Chechnya and the North Caucasus

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Waverley]

My Lords, it is rare that we have an opportunity to debate matters North Caucasus and it is a particular pleasure for me in that I have majored on the South Caucasus and central Asia in the years since independence. Therefore, while focusing my remarks principally on Chechnya, I wonder whether I might be excused attempting to put today’s debate into context, particularly the aspect relating to security.

The majority of contributions this afternoon have addressed human rights issues. However, sustainable solutions can come about only as a result of the right political environment on the ground, with all the benefits that flow from that. It is with that in mind that I believe it is important to remind ourselves of some of the background, together with Russia’s long-held vulnerability and policy to protect its core area surrounding Moscow and down into the Volga region, and Russia’s lack of geographic barriers to protect it.

The basis of Russia’s national security have been three expansions to the natural border barriers marked, first, by the Tien Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan; secondly, the Carpathian mountains on the far side of Moldova and Ukraine; and, thirdly, the Greater Caucasus mountains on the southern side of the Muslim republics. The Greater Caucasus mountains, which are separate from the Lesser Caucasus mountains in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are the most important as they are the closest to Russia’s core and historically have kept out the Ottomans and the Persians. So it always has been a geopolitical imperative to hold the Muslim republics. It is not a perfect plan but it is the basis of Russia’s national security.

The North Caucasus region is a multiplicity of ethnicities split into seven territories including North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan. The majority of the northern Caucasus people are Sunni Muslim, but while there are many different blends of Islam as well as pockets of Orthodox Christians, Jews and Buddhists, religion is not the source of discontent in the region. Animosity and disputes are nearly wholly derived from territorial issues between each of the ethnic groups, and with the region being one of the toughest in Russia and then the Soviet Union for the Kremlin to clamp down on.

During the Second World War, Moscow removed hundreds of thousands from the North Caucasus in order to split the populations, ensuring that they could not consolidate with the Germans into a force to rise against the Kremlin. Over the decades these populations returned to the region, and on into the 1990s at the demise of the Soviet Union. The implosion sent shock waves throughout the region, with the first dispute forcing the Russian state to react not in Chechnya, but to an inter-ethnic conflict between Muslim Ingushetia and Orthodox Christian North Ossetia in 1989 with their dispute over territory. The conflict demonstrated to Moscow how complicated it would be to define the status of each of these regions, how much autonomy to give them, and how to prevent them from fighting among themselves, and all of this at a time when Russia was concerned that the region would rise up against the Russian state. These are the issues that haunt the Kremlin today.

Chechnya is the largest anxiety to Moscow, as it has been for more than three hundred years, with the two regions of Dagestan and Ingushetia to a lesser degree, and the remaining four republics even less so by comparison. Chechnya lies on a lowland that, unlike its neighbours, gives it reliable food supplies, and on a bed of relative energy wealth. So no matter if Chechnya is dominated by the Russians, rising up against Moscow rule or aligning politically with the Kremlin, the focus on the Caucasus by the Russians will always be on the Chechens first. The first war ended in 1996 with little more than a stalemate, in effect an embarrassing defeat for the Russian military. This upset was another nail in the coffin of attempts to westernise and democratise.

The Russian people were sick of a chaotic country. It had endured already what many perceived as a weak leader in Yeltsin, a broken economy, a massive financial crisis, its main state enterprises taken up by oligarchs, an invasion of foreign entities, all compounded with defeat in the Caucasus. The Russian people wanted only one thing: change. And so there was the rise of a strong leader who was willing to take back control of the country, no matter what it took. President Putin came into office with a precise checklist: consolidate politically under one party loyal to him, oust foreign influence, seize strategic economic assets, crush the oligarchs and rehash the Chechen problem. Putin reacted to the atrocities and launched the second Chechen war in 1999, but the problem this time was that the Chechen insurgence was nothing like that which took place during the first.

A massive shift had taken place in the region between 1996 and 1999. Chechen militants had been infiltrated by foreign ideology, shifting the militants’ goal from a nationalist strife for independence to a jihad in order to create an Islamic state. With this came new tactics not often used in the region: large-scale terrorism. The Kremlin’s declaration of the second Chechen war brought a string of terrorist attacks across Russia, starting with the co-ordinated apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk. In the years to come, this terrorism evolved into regular train and subway bombings, the Moscow theatre siege, the twin airline bombings and Beslan.

