agree to a twenty-yearcease-fire, as Lebed has suggested (in effect, thiswould entai l an agreement to extend theKhasavyurt agreement for another twentyyears), it is very unlikely that any such agree-ment would be recognized and accepted by themany autonomous armed formations and crimi-nal organizat ions in the region. Whi leMaskhadov is, in fact, the democratically-elected leader of the Chechens, it is true, as theRussians claim, that he does not have the ca-pacity to control the Islamic militants organiza-tions, paramilitaries, or criminal groups thathave proliferated in the republic since the endof the last war.

Sixth, the roots of this conflict are nowmuch more than simply political. The devasta-tion in Chechnya is so extreme, and the socialproblems in the north Caucasus so acute, thatno matter what political solution is reached,social and economic conditions will make it ex-tremely unlikely that there will be an end to vio-lence and instability in the region for decadesto come. If Russia were, for example, to rec-ognize Chechen independence, the level of fight-ing would hopefully diminish, but there wouldstill be militant, decentralized, autonomous,embittered, hostile, and extremely effectivefighting forces and criminal organizations in andaround Chechnya that would almost certainlyrefuse to lay down their arms. Moscow willconfront a major security threat, and have todeal with periodic terrorist acts in Chechnya,Dagestan, other areas in the North Caucasus,and probably in Russia in general, regardless of

the outcome of this war. The hope shared bymany Russians that this latest offensive will de-cisively resolve the instability in the region andbring “order” to Chechnya is therefore a pipedream.

My seventh point is that Chechen Islamicmilitants, such as Basaev, Salman Raduev, andMovladi Udugov, have had little success gain-ing support from other peoples of the NorthCaucasus. A partial exception are the Ingush,who have been generally sympathetic to theChechens and have been doing their best to helpthe wave of Chechen refugees who have fledacross the border into Ingushetia since Septem-ber. However, by all accounts even the Ingushare not prepared to take up arms in support ofChechen independence or a Chechen-dominated“Mountain” (highlander) or “Islamic” republic.They and the other peoples of the region do wantthe same degree of anarchy and lawlessness thathas prevailed in Chechnya to come to their ownterritory. Thus the effort by some Chechen fieldcommanders, above all Basaev, to transformwhat has been from the start essentially aChechen national struggle in opposition to a“foreign” invasion into an inter-nationalityst ruggle wi th s igni f icant appeal to non-Chechens, either through appeals to Islamic,highlander, or pan-Caucasian solidarity, hasfailed. That is unlikely to change. Neverthe-less, given the appalling economic and socialconditions in the north Caucasus, militant ide-ologies probably will be appealing enough toprovide armed groups in the region, and not justin Chechnya, with the cadres of alienated andunemployed youth they need to sustain theirstruggle.

My eighth and ninth points relate toRussia’s apparent strategy for dealing withChechnya. A great deal has been written in theRussian press about the lessons that the Rus-sian military has supposedly drawn from NATO’scampaign in Kosovo. In some respects, thisseems to be true. The Russians appear to betrying, at least at this stage of their campaign,to hit “strategic targets” such as television tow-ers, the airport near Grozny, dams, bridges, andso on, and they clearly intend to rely moreheavily on air power and artillery than was thecase in 1994-96. They are also making a con-

sion and the Moscow bombings in similar fash-ion. It could have retaliated against militantstrongholds with air power, which would havetaken the heat out of the Russian public’s de-mand for action. It would have been stuck, ofcourse, with trying to control the border withChechnya, as had been the case in the past. Andgiven the nature of the terrain and the poor qual-ity of Russia’s military, it doubtless would havebeen able to do so only very imperfectly. But itwould nevertheless have been much better offtrying to do so while working as best as pos-sible with the Maskhadov government. The cur-rent campaign is not only greatly disproportionalto the provocation, but it is very likely to leaveMoscow with an even more intractable politicalproblem than it began with.

My final point is that, while the currentsituation is appalling, it could get even worse.A different government in Moscow is at least aslikely to escalate the war and take an even harderline with Chechnya as it is to be more moderateand inclined to search for political solutions. Infact, government officials in Moscow have beenmore moderate in their rhetoric so far than thegreat bulk of the political opposition. PrimeMinister Putin has repeatedly insisted that theRussian offensive is directed against “bandits”and not the Chechen people, and he has insistedthat ordinary Chechens have been victims of the“bandits” as much as others. The hysteria else-where in Moscow, however, is palpable. One ofRussia’s most popular newspapers reported thefollowing statement during a parliamentary ses-sion on Chechnya: “Chechnya should be pre-sented with an ultimatum: Either they [they be-ing presumably all Chechens-EWW] cease allmilitary action on Russian territory, or they facethe physical extermination of the whole repub-lic using strategic air strikes, biological weap-ons, psychotropic gases, napalm and everythingthat is at the disposal of our once powerfularmy.” While I very much hope and pray that itdoes not come to that, I would not rule it out,particularly under a different government, oreven under this one if the military situation de-teriorates for Moscow, political pressure buildsto “do something,” and a political solution seemsas remote as it is today.


siderable effort to manage the Russian mediamore effectively, with daily press briefings andvideos of successful bombing runs, and so farthey appear to be trying to limit the number ofcivilian casualties. Finally, they are trying veryhard to limit access to the war zone, certainlyto a much greater extent than was the case in1994-96.

There, however, the analogy stops. InKosovo, NATO was confronting a more-or-lessconventional military and a relatively coherentstate. It also had a clear objective – forceMilosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo.Indeed, the campaign was successful in realiz-ing that political objective – Milosevic eventu-ally ordered his troops to withdraw. There isno such coherent state or political authority inChechnya, and nowhere for the Chechen forcesto withdraw to. Neither do the Chechens havea conventional military for the Russians to fight.Finally, it is extremely difficult to separateChechen fighters from the rest of the popula-tion because the people in the area they are try-ing to “liberate” do not support them. InKosovo, in contrast, the great majority of thepopulation supported NATO.

Most importantly, however, the objec-tives the Russians have committed to – the “de-struction of the terrorists,” the “restoration oforder,” and the arrest of those who allegedlycarried out the terrorist bombings in Moscow,Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk – are unattainable.Russia’s campaign is in fact going to makesocio-economic condit ions in and aroundChechnya worse, thereby making the problemsof terrorism and crime even more intractable.There is, in short, no obvious “exit strategy”for the Russians.

My ninth point is that Russia might havebeen better off looking not at Kosovo but atthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a more use-ful model. Israel has traditionally responded toterrorist attacks by launching retaliatory strikeson areas where militant organizations were sup-posedly located – in effect, a doctrine of tit-for-tat, or more accurately, of disproportionalresponse, since the number of people killed inthe retaliatory strikes were invariably greaterthan those killed in the original attacks. Russiacould have responded to the Dagestani incur-



Johanna Nichols is a Professor in the Department ofSlavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley

Guilt and Agency in the Russian-Chechen warJohanna Nichols

I am a linguist working on the Chechen language and professionally concerned for thesurvival of the language, culture, and people of Chechnya. Like many other commen-tators, I have been impressed by traditional Chechen culture with its code of honorwhich enables any man to achieve high social standing and respect by honorable indi-vidual behavior without violence, wealth, or connections (other than connections earnedby honor and respect). Chechen political organization is highly distributed (in factthere was traditionally no political organization other than links of kinship and re-spect), a fact that has enabled it to withstand centuries of bloody centralized oppres-sion, affording to Chechens property rights in Soviet times, justice in the corrupt So-viet and post-Soviet legal systems, and respect and self-respect in a dehumanized soci-ety—only to be felled (and I emphasize that the Chechen language and culture, andperhaps the entire nation, are at risk of being felled in short order) by the other power-ful decentralized forces of modern life.

The factors pressing on Chechen language, culture, and nationality are differentfrom the chiefly political and ideological ones that pressed on the Chechens before the1990s. Linguists are well aware of the economic bases for language spreads and ex-tinctions, and it seems to me that the same economic factors are more broadly respon-sible for the durable state of war and near-war in the post-Soviet Caucasus. The fol-lowing is an attempt to identify some of these factors. It is based on internet newssources listed at the end.

BackgroundFor the second time in a decade and the third time in half a century, Chechen

society has been utterly ruined by a government that claims it as part of its citizenry.Many, and probably most, Chechens have lost everything they had. Nearly all arebereaved. Thousands have been killed and many maimed. Hundreds if not thousandsof civilians, including children, are being held in ‘filtration’ camps where they are tor-tured, raped, and sometimes killed. Chechnya itself is an economic and ecologicaldisaster. Everywhere in Russia, Chechens are targets of officially sanctioned ethnichatred.

