Allah's Mountains by Smith Sebastian

Author:Smith, Sebastian [Smith, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857730763
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

3. PHONY WAR

Negotiations to get Dudayev to sign the federation treaty, which would put Chechnya within the Russian Federation, collapsed every time. President Yeltsin was still refusing to meet with the renegade airforce general, who insisted on being treated as a head of state. Bluster had proved useless – Dudayev thrived on bluster and counter bluster – and by 1994 there was growing pressure for concrete measures. So, that summer, Moscow launched what looked like a textbook secret war, but in fact was the first step into the quagmire.

A Russian-backed coalition of anti-Dudayev figures based in the northwestern Nadterechny region of Chechnya formed an Interim Council and, in August 1994, announced that they held legitimate power in the republic. Immediately, the Interim Council began spending covert Russian funds to build an army and accentuate the dire economic situation in Dudayev-controlled areas. Opposition-held hospitals and schools were renovated, medicine was made available and teachers began receiving salaries. ‘We need to win the hearts of the people’, an opposition spokesman said at the main base in Znamenskoye. He told me his forces had just received two million dollars from Moscow. Along with the money came rifles, tanks, helicopters, and men. But as in any covert operation, setting up an opposition to Dudayev was considerably more complicated than imagined – and Moscow soon proved how poorly it understood this tiny republic it was trying to force under its control.

The first problem was the opposition leaders themselves. These warlords – called the ‘healthy forces’ of Chechnya by Yeltsin – were a dubious set of characters for the Kremlin’s avowed fight to eradicate the Dudayev ‘bandits’. Officially the opposition was led by a figure from the traditional pro-Russian north of Chechnya, Umar Avturkhanov, who flew to Moscow and met with Kremlin staff. But he did not have broad support, and few people wanted to join what was already suspected to be a Russian client army. Next to Avturkhanov was Beslan Gantemirov, a rich man in his thirties who as former mayor of Grozny had originally helped Dudayev, but then fallen out. And there was the infamous Ruslan Labazanov, an imposingly-built debt collector and convict, and another former associate who had turned against Dudayev.

The most popular anti-Dudayev leader was none other than former Russian parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov. It was less than a year since the bloody anti-Yeltsin rebellion in Moscow and Khasbulatov was free again after being amnestied from jail by the new parliament. When he returned to his native Chechnya, he was given a hero’s welcome, seen as a model of the successful yet rebellious Chechen, and a man with stature matching that of Dzhokhar Dudayev. But because the Kremlin could not countenance Khasbulatov in Chechnya’s presidential palace, backing instead went to the other, far less credible anti-Dudayev figures.

Another underlying problem with manufacturing a civil war was that the Chechens did not want a bloodbath. The society has deep-rooted methods for resolving internal conflicts, and consensus is the traditional way to solve disputes. Chechens

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