The War in Chechnya: A Regional Time Bomb

Svante E. Cornell is deputy director of the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute, Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, and research director of the Silk Road Studies Program, Uppsala University, Sweden.

The March 2005 killing by Russian forces of Aslan Maskhadov, the moderate Chechen separatist leader who was elected Chechnya’s president in 1997, was hailed by Moscow as a much-needed sign of progress towards restoring its rule in the war-torn North Caucasus republic. But the wider trends in Chechnya and the North Caucasus betray a far bleaker picture.

In the past year, with increasing violence across the region, Moscow’s control has shown clear indications of slipping, very much as a result of, and not despite, the Kremlin’s own policies. While Vladimir Putin has been arguing for several years that his military campaign in Chechnya is an anti-terrorist operation and that the republic is returning to normal, events from spring to autumn 2004 provide ample evidence that the Russian president’s description of the situation is out of touch with reality. The killing of Chechnya’s pro-Russian president, Akhmad Kadyrov, in May, the subsequent attempt to assassinate his successor, and the daring rebel raid on the capital of the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia were only the most obvious and spectacular illustrations of Russia’s failure to win the war in Chechnya. The hostage-taking at the school in Beslan in September overshadowed all these events by the sheer magnitude of the human tragedy involved, and by the singular failure of Russia’s response to the crisis.

It is increasingly clear that Russia’s strategy of trying to turn the war into an intra-Chechen confrontation is not leading to the desired results. On the contrary: the instability has become endemic as the war has led to the “Afghanisation” of Chechnya, with a collapse of the fabric of society providing a fertile ground for extremism and militancy.

The killing of Maskhadov, the sole remaining moderate separatist leader, may fulfil Moscow’s short-term goal of marginalising moderate separatist forces and thereby silencing Western calls for Russia to negotiate with them. But as it leaves Chechen youths with close to no role models bar radical Islamist extremists, this is likely to prove a pyrrhic victory. In fact, Moscow has now made negotiations virtually impossible in the event that it should one day change its mind and seek a political solution. Russia is now left with a growing radical Islamist problem in the North Caucasus that it is incapable of handling. With Moscow’s very control over the North Caucasus challenged, the prospects for peace and security in the Caucasus as a whole have been jeopardised. As long as the war in Chechnya persists and Russia seeks a solution through military repression alone, the security situation in the North Caucasus will continue to deteriorate.

An Anti-Terror Campaign?

Since the first Chechen war began in 1994, Moscow has portrayed its fight as one against bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, increasingly referred to—especially after 11 September 2001—simply as “terrorists”. Western powers long refrained from accepting the Russian position at face value, seeing the conflict primarily as an ethnic war. While recognising Russia’s territorial integrity, both the West and Islamic countries saw the rebels as more or less legitimate representatives of the Chechen people, considering that the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov had been elected president in January 1997 in elections deemed free and fair by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Moreover, the international community repeatedly condemned the Russian military’s massive human rights violations in its prosecution of the war; Russia was even briefly suspended from voting in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe over its conduct in Chechnya.

During the course of the second Chechen war, which began in October 1999 and rages to this day, the radicalisation of parts of the Chechen resistance movement and its links to extremist Islamist groups in the Middle East have prompted growing concern. September 11 introduced a new paradigm into world politics, and Chechnya has since been one of the areas most affected by the increased global focus on terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, the Russian leadership began drawing comparisons between the terrorist attacks on the United States and the situation in Chechnya. Only hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Russian state television broadcast a statement by President Putin expressing solidarity with the American people, but also reminding viewers of Russia’s earlier warnings of the common threat of “Islamic fundamentalism”. This marked the beginning of a strategy aiming to capitalise on 9/11 by highlighting the alleged parallels between it and the Chechnya conflict. “The Russian people understand the American people better than anyone else, having experienced terrorism first-hand,” Putin said the day after the attacks.