Each such event threatens the physical survival of the Chechen nation. At presentover a quarter of a million Chechen refugees have fled as refugees. Though exactfigures are unknown, over the last few years roughly the same number has formed adiaspora in Moscow and other Russian cities. Both the diaspora and the refugees weredrive out by mortal danger and/or threat of ruin. The refugees are still in mortal dangerfrom disease and starvation and because of premature Russian repatriation policieswhich force them back to the battlefield, to filtration camps, and/or to slaughter bylooting Russian troops. Those in refugee camps are a concentrated defenseless popu-lation vulnerable to violence by Russian troops (who are equally likely to celebrate avictory with a killing frenzy or a defeat with a vengeance massacre). The diaspora is indanger of eviction and extortion. Those who remain in Chechnya are in mortal danger


from mass bombings of the civilian population,from massacres by Russian troops in Russian-con-trolled areas, and from filtration camps.

If the physical survival of the nation isthreatened, there is an even greater threat to thesurvival of the Chechen language and culture. Inthe 1944-56 deportation, the school-age genera-tion was Russified and many knew Chechen im-perfectly: some of these returned and gained fullfluency (linguistic and cultural); some have im-paired fluency; and some remained abroad. Manyof those whose childhood and adolescence werein Chechnya have full fluency, and for a while itlooked as though the Russified generation wouldhave only a minimal impact on the entire nation.The post-1994 diaspora is large, however, andthe post-1996 diaspora in particular includes manyof the educated and prosperous (who left out offear of kidnapping). Their children are beingschooled in Russian and will grow up to be semi-speakers and culturally Russified. As of fall 1999,the diaspora has been forced underground in manyways; expatriate cultural associations whichhelped transmit the language and culture in thediaspora have found it dangerous to meet, andindividuals try to stay indoors at home as muchas possible. The refugee population now inIngushetia has been scheduled for resettlement,variously in northern Chechnya and in Russiancities. Even for those resettled in northernChechnya, it is unlikely that the showcase school-ing, media, and cultural organizations promisedby the federal government will (if they material-ize at all) give much priority to the Chechen lan-guage or culture. Perhaps most important, theaftermath of the last war strengthened the posi-tion of paramilitary, criminal, and fundamentalistgroups who are inimical to traditional Chechenculture, and the present war seems likely to cre-ate a durable militarized criminal fundamentalistpresence in the North Caucasus that will furtherundermine Chechen institutions. The combina-tion of Russified middle elders, a large Russifyingdiaspora, canned education and media, persistenteconomic ruin, and powerful criminal fundamen-talist interests could well spell the death ofChechen language and culture.

Apart from the threat to specificallyChechen institutions, the two Russian-Chechenwars have been the most destructive in Europe

since World War II in terms of proportion of civil-ian population killed, civilian destruction, and bru-talization on both sides. Why is this happening?Assigning responsibility is done in different ways indifferent sources, but all implicitly assume inten-tional agency high up on either the Russian or theChechen side. Let us call these analyses theChechen-guilt hypothesis (or analysis or story) andthe Russian-guilt hypothesis (or analysis or story).

In the Chechen-guilt story, the Chechens andtheir government are responsible for various kindsof violence that became commonplace in and aroundChechnya after the last war: the execution of sixICRC workers in December 1996, the execution (bydecapitation) of four British telephone engineers in1998, numerous kidnappings (some with brutality),drug and arms trading, and the growth of paramili-tary and fundamentalist Islamic groups. They areresponsible for the incursion of Chechen warlordShamil Basayev and his comrade-in-arms, Khattab,into Daghestan last summer, with the intention ofspreading warfare across the Caucasus and settingup a secessionist fundamentalist Islamicist stateconsisting of Chechnya and Daghestan (with wideraspirations). They are responsible for four bomb-ings of apartment buildings in Russian cities lastsummer. The claim of Chechnya to independencethreatens the territorial integrity of Russia, and thefundamentalist warlords are bankrolled by Osamabin Laden and/or other terrorists. Russia invadedChechnya in order to destroy paramilitaries, terror-ists, and crime groups.

In the Russian-guilt story, Russia has longbeen intent on complete extermination of theChechens. In this interpretation, the entire bloodyhistory of the attempted Russian conquest of theChechens and Chechnya is and was genocidal. The1944-56 deportation and dispossession were stepsin this direction. The 1994-96 war was intended tokill many Chechens and scatter the rest as a steptoward freeing the land permanently for Russiansettlement. The present war is simply genocidal,waged against the Chechen people and intended todestroy them all. After 1996, kidnapping and crimeflourished in Chechnya because Russian governmentpayments made them profitable and because the fed-eral government tolerated and even encouraged or-ganized crime; fundamentalists and warlords flour-ished because the postwar chaos, deliberately culti-vated by Russia, produced near-total unemployment


and made young people vulnerable to the influenceof these well-financed groups. Kidnappings and ex-ecutions of foreigners were orchestrated by the Rus-sian government in order to discredit Chechnya, re-move foreign observers and sources of foreign aid,and justify invasion. The Russian government car-ried out or commissioned the apartment bombingsand orchestrated Basayev’s incursions intoDaghestan as pretexts for a genocidal war.

Ordinary Chechens generally subscribe toneither story, holding both the federal governmentand their own government responsible for failure tocontrol crime and violence. Western media take amixed stance, holding Russia responsible for a bru-tal and unjust war and for war crimes but using theterminology of the Chechen-guilt story and some ofits analyses of the roles of individual groups andparties: Russia is presented as attacking “Chechenrebels” or “Islamic fundamentalists based inChechnya” or “Chechen-based militants” who are“not controlled by the Chechen government” andplan a “jihad” or “fundamentalist takeover ofDaghestan.” The “rebels” are “blamed for a waveof apartment bombings” in Moscow and other citiesbut have not ‘acknowledged’ them or been shownto have committed them. The conflict is depicted asbetween Russia and the “rebel republic” or “seces-sionist republic,” while Chechen soldiers are called“rebels,” “militants,” or “fighters.”

Both stories are essentially conspiracy theo-ries, implausible in their totalities and inaccurate insome of their specifics (though, over time, more andmore aspects of the Russian-guilt story prove cor-rect). There is no single orchestrating center, eitherRussian or Chechen, that conceived, set up, and car-ried out either the war or terrorism. Nor can thewar be stopped by either a Russian or a Chechensurrender. The problem is that there are multiplegroups, entities, and parties involved in a distrib-uted network of convergent interests in this war,including shared interests of otherwise inimical par-ties. Many of the interests are economic, not ideo-logical. More important, attention to the questionof guilt as polarized above deflects attention fromthe more urgent issues: destruction of Chechen so-ciety, genocide, war crimes, crimes against peace,brutalization of Russian society, institutionalizationof war, state-sanctioned and state-initiated hatecrimes, use of national tragedies for political gain—for all of which the Russian federal government and

military bear full responsibility and for none ofwhich do the Chechen people or government bearany responsibility. That is, even if the Chechen-guilt story were true Russia would bear full re-sponsibility for genocide, etc. The following isan attempt to factor out some of the parties tothe conflict and account for their interconnec-tions.

Organized Crime and Paramilitaries in theNorth-Central Caucasus

The first set of parties with economic in-terests in war is a diverse group of crime rings,paramilitary bands, and militant religious (orquasi-religious) fundamentalist organizationswhich—like violent and criminal groups every-where in Russia—are the natural and uncheckedoutgrowth of Soviet-era corruption and crimerings. Analysts and reporters often confuse thegroups with each other and with the Chechenarmy, government, and/or people, but they arevery different kinds of groups and it is importantto keep them conceptually distinct. The criminalgroups include the following:

Paramilitary organizations. The best-known one is associated with Shamil Basayev. Ido not know the source of their income, but theyacquire weapons, train for war, and aspire to mili-tary glory and political power.

“Wahhabites.” I use this term (in scarequotes) as seems to be typical in the NorthCaucasus, to refer to fundamentalist Islamistgroups that attract outside funding and prosely-tize aggressively in Daghestan and Chechnya. Notall, and perhaps not any, are genuine Wahhabisects. Some of the local groups are militarized—i.e., they are simultaneously paramilitary and“Wahhabite” groups.

Kidnapping gangs. Kidnapping of hos-tages for ransom was one of few profitable pur-suits in the central North Caucasus after the 1994-96 Russian-Chechen war. There were apparentlyone or more crime rings specialized in kidnap-ping, with a few ringleaders and much delegationof responsibilities for capturing, holding, andmoving victims around and negotiating with fami-lies or governments for ransom. Some of the vic-tims were Russian enlisted men sold to kidnap-ping gangs by their officers. Most were mem-bers of well-to-do Chechen families. A number


were from non-Chechen ethnicities, including Rus-sians, of the nearby parts of the Caucasus. Peoplefrom outside the former Soviet Union were a smallminority.

