From first to the second war-Fact file
Russia began its attempt to penetrate the Caucasus back in the time of Ivan the Terrible, who had arrived as far as the river Terek in 1556. In 1722 another tsar, Peter the Great, having invaded Daghestan for a brief period, and his successors in 1770, succeeded in occupying Chechnya, using as their pretext a request for aid by the Western Chechens (the inhabitants of the area now called Ingushetya), who were then Christians. In more recent times (1990) a national conference met in the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, with delegates representing all the Chechen national groups, including the Russians and the Cossacks, who declared the independence and sovereignty of Chechnya and its separation from the former Soviet Union. On 27 November 1990 the declaration of independence and sovereignty was unanimously ratified by the Parliament of the Chechen Republic. THE FIRST CHECHEN WAR. The first revolt of Chechnya exploded in the autumn of 1991: the former general of the Red Army Giokhar Dudayev returned to his homeland from the Baltic, where he was serving as a Soviet Air Force general, and rediscovered his Islamic faith. He then proclaimed the independence of the autonomous Chechen Republic, to which the Russian Federation recognized some degree of autonomy. Moscow first sought a political solution, offering wider self-determination. But it then sent in the Red Army with tanks. In 1992 Chechnya and Ingushetya were divided into two separate Republics. When, again in 1992, the former Soviet Union was dissolved and in its place the birth of the Russian Federal Republic was sanctioned, by express will of the Chechen people, the Republic of Dudayev did not sign the treaty of membership of the Russian Federation. Dudayev dissolved Parliament in 1993. Armed conflict between the forces loyal to Dudayev and the forces loyal to Moscow began. On 25 November 1994 some helicopter gunships attacked positions in the vicinity of Grozny. According to the Chechens, the helicopters bore the hallmarks of Russia, but Moscow insists it did not participate in the attack. On 29 November 1994 Yeltsin gave an ultimatum to the Chechens: either they lay down their arms by 1st December or Russia would intervene. The ultimatum expired on 1st December 1994: on 9 December Yeltsin authorized the use of military force in Chechnya and two days later the Russian tanks began their advance on the country, rolling towards Grozny. Chechnya agreed to participate in peace talks with Moscow, but these failed. Chechnya suspended the peace talks. In January 1995 the Russian army gradually took control of the capital, and seized the presidential palace. The Chechen capital was devastated during the assault and the victims among the civilian population ran into their thousands. In June a Russian government delegation visited Chechnya to negotiate a ceasefire, which would be formalized at the end of July. In January 1996 the pro-Russian Doky Zavgayev was elected head of the Chechen Republic, but Dudayev declared the result invalid. His followers launched an offensive against Grozny, but the Russians, after three days of fierce combat, got the upper hand. In April 1996 Dudayev was killed. Zemlikhan Yandarbiyev succeeded him as leader of the movement of Chechen rebels. A new ceasefire between the Russian and Chechen forces came into force in June. The Russian troops withdrew before the presidential elections in Chechnya, which were held on 27 January 1997 and were won by Aslan Maskhadov, former commander in chief of the Chechen arm, who signed a peace treaty with Russian President Boris Yeltsin five months later. But the armed conflict flared up again in the summer of 1999. THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR. The second Chechen war began in late September 1999, after a bloody wave of terrorist attacks in Moscow and other Russian cities, with hundreds of victims, both military and civilian. The attacks were claimed by Chechen separatists. As happened five years previously, the Red Army, after a rapid advance on Grozny, fell into the trap of the separatists. The ascent of Putin is inseparably linked to the Chechen question. At the end of 1999 he was called to assume the interim post of President of the Russian Federation until the elections in the following year, in which he was elected as leader of the country. In February 2000, after months of combat, the Russian flag once again flew over Grozny, by now reduced to a pile of rubble. In June 2000 the mufti Akhmad Kadyrov accepted the invitation of the new Russian President Putin to become the head of the provisional administration of the Chechen Republic, but the war in Chechnya continued to claim thousands of victims each year. According to Moscow, 4,300 soldiers had been killed there before August 1999. But far more alarming figures appear in the press: 10-11,000 Russian soldiers dead. The second war in Chechnya is a complex web of tensions that traverse the Caucasus as a whole: the emergence and reinforcement in Chechnya of the power of armed bands, the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism in the region, the strategic importance of the Caucasus for Russia, the strong economic interests linked to the oil pipelines that traverse the region.
