The Internationalisation of the Russian–Chechen Conflict: Myths and Reality

Abstract

The article provides a critical reading of various related discourses, depicting the political motives behind the conflict in Chechnya as a battlefield of the global jihad. These narratives have sought to present the involvement of external Islamist groups as a major factor in the conflict, and to portray many of the main groups within Chechnya as subscribing to a jihadist ideology. The authors suggest an alternative narrative focusing on the significance of the blood feud in the societies of the North Caucasus. It is argued that it is necessary to differentiate between the radicalisation of the resistance as such and the strengthening of the ideology of jihad. It is concluded that the resistance currently assumes a supranational character, yet one which is delimited regionally rather than globally.

Notes

This article is partially based on research carried out by Emil Souleimanov and Ondrej Ditrych on transnational terrorism as part of the Transnational Terrorism, Security and the Rule of Law (TTSRL) project funded by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme.

Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 July 2000.

Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 January 2000.

By internationalisation, we mean territorial extension of the conflict beyond the borders of a nation state, in this case the Russian Federation. In contrast, we refer to regionalisation as the spread of the conflict within the North Caucasus (see particularly fourth section below).

In this article the term ‘rhetorical action’ is used in the sense borrowed from Schimmelfennig, that is ‘the strategic use and exchange of arguments based on ideas shared in the environment of the proponents and intended to persuade the audience and the opponents to accept the proponents’ claims and act accordingly’ (Schimmelfennig 2003, p. 199).

By ‘securitisation’ is meant the framing of a certain issue as an existential threat to the referent of security and legitimising extraordinary means to tackle the issue (Buzan et al. 1998).

These assumptions may be summarised in the proposition that ‘it is by labelling something a security issue that it becomes one’ (Wæver 2004, p. 13).

There seems to be some substance in theories about the involvement of Russia's security service FSB (Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti, heir to the KGB): for discussion of these theories see Souleimanov (2007, pp. 153–57). There are no reliable numbers of casualties of the Second Chechen War, but they run into thousands on both sides. Moreover, frequent human rights violations including targeting the civilian population, murder, rape and torture committed at the checkpoints and during infamous zachistka (purge) operations by Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen government forces have been reported by NGOs such as Memorial or Human Rights Watch. For the latter organisation's recent report, see http://hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/chechnya1106/, accessed 10 August 2007. Cornell speaks of a ‘brutal war against the entire people’ (Cornell 2004, p. 275); in addition, Gall and de Waal have written of a ‘War against the People’ (Gall & de Waal 1997). Russell cites as many as 200,000 Chechen casualties (a fifth of the Chechen population) and 25,000 dead Russian soldiers in both the first and the second conflict (Russell 2005, p. 101).

Nezavisimaya gazeta, 8 July 2000.

White House ‘Press Conference Transcript’, 16 June 2001, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010618.html, accessed 8 August 2007.

Asia Times Online, 28 September 2001.

Izvestiya, 9 March 2005.

Izvestiya, 26 January 2002.

Quoted in LaFraniere (2001).

Globe and Mail, 11 November 2004.

Occasionally, the battlefield would be expanded to include Georgia's Pankisi Gorge as a safe haven for the Chechen militants and global jihadists in order to exert international pressure on that country. According to numerous accounts—including formal statements by the Tbilisi government—this hinterland area inhabited by Kists, an ethnic group related to Chechens, was not under the control of Georgia's state authorities from the end of the 1990s until 2003 and indeed served as a haven to both Chechen guerrillas and some international mujahideen.

This figure assumes that the total number of Chechen rebels reached approximately 1,500 combatants—a number presented by Regional Operations Staff for Direction of Anti-Terrorist Operations in the North Caucasus, Major General Arkady Yedelev and the Russian Presidential Plenipotentiary in the Southern Federal District, Dmitri Kozak (Chechenskoye obshchestvo, 26 September 2005). Even this total number of Chechen rebels may arguably be overstated to justify the deployment of the Russian army and FSB units of considerable size in the North Caucasus, alongside the local government's militias.

Traditionally endogamous Chechens tend to be very reluctant to give consent for their daughters and sisters to marry foreigners. Emir Khattab did marry in the North Caucasus, however, to a Dagestani Darginian.

Literaturnaya gazeta, 12 August 1992.

‘I have learned mainly from the teachings of Imam Shafi'i [a celebrated Sunni scholar of the eighth and ninth century]’, Saydulayev maintained in an interview in Chechnya Weekly, 6 July 2006.

Chechnya Weekly, 27 May 2006.

Chechnya Weekly, 16 February 2006.

RFE/RL interview, 4 June 2005.

Nezavisimaya gazeta, 28 February 2001.

