Sunday, October 16, 2005
New Yorkers concerned about spreading Chechen insurrection
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
“Say, Wally, you know everything” is a gambit that I hate, sort of. It is flattering but it puts me to work, to go where I don’t want to be. This time though, the neighbor’s question was about a republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, where Muslim attackers had shot up a police station and an arsenal, a subject of justified concern in this month of terrorist fears...
Searching the CIA’s reliable World Factbook (on Internet, it is a detailed though dull almanac of demographics) revealed something more about the Russian Federation, USSR before 1991, when it was composed of 15 republics. Just for a refresher, only Russia, shrunk from USSR’s 22.4M square miles to 17M, with a population down from 262M in 1979 to 143M, is keeping the pan-Slavic Confederation of Independent States together, with obstreperous Ukraine, dictator-run Belarus, and Moldova, which USSR annexed from Romania after WWII. The Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, broke relations and have joined EU, the five Central Asian Muslim lands, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, rife with insurgency, are run by Communist-style local dictators, and of the three in the Caucasus, Armenia, a Christian landlocked country, is fussing with the neighboring oil-rich Muslim Azerbaijan, and Georgia has Chechen separatist resistance group worries.
Little K-B with a population of 900K is right there, north of Georgia, with North Ossetia and Ingushetia separating it from Chechnya, which borders in the north with Dagestan, all of them so-called interior republics.
The laconic CIA book shows that Russia has 21 such interior republics, with their own constitutions, presidents and parliaments. There are also 49 oblasts (provinces with appointed governors and elected legislature), 10 autonomous okrugs (more autonomous than oblasts) and 6 krays (frontier territories, run by governors) and one autonomous oblast (the infamous Birobidjan, designated home for the Jews). All of the above plus the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are “federal subjects,” equal to our states, each sending two representatives to the Federal Council (upper house). The details come from the more eloquent Wikipedia, the free reader-written encyclopedia. Calling on local Russian resources proved to be useless.
The attack on Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, involved insurgents invading and taking hostages in at least nine police and security buildings, with nearly 100 persons dying, mostly the attackers. Looking deeper, K-B dad been a central Chechen resistance center, with assassinations, drug crime and corruption rampant until a new president initiated raids on terrorist nests. The bloody insurgent response brought in Russian FSB security troops and the fighting is on.
This is yet another episode in the on-and-off Chechen wars, beginning when the Tsarist Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. In 1936 USSR granted autonomous republic status to the Chechen-Ingushes, but in the 1940s, fearing collaboration with the invading Hitler’s armies, deported some 500K Chechens to Kazakhstan, where a quarter of them died of famine. Khrushchev permitted their return in 1956.
After the collapse of the USSR, Chechens declared independence, President Yeltsin’s Russian army tried to control the revolutionaries, expecting a short campaign, and the result was the brutal First Chechen War, 1993-96, with 100K casualties. The Russians withdrew, subsequent to negotiations releasing 1000 hostages taken in a Budjonnovsk hospital, in Russia’s Stavropol Kray, and permitted the kidnappers to retreat. But the new Russian-dominated middle-of-the-rod governments were destroyed by separatist insurgents, and more bombings and suicide attacks on hospitals, Moscow subways and two airliners, culminating in a 1999 Moscow apartment house bombing, prompted President Putin to attack, starting the equally brutal Second Chechen War. It ended with another pro-Russian government, an election and a referendum in 2002-3. Presidents and government workers are continuing to be assassinated by separatists, and there are bombings in Russia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, with a particularly horrid hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre in October 2003 resulting in deaths of 115 hostages, and another in September 2004 in Beslau, North Ossettia, at a school, taking the lives of 332, mostly children. Shamil Besayev, the Chechen warlord who has taken credit for all the violence, in revenge for past brutalities and with the objective of gaining independence, is known to operate with al Qaida money and volunteers. The Kabardino-Balkaria incident is just a routine response to Russia’s attempt of control; the Chechen nation of just over one million souls is apparently willing to supply an unlimited number of martyrs.
Looking at that part of the world, the American righteous dream of bringing democracy to the Mideast and Central Asia begins to look like a nightmare. Arab Islamists are trying to recreate a Muslim Caliphate from Spain eastward to Indonesia. Local Turkic and Tajik rebel fighters in former Soviet Muslim SSRs, China’s Western provinces and Russia’s internal republics are seeking to establish warlord-based insurrections, maybe allied with the Caliphate. All are supported by a faction of rich Wahaabis, many of them members of the 5,000-strong Saudi aristocracy, who would not mind if the ruling Saudi faction should go down. If you think I exaggerate, check the facts.
Wally Dobelis also thanks the New York Times.