Arms traders. Paramilitary groups haveacquired large stockpiles of arms and equipmentby illegal purchase, primarily in Russia and prima-rily from military commanders in and near theCaucasus who were willing to sell their units’ armsand ammunition for personal profit. During the1994-96 war, officers and individual soldiers soldtheir weapons to Chechen guerrillas in exchangefor food, liquor, or money. Well before that war,and during it, larger-scale arms purchases wereapparently being carried out by specialists. Cer-tainly by 1992 many individuals and groups in theNorth Caucasus were armed and/or employedarmed bodyguards. Arms purchases by Chechencommanders from Russian commanders, and byChechen troops from Russian troops, have beenreported during the present war.

Drug traders. Drugs are said to be a prin-cipal currency for which military officers sell arms;to that extent, drug and arms trading groups maysometimes have been one and the same. This tradecan at most have been only a tiny part of the vastflow of drugs into and through Russia.

Oil interests? In all likelihood, beginningin the early 1990s, organized crime rings through-out the Caucasus-Caspian area began planning tocontrol oil exports. There is no reason to believe,however, that oil-centered groups have been ac-tive in the chaos of interwar Chechnya. Distillingof crude oil siphoned off from the pipeline was animportant cottage industry in 1996-99 Chechnya,but the market was purely local, and major crimegroups were apparently uninvolved.

One of the above? It is unknown who mur-dered the ICRC workers in 1996 and the telephoneengineers in 1998. It seems likely that paramili-tary groups may have done the killing. It is abso-lutely unknown who made the decisions to kill.

Not only paramilitaries but also othergroups are armed. The “Wahhabites,” at least someof the paramilitaries, and perhaps some of the kid-nappers present an Islamist exterior. Because oftheir overlapping functions and interlinked eco-nomic interests, all these groups are frequentlylumped together as “militants” or “fundamental-ists,” or (in Russian sources) “bandits” or “terror-

ists.” They can legitimately be lumped together asorganized crime groups. Importantly, though, thereare different kinds of groups, and they do not fallunder any unified hierarchical organization. Nordo they have individual hierarchical organizationsto any great extent. They seem to be more or lessautonomous local groups, in part kinship-based,without any high-ranking leaders anywhere.

Are they Chechen?Can any of these groups be considered

Chechen? Organized crime is pan-Russian and in-ternational, and Russian organized crime crossesrepublican boundaries. Nonetheless, for each kindof group, it can be asked whether its membership,its leadership, and its economic basis are Chechen,and what its connection is to the Chechen republicand government.

Paramilitaries and militarized “Wahhabites,”in eyewitness reports, are identified as of mixedethnicity and include a sizable non-Caucasus com-ponent even in their smallest local units. The lan-guage of paramilitary, “Wahhabite,” and kidnap-ping groups can be the ethnic language of a domi-nant or majority component in a local unit, the eth-nic language of a smaller component, or Russian.The paramilitary groups that entered Daghestan lastsummer are said to have used Dagestanian lan-guages and/or Russian as their main languages. Interms of ethnicity and language, therefore, none ofthe groups and none of the kinds of groups can besaid to have a standing Chechen identity. Detailedinformation is of course lacking, but the point isthat there is little evidence that any of the groupshave Chechen ethnic or linguistic identity quagroups.

In nearly every statement by a Chechen thatI have heard or read since 1996 (including pub-lished interviews of refugees where the point hascome up), kidnapping rings, paramilitaries,“Wahhabites”, and those who have executed for-eigners are disowned as Chechens on grounds oftheir behavior. Anyone who kidnaps Chechens,kidnaps others on Chechen soil, holds kidnap vic-tims, kills foreigners on Chechen soil, undertakesactions that might trigger war against Chechens,or initiates non-defensive attacks on neighbors ofChechens, is simply not a Chechen. The Chechengovernment as well has condemned and disownedthese activities.


Some of the groups have Chechen leaders.Shamil Basayev, a paramilitary leader, is a Chechen,as are some “Wahhabite” leaders and some indi-viduals said to run kidnapping gangs (notably, ArbiBarayev). (Recall, however, that the membershipof most paramilitary and “Wahhabite” groups is saidto be multi-ethnic). The paramilitaries appear tobe purely local, autonomous groups with no affili-ations outside of Chechnya. The “Wahhabites” arepart of a movement that is also active in Daghestan,and may have ties to radical Islamist groups abroad.Kidnapping is a regional phenomenon of the NorthCaucasus, and it is difficult to say whether it is head-quartered anywhere. The drug and arms trades arepan-Russian and worldwide phenomena, and thegroups in the North Caucasus are small local cellsin a vast network whose largest-scale profiteers arein major world cities.

Like organized crime groups everywhere,those of Chechnya have gradually infiltrated,cowed, and corrupted the legitimate government.Some commentators assume that powerful para-military leaders (especially Basayev) are in a posi-tion to claim a cut of the take of kidnapping anddrug-trading gangs. If this is so, and if the claimsare indeed one-directional, then the kidnapping anddrug-trading groups have quasi-governmental func-tions as well, taxing other criminal groups, as itwere. (Basayev’s group was reported in news in-terviews in October to have gained some local fa-vor as a result of supporting orphanages and simi-lar institutions. Support of charitable organizationsis another quasi-governmental function).

In the current war, Chechnya is being de-fended by an army formed by mobilization of citi-zens (a national mobilization as the invasion beganwas disregarded by many but still appreciably ef-fective) and incorporation of existing groups. TheChechen army is decentralized in day-to-day con-duct and financing, but standard in its hierarchicalcommand structure. When the Russian invasionbegan, some of the paramilitary groups (and per-haps also paramilitarized “Wahhabite” groups)joined forces with the Chechen army. That is, de-spite earlier condemnations and disownings, thegroups were incorporated, as groups and with theirexisting leadership, into the Chechen army. ShamilBasaev is now a general in the Chechen army.

Kidnappings continued in and around

Chechnya into October, a fact which suggests thatthe kidnapping gangs were not incorporated (asgroups, with their existing leadership) into thearmy. (Some individuals joined; Arbi Barayev isnow a commander in the army.) To my knowledge,there have been no new kidnappings since Octo-ber, either in or around Chechnya. No doubt thewar has made kidnapping unprofitable and moredifficult to carry out. It must be impossible to bringhostages across borders; with villages bombed andabandoned there is no place to hold hostages; thesale of enlisted men and conscripts by Russian of-ficers seems to have ended when the current inva-sion began; and internally, with many Chechenshaving fled and most ruined, there is no one andnothing to extort. All of this suggests the kidnap-ping trade relied crucially on the interwar situa-tion in Chechnya—that is, Chechnya was the keyconduit and reservoir for a regional kidnapping in-dustry, but not necessarily the center.

There are reports of Chechen troops buy-ing weapons from Russian troops even now, butno information on whether the larger arms tradecontinues. Crucially, I have seen no evidence thatprices, availability, etc. of weapons have changedeither inside or outside of Russia. This supportsthe claim that the Chechen arms trade was local,serving to arm the paramilitary and Wahhabitegroups and perhaps also the legitimate military, butnot part of the international arms trade. That is,Chechnya was not an arms-trade conduit.

I have seen no information on the impactof this war on the drug trade in and around Rus-sia. Again, I have not read that drug prices, de-mand, availability, etc. have changed either in orout of Russia. This suggests that there was nomajor Chechen drug conduit either.

All in all, then, the Chechen people and so-ciety are not interested parties in the conflict.Neither is the Chechen government, except to theextent that it has been influenced or infiltrated byorganized crime. Influence by paramilitaries maybe considerable; other criminal influences are un-known.

Who Gains?Other interested parties are the Russian fed-

eral government and the military. Organized crimehas infiltrated and influenced the Russian (and ear-lier Soviet) government and military deeply and


intimately for the last few decades. Of course, lo-cal groups from the North Caucasus have little di-rect influence in Moscow. But consider their localinfluence on the Russian military as a case of con-vergent interests. The Russian military bases inand near the Caucasus are the trading partners ofthe organized crime groups: they sell troops tokidnapping rings and weapons to arms traders, andreceive payment in drugs. In a near-war situationsuch as the one that obtained in Chechnya from1996 to 1999, when the border was blockaded andentry points staffed by Russian military, trade indrugs, guns, hostages, or other illegal commodi-ties meant bribes for the customs officials and bor-ders guards. The trading and the bribes went onduring the 1994-96 war, much of which was closerto guerrilla than conventional warfare. All of theseconsiderations mean that a tour of duty in or nearthe Caucasus, especially in a near-war or guerrilla-war situation, must be, for officers, one of the mostprofitable in all of Russia. During the current in-vasion, with troops massed and supervised and witha large active battlefield, the trade in drugs andhostages seems to have mostly ended. Purchaseof arms and ammunition continues, including pur-chase in exchange for food and vodka. Looting ofChechen houses and property has made the cur-rent large-scale war profitable for some of thetroops, but the profit to officers must be much lessthan that obtained from trading in arms and drugs.

