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Referendum and election

With atrocities being committed by both sides, a referendum was held in Chechnya on March 23, 2003. It was part of Moscow’s new strategy of “Chechenization”—the transfer of power from Russia’s federal government to local Chechen officials who believed Chechnya should remain part of the Russian Federation. The referendum, which was passed overwhelmingly, granted Chechnya limited autonomy from Moscow in exchange for Chechens’ abandoning their claims to independence and their holding presidential elections in October.

Russian president Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Akhmed Kadyrov, his choice for the Chechen presidency - Moscow
� 2001 Getty Images, Inc.

A wave of terrorist attacks—including a suicide bombing at a military hospital in southern Russia—followed the referendum, but elections were held anyway. To no one’s surprise, Akhmed Kadyrov, the man who had been serving as Moscow’s main representative in Chechnya, won. Once elected, Kadyrov put his son in charge of preserving security and order. The younger Kadyrov set about this task using a very unpopular and highly feared private army, known as the Kadyrovtsi.

Was the referendum fair?
Most international observers didn’t think so. They objected that the numbers were inflated and that many people voted only because they feared getting beaten up by Russian soldiers if they didn’t. International observers objected even more strongly to the October election, in which the 30,000 Russian troops stationed in Chechnya were given a vote. Human rights groups called that election “a farce.”

READ MORE from the Chechen constitution that was voted for in the referendum.

Escalation of violence

Kadyrov’s election did nothing to slow political violence in Chechnya. The first few months of 2004 were especially deadly. In February, a bomb blamed on Chechen militants killed 41 commuters in a Moscow metro station. A few days later, the man who succeeded Dudayev as president of Chechnya died in Qatar after Russian intelligence agents booby-trapped his car. Then in May, Akhmed Kadyrov (the recently elected Chechen president) was blown up, presumably by militants who believed he had sold out the Chechen independence movement.

Russians watch an emergency helicopter land near the site of an explosion in the Avtozavodskaya metro station - Moscow, February 2004
� 2004 Getty Images, Inc.

Kadyrov’s murder appeared to demonstrate that Chechenization was not working. Nevertheless, a replacement was appointed, and new elections were scheduled for August 2004. Sandwiched around these elections were the worst Chechen atrocities in several years. In June, 200 Chechen gunmen crossed the border into Ingushetia and killed dozens of state employees. Then in August, Chechen militants killed 30 people in attacks on polling stations and 89 more in the almost simultaneous downing of two Russian passenger jets. But it was an atrocity that occurred after the election that shocked the world.

Who won the election?
Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin’s choice, Alu Alkhanov, was the runaway winner.

Beslan and beyond

On September 1, the day after the Chechen elections, 35 heavily armed men and women stormed a school in Beslan, a small town in southern Russia. There they herded more than 1,000 people, most of them children, into the school gymnasium, which was mined with explosives. The hostage takers were not all Chechens—11 were identified as Ingush and there have been unconfirmed reports that some were Arabs—but all their demands focused on Chechnya. The main one was the withdrawal of Russian troops.

North Caucasus

After three days of unsuccessful negotiations, an explosion in the school reportedly prompted elite Russian troops to storm the school. In the chaos that followed, more than 330 people, at least half of them children, were killed.

As badly as the siege ended, Putin emerged from it relatively unscathed. Using state-controlled television and sympathetic Russian newspapers, he managed to divert attention away from the ongoing Chechen war and onto the war against the global network of Islamic terrorism. It wasn’t a hard sell. Television coverage of the siege repulsed viewers everywhere and extinguished whatever international sympathy there had been for the Chechens’ independence struggle.

Russia's President Putin visits injured children in hospital - Beslan, September 4, 2004
� 2004 Getty Images, Inc.

Why would non-Chechens participate?
The Ingush may have participated because Ingushetia has for years been locked in a conflict with North Ossetia, of which Beslan is a part. What is fundamentally a territorial conflict is complicated by the fact that most Ingush are Muslim and most Ossetians are Christian. If Arabs from the Middle East were involved, they might have been motivated by a desire to rid Chechnya of non-Muslims.

Aslan Maskhadov, still in hiding, condemned the atrocity and called for the perpetrators to face justice. A few days later, Shamil Basayev said he had masterminded it.

READ MORE from the statement by Shamil Basayev about Beslan.

Death of Maskhadov

Russian security forces killed Aslan Maskhadov in the north Chechen town of Tolstoy-Yurt on March 8, 2005. The killing was hailed by Russian and pro-Russian officials as a major coup. On hearing of the news, President Putin promised medals to the soldiers who carried out the operation, and Chechen deputy prime minister Ramzan Kadyrov called Maskhadov’s death a “gift” to Chechnya’s women on International Women’s Day.

