The images of war in Chechnya are some of the most harrowing in modern times. A modern European city bombed to ruins while its citizens cower in bunkers. Streets littered with dead bodies, uncollected for weeks. Mass graves. Mothers combing the hills for their missing sons… The chaotic, underfed, vicious Russian army did something quite apocalyptic in small Chechnya. It became a war against all Chechens.¹ – From Chechnya: A Small Victorious War 1997

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The Russian-Chechen conflict is one of the most pervasive and enduring conflicts in history. It is a conflict that has spanned more than two centuries leaving a historical legacy of mutual hatred and recurring episodes of hostility and warfare between both sides.

It is enough to note that it has been a decade since the tiny republic tried to declare independence from the Russian Federation. For most of the decade, Russian troops waged a brutal and indiscriminate war against Chechnya. This has led to the death of almost 100,000 Chechens (from a total population of about 1.2 million)² and has created an equal amount of refugees.³ Despite the massive loss of life on behalf of the Chechen people and the genocidal policies of successive Russian governments, the conflict in Chechnya has often been neglected and has received very little rigorous, systematic analysis.⁴ In fact, most books on Chechnya were written in either factual-informative or plain, journalistic fashion.⁵

In order for one to unravel the sources of conflict in this troubled region, one must outline its geopolitics. Traditional notions of geopolitics emphasized the “neutral and objective practice of surveying global space” and the simplistic linkage of geography with politics.⁶ The notion of geopolitics employed in this work is a more encompassing one which involves an interplay between issues of “high politics,” such as balances of power, territorial disputes, struggle for vital resources and military/security dilemmas, with those of “low politics,” with their emphasis on “identity,” “culture” and “religion.”⁷

With almost 100,000 Chechen lives lost, the Chechen fight has been neglected and has received little systematic analysis

The conflict in Chechnya is a function of two factors: animosities rooted in a historical, ethnic, religious, and territorial claims, and the struggle for geostrategic space and vital resources, such as oil and oil pipeline routes.

The attacks of September 11^th and the subsequent US “war on terrorism” have shed new light on the ongoing war in Chechnya. Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his army’s brutal policies in Chechnya using the same language that was used by President Bush. Putin declared it a war against terrorism in a lawless region, which could become a safe haven for al-Qaeda fighters and its Islamist sympathizers, whom he declared, are already fighting alongside Chechens.⁸ In fact, there are recent suggestions that there may be a quid pro quo between the US and Russian administrations, with Russians providing intelligence support to American troops in Afghanistan and the US turning a blind eye from a brutal Russian occupation in Chechnya.

In addition, US Special Operations units have been helping train and equip Georgian forces since May in a $64 million program to enable them to establish control over the Pankisi Gorge, a green valley north of Tbilisi (Georgia’s capital), which is seen as being home to hundreds of Islamic militants, including a number of suspected al-Qaeda fighters who are thought to be supporting the Chechens.⁹ On the other hand, Chechen fighters have staged a number of kamikaze operations against Russian forces over the past months, some of which involved truck bombings against security checkpoints and military installations, killing scores of Russian soldiers.¹⁰ The most daring operation involved the shooting down of a Russian military helicopter over Chechnya, which led to the death of over 120 Russian soldiers in mid-August.¹¹

A Historical Ethic of Conflict: Centuries of Deportation & Ethnic Cleansing

Chechnya, 1996

Chechnya is a small national grouping situated in the Caucasus within the southern border of the Russian Federation. First known in the Middle Ages, the Chechens were a distinct ethno-linguistic group who called themselves the Nokhchi.¹² They have a distinct religious and cultural basis compared to either Russians or Cossacks, and had resisted Russian rule since the colonial wars of the late 18^th century.

