Russian/Chechnya Conflict

The conflict between Russian and her former Soviet satellite, Chechnya, has exacerbated in recent years, threatening to become the full scale civil conflict that many on both sides have anticipated and some have longed for. Chechnya is a Muslim republic with a history of doggedly pursuing independence. For its part, Russia has crafted its own legacy toward Chechnya as a single-minded suppressor whose response to Chechen bids for autonomy is consistently brutal. Today, the Russo-Chechen conflict has claimed roughly 1,000 lives in Russia during the last two years; nearly half of these lives were taken in September of 2004 alone (Kaplan 28). In Chechnya, since 1999 nearly 2,000 citizens have disappeared; the Russian prosecutor's office reports that these are bona fide abduction and kidnapping cases (Caryl 40). Reminiscent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the situation in Chechnya is beginning to bear the signs of a true ethno-religious conflict. As the post-9/11 world can attest, it is this brand of conflict that only seems to worsen as more violence is applied as a remedy.

The Chechens are a historically independent people hailing from the jagged Caucasus Mountains, which run through the homeland. They have always sought political autonomy, and have engaged their Russian partner to the East for centuries. On the heels of the Soviet demise, Chechnya attempted to secede. In Moscow, fears that a successful Chechen secession would initiate a series of independence m

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st movement, sparking a second war with Moscow�(Kaplan 29)". The cruel legacy of that conflict is all too familiar: radical Islam, suicide bombings, and other weapons of terror. By 2003, though Moscow had long been proclaiming the war with Chechnya over, suicide bombings had become commonplace, routinely claiming up to a dozen Russian soldiers per week. To counter this, Russian forces adopted the habit of detaining those Chechens thought to be cooperating with the guerilla terrorists. Rarely are these detainees ever heard from again. And still, the Russian government has remained more likely to present the world with a party line that reduces the Chechen conflict to a minor police action than to acknowledge its actual ongoing military campaign in the region. In 2003, some 80,000 Russian troops were stationed in and around Chechnya (Caryl 41). Throughout the conflict, Chechnya has been battling not merely abductions and kidnappings, but assassinations as well. Of the four presidents it has recognized since the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, three have been assassinated. In 1996, President Jokar Dudaev, who first led Chechnya's bid for independence and secession from Russia, was killed by a Russian missile. His s

Category: Foreign - R