Rupen Savoulian
In a spectacularly defiant act, on May 9, Chechen rebels killed the Russian-sponsored president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, by remote-controlled bomb in a stadium where dignitaries were gathered to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had boasted earlier that his regime had "stopped the aggression of international terrorism", referring to the Chechen national rebellion against the Russian Army's occupation of the oil-rich, northern Caucuses republic.
A long-term Chechen rebel field commander, Shamil Basayev, claimed responsibility for Kadyrov's assassination on a Chechen rebel-sponsored website.
The Russian capitalist rulers have been waging a brutal counterinsurgency war against the Chechen nation's struggle for independence since the early 1990s — killing tens of thousands of Chechen civilians.
Kadyrov was installed by Putin as president of the Chechen republic in a bid to create an indigenous regime that could allow Moscow to finally withdraw its estimated 80,000 occupation troops. In doing so, the Kremlin was seeking a way out from the unending cycle of insurgent attacks followed by punitive retaliatory strikes by the Russian Army. The assassination of Putin's handpicked administrator in such a public fashion was a direct repudiation of Putin's claims to have settled the Chechen problem.
Between 1994 and 1996 Russian President Boris Yeltsin carried out a merciless war against Chechnya. Putin, Yeltsin's handpicked successor, owes his rise to power largely to Russian chauvinism he whipped up to wage a second war against Chechnya in 1999.
At least 80,000 Chechens have been killed since 1994. All of the major towns, including the capital city of Grozny, have been razed to the ground. Inhabitants have been subjected to continual house searches, kidnappings, robberies, executions, rapes and extortion by unpaid and poorly supplied Russian soldiers. This has only increased the resolve of the Chechen independence fighters to resist the Russian occupation.
Since 9/11, the Kremlin has presented its war against Chechnya as part of the "international war against Islamic terrorism". It has been assisted in this by the adoption by nearly all of the Chechen rebel fighters of Islamism as their guiding ideology.
When the Soviet Union was falling apart, political Islam barely played a role in Chechnya. Many of the current Chechen irregular soldiers studied at Soviet universities, made their careers in the Soviet army and only turned to political Islam following Moscow's first war against the historically Muslim population of Chechnya. For instance, Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of the Chechen rebels, is a former Soviet army general.
Even though the Russian Army can claim nominal control over most of the country, thousands of Chechens continue to fight.
The Kremlin's war against the Chechen rebels has increasingly been waged against the whole of the Chechen people, with indiscriminate aerial bombing and artillery shelling of towns and villages by the Russian occupation army. Huge numbers of Chechens have been rounded up and detained by Russian soldiers, with many of those detained having later been found dead bearing the scars of torture.
Pro-Kremlin Chechen officials reported that on average two people went missing every day in the first half of 2003, many of them after being detained by Russian forces. In April this year, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights groups issued a report denouncing the enforced disappearances, rape and torture of Chechens and the extra-judicial killings by Russian soldiers of Chechen civilians.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 26, 2004.
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