This national feeling of distinctness was sustained by the presence of two Islamic Sufi orders, the Naqshbandiya and the Quadiriya – both were reformist Muslim groups that taught people to resist oppression.¹³ In fact, Islam is the main source of identity for the Chechens and the main mobilizing force for their resistance of Russian tyranny.¹⁴ Moreover, Shariah (Islamic law) offered a historically respected code of law and social discipline that was much sought after in Chechnya. Hence, the quest for an Islamic republic, independent from Russia, was the motivating factor behind consecutive Chechen uprisings.

The Russian conquest of the North Caucasus, an Ottoman protectorate, began at the end of the 18^th century. The first concerted efforts by North Caucasian Muslim nations to repel Russian advance was led by a Chechen, Mansur Ushurma, between 1785 and 1791. His jihad achieved remarkable military successes at a time when Russia was at the height of its power.¹⁵ Sheikh Mansur raised Islamic awareness and steadfastness to very high levels. In fact, the “Islamization of the Northwestern Caucasus was… [his] most durable work.”¹⁶ However, the retreat of the Ottomans after the loss of their fortress Anapa on the Black Sea in 1791 led to the capture of Sheikh Mansur, who later died in Russian captivity in 1794.

General Alexei Yermolov

In 1816 General Alexei Yermolov was appointed chief administrator of Georgia and the Caucasus. His autocratic and purposefully cruel rule shaped the future of Russian-Chechen relations. In 1818 he wrote to Tsar Alexander II that “he would find no peace as long as a single Chechen remained alive” because “by their example they could inspire a rebellious spirit and love of freedom among even the most faithful subjects of the Empire.”¹⁷ His advent marked a policy of systematic extermination and expulsions in the North Caucasus. In the process of Russian conquest, tens of thousands of Chechen noncombatants died, agricultural land was denied to Chechen fighters to starve their people into submission, and more than a million people were expelled from their homelands, settling in Turkey and elsewhere in the Middle East.¹⁸

Imam Shamil

Yermolov’s policies paved the way for the emergence of three imams who led the Chechen resistance movement during the Caucasus War (1817-64). The three imams were Kazi Mullah, Gamzat-Bek, and Shamil. The latter imam was perhaps the most outstanding political and military leader ever to emerge in the North Caucasus region.¹⁹ Imam Shamil was an exceptionally tall, strong, and athletic man, an unrivalled horseman, highly intelligent and well educated in the Arabic language and Muslim religious literature.²⁰ He repeatedly outmaneuvered the Russians in battles, intrigues and negotiations and remained steadfast on his goal of pursuing an Islamic state governed by Islamic law.

In 1859 the Russian military contingent in the North Caucasus numbered half a million. Prince Bariatinsky, the Russian commander-in-chief, deployed 40,000 troops in the final assault against Shamil and his 500 remaining partisans at Gunib in the Daghestani mountains. After Shamil, Chechens continued to fight for another 3 years under the leadership of Baysangur. Baysangur of Benoy, the Chechen lieutenant of Shamil, managed to break through the encircling of Gunib. Of the 100 Chechen who followed him to continue fighting in Chechnya, only 30 survived. Among them was an ancestor of the prominent present-day Chechen commander, Shamil Basaev.

After the execution of Baysangur, not a single legitimate Chechen leader accepted to swear allegiance to the Russian Empire.²¹ Totally decimated, reduced to barely 50,000 souls after half a century of warfare, Chechnya was defeated but not pacified. Eighteen years after the conquest, in 1877-78, a new war broke out and ended with mass executions of Naqshbandi and Qadiri followers, thousands of deportations to Siberia and an exodus to the Ottoman Empire from the lowland of northern Chechnya.²²

In 1940 and 1942 the Soviet Air Force bombed Chechnya and Ingushetia to quell new popular insurrections. In February 1944 the whole Chechen and Ingush nations were deported under the pretext that they had collaborated with the enemy during World War II – an absurd accusation given that the Germans had not reached their territories.²³ Some were sent to the death camps in Siberia, the majority to the frozen wastes of Kazakhstan. Half of the 618,000 deportees perished during transportation and the ensuing typhus epidemic.

