ekline@inx.net
After Russia`s failure to reassert effective sovereignty over Chechnya in November 1991, an extended stalemate developed. Chechnya attempted to assert the prerogatives of an independent sovereign state, while Russia continued to regard the Chechen Republic as part of the Russian Federation and subject to its laws-- the Chechen Republic is listed in Article 65 of the 1993 Constitution as one of the 89 subjects of the Russian Federation and the two seats in the Council of the Federation assigned to Chechnya are listed as vacant. Nevertheless, an uneasy modus vivendi prevailed for two and a half years, despite intermittent sound and fury. Some attempts were made to negotiate a resolution of the conflict, but Russia mainly followed a policy of benign neglect, except in the international arena where its adamant stance prevented any state from extending diplomatic recognition to the Chechen Republic.
Dudaev turned out to be an erratic and quarrelsome president. Suzanne Goldenberg, author of The Pride of Small Nations: The Caucasus and Post-Soviet Disorder, describes her visit to Grozny and her audience with Dudaev as follows:
Everywhere one sees men in various menacing guises, loitering with a disregard for time that seems closer in spirit to Peshawar, say, than to Moscow. The village elders with heavy sheepskin coats and cutlasses, the suspected mafiosi with gold teeth, fedora and black coat of movie gangsters, the bored soldiers -- these are the people with power in Grozny. They preen themselves in front of some of the finest cars in Russia -- Mercedes, Saabs, and other imports -- clasp each others shoulders in a quick hug in the Islamic style of greeting, mutter "salaam" and move on. On Thursday mornings the square is resrved for the dancers, who, according to local Sufi or mystical traditions, move at speed in dizzying circles and patterns meant to induce a religious ecstasy.In Moscow's newspapers and on television, the leader of independent Chechnya, General Jokhar Dudaev, is portrayed as a dangerous lunatic. Amid all the Russian prejudices against Caucasians, there is a particular contempt for Chechens. They are depicted by the media as a nation of thugs and criminals, relying on strong-arm techniques to safeguard their claim on the takings of Moscow's drug dealers, prostitutes, arm merchants, and smugglers. Although there is almost certainly a Chechen presence in Moscow's underworld, this fact is blown out of all proportion. As a Chechen foreign ministy official complained: "Some journal-ists who come to the Chechen Republic see only the limousines, they can't see the poor people, or the people fighting for their freedom. The main purpose of this idea of the Chechen mafia is to hide the struggle of a people for independence." At first glance, General Dudaev does indeed appear strange. His grip on affairs is so complete that it is impossible even to get a hotel room in Grozny without his personal intervention. Visitors seeking an audience stand waiting for six hours at a stretch in a corridor of heavily armed bodyguards, pacing and smoking. When they do reach the inner sanctum, Dudaev is invariably behind his desk, a strategy to hide the fact that he is very short. Wary but smiling in civilian clothing, he greets visitors from beneath the new green velvet national flag. The emblem of freedom shows a seated wolf on a mountain top in the light of a full moon. The green represents Islam, and the wolf the uncompromising independence of the mountain people.In November 1991, when Russian pressure was at its height, Dudaev released 640 prisoners from Grozny's prison to help defend Chechnya's independence. Many subsequently became members of the National Guard or of Dudaev's personal bodyguard. In early 1992, soon after Chechnya's declaration of independence, there were raids on Russian weapons depots in Chechnya, possibly instigated by Dudaev. Chechnya became a major supplier of Russian arms to the Bosnian Muslims, and allegedly an important base for drug dealers as well. Even sympathetic observers have called the Dudaev government's management of the Chechen economy a disaster; the blockade and other other sanctions imposed by Russia, even though they were only haphazardly enforced, accelerated the economic decline.When Dudaev clashed with parliament in June 1992, he announced the introduction of direct presidential rule. After speaker of the Chechen parliament Husein Akhmadov met in January 1993 with Ramazan Abdulatipov, chair of the Russian Supreme Soviet's Council of Nationalities, and Sergei Shakhrai, then chairman of the State Committee on Nationalities, and signed a letter of intent to negotiate a treaty with Russia, the conflict between Dudaev and the parliament escalated. It culminated in Dudaev's dissolution of the parliament and a June 1993 battle in Grozny between the National Guard and supporters of the parliament, which claimed more than 100 victims. Dudaev made Grozny the seat of the Confederation of Caucasian Peoples, a loosely structured and not very effective organization of fifteen peoples. The Confederation was intended to encourage the belief that a union of the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus is possible and could produce a viable independent state, but it also