Russian-supported Kadyrov claimed that living conditions in Chechnya were improving from their wartime nadir and that businesses and peace were slowly, if glacially, returning to this twice-destroyed and never-fully-rebuilt city. But these claims, like many a building in Grozny, were hollow. Years after the Chechen Wars had ended, the region remains engulfed in political and ethnic turmoil. The outside world sees only sporadic displays of this unrest, for example, when the Chechen rebels seized the Parliament building in Grozny in October 2010. Yet bombings, attacks, and sieges are part of a bitter reality that many Chechens have to live with daily.
The First Wave
In 1995, when Chechen terrorists took hundreds of hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called the rebel leader Shamil Basayev. Chernomyrdin’s negotiations saved the hostages’ lives, and led to talks that ended the first Chechen war.
Similar attempts to negotiate were lacking in the subsequent hostage crises; in 2002, when the Chechens seized a packed Moscow theater and demanded unconditional removal of Russian troops from Chechnya, the Russian government responded by sending in a bumbling SWAT team. The botched rescue attempt, which culminated with gassing the theater, led to nearly 200 deaths. Meanwhile, violence grew in Chechnya and spread to neighboring regions. 2004 marked the goriest year, with over 800 terrorist-related incidents (attacks, kidnappings, bombings) including the blowing up of two Russian airplanes and the infamous Beslan school siege.
At an elementary school in Beslan, Chechen rebels took over a thousand people hostage, nearly 800 of them children. On the third day of the standoff, the Russian security forces attacked the school with tanks and rockets, and over 300 people were killed. For better or worse, Beslan was a turning point for both sides. Recently re-elected President of Russia, Vladimir Putin avowed revenge, paraphrasing Stalin, "We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten." Putin went on to replace the direct election of regional governors and presidents with a Kremlin-based appointment system. He further consolidated presidential powers in moves that Freedom House pointed out as significant backward steps for the progress of democracy in Russia.
For the rebels too, Beslan marked a shift. The insurgent and their leader Shamil Basayev, who ordered the attacks, were criticized for inhumane assaults on children, and the local support dwindled. “A bigger blow could not have been dealt on us. People around the world will think that Chechens are beasts and monsters if they could attack children,” one of the separatists’ spokesmen said at the time.
The months that followed the Beslan school siege were surprisingly peaceful by Chechen standards. Although the Russian government vowed that its retaliation would be swift and uncompromising – a prophecy that was somewhat fulfilled in 2006, when Basayev was killed – it also pursued a hearts-and-minds strategy to win over the war-torn population. Surgical military operations reduced the civilian death count, and amnesty programs were introduced. In the ensuing chaos after Basayev’s death, many of his deputies either surrendered or were killed. Attacks also subsided: there were 27 suicide bombings between June 2000 and November 2004, but there were no attacks after that until the end of 2007.
The Second Wave
The resurgence of Chechen terrorist coincided with the appointment of Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of assassinated Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, as the President of Chechnya. Like many a puppet dictator that superpowers often prop up, Kadyrov was an eccentric, expressing support for polygamy, honor killings, and bride kidnappings. Tribalistic by nature, Kadyrov had attacked his rival politicians and their clan supporters, and had ordered assassinations even beyond Chechnya’s borders. While he had secured elements of autonomy and massive subsidies for Chechnya from Moscow, Kadyrov had to return the favor by stamping out the remaining militants. His harsh measures earned him a resounding condemnation from the European Union, and a renewed enmity from the Chechen rebels.
Suicide bombings resumed in October 2007, with 18 attacks occurring between that date and November 2010. Incidents of violence rose from 795 in 2008 to 1,100 in 2009. In November 2009, in the first major attack outside Chechnya since 2004, the Nevsky Express, an express train between Moscow and St. Petersburg favored by the political elite, was bombed. The attack claimed 26 lives – including those of two of the highest-ranking members of the Russian Federal Reserve – and wounded nearly 100 people.
The most recent large-scale attack by the Chechens targeted the Moscow Metro on March 29, 2010. Forty people died in two separate bomb attacks at the morning rush hour: the first bomb exploded at 7:57 a.m. at the Lubyanka Station, close to the former headquarters of the KGB; 26 people died there. Fourteen people were killed when a second bomb exploded at 8:39 a.m. at Park Kultury Station. The segment sandwiched between two stations is among the busiest lines during the morning rush hours.
The problems with Chechnya remain intractable, not least because politicians and commentators used the explosions for their own political advantage. To divert attention from its own human right abuses in Chechnya, the Russian government has sanctioned the silencing of human rights activists and reporters and hasover-emphasized the religious divides. It largely blamed Muslim terrorist organizations after Moscow Metro attacks, leading to violence against Muslims in the aftermath of the attacks.
Russia festers with conspiracy theories, and Putin’s opponents accuse him of orchestrating terrorist attacks as an excuse to grab more power. There might be some credence to these allegations, as the government has used previous terrorist attacks to justify scrapping independent television broadcasts and cancelling regional elections. Meanwhile, apologists for the Kremlin blame the attacks on liberals who “destabilize” the country by criticizing the authorities.
Above all, Russia remains an outlier in the War on Terrorism. It distrusts the Western intelligence community and cooperates very little with it. The Kremlin even blames Western security services for destabilizing the region. Some Russian security men also blame Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, for the problems in Chechnya and beyond: “For as long as people like Saakashvili—the neo-Nazis and neo-Führers—lead neighboring states, we will not be in peace,” said Arkady Yedelev, Russia’s deputy interior minister. So much for a coordinated effort against terrorism.
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