Certain atrocities left deep marks: in Khaibakh, isolated in the mountains, 700 people too old or too ill to be transported or simply living in villages too remote for convenient transport were gathered into an ancient tower and burned alive. Despite multiple genocidal measures undertaken by the Russians, the Chechens remained the only people who refused to accept the psychology of submission.²⁴

On December 10^th, 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin called upon the Russian armed forces to restore order in the breakaway Chechen republic. The military soon deployed to the Caucasus, utilizing World War II-era doctrines that emphasized the massing of forces and aerial carpet-bombing. The Russians organized in classical, hierarchical fashion, and maneuvered in a linear, sequential approach to seizing control of territory – with emphasis on occupying the Chechen capital, Grozny.²⁵ The Chechens fought back with small, mobile teams of light, but nevertheless well-equipped, fighters. Instead of centralized command and control, the Chechens gave great latitude for action to their dispersed but highly interconnected bands, enabling them, repeatedly, to “swarm” advancing Russian columns from all directions.²⁶ Their view of the arena of conflict “was expansive, their organizational approach innovative, and their results stunning.”²⁷

Commander Khattab

The Chechens managed with the help of battle-hardened Arab mujahideen, led by the famous commander, Khattab, to repel the Russian invasion and achieve a short-lived Chechen independence. The Chechen struggle in 1994-96 was the latest in the series of anti-colonial wars. The Chechen victory in that war was quite unique in the modern history of war, in that the Chechens won not just without the support of a real state but also without the help of any formal military or political organization.²⁸ They relied solely on the strength of their society and traditions. Nevertheless, using the pretext of a mysterious wave of bombings in Russian cities in 1999 (Chechens continue to deny their responsibility for them and Russia has failed to produce evidence linking Chechen rebels with those bombings),²⁹ Russia invaded Chechnya once again.

The Politics of Oil

Oil refinery in Chechnya, destroyed by Russia

The recent conflict in Chechnya masks a more hideous struggle between great powers for the control of the vital oil resources of the Caspian and oil pipelines that go through Chechen territory. Chief among Russian concerns and Western interests is the oil pipeline that runs from the oilfields of Azerbaijan through Dagestan and Chechnya, to the Russian port of Novorossiisk.³⁰ The Baku-Novorossiisk pipeline has come to be of major importance due to the discovery and planned development of major new oilfields on the Azerbaijani shore on the Caspian. These fields are estimated to contain some 3.5 billion barrels of oil, comparable to the North Sea.³¹ Control over, access to, and shipments from these fields are seen as of great geopolitical importance in Moscow, Ankara, and Washington alike.³²

In this regard, one can see that September 11^th did not change some essential features of the current world order – a global system that, in fact, was shaped by the fall of the Soviet Union.³³ The end of the Cold War gave rise to a life-and- death struggle to monopolize energy resources. Superpower status naturally requires control of oil at every stage – discovery, pumping, refining, transporting, and marketing. The Washington-based American Petroleum Institute, voice of the major US oil companies, called the Caspian region “the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East.”³⁴ Dick Cheney, Vice-President to George Bush, speaking of the Caspian Sea basin in 1998 when he was working for the oil industry, commented, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”³⁵

Oil is clearly not the only force in action, but it is an important piece of a complicated political/military and economic struggle. It can be argued that Russia's geo-economic reasons for establishing a firm control over Chechnya are related to the need to control the resources of the Caspian. Moreover, Russia’s concerns over Chechnya grew as a result of the US-NATO war against Serbia and the subsequent NATO occupation of Kosovo. Tensions with Russia escalated in the course of Russia’s military campaign in Chechnya soon after. The Russian intervention in Chechnya in 1999 was meant to be a warning to the US, NATO and the other likely candidates to rebel against Russia in the post-Soviet space, that Russia was still a mighty military force to be reckoned with.