aroused Russian fears of Chechen meddling in Russia's ethnic Republics. Dudaev's grant of political asylum to Zviad Gamsakhurdia when he was ousted as Georgia's president in January 1992 and, later that same year, the sending of Chechen volunteers to assist Abkhazians in their fight for independence from Georgia only added to these fears.Despite official policy not to discriminate against Russians and to encourage them to remain in Chechnya, economic depression, interethnic incidents (many involving Cossacks in Chechnya's northern districts), fears of crime, and a reluctance to live as a minority in a Chechen-speaking and Muslim-oriented state led to a substantial increase in the emigration of Russians from Chechnya after 1991. A letter from an emigrant from Grozny published in Argumenty i fakty, no. 6, 1995, provides insight into a Russian's perception of interethnic relations before the war:Three years have passed since Dudaev came to power, and during that time 200,000 Russians have left Chechnya [this figure seems somewhat exaggerated], abandoning their homes, or selling them for a pittance. We Russians from Chechnya lost everything: our homes, possessions, friends, jobs. It was the Russians who developed the Republic's economy. No Chechen ever worked at a lathe or in the dangerous conditions of the oil refineries. They considered such jobs degrading. They would say "we have our white slaves -- the Russians."Now everyone's calling the Chechens poor unfortunates! Rackets, terrorism, counterfeiting, theft and armed robbery are the occupations "a real Chechen" considers worthy of him. "Go back to your Russia!" they screamed. And did everything to make their wish come true. And almost all Russians left. The Chechen people got what they wanted, and there's no reason to feel sorry for them. Chechnya's industry has been devastated. Sewage flows in Grozny's streets, and there's no water, electricity, heat. What can be done about it when earlier everything was supplied by Russian workers -- the Chechens thought that to get water you turn on the taps, to get light you throw the switch, and that's all there is to it.Calamities can really be understood only by persons who have suffered them. I'm not a nationalist, but I'm absolutely sure that the government has to be tough in taking care of Dudaev's gang, because Grozny is Russia, it's our town built by our ancestors.
After Russia's failure to establish effective control over Chechnya in November 1991, despite all the real and alleged sins of the Dudaev regime, despite its anti-Dudaev propaganda campaigns and its fitful economic blockade of Chechnya, Moscow largely followed a policy of peaceful coexistence with the Grozny authorities until spring 1994. Russia's adoption in December 1993 of a Constitution and the simultaneous election of a Federal Assembly more Russian nationalist in outlook seems to have triggered a reassessment of the Chechen question.
On February 15, 1994, Russia and Tatarstan signed a treaty affirming Russian sovereignty but granting Tatarstan substantial domestic autonomy. Tatarstan had been the only Republic other than Chechnya which had refused to sign the March 1992 federal treaty. Dudaev, while acknowledging the desirability for Chechnya of close economic relations with Russia, apparently declined suggestions to follow Tatarstan's course and refused to enter into negotiations until Russia recognized Chechnya as an independent state and a subject of international law.
Pressure mounted in Moscow to do something about Chechnya. Nationalists wanted to reassert Russian rule by force. Liberals wanted to bring Chechnya within the framework of the Russian Constitution and the rule of law by means of a process of peaceful negotiation. The average Russian was angered by stories of Chechen abuse of local Russians and saw Chechnya as a dangerous center of mafia activities. Almost no one in Russia or abroad called for recognition of Chechnya's independence.At the same time, local opposition in Chechnya to Dudaev had grown because of the Republic's failure to win international recognition, Dudaev's erratic and authoritarian behavior, a severe economic slump, and increasing crime, corruption, and clan rivalry. Some districts of Chechnya had come under the control of the opposition, notably Nadterechny raion, dominated by Umar Avturkhanov, who in December 1993 organized a Provisional Council as a potential alternative government for Chechnya and appealed to Moscow for assistance.
In the spring of 1994 Yeltsin and his advisors apparently decided to provide covert financial and military assistance to the opposition in Chechnya in hopes that Dudaev could be overthrown and that a reconstituted Chechen government would accept the Russian Constitution and the status it granted to the Chechen Republic. Implementation was assigned to the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK -- the principal successor to the KGB), headed by Sergei Stepashin. On June 29, while on an inspection tour of Russian troops in the North Caucasus, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev announced that Russia intended to develop in the region a powerful mobile army group that would be available to help Ministry of Interior forces with domestic security operations.
