Chechnya - The Country

It seemed only a matter of time before the fiercely independent Chechen people would rise up against "Mother Moscow." Again. The Chechens have been conquered, neglected, abused and banished by everyone from the Ak Koyonlu and the Horde of the White Sheep to Georgian boy-turned-snuffmeister; Joey Stalin. During WW2 Stalin stuffed the Chechens in boxcars and sent them to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan (along with the Tartars) for being German collaborators. Well they weren't actually, but; hey a dictator can never be too careful you know. So it's not surprising the Chechens have a mean streak as wide as the mountainous border that divides the southern part of their country.

After they were repatriated by Kruschev in the 50's the Chechens, hardened and without any means of earning a living, set about forming the largest criminal gangs in the former Soviet Union. Keep in mind that in Russia, one has to be careful before calling someone a crook. The Chechens were as far from the Marxist, there-is-no-God, one-size-fits-all Soviet model as a people could be. Why? First, Chechens aren't even Chechen (they are Nuokhchi, or sons of Noah); they speak a unique language- Nakh; they are Muslim; they are more entrepreneurial than Donald Trump and tougher than a hung over hockey team. More importantly they have kept their national identity intact. Chechen loyalties are to one of the more than 100 teips, or clans, that constitute Chechen society, not to the fat-bottomed thieves in the Kremlin. Think of teips as similar to the city states of Athens. Warring in peacetime, peaceful in war. Left to their own devices and sitting on the nexus of the east and west, the Chechens thought and acted just like the lone wolf that has become their national symbol.

The Russians considered them the toughest, baddest people in the former Soviet Union. But bears don't kill wolves, packs of wolves kill bears. Russians are quick to accuse the Chechens of blowing up apartments, running drugs, hijacking airliners and school buses and other abuses, and of then hotfooting it back to Chechnya to hide out in their inaccessible mountain villages.

So DP thought it was strange that the news media were quick to recast the ornery Chechens as the heroic-defenders-of-their-homeland underdogs in the West in the O94 -'96 war. You didn't hear much about the rumblings in Chechnya and the contractistya's hired by the Russian army to start a revolution. But when the sham civil war started the empire struck back. Russian defense minister Pavel S. Grachev boasted that a single paratroop regiment would need only a couple of hours to wipe out the rebellion. Darth Vader he ain't.

Outnumbered by five (more likely ten) to one, the Chechen irregulars, along with volunteers, waged a guerrilla war from the mountains. The Russians seemed to have completely forgotten the lessons they learned in Afghanistan, as their forces hid in their newly built forts along the major highways using vulnerable supply and patrol convoys. Then when the Chechens came out of the mountains to kill the Russians in Grozny, it was all over.

It was a story the Western media loved-peasants armed with sticks and shovels defiantly dancing around bonfires in central Grozny, seemingly holding off the entire might of the Russian bear. Wolf-like Chechen fighters, unshaven and dirty, waving their flag while strafing fighters soared overhead turning their parliament into Swiss cheese. Meanwhile, the most feared army in the world turned out to be shivering, underfed, stoned, confused and mostly prepubescent.

Although the vastly superior Russian forces eventually took the Chechen capital in February 1995, they faced a low-budget Afghanistan for the next 20 months. The Chechen insurgents-many of them former Soviet soldiers trained in mountain guerrilla fighting-dug into the hills and waged a long and fierce battle of attrition against an undisciplined, underaged band of Moscow's best. And, in true Afghanistan form, the Russian army set up a puppet government, while the rebels regrouped in the hills.

Between 1,500 and 3,000 Chechen fighters in three groups fought this pocket gazavat, or holy war. Dzhokhar Dudayev ran his tiny rebel army from his "secret" base in Roshni-Chu, about 45 minutes south of Grozny, until he was hit by a Russian missile, which homed in on his satellite phone in a clearing 20 miles southeast of Grozny in April 1996. In February 1995, the Russian army needed 38,000 troops just to keep the lid on Chechnya, and the Interior Ministry had deployed an additional 15,500 men. But an aggressive drive by the Chechen fighters on August 6, 1996 (Yeltsin's inauguration day) reversed the war, driving thousands of Russian troops and civilians out of Grozny. It seems the Russian had never controlled anything, including their drinking and self deception. When Alexander Lebed was sent in by Yeltsin to work out a cease-fire, he found Russian soldiers had become demoralized, vanquished and lice-ridden weaklings. After the cease-fire went into effect, sporadic firing continued and Chechen refugees were bombed by the Russians as they fled the city. Two daring raids by Basayev and Raduyev inside Russia quickly reminded the Russians that Moscow was only a bus ticket away for holy warriors. A peace treaty was hammered out but as the Chechen commander told DP Lebed warned them they had three years, they better be ready. In the meantime all the money slated for rebuilding Chechnya was siphoned off and stolen.

So in October of 1999 the Chechens were ready. One-hundred thousand Russians rolled in fueled by promises of quick victory and a budget bump from higher oil prices. On paper it looked good Russian tanks swept through miles of flat northern plains encircling cities, pounding them to rubble and then declaring victory. The problem was the Chechens weren't fighting. When DP was in Chechnya the Russians pounded Argun for three days after the fighters left.

The second war was pretty much a bigger budget remake of the first war. More troops, more fireworks, more rhetoric and more dead. The Russians had learned media spin from ex-CIA director Bush and his Gulf War. No journos allowed (except on escorted bus tours) was the rule. Few if any journos dared to cover the war from the rebel side, terrified of stories of kidnapping, murder and deceit. Meanwhile the Russians pounded their own people (mostly elderly, poor Russians who had been given flats in Grozny) while claiming victory against terrorists. DP was in the bunkers with the "terrorists" eating pumpkin pancakes and wondering why the media didn't give a shit about a war in Europe that made the Balkans pale in comparison.