The new prominence of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and their potential oil riches is but one sign of a larger transformation of US strategic thinking. During the Cold War, the areas of greatest concern to military planners were those of confrontation between the US and the Soviet blocs: central and southeastern Europe and the Far East.³⁶

Since the end of the Cold War, however, these areas have lost much strategic significance for the United States (except, perhaps, for the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), while other regions – the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin, and the South China Sea – are receiving increased attention from the Pentagon.³⁷ Accordingly, security officials have begun to pay much greater attention to problems arising from intensified competition over access to critical materials – especially those such as oil that often lie in contested or politically unstable areas.³⁸

Unfortunately, the Muslim world has become a major area for superpower contestation and, once again, Muslims have to pay the price.

Kareem M. Kamel is an Egyptian freelance writer based in Cairo, Egypt. He has an MA in International Relations and is specialized in security studies, decision-making, nuclear politics, Middle East politics and the politics of Islam. He is currently assistant to the Political Science Department at the American University in Cairo.

1- Carlotta Gall & Thomas De Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (London: Pan Books, 1997): Introduction.

2- James Ferguson, “Afghanistan and the New Arc of Instability: Security Dilemmas of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya,” Lecture: Department of International Relations – Bond University.

3- Masha Gessen, “Putin’s War,” U.S. News & World Report May 27^th, 2002.

4- Examples of this trend are Sebastian Smith, Allah’s Mountains: Politics and War in the Russian Caucasus (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998); Carlotta Gall & Thomas De Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (London: Pan Books, 1997); John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5- Perhaps the only text I’ve encountered that is more academic and systematic was Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998).

6- Gearoid O. Tuathail and Simon Dalby, “Introduction: Rethinking Geopolitics – Towards a Critical Geopolitics,” in Gearoid O. Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 2-3.

7- Ibid., 2-3; Also see Bahgat Korany, Paul Noble, and Rex Brynen. The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World (New York: St.Martins Press, 1993).

8- Anatol Lieven, “Chechnya After September 11^th,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace March 9th, 2002.

9- Scott Peterson, “US-Russia Ties Jolted By Crisis in Georgia,” Christian Science Monitor August 26^th, 2002.

10- Fred Weir, “Chechen Rebels Go Kamikaze,” Christian Science Monitor June 7^th, 2002

11- “Chechen Crash Controversy,” Maclean’s September 2^nd, 2002

12- James Ferguson, “Afghanistan and the New Arc of Instability: Security Dilemmas of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Chechnya,” Lecture: Department of International Relations – Bond University.

13- Ibid.

14- Rajan Menon, “Russia’s Ruinous Chechen War,” Foreign Affairs 79 (March/April 2000). 

15- Marie Bennigsen, “Chechnya: Political Development and Strategic Implications for the North Caucasus,” Central Asian Survey 18 (December 1999).

16- John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 12.

17- Marie Bennigsen, “Chechnya: Political Development and Strategic Implications for the North Caucasus,” Central Asian Survey 18 (December 1999).  

18- Rajan Menon, “Russia’s Ruinous Chechen War,” Foreign Affairs 79 (March/April 2000).

19- John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 24.

20- Ibid.

21- Marie Bennigsen, “Chechnya: Political Development and Strategic Implications for the North Caucasus,” Central Asian Survey 18 (December 1999).

22- Ibid.

23- Ibid.

24- Ibid.

25- John Arquilla and Theodore Karasik, “Chechnya: A Glimpse of Future Conflict?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22 (July-September 1999): 207.

26- Ibid.

27- Ibid.

28- Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998): 301.

29- Rajan Menon, “Russia’s Ruinous Chechen War,” Foreign Affairs 79 (March/April 2000).

30- Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998): 85.

31- Ibid.

32- Ibid.

33- Bulent Gokay, “Oil, War, Geopolitics and Hegemony,” Conflict & Peace in Mountain Society: Case Study March 7^th, 2002.

34- Ibid.

35- Ibid.

36- Michael T. Klare, “The New Geography of Conflict,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2001).

37- Ibid.

38- Ibid.

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