Thus a situation of near-war or guerrilla waror localized war is highly profitable to both baseofficers and crime groups, and both have economicinterests in maintaining that situation. A spectacu-lar case of cooperation between the Russian mili-tary and the paramilitaries was in last summer’sinvasion of Daghestan, in which the paramilitariesand crossed the border (with heavy equipment, inlarge numbers) with obvious cooperation of cus-toms officers and border guards, and were cov-ered by Russian helicopters on their return toChechnya.

Mass warfare must be less profitable to bothsides, though it offers pursuit of glory and the ab-stract prospect of seeing the hand of one’s tradingpartner in the adversary society or organizationstrengthened. Pursuit of individual military gloryis evidently a strong motivation for paramilitarygroups but is in little evidence among the Russianforces. It took slightly more than two months af-

ter the beginning of the invasion for Russian troopsand commanders to start giving media interviewsin which they took issue with official statistics ontroop losses and complained about conditions, sala-ries, and the conduct of the war. I take their disaf-fection to have economic grounds: there is littleprofit for them in this kind of war. In the samegeneral time frame, military spokesmen beganspeaking of the possibility of a protracted guer-rilla war.

The commissions that put officers on armybases in and near the Caucasus and the kickbacksthat keep them there must be expensive, and theupper military command profits accordingly andhas an interest in keeping them valuable. The up-per command also stands to profit institutionally—in decorations, clout, and prestige—from any vic-torious war. News reports of mid-October depictedthe ranking Russian generals as threatening a coupand/or civil war if they were not allowed to pursuethe victory they felt they were entitled to.

At the highest level, the decision to makewar was motivated by political considerations.Vladimir Putin’s aspiration to the presidency ofRussia would be served by a brief all-out war andan easy, decisive victory, but not by the prolongedguerrilla war or near-war situation that best servesorganized crime and military graft. High-level plan-ning for some kind of military intervention inChechnya began nearly a year ago in the Kremlin.The initial plan was to set up a security zone innorthern Chechnya and proceed no further. Thiswould have strengthened the position of paramili-tary and criminal interests in the south of Chechnyaand led to a maximally profitable protracted near-war situation. The war has since escalated into defacto genocide and mass destruction, which servePutin’s political interests better but are also thenatural outcome of Russian military commandersfailing to get the easy and quick victory they hadexpected.

One of the most disturbing aspects of thewar and its preparation is the ease with which allof Russia—ordinary citizens, media, public figures,government bodies—could be whipped up intomass genocidal rage and hate crimes againstChechens. Here too there is no center, leader, ororganized campaign but a resonant mindset inwhich hatred is an end in itself. And an evil na-tional enemy, if (as now) it does not exist, must be


invented.To summarize, bloodshed in Chechnya

serves many interests, including the interests ofsupposed enemies. Paramilitary and “Wahhabite”groups gain recruits from war and its aftermath.All organized crime in the Caucasus prospers fromthe enhanced trade opportunities of near-war andguerrilla-war situations. Russian military offic-ers profit from the same trade, and the highervalue on their commissions profits their higher-ups. Border guards extort bribes from refugees.Troops loot villages. The hateful and the angryabuse Chechen refugees, slaughter civilians, andpresumably volunteer for torture duty in “filtra-tion” camps. Hatreds that seek a national enemyand scapegoat find a state-sanctioned one in theChechens. Nationwide, organized crime probablywelcomes the diversion, and crime groups in cit-ies with Chechen (and other Caucasian) diasporicpopulations realize increased chances for extor-t ion as Chechen nationality is de factocriminalized. With a Russian victory, Putin wouldride to the presidency and the ideologically moti-vated would see the military’s glory buffed. Busi-ness, criminal and legitimate alike, quickens inVladikavkaz and Mozdok, the main Russian basesfor the invasion.

In the interwar situation, kidnapping andexecution of foreigners served the interests of or-ganized crime and the Russian military and gov-ernment, making law enforcement haphazard dur-ing the interwar period and keeping out foreignobservers and aid agencies that might help stabi-lize the society. That effect lasted until well intothe present war.

Two months into the war, it was becom-ing clear that not all interests were equally wellserved by all kinds of war. Crime rings, Russianbase commanders, and Russian troops need a pro-longed near-war situation, a protracted guerrilla,or low-scale war. High-level political consider-ations require a quick victory and all-out war.(Clearly, the media attention to statements of dis-affected soldiers represents an ominous threat toPutin, who needs a popular bloodless war.) Whatwill come of this conflict of interests in this typeof war is unclear. Both in the last war and thepresent one, lootings, slaughters of civilians, at-tacks on refugees, weapons sales, and sale of hos-tages have been undertaken at the initiative, of-

ten casual, of the troops involved rather than spe-cifically authorized at higher levels. This probablymeans that, whatever the strategy and course of thelarger war, the convergent interests of the variousorganized crime groups and the mid and lower lev-els of the military will continue to be realized, tothe grave endangerment of the Chechen people. Anaccurate description of the conflict might be this:The convergent interests of Moscow, the Russianmilitary high command, regional crime gangs of allstripes, and the mid and lower levels of the militarydestroy the Chechen government, people, society,and land, thereby realizing profit and strengtheningthe crime-government and crime-military interface.There is no conspiracy and no high-level malevo-lence plotting genocide but simply various conver-gent criminal interests. The incidental outcome ofthese interests, however, is state terror trending ina direction indistinguishable in its effects fromplanned genocide.

Who Loses?The Chechen people and society are the ob-

vious major losers in this conflict. In the interwarsituation, they were terrorized by crime gangs, in-adequately protected by their own leaders, and dev-astated by an extreme brain drain, economic andecological ruin, and public health disasters. In bomb-ings and all-out war, they are killed in large num-bers, their land and houses and towns destroyed; inguerrilla and low-scale war, they lose their standingas refugees and have their houses looted as the tug-of-war brings Russian troops into and out of townsbehind the front. The language, culture, and socialinstitutions are in danger of rapid extinction. Morethan half of the population is in refugee camps ordiaspora.

The neighbors of the Chechens also suffer.Ingushetia, conceptually lumped with Chechnya inthe minds of many Russians and in much federalthinking, is heavily blockaded and threatened withviolence. Ingush in diaspora are in nearly as muchdanger as Chechens. Impoverished to start with,Ingushetia has been devastated by an influx of refu-gees nearly equal in number to Ingushetia’s ownpopulation. Ethnically Chechen refugees are re-quired to go to Ingushetia, and only there, and ini-tially were forced to stay there by federal decree—there are no refugee camps except in Ingushetia.

Daghestan suffered much kidnapping and


growth of paramilitary and “Wahhabite” groupsduring the interwar period, as well as the destruc-tion of several villages and a flight of thousandsof refugees during the foreplay to the war.

Georgia has had some villages bombed andhas received threats of Russian military action.The war provided Russia with an opportunity tostrong-arm Georgia into closer cooperation, andperiodically the Russian government accusesGeorgia of harboring and funding Chechen “ter-rorists.” Azerbaijan has received similar threats.

More generally, the prospects for peacein the Caucasus, and the wellbeing of all thepeople there, suffer under any near-war or warsituation.

Why Chechnya?Given the interest of the military and or-

ganized crime in a near-war or guerrilla war situ-ation in the abstract, why did this one arise inChechnya? It arose there not because Russia hasan explicit long-term policy of genocide of theChechens, and not because Chechnya is a terror-ist state bent on working havoc on Russia, but asa direct result of the 1994-96 war. Chechnya wasruined after that war, and it was the only part ofthe Russian Federation and its immediate neigh-bors that can be described as ruined. The ruinfostered the growth of organized criminal groups,made crime the only profitable enterprise, and cre-ated an embittered, unemployed youth ripe forparamilitary or “Wahhabite” recruitment. TheChechens were a convenient scapegoat for themilitary, the militarily-minded, and the hateful.They were the easiest to paint as a national en-emy when resuscitating the old Soviet myth of anational enemy proved expedient.

ProspectsWe have seen that the incidental outcome

of convergent corrupt interests is trending in adirection effectively equivalent to terror and geno-cide. Given the corruption of the Russian gov-ernment and institutions, the violence of organizedcrime, and the ease with which much of the Rus-sian population can be incited to hatred, an out-break of war somewhere in or near Russia wasprobably to be expected. The aftermath of thelast war in Chechnya made it almost inevitablethat conditions for the outbreak of war would

arise there.An important corollary is that organized

crime, government sheltering of organized crime,and ruin of people by their own governments canlead to results indistinguishable from genocide.These basically economic activities might well beconsidered crimes against humanity.