July 1994 saw the beginning of a gradually escalating, low-intensity conflict between Dudaev and the Russian-backed opposition, although it seemed initially more a battle of propaganda and disinformation, of alarms and excursions, rather than conventional military warfare.On August 2, Avturkhanov claimed on Russian TV that his Provisional Council (PC) exercised effective power in Chechnya, and Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin asserted that the time had come to take "concrete measures" against the Dudaev regime in Chechnya, but promised that Russian military force would not be used. Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that FSK's deputy director Evgeny Savostyanov (later dismissed) had clandestinely visited the North Caucasus and covert operations against Chechnya were being stepped up.
On August 6 there was a battle between pro-Dudaev and opposition forces in the Nadterechny raion. On August 10, a meeting was held in Grozny of clan chieftains, village elders, and Muslim religious leaders, who voted to proclaim a holy war (gazavat) if Russian troops invaded Chechnya. On August 29, Ruslan Khasbulatov agreed to cooperate with Avturkhanov's PC. (Dudaev had offered Khasbulatov asylum in Chechnya after Yeltsin disbanded the Russian Supreme Soviet in September 1993. Khasbulatov has played an ambiguous role in recent Chechen events, seemingly courted and also distrusted by all sides.) September 1-6 there was fighting between Dudaev's forces and opposition forces commanded by Beslan Gantemirov (elected mayor of Grozny in 1991), Ruslan Labazanov, and Avturkhanov. The Dudaev forces won this round despite the opposition's use of tanks and alleged support by Russian helicopter gunships. Fighting broke out again on September 13. Two of Grozny's television transmitters were blown up on September 15. On September 30, opposition forces claimed to have destroyed most of Chechnya's air force in an attack on the Grozny airport. On October 14-16, there was an attack, including helicopter strikes, on Grozny's suburbs: an army barracks and ammunition dump were blown up before opposition forces withdrew. Dudaev's forces captured Urus-Martan, Gantemirov's headquarters, on October 19, and a month-long lull in the fighting followed, but on November 17 near the village of Bratsk, Dudaev's troops engaged a column of tanks en route from North Ossetia to reinforce the PC forces.
The war entered a new phase in late November. On the 25th, 40 helicopters with Russian insignia attacked the Grozny airport and on the 26th the opposition launched a blitzkrieg tank attack on Grozny which penetrated up to the President's Palace. The attack fizzled out the next day, and the Chechens captured about seventy Russian soldiers who had manned the tanks. It was later disclosed that FSK had recruited them for this operation from regular army units. On November 29, President Yeltsin issued a 48-hour deadline for all factions fighting in Chechnya to surrender their weapons -- it was ignored. After General Grachev admitted on December 5 that Russian warplanes had bombed targets in Chechnya, which had earlier been denied, and that Russian soldiers had participated in the November 26 attack on Grozny, Dudaev met him in North Ossetia and agreed to release the captured Russian soldiers.
On December 8, President Yeltsin convened a special meeting of Russia's Security Council. The following day he issued Decree No. 2166, "On Measures to End the Activity of Illegal Armed Formations on the Territory of the Chechen Republic and in the Zone of Ossetin-Ingush Conflict," which stated:The Security Council of the Russian Federation has established the presence of illegal armed formations, whose actions over an extended period of time have led to bloodshed, the loss of life, and violation of the rights of citizens of the Russian Federation on the territory of the Chechen Republic and several districts of the North Caucasus.In accord with paragraph 5 of Article 13 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, activity directed toward violation of the Russian Federation's integrity, subversion of state security, creation of armed formations, or instigation of ethnic and national hatred is prohibited and is unlawful.On the basis of Article 80 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, I decree the following:1. I charge the Russian government in accord with points (e) and (f) of Article 114 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation to use all available state means to ensure the security of the state, the rule of law, civil rights and liberties, the defense of public order, the fight against crime, and the disarming of all illegal armed formations.2. This Decree enters into force from the date of publication.The Decreee was dated December 9, 1994. On the same day, the Russian government issued a resolution ordering the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) together with the Ministry of Defense "to disarm illegal armed formations on the territory of the Chechen Republic." The Ministry of Defense was ordered to destroy aircraft, armor, artillery and heavy weapons that were not surrendered or confiscated. The MVD and FSK were authorized to detain suspects, and deport non-residents from Chechnya. A special commission was set up to accredit correspondents in the war zone and to "ensure objective reporting of events in the Chechen Republic."
ASF Home PageASF page