A Five-Step Strategy

This turned out to be the harbinger of a diplomatic campaign aimed at Western countries that was intended to shore up legitimacy, if not support, for the Russian army’s violent crackdown in Chechnya. This campaign was part and parcel of a five-step strategy to reduce the negative fallout of the war in Chechnya. The first component of that strategy had been to isolate the conflict zone and prevent both Russian and international media from reporting on the war independently. The arrest in January 2000 of Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for the US government–funded Radio Liberty, on charges of using a forged passport, served as an early warning for journalists of the consequences of ignoring Moscow’s rules on reporting the conflict. Since then, only a few journalists have actually been able to provide independent reporting from Chechnya. Most prominent have been Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and French writer Anne Nivat. The danger involved in covering the war was illustrated again during the Beslan crisis: both Babitsky and Politkovskaya were prevented from travelling to the scene, Babitsky by arbitrary detention and Politkovskaya by being poisoned on a flight from Moscow to Rostov.

The second prong in the strategy was to rename the conflict: instead of a “war”, it was an “anti‑terrorist operation”.

Third, and stemming directly from this, Russia sought to discredit the Chechen struggle and undermine its leadership by accusing the Chechen opposition individually and collectively of involvement with terrorism. Russia’s campaign against Aslan Maskhadov’s chief negotiator, Akhmed Zakaev, is one example of this. It nevertheless backfired as first Denmark and then Britain refused to extradite Zakaev to Russia, Britain instead providing him with political asylum. Zakaev’s freedom to travel nevertheless remains restricted as long as Russia’s Interpol warrant against him stays in place. Likewise, Moscow tried to have Maskhadov’s foreign minister, Ilyas Akhmadov, extradited from the United States on terrorism charges, but he too was granted political asylum.

Fourth, Russia sought to “Chechenise” the conflict and turn it into an intra-Chechen confrontation by setting up and arming a brutal and corrupt but ethnically Chechen puppet regime in Grozny, under the leadership of the former mufti of the republic, Akhmad Kadyrov. The idea was to reduce Russian casualties and enable hostilities to be depicted as a war between Chechen factions that Russia was seeking to stabilise.

Fifth and finally, Russia declared that the war was over. Yet it is today blatantly obvious that this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny.

Western Acquiescence

Although European countries and the United States maintained a moderate but noticeable level of criticism of Russia’s massive human rights violations in Chechnya during both the first war in 1994–6 and the present one, Moscow has had some success in convincing Western observers that it is fighting not a people, but terrorists. The first achievement in this regard was a statement by Putin’s closest European acolyte, German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Germany had for years criticised Russia for its human rights abuses in the breakaway Chechen republic, but during Putin’s state visit to Berlin on 25 September 2024 Schröder said: “Regarding Chechnya, there will be and must be a more differentiated evaluation in world opinion.” Observers interpreted the remark as meaning that the West now had to accept Moscow’s view that the Chechen rebels were terrorists.¹ This was followed by President George W. Bush’s demand that Chechen forces sever links to terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. On the whole, 9/11 provided Moscow with an opportunity to reshape its relations with the West, as evidenced by the more positive climate between Russia and the European Union that continued unharmed up to the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of December 2004. In an atmosphere of increased co-operation, with America’s need for Russian intelligence assistance on Afghanistan, a halt to criticism on Chechnya has become the chief prize Russia has managed to extract from the post-9/11 situation.

Having found tacit acceptance of his anti-terrorist agenda in the West, Putin since 2002 has moved on to claim that the war in Chechnya is over and that a return to normality is under way, with economic reconstruction and the beginnings of an indigenous political process. Indeed, for a time Russia managed to keep down the level of the conflict, which was gradually turning into a low-intensity confrontation. In 2003, Russia tried to decapitate the Chechen leadership by eliminating some of its top figures, such as field commander Ruslan Gelaiev, the Islamist mujahideen commander Abu al-Walid, and exiled former interim president Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, who was killed by Russian agents in Qatar. However, the increasing frequency of suicide attacks during 2003 and 2004, and the intensification of military hostilities in and around Chechnya in 2004 and early 2005, render hollow the Russian argument that the war is over. In fact, the rising political violence in the North Caucasus republics neighbouring Chechnya indicates that, if anything, the war is spreading, beginning truly to challenge Russia’s control over the region.