Islamism in the region gave the Kremlin another tool in order to crush the insurgency. In the early 2000s, Russia began to split the nationalists from the Islamists and set them against each other. Moscow pulled the nationalists into alliances and loyalties with the Russians, offering them power and money in exchange for their help against the Islamists, and so the Chechen nationalists began fighting alongside the Russian forces against the Islamists. Over the mid-2000s, nearly all the Chechen Islamist leaders were killed, thus enabling the declaration of the war being over by 2009. With the war officially over, Chechnya remains today a delicate and complex republic, with its problems and insecurities resonating throughout the region.

The Catch-22 is this: in setting up an alliance with the Chechen nationalists the Kremlin was compelled to empower them. Whereas the Caucasus emirates, representing Islamic militancy, were successfully broken into smaller militant groups with no real co-ordination, the Chechen brigades were given free rein to use traditional guerrilla warfare and—unapologetically—torture, together with specialist training by the Russian military, to squash the Caucasus emirates.

The Chechen brigades are now an elite fighting force in the region, currently numbering 40,000, whereas the Russian forces in the region have dropped from 110,000 to around 50,000, nearly equal to that of the Chechens. The Chechen brigades have also been given licence to secure the neighbouring region of Ingushetia, but here is the rub: the Kremlin has petitioned them to expand their security reach into Dagestan but the bitter rivalry between Chechnya and Dagestan will erupt into war once again if the Kremlin allows Chechen forces to cross the border.

Looking forward, other difficulties in the short term and the long term arise. First, although the rebellion in Chechnya has ended, this does not mean the end of militancy. The militant groups in the Caucasus are fractured and disorganised; however, they still hold the capability to strike at soft targets. So while the large-scale attacks of the past, such as Beslan and the apartment bombings, are most likely over, small attacks such as those on the Moscow subway and Domodedovo Airport will continue. The Kremlin has come to accept this reality, as have most of the Russian people.

This leads to the second problem: whereas Russia has accepted that smaller attacks will occur, Moscow is focusing on preventing any attack, no matter how small, when large international events take place. Russia is hosting two major events in the next decade—the 2014 Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 World Cup in Moscow. The Olympics in Sochi are of immediate concern as it is a mere 500 kilometres from the Chechen capital. The Russian Government have been considering their choices, with a distinct possibility of a firm military option being implemented. The killing yesterday in Chechnya of a top al-Qaeda militant, who co-ordinated foreign rebels in the North Caucasus, will reinforce this.

The third issue concerns the mid term. Even though the Chechen wars are over, the traditional rivalry between the Caucasus republics remains, with the largest between Chechnya and Dagestan. Dagestan is still without a suitable security plan by the Kremlin, although the current thinking by Chechnya is to set up Dagestani brigades like those in Chechnya. However, there is no real leader in Dagestan under whom to establish such a force. With the strengthening of the Chechen brigades, it has become a real concern in Dagestan as to whether it can trust the Kremlin to control its rival Chechnya.

The last issue is twofold and the most dangerous of them all. While the Kremlin has created an elite fighting force in Chechnya—made out nearly all of former militants—and empowered it with regional wealth, military training, arms and a right to do as it pleases, its forces in the region nearly match those of Russia. The Kremlin is singularly uncomfortable with this but felt it had no other option in order to win the second Chechen war. Russia has a large demographic problem which will particularly manifest itself in both the workforce and military in a decade or so. The effect on the Russian military is the most troubling—the Kremlin is already downsizing its forces and will continue to do so. At the same time, the only population in Russia that is growing is the Muslim population, from the current 12 per cent of the population to an anticipated 20 per cent in 2020. The effect of that will be that ethnic brigades and militant forces in the Russian Caucasus grow rather than decrease and that the balance of power in the region tips in future, unless the Kremlin can devise an alternative. It appears that Moscow is for the moment currently devoid of that strategy.