Washington Post, 29 December 2002.

Reuters, 19 August 2004.

http://www.chechenpress.co.uk/russian/news/2004/09/04/01.shtml, accessed 8 August 2005.

Vremya Novostei, 17 December 2001, quoted in Wilhelmsen (2004, p. 24).

Coerced by the circumstances, and according to some accounts, by the guns pointed at him by Basayev and Khattab (Nezavysimaya gazeta, 17 July 1999), Maskhadov finally significantly yielded to the demands of the radicals (Wilhelmsen 2004, pp. 57–58).

Terrorism Monitor, 26 January 2006.

PrimaNews, 1 November 2004. Basayev used a very similar argument during the Budennovsk attack in 1995: ‘We will use the same methods as the federal forces in Chechnya use. Remember the hospital in Grozny, or the resident house in Shali’ (Segodnya, 17 June 1995).

The Times, 3 February 2005.

Terrorism Focus, 12 December 2005.

Novaya gazeta, 4 August 2005.

It is quite certain that some Chechens were in Afghanistan. A late reported case has been that of Ruslan Odizhev, killed in Nalchik (Kabardino-Balkariya) on 27 June 2007. Odizhev, who had been captured by US forces in Afghanistan and detained for several years at Guantánamo Bay, was subsequently released without charge. Following his death, he was referred to by the FSB as a participant in the Moscow and Volgodonsk apartment building bombings (1999) which immediately preceded the Second Chechen War, the Nalchik raid in 2005, and even as the ‘spiritual leader’ of Yarmuk jamaat, which operated from 2002 to 2005, which was during his detention at Guantánamo (Chechnya Weekly, 28 June 2007).

A few similar attempts to repeat the scenario occurred in this period. In 2000, a plane en route from Makhachkala, Dagestan, to Moscow was hijacked and redirected to land in Israel. Unlike this incident however, the hijacking of a Tu-154 heading from Turkey to Russia, which was forced to land at Medina Airport, Saudi Arabia, ended with the storming of the plane and bloodshed the following year.

Benahmed himself used to be emir (commander) of GIA, and a personal friend to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, whom he met in Afghanistan. He seems to be a true globetrotting mujadid with numerous contacts in the global jihad movement (Nesser 2004, pp. 63–64).

Tokcan had, however, reportedly fought in the South Caucasus, in Shamil Basayev's Abkhaz battalion in 1993.

Traditionally, a wide range of acts may be understood as a so-called deadly insult leading to a blood feud. Such acts, violating the principles of local (mountain) etiquette, may be verbal (and publicly expressed) insults of parents or female relatives or (brutal) beatings. While the custom of blood feud does not apply today to the extent that it did 100 years ago or more, relics of the practice in one form or another persist in the region to this day. In mountainous Dagestan and especially in Ingushetia and Chechnya, blood feud exists in a form that remains virtually unchanged.

It was the Turkic population of the north-western Caucasus inhabiting the nearly inaccessible mountain areas that recently made up the majority in the Yarmuk Jamaat, the activity of which is noted below.

See Joint Statement by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and (a Russian organisation for the protection of human rights) Memorial, 8 April 2004, available at: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/04/07/russia8408.htm, accessed 10 July 2007.

Jamaats in the mountainous Caucasus were originally a part of long-established local traditions. This originally Arab word was revived mainly in Dagestan to designate communities that united the male population of the auls (mountain villages) for the purpose of the common defence of land, shared agricultural work and military training, as well as activities related to religion. Over the centuries these village communities came under the strong influence of Islamic mysticism. They existed more or less illegally during the Soviet domination, and they did not become legal until Gorbachev's perestroika in the latter half of the 1980s, when they were viewed as the revival of a local tradition. Although it cannot be denied that since the 1980s and especially the 1990s, many Jamaats have come under the influence of Wahhabite or Salafi Islam, in the great majority of cases the Jamaats have remained faithful to Sufism. To this day, the function of the Jamaats has never been limited to the sphere of orthodox religious practice, and their blanket identification with Islam is misleading since, as we have seen, they have served and still serve as a synonym for the village (male) community and the efforts of the mountain people to provide each other with support and solidarity under the harsh conditions high in the mountains.

See the report by Memorial, ‘Conflict Spill-Over Outside the Chechen Republic in 2004–2005 (Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkariya)’, available at: http://www.memo.ru/hr/hotpoints/caucas1/msg/2006/03/m53212.htm, accessed 2 March 2006.

For example, it helped young people overcome difficult personal problems (alcoholism, drug addiction) and was involved in benevolent activities, dialogue with older generations of the Muslim public and also in the joint resistance against racketeering in the economy and dishonest business practices.