What awaits Chechnya? If Chechen socialstructure survives at all, it will always be decentral-ized. But powerful paramilitary andparagovernmental figures, “Wahhabite” proselytiz-ers, organized crime, and the corruption of govern-ment and society by all of these are not inevitableparts of Chechen society; they will exist only in con-ditions of economic ruin.

The ongoing destruction of Chechen societyand traditions is a loss to the world, as well as atragedy and moral crime in itself. It is also a firststep toward what might be called the Talibanizationof Russia’s southern fringe, so it is worth consider-ing how it might be averted. The following are threeessential conditions for peace and normalcy in thecentral Caucasus.

Justice. A distributed organizational struc-ture, convergent interests among conflicting parties,and outcomes that are incidentally genocidal but notplanned top-down do not preclude assigning moralresponsibility. Righteous rage will fester in theCaucasus (and outside) until international indict-ments are passed on those guilty of crimes againstpeace and war crimes for both the 1994-96 and cur-rent wars. The roster of war criminals would in-clude ex-President Yeltsin, Acting President Putin,all prime ministers who have served during wars ortheir planning, the ministers of defense and the inte-rior, the high command of the army, officers at anylevel who have specifically authorized or overseencivilian massacres (like those at Samashki in 1996or Alkhan-Yurt in 1999), the entire line of commandfrom filtration camp torturers on up, and ShamilBasayev, Khattab, and perhaps other paramilitaryleaders for their part in the Daghestan incursion thatwould so clearly trigger a de facto genocidal re-sponse from Russia (but not for anything Basayevhas done as commander in the defense force in thisor the 1994-96 war).

Reparations. The Chechens are a self-reli-ant and hard-working people who can and will re-build their own country once some basic resourcesare restored. Compensation for multiple financial

Available N

ow!

Edward W. Walker, Executive Director, BPS


Available in pdf format at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~bspContact us at [email protected] or510-643-6737 to order a copy.

Russia’s Soft Underbelly:The Stability of Instability in Dagestan

Stephan Astourian (Continued from page 5)

ruin, reconstruction of infrastructure, and de-mining must come from the outside (and shouldproperly be Russia’s financial responsibility).Looking beyond Chechnya, peace and stabilityin the Caucasus will never be possible until thedispossessions and border disputes resultingfrom the 1944 deportations and gerrymander-ing under Stalin are settled through some com-bination of negotiation, compensation, andreconciliation.

International guarantees of peace andjustice. The above measures need to be initi-ated and guaranteed by an international presenceor other oversight. There must be direct com-munication of the various peoples of theCaucasus with the larger world, without Mos-cow as intermediary. International organizationsaiding refugees must be able to donate aid di-rectly to Chechnya (or, for refugees in camps,

Ingushetia) and not (as is now required) to Rus-sia. Justice for kidnappers and other major non-war criminals will not be forthcoming from Russiaas long as organized crime is closely involved withthe Russian government, and bringing to justicethose who are guilty will therefore require an in-ternational basis.

If these conditions are met, there can bepeace in the Caucasus almost without regard tothe political situation in (the rest of) Russia.

Sources used for this article:http://www.egroups.com/list/chechnya-sl/

http://ingush.berkeley.edu:7012/human_rights

new for 2000 seriesBPSWORKING PAPER

Kocharian’s political survivalduring and after the cri-sis stems, no doubt, from the extensive powers en-joyed by the president under the current constitu-tion. If need be, for instance, President Kochariancould dissolve the parliament in a few months, as-suming he feels secure enough politically to do so.His political survival may also result from the real-ization by some in the ruling coalition and in thearmy that the country can ill afford to lose its presi-dent as well in the current circumstances.

Whether the ongoing investigation revealsthe deeper layers of what looks like a broadly based

political conspiracy remains to be seen. The killerswere mere tools, deluded into thinking that their ac-tions inside parliament would receive support fromthe outside and that their motivations for killing werealso the ones inspiring their sponsors. Nairi Hunanianand his accomplices are unlikely to know who thereal forces are behind these events. While it may alsobe that a coup was in fact planned, as the chief mili-tary prosecutor has suggested, this hypothesis can-not be corroborated given currently available evi-dence. In due time, Mr. Jhangirian will have to ex-plain how and why it failed.


Two Incursions into Dagestan andTheir Extraordinary ConsequencesJohn B. Dunlop

Before the breakup of the Soviet Union in late 1991, Wahhabism had been strictly proscribed asa dangerous religious and political tendency. But after the fall of communism, a number ofDagestanis found themselves free to perform the hadj to Mecca. An estimated 80 percent of theMuslims from the Russian Republic who made the hadj were reported to be from Dagestan.While on pilgrimage, the Dagestanis would come into contact with Wahhabis from Saudi Arabiaand from other Muslim countries, who would attempt energetically to proselytize them.

Most recent estimates of the percentage of Wahhabis to the total population of Dagestanhave been quite low. Specialist Robert Bruce Ware, for example, estimated that figure at onlythree percent as of August of 1999.1 Other analysts of Dagestani politics, however, believed thepercentage had been growing fairly rapidly in the period preceding the August 1999 events.Some Russian commentators began to cite percentages as high as 10 percent.2

Poverty, Unemployment, and CorruptionWhat were the factors influencing a growth of Wahhabism in Dagestan? In an interview

appearing in the newspaper Segodnia, leading Caucasus specialist Sergei Arutiunov noted thatsome 20 percent of the populace of Dagestan controlled 85 percent of the republic’s naturalwealth.3 The remaining 80 percent of the populace, by contrast, lived far below the Russianpoverty line, being three-to-four times poorer than the statistically average citizen of the RussianFederation. Especially significant in this regard, Arutiunov stressed, was youth unemployment—approximately 85 percent of the youth of Dagestan were unemployed.

Ramazan Abdulatipov, a well-known Dagestani Avar, and a former Russian Minister ofNationalities, has commented: “The chief reason [for the growth of Wahhabism in Dagestan] isthe qualitative worsening of the social position of the populace, especially in the mountain dis-tricts . . .”4 Much of this populace, Abdulatipov noted, was being forced to migrate down to thelowland regions, where they often received an unfriendly reception from locals. Resentful andalienated, the displaced mountaineers became relatively easy prey for Wahhabi proselytizers.

Another key factor underscored by Sergei Arutiunov was the high birth rate amongDagestanis (second only to Ingushetia within the Russian Federation). Due to this circumstance,each year large numbers of new youths entered the republic’s unemployment rolls. In addition tobeing numerous and unemployed, the Dagestani youth were also, for the most part, unedu-cated—it had become too expensive for their families to provide them with an education. Unem-ployed and uneducated Dagestani youths represented a potentially receptive target for Wahhabipreaching.

Flagrant police corruption was another factor promoting the rise of Wahhabism inDagestan. In the republic, as Sergei Arutiunov has pointed out, “At each kilometer marker therestands a militia post, where you have to pay. Large vehicles suffer from this the most. Themajority of the male populace of the Dargin Wahhabi villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhiare long-distance truck drivers, and the fact that they adopted Wahhabism is, to a large extent,the result of a protest against police arbitrariness.”5

John Dunlop is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.



The Recent History of Wahhabism in DagestanBy the year 1997, several highland settlements

located in the Dargin region of Dagestan (Buinaksk Dis-trict) had de facto been taken over by Wahhabis. Thesesettlements—Karamakhi, Chabanmakhi, and Kadar—were, it should be emphasized, located in the middle ofthe republic, a considerable distance from the borderwith Chechnya. (The Dargins constitute the second larg-est ethnic group in Dagestan, numbering around 310,000as of 1996).6

In mid-May of 1997, a serious confrontation ata funeral occurred between Dargin Wahhabi mournersand adherents of the local Sufi Tariqat (brotherhood).The Wahhabis objected vigorously to the Sufis’ prayingtoward the coffin of the deceased and issued a plea thatthose in attendance face toward Mecca. A Wahhabifanatic then shot a Sufi. The result was a melee involv-ing 500 people. The authorities were finally able tocontrol the situation, but only with difficulty.