But for many observers, the elimination of Chechnya’s last fairly elected president and the longtime face of the Chechen independence movement was no cause for celebration. It left the militant Shamil Basayev as the de facto head of the Chechen separatists, even though a little-known Islamic judge—a young man named Abdul Khalim Saidullayev—was appointed Maskhadov’s official successor.

Rise of Islamic militancy

Shortly after the Beslan siege had ended in tragedy, Shamil Basayev released a statement acknowledging responsibility for the operation (but blaming Putin for the slaughter). Basayev’s language, which was full of common Islamic phrases like Allahu Akbar (God is great), gave Putin ammunition to press home his case that the Chechen independence movement was a front for Islamic extremism.

Subsequent attacks attributed to Basayev’s gang further bolstered Putin’s case and instilled fears in Moscow that Russia’s nightmare scenario—the transformation of the north Caucasus republics into a hotbed of Islamic militarism—was becoming a reality. One of the deadliest attacks occurred in Nalchik, a small town in the previously stable republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. On October 13, 2005, about 200 militants loyal to Basayev stormed several police stations, killing 45 civilians and police and generally creating mayhem. Although Russian security forces killed nearly 100 militants in ending the siege, Basayev called the operation a success, reasoning that “our dead are in Paradise and theirs in Hell.”

Russian security forces storm a shop being held by Islamist militants - Nalchik, Russia, October 14, 2005
� 2005 Getty Images, Inc.

Was Putin correct in characterizing the Chechen conflict as an Islamic jihad?
When he said it, he might have been. But the situation used to be very different. When Chechen fighters fought Russian troops in the first Chechen war, few would have considered themselves first and foremost Islamic warriors. The Wahhabization of their independence struggle, which seems to have taken root between the wars, appears to have been the result of several factors: notably the considerable money the Chechen separatists stood to gain by attaching their struggle to a global holy war and the prolonged brutality of Russian troops.

The Kadyrov factor

The attention the media gave to spectacular attacks in Nalchik and elsewhere tended to make most of the world forget about the role the Russian military and its Chechen allies played in creating the anger and despair on which terrorism has thrived. But the ruthlessness of Russian troops and the brutality of Ramzan Kadyrov’s antiterrorism squad (the Kadyrovtsi) convinced a number of Chechens, especially young men, to join militant Islamist groups. True, some of them would have probably joined anyway out of a sense of religious obligation, but many others signed up to get revenge for abuses committed against them or their families by pro-Russian security forces. Hundreds of abuses, including torture, executions, and kidnappings, have been documented by human rights groups.

During the summer of 2006, Russian special forces killed both Abdul Khalim Saidullayev and Shamil Basayev, removing two of the greatest threats to the pro-Russian government of Ramzan Kadyrov, who became the republic’s prime minister in 2006 and its president in 2007. Killings—widely blamed on and personally denied by Kadyrov—continued in 2008 and 2009, with high-profile rivals of the Chechen president gunned down in Moscow, Vienna, and Dubai.

As the threat to Kadyrov’s rule receded, various dangers associated with that rule increased. The concentration of such power in a man generally regarded as a nasty thug risked worsening Chechnya’s already grim human rights record and giving the republic more autonomy than Moscow has traditionally been willing to tolerate.

Why, given their muted criticisms of Russia’s military actions in Chechnya, were Western leaders so critical of the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia?
Western leaders have tended to distinguish the two in terms of the violation-of-sovereignty issue; Moscow has accused these leaders, which include the architects of the war in Iraq, of gross hypocrisy. The more persuasive answer is that global politics have shifted since Russia invaded Chechnya the second time, and there is a sense in the West that Russia—the beneficiary of high oil prices—once again needs to be contained or weakened.

End of the war

Instead of attempting to clamp down on Kadyrov’s power, the Russian government effectively eliminated the last serious challenge to it. On April 16, 2009—some 10 years after Putin had sent Russian troops back into Chechnya—Moscow announced an end to counterterrorist operations. This decision marked the completion of Chechenization and appeared to clarify the terms of Ramzan’s bargain with the Russian government: Chechnya can be independent as long as you don’t call it that.

Kadyrov addresses the press after Russia officially ends the war in Chechnya. - Near Grozny, April 16, 2009
� 2009 Getty Images, Inc.

However, rising Islamist insurgent activity in Chechnya�s neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan has threatened to disrupt the fragile stability Kadyrov�s tight grip on Chechnya has secured.

Wasn’t this the same arrangement as existed under Aslan Maskhadov in 1996?
More or less, but with two major differences: Kadyrov bought into the Russian characterization of the war as a terrorist cleanup operation in a way that Maskhadov never did, and Kadyrov imposed order and stability within Chechen borders to an extent that Maskhadov never could.

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