The Roots of Extremism

Rather than being a cause of the conflict, as Moscow argues, the extremist/terrorist dimension of the Chechnya crisis is a distinctively alien phenomenon grafted upon the Chechen struggle as a result of the war. Foreign Islamist radicals gained ground in Chechnya only after the first war, in the anarchy that followed the devastation of the republic in 1994–6. Islamist radicalism has a weak natural breeding ground in Chechen society, but the circumstances and consequences of armed conflict are making it possible for foreign extremist groups to thrive there. Even during the chaotic period of de facto Chechen independence in 1996–9, the radical Islamists under the leadership of Shamil Basaev and Amir Khattab were confined to a small area in south-eastern Chechnya. President Maskhadov in 1999 even warned Moscow of their possible intentions and requested its help to combat them, but received no response.

The ‘Afghanisation’ of Chechnya

It is the war that is enabling the radicals to attract followers in Chechnya. However minor their following may be at present, it is clearly growing, in a process that may be termed the “Afghanisation of Chechnya”.

This analogy to the Afghanistan of the early 1990s is intended to illustrate how war is leading to the destruction of the fabric of Chechen society. Most civil wars shake society and endanger the lives of citizens during the fighting. Yet they do not necessarily destroy the possibility of a relatively swift restoration of peaceful conditions once hostilities cease. The economic and psychological effects of such wars may be profound, but a basic economy, basic education, health care, social norms of behaviour, etc., remain. In sum, the social capital of the society endures. However, some conflicts, owing to their brutality and length, do destroy the very foundations of society. Afghanistan is a prominent example. Twenty-three years of war had a devastating effect on its people. Of a population of roughly 20 million, some 1.5–2 million were killed, a similar number were wounded or maimed, 6 million were made refugees in other countries, and several million were forced into internal displacement. Over 50 per cent of the population was directly affected by death, injury, or displacement.

Beyond this staggering human toll, the infrastructure of society was destroyed. Materially, transport and telecommunications systems were smashed. The provision of health care and education was wrecked. Economic livelihood was made hazardous and sometimes impossible because of the ten million landmines seeded around the country. Law and order collapsed in the early 1990s, to be replaced by anarchy and the spread of “Kalashnikov culture”; pillage, killings, and rape were no longer exceptional events. The very emergence of the Taliban testified to the destruction of both traditional and modern social norms. The war undermined the tribal structures of authority. The traditionally tolerant Afghan society was invaded by alien, extremist ideas that gained dominance, a process that culminated in the rule of the Taliban, a group originating mainly in the Afghan refugee communities in Pakistan, consisting of young men who had never known peace, who had grown up in war and knew nothing but war. Whatever we may think of the Taliban’s policies or worldview, we cannot ignore the fact that the movement’s existence and way of thinking were a direct product of the war that had devastated the lives of its members, putting them in exile where they were taken up by extremist militias that inculcated them with their austere and violent beliefs.

The dire picture of Afghanistan unfortunately applies to Chechnya in all too many ways. In terms of the human toll of the war, a similar share of Chechnya’s population has been killed—perhaps over one hundred thousand people. As in Afghanistan, over half of the Chechen population has been affected by death, injury, or displacement. Likewise, the extreme brutality of the Russian military’s campaign has destroyed the foundation of society in Chechnya. People are being killed, maimed, abducted, tortured and raped at will by the forces that are supposed to uphold law and order; no one is safe at any time in Chechnya. The basis for a functioning economy has also been destroyed. Infrastructure has been obliterated, as may be confirmed by comparing satellite photos of the normal urban face of Grozny in 1994 with the shattered moonscape it presented in 2002. In the countryside, agriculture has been laid waste. There is a general absence of livestock and seeds; livestock has either been “collateral damage” of fighting or deliberately killed by Russian forces. The oil economy that once existed has been for the most part physically eliminated.

Destruction of a Generation

A generation of Chechens is growing up either in destroyed villages in Chechnya under the constant threat of brutal Russian “mopping-up” operations (zachistki), or in refugee camps in neighbouring Ingushetia. This generation, much like the Afghans in refugee camps in Pakistan, has no conceivable hope of a normal life. As Anna Politkovskaya put it while describing her encounter with one of the hostage-takers in the October 2002 Moscow theatre siege,

This is a certain generation of modern Chechens. Bakar is one of those who has known nothing but a machinegun and the forest for the last decade, and before that he’d only just finished school. And so, gradually, the forest became the only life that is possible.²