On 27 May, a public debate was held in the re-publican capital of Makhachkala between Wahhabis andSufis, with the debate being broadcast over republicantelevision. This incident showed that the Wahhabi move-ment was beginning to acquire momentum in Dagestan.7

In August of 1998, in the Dargin city ofBuinaksk, there took place negotiations between theleaders of the local Wahhabis and the government of therepublic. The government delegation was headed byState Council chairman Magomedali Magomedov, him-self an ethnic Dargin. In agreements signed by the ne-gotiators, the political leadership of Dagestan pledgedto halt the de facto persecution of the inhabitants of theDargin Wahhabi villages and to allow them to live ac-cording to the laws of the sharia, while they, in turn,agreed not to disseminate their beliefs beyond the bor-ders of their communities. They also pledged not tospeak out against Dagestan’s remaining a part of theRussian Federation. Writing in September 1999, jour-nalist Aleksandr Rylkin concluded: “Over the past yearthe Wahhabis did not once infringe this agreement.”8

Wahhabism Penetrates Mountain Avar VillagesIt was the spread of Karamakhi-style Wahhabism

to other regions of Dagestan, and especially to the Avars,the republic’s largest ethnic group (numbering 540,000in 1996), that seriously alarmed the political leadershipof Dagestan and also the Russian government. On 9July 1999, Dagestani police in the Tsumadin District ofDagestan raided the mountain village of Echeda, locatednot far from the border with Chechnya, and seized weap-

ons and ammunition. Reacting to this raid, the local AvarWahhabis took two policemen hostage and demandedthat police personnel be removed from Echeda and othernearby villages, and that the searches be ended. Afterprotracted negotiations, the captured police officers werereleased, and the Wahhabis were able to keep their weap-ons.

Not surprisingly, tensions in the region contin-ued to escalate. Neither the official Dagestani leader-ship nor the Russian government was prepared to allowthe emergence of de facto independent Wahhabi settle-ments in the Avar region of the republic, adjacent tounstable Chechnya. On 1 August, however, the AvarWahhabis announced that sharia rule was being intro-duced throughout Tsumadin District.

The First IncursionThe following day, 2 August 1999, a large in-

cursion into Dagestan from Chechnya took place. Thedeclared aim of the invaders was to come to the aid oftheir threatened Wahhabi brethren in the Avar mountainvillages. Perhaps as many as 2000 fighters (boeviki)took part in this incursion. Sharp pitched battles soonensued, first with the local Dagestani police and thenwith the Russian military and MVD internal troops.

It should be stressed that we have little trust-worthy information concerning what happened up inthe remote mountain villages of Avar Dagestan. Whowere these armed men who conducted the raid? Therehas been a widespread assumption that they were mainlyethnic Chechens, due to the fact that they had comeover the border from Chechnya and that a legendaryChechen field commander, Shamil’ Basaev, was soonasked to assume co-leadership of the operation, alongwith the shadowy Saudi fighter Khatab (Habib AbdelRahman Khatab), who had reportedly been running train-ing camps for Wahhabis in Chechnya.9 (Khatab, it mightbe noted, is married to a Dargin woman from one of theDargin Wahhabi villages in Dagestan.)

Local villagers and other witnesses who sawthese fighters up close have reported that most of themwere definitely not Chechens. Perhaps a majority of theinvaders were natives of Dagestan, many of whom hadundergone training at Khatab’s camp (or camps) locatedin Chechnya. The initial leaders of the incursion wereBagautdin Magomedov, a native of Tsumadin District,and another Dagestani, Magomed Tagaev, author of thebook, Gazavat, or How to Become Immortal. Whenthe incursion first occurred, it was reported that: “Theauthorities of the republic [of Dagestan] state that the


boeviki are Dagestanis.”10 The chairman of theDagestan State Council, Magomedali Magomedov,was quoted as stating: “We do not say that Chechensattacked us. We say that aggression has been accom-plished from the territory of Chechnya.”11 A Frenchjournalist, Sophie Shihab, who writes for Le Monde,visited the Chechen-Dagestan mountain border areaand reported that the villagers there informed her thatthere had been many Arabs, Tajiks and even someAfricans among the invaders.12

The invaders proceeded to declare the estab-lishment of an Islamic state in the Avar mountain re-gion, with Siruzhdin Ramazanov being named primeminister of the new state, and the aforementioned ide-ologist Magomed Tagaev named information minis-ter.

The incursion was followed by heavy fightingin both the Tsumadin and Botlikh districts. Many ofthe local Avars appear to have been strongly offendedat this attempt to force Wahhabism down their throats.Gadzhi Makhachev, a deputy prime minister of therepublic and a leading Avar politician, brought a largeforce of armed volunteers to the region, while the well-known Lak leader, Nadirshakh Khachilaev—arrestedin early October 1999 by the Russian police13—de-clined to support the invaders and advised them noteven to attempt an incursion through the Lak-con-trolled Novolakskii District. (As of 1996, there wereapproximately 100,000 Laks in Dagestan.)

One suspects that future analysts and histori-ans will conclude that a great deal of the fighting againstthe invaders was in fact done by armed Avar volun-teers. As one Russian journalist commented in earlySeptember: “The soldiers on both sides of this warare Dagestani…”14 The Russian government, how-ever, eventually poured in large numbers of troopsand began to employ air strikes and heavy artillery.The Russian air force made use of highly lethal FuelAir Explosives (FAE’s) to kill fighters concealed incaves and in other inaccessible locations in the moun-tains.15

On 23 August, Shamil’ Basaev unexpectedlyannounced that the invading force was withdrawing,and it then retreated back into Chechnya. Many Avarscomplained bitterly at the time—and perhaps with rea-son—that the Russian military had permitted the in-vaders to get away.16

This vigorous repulsion of the invasion mightfeasibly have marked the end of military conflict in theregion. The retreat of the invaders constituted a major

victory for Vladimir Putin, who had taken over as (act-ing) prime minister from the ousted Sergei Stepashin on 9August. Of course, the problem of the porous borderwith Chechnya would have to be addressed. Duma depu-ties General Andrei Nikolaev, former head of the RussianBorder Guards, and Aleksei Arbatov, a defense specialist,as well as others, believed that the border with Chechnyacould have been effectively sealed (like, say, the borderbetween Tajikistan and Afghanistan).17

Russia Assaults the Dargin Wahhabi VillagesInstead of taking such a step, however, the Rus-

sian government and the “hawkish” Dagestani State Coun-cil, led by Magomedali Magomedov, decided to followup their victory in the Avar mountain region with an as-sault on the Dargin Wahhabi villages of Karamakhi,Chabanmakhi, and Kadar (which had a combined popu-lation of 8,000).18 Nikolai Petrov of the Moscow CarnegieCenter has aptly commented: “I think that it was a greatmistake, having finished with the… fighters in the moun-tainous region, to turn to a fight with internal DagestaniWahhabis. [The Russian forces] started simply to destroypeople defending their homes.”19

On 29 August, the federal forces commenced anoperation to seize these three settlements and to stampout what they termed “the Wahhabi contagion.” Some500 Wahhabi fighters emerged to defend their communi-ties. Long fearing an assault, they had constructed elabo-rate fortifications. Extremely savage fighting ensued, withthe Russian forces employing bombers, attack helicop-ters, and heavy artillery. The fighting became so brutalthat on 4 September the Defense Ministry was requiredto assume control of the operation from the Interior Min-istry.20

One point made by Russian journalists is that theDagestani reaction to this move by the federal authoritieswas markedly different from their reaction to the earlierAugust events. In September, many leading Dagestanisdid not endorse the Russian assault on the Dargin Wahhabisettlements—for example, the aforementioned Avar leaderGadzhi Makhashev, who voiced support for his besiegedDargin “brothers”—while the previously-noted Lak leader,Nadirshakh Khachilaev, reportedly fought along with the“bearded men” of Karamakhi against the federals.21

The Second IncursionIt was this campaign against the Dargin Wahhabis

that provided the rationale for a second major incursioninto Dagestan, on 5 September 1999, this time throughthe Lak region of the republic (Novolakskii District). Once


again, Shamil’ Basaev and Khatab served as titular lead-ers of a force consisting of some 2000 men. By 6 Sep-tember, the invaders were said to be in control of sixsettlements of Novolakskii District, plus two inKhasavyurt District. These were both districts, it shouldbe noted, with a significant number of Chechens (theso-called Chechen-Akkins of Dagestan, who numbered70,000 as of 1996). By 7 September, the invaders hadseized all of Novolaksii District, leading Boris Yeltsinto complain indignantly, “How is it that in Dagestan welost an entire district?”22

The invaders on this occasion seemed to bemaking excellent progress in the midst of heavy fight-ing. One reason for this improvement in fortune couldhave been that, as Edward Walker has suggested, theparticipants in this second incursion, as opposed to thefirst, may have been largely ethnic Chechens.23 TheChechens are unquestionably the best fighters in theNorth Caucasus region. The Dagestanis, Central Asians,and other Wahhabis comprising the bulk of the fightersof the first incursion lacked the battle skills and resource-fulness of the Chechens. (It should be emphasized herethat neither incursion enjoyed the support of the electedpresident of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, or of his gov-ernment.)