“Say, Wally, you know everything” is a gambit that I hate, sort of. It is flattering but it puts me to work, to go where I don’t want to be. This time though, the neighbor’s question was about a republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, where Muslim attackers had shot up a police station and an arsenal, a subject of justified concern in this month of terrorist fears...
Searching the CIA’s reliable World Factbook (on Internet, it is a detailed though dull almanac of demographics) revealed something more about the Russian Federation, USSR before 1991, when it was composed of 15 republics. Just for a refresher, only Russia, shrunk from USSR’s 22.4M square miles to 17M, with a population down from 262M in 1979 to 143M, is keeping the pan-Slavic Confederation of Independent States together, with obstreperous Ukraine, dictator-run Belarus, and Moldova, which USSR annexed from Romania after WWII. The Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, broke relations and have joined EU, the five Central Asian Muslim lands, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, rife with insurgency, are run by Communist-style local dictators, and of the three in the Caucasus, Armenia, a Christian landlocked country, is fussing with the neighboring oil-rich Muslim Azerbaijan, and Georgia has Chechen separatist resistance group worries.
Little K-B with a population of 900K is right there, north of Georgia, with North Ossetia and Ingushetia separating it from Chechnya, which borders in the north with Dagestan, all of them so-called interior republics.
The laconic CIA book shows that Russia has 21 such interior republics, with their own constitutions, presidents and parliaments. There are also 49 oblasts (provinces with appointed governors and elected legislature), 10 autonomous okrugs (more autonomous than oblasts) and 6 krays (frontier territories, run by governors) and one autonomous oblast (the infamous Birobidjan, designated home for the Jews). All of the above plus the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are “federal subjects,” equal to our states, each sending two representatives to the Federal Council (upper house). The details come from the more eloquent Wikipedia, the free reader-written encyclopedia. Calling on local Russian resources proved to be useless.
The attack on Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, involved insurgents invading and taking hostages in at least nine police and security buildings, with nearly 100 persons dying, mostly the attackers. Looking deeper, K-B dad been a central Chechen resistance center, with assassinations, drug crime and corruption rampant until a new president initiated raids on terrorist nests. The bloody insurgent response brought in Russian FSB security troops and the fighting is on.
This is yet another episode in the on-and-off Chechen wars, beginning when the Tsarist Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. In 1936 USSR granted autonomous republic status to the Chechen-Ingushes, but in the 1940s, fearing collaboration with the invading Hitler’s armies, deported some 500K Chechens to Kazakhstan, where a quarter of them died of famine. Khrushchev permitted their return in 1956.
After the collapse of the USSR, Chechens declared independence, President Yeltsin’s Russian army tried to control the revolutionaries, expecting a short campaign, and the result was the brutal First Chechen War, 1993-96, with 100K casualties. The Russians withdrew, subsequent to negotiations releasing 1000 hostages taken in a Budjonnovsk hospital, in Russia’s Stavropol Kray, and permitted the kidnappers to retreat. But the new Russian-dominated middle-of-the-rod governments were destroyed by separatist insurgents, and more bombings and suicide attacks on hospitals, Moscow subways and two airliners, culminating in a 1999 Moscow apartment house bombing, prompted President Putin to attack, starting the equally brutal Second Chechen War. It ended with another pro-Russian government, an election and a referendum in 2002-3. Presidents and government workers are continuing to be assassinated by separatists, and there are bombings in Russia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, with a particularly horrid hostage-taking in a Moscow theatre in October 2003 resulting in deaths of 115 hostages, and another in September 2004 in Beslau, North Ossettia, at a school, taking the lives of 332, mostly children. Shamil Besayev, the Chechen warlord who has taken credit for all the violence, in revenge for past brutalities and with the objective of gaining independence, is known to operate with al Qaida money and volunteers. The Kabardino-Balkaria incident is just a routine response to Russia’s attempt of control; the Chechen nation of just over one million souls is apparently willing to supply an unlimited number of martyrs.
Looking at that part of the world, the American righteous dream of bringing democracy to the Mideast and Central Asia begins to look like a nightmare. Arab Islamists are trying to recreate a Muslim Caliphate from Spain eastward to Indonesia. Local Turkic and Tajik rebel fighters in former Soviet Muslim SSRs, China’s Western provinces and Russia’s internal republics are seeking to establish warlord-based insurrections, maybe allied with the Caliphate. All are supported by a faction of rich Wahaabis, many of them members of the 5,000-strong Saudi aristocracy, who would not mind if the ruling Saudi faction should go down. If you think I exaggerate, check the facts.
Wally Dobelis also thanks the New York Times.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 8:53 PM 