The young generation of Chechens may already be marked beyond repair. Psychologists have noted the difference between children coming to refugee camps in Ingushetia at the beginning of the war in 1999 and those who left Chechnya later in the fighting. Whereas “it was possible to protect the first group from severe traumatic situations”, the second tends “to be withdrawn, irritable, quick to take offence or aggressive”.³ A recent study by the World Health Organisation concluded that 86 per cent of the Chechen population studied suffered from physical or emotional distress, and 31 per cent from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Whether or not these figures are accurate, it is obvious that the psychological effects of the war on the adult population, not to mention the children of Chechnya, have long since reached crisis proportions. The point is that among this generation of Chechens, the percentage that will be attracted to radical Islamist beliefs will almost certainly be considerably higher than among current fighters.

Russia’s proclaimed “normalisation” of the situation in Chechnya seems to have had little effect, either on the war or on the civilian population. In April 2004, four human rights groups issued a joint statement concluding that the plight of civilians was worsening, not improving. Eighty people were abducted, mainly by pro-Russian Chechen groups, during the first three months of 2004. The Russian security services began explicitly targeting the widows of killed Chechen resistance fighters, as they have come to be seen as potential suicide bombers. Members of Aslan Maskhadov’s family were taken prisoner and held hostage by Russian and pro-Russian Chechen forces.

The Resurgence of Violence

The experience of 2004 shows that the ills affecting Chechnya seem to be intensifying and spreading across the North Caucasus. Thousands of Chechens have been living in refugee camps in Ingushetia for several years, and are being pressured by Moscow to return to Chechnya to bolster its claim that the conflict there is dying down. However, the conditions in Chechnya have led the refugees to refuse adamantly to return. Moreover, repression in Ingushetia grew in the first half of 2004, as increasing numbers of civilians were abducted or disappeared, as in Chechnya, and media censorship intensified.

The Murder of Akhmad Kadyrov

On 9 May 2004, pro-Russian Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was killed by a bomb under the VIP section of the Dynamo Stadium in Grozny while he was attending a Victory Day parade marking the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The killing was a severe blow for President Putin, whose policy had been to eliminate all possible rivals to Kadyrov and exercise through him Russian control over Chechnya. At the same time, Kadyrov’s position had become so strong that Moscow had begun to worry about a possible future confrontation with him. Indeed, shortly before the assassination, Kadyrov and his son, Ramzan, who headed the dreaded presidential guards, had spoken of the need for Russian troops to leave Chechnya. After the killing, rebel attacks greatly intensified, leading Russian observers to state that the situation had reverted to that of two or three years earlier. Attacks were now taking place inside the capital Grozny again. On 13 July, rebels narrowly failed to assassinate the interim president of Chechnya, Sergei Abramov, in Grozny, while killing his bodyguard.

The Ingushetia Raid

On 21 June 2004, armed guerrillas attacked the headquarters of the interior ministry in Ingushetia and several other government buildings and official structures in various Ingush towns. This was the first large-scale rebel infantry attack in many years, and the first on a territory outside Chechnya since 1999. Sixty-two policemen and officials were killed, as well as numerous civilians. Moreover, as a ground assault rather than a hit-and-run bombing, the attack proved that the rebel forces possessed planning and co-ordination capabilities that some observers had thought were now beyond them. Even worse for the Kremlin, investigations into the raid showed that it was in all likelihood an operation carried out mainly by Ingush, not Chechens.

While the details remain murky, the evidence suggests that most participants were Ingush who had left to fight in Chechnya, together with young Ingush who had turned to Islamist militancy as a result of the poverty, corruption, and increasingly harsh repression in the republic since its presidency was taken over in April 2002 by a former officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service, Murat Ziazikov. The Ingush authorities have been accused of continuing to neglect the rising Islamist militancy in the republic, including by Ingush chief mufti Magomed-Hadji Albogachiev, who resigned shortly after the raid in protest at Ziazikov’s inability to guarantee security to Ingushetia’s populace. A Chechen website later reported that Ingush rebels had declared a jihad against the republic’s authorities, implying that the war in Chechnya, far from winding down, could be spreading to embrace Ingushetia as well. From 1991 until 2003, especially during General Ruslan Aushev’s tenure as president, Ingushetia succeeded in maintaining its neutrality in the conflict between Russia and Chechnya. However, the advent to power of Ziazikov, handpicked by the Kremlin, brought mismanagement, insensitivity and repression that have alienated much of the population and led some young Ingush not only to sympathise with Chechen separatists but to join forces with them.