Russian intelligence reported that monitored ra-dio traffic indicated that the fighters of the second in-cursion wanted to seize the town of Khasavyurt and todeclare it the Islamic capital of Dagestan.24 On 12 Sep-tember, however, Shamil’ Basaev suddenly and unex-pectedly announced that his forces were pulling out ofNovolakskii District. Why the decision to retreat?

The Russian military would have us believe thatthey had once again achieved a major victory, as theyhad done in August. The Chechen invaders, however,were apparently doing well, and there was thus no mili-tary reason for them to call a halt to their operation.The key factor behind the pullback was almost certainlythe 9 September terror bombing in Moscow.

On 31 August, a small bomb was set off in ashopping arcade in Moscow, near the Kremlin. Oneperson eventually died from injuries suffered in the blast.On 4 September, a very large bomb was detonated at afive-story military housing facility in the Dargin city ofBuinaksk, not far from where the Wahhabi fighters werebeing assaulted by Russian troops. Sixty-four personsdied and 120 were wounded in this incident. Since mostof the victims were apparently Dagestanis and other non-Russians, this incident failed to inflame ethnic Russians.25

(The bomb may have been set by Dagestani Wahhabis

seeking revenge against a military target for the brutalsuppression of their Dargin Wahhabi brethren.)

Five days later, on 9 September, an extremelypowerful bomb exploded at House No. 19 on Gur’yanovStreet in Moscow. Ninety-four persons were killed andapproximately 300 were wounded. This brutal terroristact served to shock and to enrage ethnic Russiansthroughout the Russian Federation.

Three days after this, on 12 September, Shamil’Basaev announced a pullback of all his forces fromDagestan. Early the following day, on 13 September, at5:00 a.m., a second powerful bomb exploded at HouseNo. 6 on the Kashirskii Highway in Moscow. One hun-dred and nine persons died in the blast.26 Lastly, on 16September, a truck bomb exploded in the southern Rus-sian town of Volgodonsk, Rostov oblast’, killing thir-teen and injuring 115.

My sense is that Basaev, a Chechen nationalist,well understood that the continued presence of his forcesin Dagestan, combined with the savage terror bombingcampaign being carried out in Moscow, could elicit atowering rage among ethnic Russians. Fed by such arage, public opinion might have backed even the use ofweapons of mass destruction against the Chechens.

By swiftly withdrawing his forces, Basaev cal-lously doomed what was left of the 500 Dargin Wahhabiboeviki, and they were physically overwhelmed by theRussian forces. As for the Chechen-Akkins of Dagestan,they became the object of pogroms carried out by venge-ful Laks.27 The newspaper Komsomol’skaya pravdareported at the time that the Russian forces had begunto set up so-called filtration camps—notorious for theirpractice of torture and of summary executions duringthe 1994-96 Russo-Chechen war—in an attempt to iden-tify (and punish) Wahhabi fighters and their sympathiz-ers in Dagestan.28

The end result of the two incursions intoDagestan was not only the repression of Wahhabism inDagestan but also, of course, the subsequent Russianmilitary invasion of Chechnya. A belief that ethnicChechens had been behind the terror bombings in bothMoscow and Volgodonsk (a charge vehemently deniedby President Maskhadov of Chechnya) served to unitepublic opinion around Prime Minister Putin and the Rus-sian generals. To date, however, no convincing evi-dence has been produced to support the regime’s claimthat ethnic Chechens were behind these bombings; in-deed many in Russia believe that the FSB itself couldhave carried them out, especially in light of a highly sus-picious incident which occurred in Ryazan’ on 23 Sep-

tember.29 Under such an interpretation, the Moscowbombings would represent bold provocative acts akinto the burning down of the German Reichstag in 1933.

The August and September incursions intoDagestan had a number of extraordinary results. First,they permitted the Dagestani and Russian authoritiesto crush Wahhabism in Dagestan. Second, they pro-vided a justification for a second major invasion ofChechnya and for the effective annulment of the Au-gust 1996 Khasavyurt Accords. And finally, theybrought about an awesome surge in the popularity ofPrime Minister Putin, who became the odds-on favor-ite to be elected Russian president in June of the year2000, as well as a remarkable showing by the pro-re-gime bloc “Unity,” which burst out of nowhere to placea close second to the communists on the party list votein the State Duma elections of December 1999. Thetwo incursions into Dagestan, thus, served to turn Rus-sian politics upside down.

1 For an illuminating discussion of the development ofWahhabism in Dagestan, see the article by MagomedVagabov, a professor of Islamic studies at Dagestan StateUniversity, in N.G. religii, 25 August 1999. On the samesubject, see also Igor’ Rotar’, “Rossiiskii kavkaz,”Nezavisimaya gazeta, 15 September 1999.1 From an op-ed appearing in the Los Angeles Times, 27August 1999.2 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 6 August 1999.3 Segodnya, 7 September 1999. See also SergeiArutyunov, “Kavkazskaya likhodradka,” Itogi, 24 August1999, pp. 16-19. For a first-rate analysis of the currentpolitical situation in Dagestan, see Edward W. Walker,“Russia’s Soft Underbelly: The Stability of Instability inDagestan,” BPS working paper, Winter 1999-2000.4 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 21 August 1999.5 Segodnya, 7 September 1999.6 For this figure and also figures for other major ethnicgroups in Dagestan, see Robert Bruce Ware and EnverKisriev, “Political Stability and Ethnic Parity: Why IsThere Peace in Dagestan?,” in Mikhail Alekseev, ed.,Center-Priphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia: AFederation Imperiled (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press,1999), pp. 100-101.7 On these 1997 episodes, see Ware and Kisriev, “PoliticalStability…,” pp. 122-123.8 In Itogi, 14 September 1999, pp. 15-16.9 On Khatab, see the biographical note from the JordanianInformation Center, posted by Thomas de Waal of theBBC on Johnson’s Russia List, 14 September 1999.10 In Nezavisimya gazeta, 4 August 1999.11 In Nezavisimaya gazeta, 10 September 1999.


12 Report of 20 September 1999, posted in the originalFrench by Joan Beecher Eichrodt on the Discussion Listabout Chechnya, 27 September 1999.13 Segodnya, 8 October 1999.14 Komsomol’skaya pravda, 5 August 1999.15 Interfax, 24 August 1999, citing an interview withRussian Air Force commander General Anatolii Kornukov.16 Paul Quinn-Judge has also confirmed this version fromRussian military sources. See Time, 11 October 1999, pp,46-48.17 For Nikolaev’s views, see Segodnya, 4 September 1999;for Arbatov’s, see his 19 September interview with NTVposted in translation on Johnson’s Russia List, 22 Septem-ber 1999.18 On the background to the assault of these villages, seethe article by Vadim Dubnov in Novoe vremya, no. 36(1999), pp. 4-5.19 Quoted by Reuters, 6 September 1999.20 On the assault, see Kommersant-daily, 31 August 1999.21 See RFE-RL Caucasus Report, 2 September 1999, andIzvestiia, 17 September 1999.22 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 September 1999.23 Walker, “Russia’s Soft Underbelly.” Identified ascommanders of this second incursion were, in addition toBasaev, the Chechen commanders Ruslan Gelaev, ArbiBaraev, and Saiputdin Isaev. See Izvestiia, 7 September1999. A leading Chechen politician, Movladi Udugov,served as information minister for the invaders.24 Agence France Presse, 5 September 1999.25 On this, see “Osobennosti natsional’nogo traura,”Segodnya, 11 September 1999.26 For a detailed chronicle of the bombings, see “Khronikateraktov,” Izvestiia, 14 September 1999.27 Yurii Biryukov, head of the Russian Federal Procuracyfor the North Caucasus region, has maintained that: “Amajority of the Chechen-Akkins living in Novolakskii andKhasavyurt districts, despite the hopes of the aggressors,did not support them.” (Izvestiia, 17 September 1999)28 Komsomol’skaya pravda, 27 September 1999.29 On the Ryazan’ episode, see Segodnya andNezavisimaya gazeta, 25 September 1999. For a detailedinvestigative report on the Moscow bombings which castsdoubt on the regime’s version of events, see Moskovskiikomsomolets, 24 September 1999.


Afghanistan: How to Grow an Ethnic ConflictDavid Isao Hoffman

On November 2, 1999, BPS hosted a presentation entitled “Afghani-stan: How to Grow an Ethnic Conflict.” The talk was presented byDavid Isao Hoffman, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Po-litical Science at U.C. Berkeley. Hoffman had recently returned froma three-month research trip to northern Afghanistan and environs,and presented his findings to the BPS community.

Hoffman began by explaining that he and a colleage were retained as con-sultants to the international non-governmental organization Human RightsWatch (HRW) to research and document military assistance to the warringparties in the Afghan civil war by outside governments. As all of the coun-tries bordering Afghanistan, as well as the United States and Russia (collec-tively, known as the “six plus two” group) are party to U.N.-sponsored agree-ments prohibiting the supply of military assistance to any of the factions inthe ongoing Afghan conflict, the results of the study were intended to weighheavily in HRW’s advocacy work, which is geared towards pressuring gov-ernments to halt the flow of military aid—one of the key enablers ofAfghanistan’s bloodshed, now into its third decade.

Hoffman asserted that the conflict in Afghanistan, contrary to por-trayals in the media and general public, is extremely multifaceted and opento multiple interpretations. The war can be described, with equal plausibil-ity, as (1) a fight among corporate, semi-criminal groups over rent-seekingand control of strategic resources; (2) an ethnic war, pitting a Pashtun plu-rality against Uzbeks, Hazara, Tajiks, and other ethnic and linguistic groups;(3) a religious war between Sunnis and Shia, the battle lines of which cross-cut many ethnic divisions; (4) an international conflict that results from out-side interference by the United States, Russia, Pakistan, Iran and others; or(5) an international conflict indirectly fueled by the world community’s lackof attention to the region, the results of which include phenomena such asarms dumping and a lack of will in the international community to support avigorous peace effort. All these interpretations, to some extent, are valid.Accordingly, the conclusions one draws from the Afghan tragedy will beheavily informed by how one packages the conflict.

In addition to providing an empirical overview of the current situa-tion in Afghanistan (and in particular, in the northern regions still opposingthe Taliban government in Kabul), the presentation addressed Afghanistan’srelevance to the larger project of comparative social science. As a socialscience laboratory, Afghanistan can be used to test a number of questions,such as: What happens when a country is completely abandoned by the worldcommunity? How do wars that do not begin as such become transformedinto ethnic or sectarian conflicts? What are the responsibilities of the worldcommunity to an area that was armed for so long by outside powers but thatis difficult to “reach” politically, economically, and even physically? Exam-ining the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan forces social scientists to addressthese and other difficult questions in an effort to generate fruitful compara-tive insights.

On August 8, 1998, the opposition stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif fell


to Taliban forces. In the ensuing “killingfrenzy,” at least two thousand and as many asten thousand men and boys from non-Pashtunethnic groups, in particular Shia Hazaras, werebrutally murdered. The war in Afghanistan,however, had only recently evolved into an eth-nic conflict. The original call to arms againstthe invasion by the Soviet Union in 1979 unitedAfghans of all political, ethnic, and religiousstripes. Islamists, democrats, and monarchistsfrom virtually all of the country’s major lin-guistic and ethnic groups participated in theresistance war against Soviet forces from 1979to 1989, when the last Soviet troops crossedthe Druzhba (“Friendship”) Bridge out of Af-ghanistan and into then-Soviet Uzbekistan.Following the Soviet withdrawal, fighting con-tinued, albeit no longer against a foreign in-vader but against the perceived communistpuppet regime of President Najibullah. Hav-ing been a war of national liberation, the con-flict became an extension of the Jihad, but nowalong ideological lines, until 1992 when theNajibullah regime fell. The years between 1992and 1996 then witnessed a fight for power andrent-seeking opportunities among fractiouswarlords, with frequent shifts in loyalties.

The appearance of the Taliban as a cred-ible fighting force in 1994-5, and the militia’seventual capture of Kabul in 1996, ushered inyet another phase in the Afghan war. Philo-sophically rooted in a combination of Pashtuntribal customs and Sunni religious doctrine, theTaliban introduced a degree of religious andethnic puritanism that had not been seen be-fore in Afghanistan. As witnessed at Mazar-i-Sharif, Shia populations were the first to betargeted in the escalating cycle of violence.However, following the mass deportations ofnon-Pashtun Sunni Tajik villages from theShamoli plains north of Kabul in the summerof 1999, it became clear that the civil war inAfghanistan had adopted distinctly ethnic over-tones.

According to Hoffman, the ethnicizationof the war in Afghanistan has crystallized la-tent ethnic identities that had previously playeda relatively minor role in the country’s politi-cal life. Whereas the intensity of ethnic self-identification had been relatively low in many

communities in Afghanistan previously, many lo-cal inhabitants, after having their village ethni-cally “cleansed,” have begun to identify them-selves as Tajik, Uzbek, or Pashtun rather than“Afghan,” as the previous practice had been.Political and military organizational patterns, inturn, reflect this trend. The conflict in Afghani-stan is thus a case study of the evolution of apolitical conflict into ethnic warfare.

The other main theme touched upon in thepresentation was the role played by the outsideworld in the Afghan war. After being the recipi-ent of huge amounts of Soviet and American aidin the 1980s, Afghanistan has been almost entirelyabandoned by the international community. Hav-ing been a fulcrum of cold war tensions, the con-flict has been all but forgotten. International or-ganizations, meanwhile, have also retreated fromthe country, driven out by a lack of funding, alack of security, and a lack of cooperation fromthe warring parties. For the major powers, bothinternational and regional, attention to Afghani-stan is now based on the narrowest of concerns.For the U.S., Afghanistan is significant only inso far as it continues to harbor “public enemynumber one”—Osama bin-Laden. Russia and theother post-Soviet Central Asian nations, mean-while, have attempted to isolate Taliban-con-trolled Afghanistan, both physically and diplo-matically, viewing it as a haven for terrorism,drugs, and Islamic fundamentalism.

The two countries that are most activelyinvolved in the ongoing hostilities in Afghanistan,however, are its two powerful neighbors, Iran andPakistan. Historical political and sectarian rivals,Iran and Pakistan have traditionally fought forcontrol over Afghanistan, using the country asan arena for power struggles between religiousand political proxies. These two countries’ con-tinued military interference in Afghanistan con-stituted one of the principal focuses of Hoffman’sfield research in Afghanistan, and he discussedsome of his findings in his presentation.

During his time in northeastern and north-ern Afghanistan (in particular, in Tahar and Parvanprovinces), Hoffman employed a variety of re-search techniques, ranging from interviews withfield commanders and journalists, frontline radiointercepts, documentary evidence, and interviewswith prisoners of war. On the basis of his re-

search, Hoffman and his research partner wereable to sketch a fairly detailed, thoroughly-documented picture of outside military involve-ment in the Afghan conflict today.

The evidence suggests wide-ranging Pa-kistani and Iranian involvement in support forthe Taliban and anti-Taliban forces in Afghani-stan, respectively. On the Taliban side, theclearest evidence of Pakistani involvement is thepresence of between three and ten thousandPakistani citizens in Afghanistan, fighting on theside of the Taliban in what constitutes a de factocreeping invasion of a neighboring country.During his visit to territories held by anti-Taliban forces, Hoffman conducted extensiveinterviews at three separate prisons with Paki-stanis who had been captured fighting for theTaliban. Pakistan is also providing extensivematerial, financial, and logistical support to theTaliban—support that has proven essential tothe militia’s ongoing military successes.

The anti-Taliban “northern alliance” inAfghanistan, meanwhile, is receiving supportfrom the Iranian government, according toHoffman. A traditional ally of Afghan Shiagroups, Iran in recent years has actively sup-ported all Northern Alliance forces. In addi-tion to official aid—including humanitarian do-


nations, infrastructure improvement, and medi-cal assistance—the Iranian government is in-volved in the provision of covert military aid aswell. According to Hoffman, this consists pri-marily of military training (through the use of Ira-nian military advisors) and weapons and muni-tions deliveries. The latter has proven particu-larly problematic, as the lines of communicationbetween Iran and Northern Alliance-held terri-tory have grown increasingly long and circuitousin the face of repeated Taliban advances. Thiswas highlighted in October 1998, when a traincarrying 20 wagons of declared humanitarian aidfrom Iran to opposition-held territory in Afghani-stan was stopped in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and dis-covered to be carrying weapons and munitionsfor anti-Taliban forces.

Available in pdf format at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~bspPlease contact BPS [email protected] or 510-643-3737 to order a copy.

conference report 20 april 1999

State Building and theReconstruction of Shattered Societies

VLADIMIR DEGOEV

STEPHANIE PLATZ

BARTOLOMIEJ KAMINSKIeconomic transitions in the transcacuasus: institutions, performance, and prospects

CHARLES FAIRBANKSthe weak state: public and private armies in the caucasus

society, nation, state: ethnographic perspectives on armenia

leadership assets in the foreign policy strategies of the caucasus

SERGEI ARUTINOV

the challenge to the caucasus to russian statehood: the legacy of history

tradition and prosperity in the caucasus: are the in conflict?

LEILA ALIEVA

new for 2000 seriesBPSWORKING PAPER

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