The Beslan Tragedy

In its quest to portray the situation in Chechnya as reverting to normal, Moscow on 29 August 2024 staged a presidential election in the republic. Reporters noted empty streets and polling stations, but the Kremlin claimed that 85 per cent of the electorate voted, nominating Moscow’s chosen successor to Kadyrov, Alu Alkhanov, with 74 per cent of the vote. Although the election was little more than a farce, Moscow was unable to capitalise on the momentum it created. Instead, it was the most radical forces of the Chechen resistance that took the initiative. In the last days of August 2004, two Chechen women blew up two commercial Russian airliners in flight, and a Moscow metro station was also bombed. On 1 September, a group of Chechens and Ingush seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, a republic bordering Ingushetia with which the Ingush have a long-standing territorial dispute. The radical Islamist terrorists, apparently acting on the orders of Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basaev, kept over a thousand children and adults hostage under appalling conditions. After two days, during which the Russian leadership failed to start a dialogue with the hostage‑takers even to play for time and tried to prevent the efforts of mediators such as former Ingush president Ruslan Aushev, the hostage-taking descended into chaos and horror. While accounts differ over what occurred, it seems clear that a bomb was set off either by the terrorists or by a Russian attack on the school. In either case, what followed showed the utter failure of Russian counter-terrorism measures. At least 350 people—many of them children—were killed after Russian troops stormed the school.

Russia attempted to minimise the tragedy by claiming that the number of hostages killed was much lower than it actually was. It also claimed (though this was later proven false) that the terrorists were a multinational group that included Arabs. Russia’s counter-terrorism forces proved completely unready for an operation of this type. With at least eleven killed and thirty wounded, the elite special forces suffered their heaviest losses in a single operation, partly because of a total lack of co-ordination and partly because of their failure to disarm or control groups of armed local forces that had spontaneously formed at the scene. At the operational level, Russian shortcomings were so severe that Putin himself was forced publicly to acknowledge the failure and vow to implement a comprehensive overhaul of Russia’s counter-terrorism and crisis-management systems.

The human toll of the Beslan tragedy significantly damaged Putin’s hitherto high popularity and generated significant distrust among the Russian public. Indeed, Beslan proved to be the first in a series of crises for Putin, which included the fallout of the Ukrainian elections in December 2004 and large demonstrations by disgruntled pensioners in early 2005. But Beslan also showed that Russia’s efforts to secure and control the North Caucasus had failed. In the most pro-Russian republic of the region, North Ossetia, and only a handful of miles away from Russia’s main regional operating base at Mozdok, armed Islamist rebels were able to prepare and carry out a devastating terrorist attack that shook Russia and the Kremlin to their foundations.

The Spread of Radicalism

The June 2004 raid into Ingushetia and the Beslan terrorist atrocity are not isolated incidents but part of a pattern of increasing political violence in the North Caucasus. Whereas the main threats to the stability of the region and to Moscow’s control in the 1990s were ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic violence, today the chief challenge is Islamist radicalism, which is a mounting problem in areas as far apart as Dagestan and Karachai-Cherkessia.

To what extent this is related to Chechnya is difficult to determine. It is clear that Chechnya is both an inspirational and a practical factor in the rise of Islamist radicalism in the North Caucasus. There are frequent clashes between apparently isolated Islamist radical groups or cells and official forces. In summer 2004, the government of Karachai-Cherkessia imposed martial law, citing the presence of radical Islamist militants in the mountains in the south of the republic. In October, following the implication of the president’s son-in-law in a murder, an angry crowd stormed the presidential palace. The Karachai-Cherkessia government subsequently collapsed, forcing the Kremlin to intervene directly. On 15 January 2005, a shoot-out between police and rebels led to the destruction of an apartment building in Makhachkala, Dagestan; a similar showdown took place on 27 January in Nalchik, capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic.

The recent spate of violence is inextricably linked to the Kremlin’s policy of seeking to exert direct control over the North Caucasus republics in order to stamp out extremism and terrorism. Regional leaders used to be elected locally, but are now appointed by Moscow. This virtual annulling of federalism and of the autonomy of the constituent republics of the North Caucasus may allow Moscow a sense of control over developments, but it also seems to be a chief factor fuelling the appeal of the radical forces. Across the North Caucasus, Moscow and the increasingly subservient local governments are implementing the same type of measures that led Russia nowhere in Chechnya. The influence of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB) is growing, its personnel occupying high places in the governments of the republics. The heavy-handed methods of the FSB help destabilise the uneasy political balance that had existed in the region despite the dire socio-economic conditions that prevail there. Political opposition is being suppressed, while independent Muslim activity is harshly repressed.

This state of affairs is not exclusive to the North Caucasus in the post-Soviet context: the same picture has long been true of certain countries in Central Asia. However, unique to the North Caucasus is the following volatile mix: relatively rapid change from a comparatively liberal political atmosphere to ever-stronger repression and control by the Kremlin and FSB; continued and worsening socio-economic problems; rising Islamist political activity; popular frustration over the war in Chechnya; and the opportunity for disaffected young men to travel to Chechnya and join the radical formations operating there. The North Caucasus tinderbox risks becoming a zone of hostilities that Moscow cannot control. Every terrorist act forces the Kremlin to up the ante and seek to tighten its grip on the North Caucasus, with less attention paid to local sensitivities. The resort to increasingly severe policies further alienates and antagonises the local population.

Russia’s Self-defeating War

The longer the Chechen war goes on and the longer Russian brutality continues, the more recruits the Islamist radicals will find across the North Caucasus. Moscow would argue that precisely because Chechnya is a hotbed of extremism that threatens the security of the entire region, the “terrorists” must be destroyed and order restored in the republic. But Russia has been fighting this war for over five years, and is no closer to victory than it was at the outset. And as long as Moscow does not win the war, it will continue to lose it. The Russian defeat in 1996 and the current stalemate make it clear that Moscow is unable to arrive at a military solution to the Chechen problem. Consequently, its repressive policies raise the risk of the conflagration spreading across the North Caucasus. The intensification of fighting in 2004 and the increasingly daring raids and attacks that the rebels have proven able to mount indicate that the war in Chechnya is not about to abate. While the conflict persists, the spiral of violence will continue, and the Chechen population—and probably other North Caucasian populations—risk becoming further radicalised.

Analysis of the situation in Chechnya leaves little doubt that the current war is not an anti-terrorist operation but a brutal assault on an entire people, one generating anarchy and chaos that criminalise the fighting forces on both sides. The war also permits Islamist extremists alien to Chechnya to find a base there and in the North Caucasus in general, and gradually to influence a generation growing up with little or no hope for the future. Russia’s war in Chechnya, so far from countering terrorism, is inevitably creating extremism and sowing the seeds of terrorism.

Evidence presented by human rights organisations makes it abundantly clear that Russia’s war in Chechnya is exacting an appalling toll from the local population. The indiscriminate bombings of Chechen villages, the resort to non-conventional weapons such as vacuum bombs, the systematic use of concentration camps, and the brutality of the zachistki (“mopping-up” operations) are cruel measures that collectively punish the Chechen people as a whole.

Russia’s response to the evolving crises in 2004 indicates little acceptance of this reality. Moscow is continuing the same policy of seeking to Chechenise the conflict and support Chechen formations that are to take over the task of fighting the rebels. The fraudulent elections of August 2004 installed Moscow’s man, Alu Alkhanov, as president of Chechnya. Credible and more neutral candidates were removed from the ballot by a variety of administrative means. As a result, Russia once again has a puppet regime in Chechnya, but it is clear that this leadership will not be seen as legitimate by the Chechen population. As long as that is the case, there is no prospect for true normalisation in Chechnya. And in turn, stability in the North Caucasus will be a pipe dream.

Endnotes

1. See Roland Eggleston, “Germany: Schroeder Hints at Change in Opinion on Chechnya”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 26 September 2001.

2. Anna Politkovskaya, “My Hours inside the Moscow Theatre”, IWPR Caucasus Reporting Service, no. 153, 31 October 2002.

3. Asiyat Vazaeyva, “The Mental Scars of Chechnya’s Children”, IWPR Caucasus Reporting Service, no. 165, 6 February 2003.