From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 1/15/2008 6:12 AM
Chechnya: The unsung struggle
By Garba A. Isa
 
Russian forces under the late president Boris Yelsin launched a massive invasion of the breakaway region of Chechnya on December 10, 1994.
 
The Russian invasion was meant to make the weak Chechens into surrender “within hours or days.” But Russian’s over 40,000 soldiers who were bolstered by troops from its North Sea fleet and from its territory of Kalingrand, were later to be bogged down into a long drawn war. The battle for control of the Chechen capital Grozny. For instance, it took the Russian forces several weeks pinned down in ground, air and artillery assaults particularly at the presidential palace from which the Chechen resistance withdrew only after it was reduced to rubbles!

Today 13 years after the Russian invasion, a puppet regime is installed in the capital Grozny with control of the major towns while the Chechen resistant forces controlled the mountainous countryside.

In their current war in Chechnya, the Russians seem to portray a short memory: when Russia’s successor the defunct Soviet Union or USSR, launched a similar gamble in Afghanistan (ironically also in December) of 1979, it was bogged down into a bloody fiasco for 10 years.

The Afghan war consumed four defunct Russian presidents; Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gobachev with whom also went the USSR itself. By the time the Soviet Union was forced to shamefully withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989, the toll of the Afghan Jihad was put at one million Afghans killed, five million made refugees and a number of towns and villages destroyed by years of savage Russian air raids.
 
The puppet Russian-installed Afghan regime of president Najibullah was sent parking from the capital in April 1992 by the Afghan Mujahiduns.
Today though, a US puppet president Hamid Karzai precariously hangs to power in the Afghan capital Kabul and other major cities while the Taliban control most of the outlying areas.
 
The war in Chechnya is rooted in the defunct Soviet Union’s Nationalities Question. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 which overthrew the Land owner, Capitalist Tsarist regime, USSR was a nationalities-crisis wasteland.
 
The defunct Soviet Union in fact swallowed many nationalities (more than 100, with 57 percent of them non-Russian), mainly through sheer brute force.

The gimmick is that under the constitution of the Russian Federation, the union members are of “equal status” with “the right to seced.” On November 2, 1917 the historic declaration of right of the people of Russia was proclaimed with among others, the principle that “....the right of all people of Russia to free self determination up to and including secession and the formation of independent states” (AKPAN F.E., 1985, p.34). Similar secession clause existed in the Constitutional declaration of the defunct Soviet Union.
 
The so-called Commonwealth of Independent States the (CIS), which gave birth to Russia and other republics in 1991 drew largely from that constitutional provision.

Three different administrative structures existed under the defunct Union of Socialists Republics, the USSR: 1, Autonomous Federations (such as Russian Federation itself), 2; Autonomous Regions (such as Chechnya) and 3; Autonomous areas (such as Dagestan).

Each of these tiers of the Union should ideally enjoy administrative and political autonomy. Chechnya, one of the Russian Federation’s Autonomous Regions (population then around 3 million people), opted to follow the examples of Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Azerbaijan and other members of the so-called CIS to proclaim its independence from Russia. The Muslim people of Chechnya voted massively to go their own way to shape their destiny in accordance with their Chechen culture and their (Islamic) religion.

The Chechen vote to depart from Russia was not the first; in December 1917, the manifesto of the Ukrainian people, confirmed the constitutional right to self determination of all nations forming the Russian Federation.

Today, Ukraine is an independent state under the CIS. Why not Chechnya? Russia is often seen as a friend of Muslim nations, but the reality is different: its support for Serbs’ genocide campaign in Bosnia Herzegovina, its support for Serbians in Belgrade against the Muslim Kosovo’s independence bid and its hegemonic scotched earth campaign in Muslim Chechnya since 1994 among others. After several years of savage war in Chechnya, the Russians have settled for a long drawn campaign of attrition.

Boris Yelsin’s successor as Russia’s president, the outgoing president Vladimir Putin even took a bloodier genocide approach to the Chechen occupation and in fact largely regained the breakaway region from the Chechen resistance. Putin has restored Russian hegemony and installed urban based puppet regime led by Akhmad Kadrov (who claimed to be a former resistant fighter even though his real identity is that of a Russia’s secret service FSB, agent).

The resistance on the other hand, control the mountainous regions and carry out occasional sabotage mission even in the towns.
President Putin of Russia is engaged in a campaign of ethnic and religious cleansing of indescribable proportion in Chechnya with the tacit support of the apostles of “Democracy and Human Right” led by America. Once the Chechen independent struggle was branded as “Terrorism” then the Chechens have virtually no one to support them other than God, The Most High, Who gives victory to the oppressed at the appropriate time He so pleases.

But why did Russia attack Chechnya in the first place? It was principally to regain its colonial hegemony over the Muslim region. Also given its economic crisis, the continued control of the Oil and Gas rich region is mouth watering for Russia.

There is the usual gimmick which is to tame the rising tide of Islam. There is also the colonial mentality fear among the Russians that if Chechnya goes, other republics and autonomous areas (there are many in Russia such as Dagestan, Ingush and North Ossetia among others), may be tempted to follow.

The Chechens were led into voting for independence and the initial war of heroic resistance against the Russian invasion of December, 1994 by the region’s first president Jokar Dudayev, a former Russian Airforce General. He was eventually killed on April 21, 1996 in the village of Gekhi-chu in a Russian missile attack.
 
He was succeeded by his deputy Zelimkhan Yanderbyeb. General Dudayev and other Chechen resistant fighters were inspired by Sheikh Shamil who led a heroic resistance against the Russian colonisation of Chechnya in the last century. Dudayev died a dignified martyr of the struggle and may have set off a non-stoppable uprising against Russian occupation of Muslim Chechnya. Several other key leaders of the Chechen struggle were killed such as former president Aslan Maskhadov.

In the summer of 2006, former Chechen resistant president Abdulkhalim Sadulayev and vice president Shamil Basayev were killed by Russian forces. The current leader of the Chechen resistance is called Dokka Umarov. Former Russia’s apparent lunatic president Boris Yelsin, who launched military offensive on his country’s parliament to settle a political dispute, may have died a senile, dejected man.

When Yelsin first ordered the invasion of Chechnya in December 1994, it was opined then that he would hardly survive the war- he died some two years ago while the guerrilla-styled war goes on in the break away region.

How could Yelsin and Putin spill blood so wantonly and confront the collective wrath of God and the Chechen and world Muslims and expect a dignified end? Mention has been made that even after years of Russian genocide war in Chechnya and its occupation, the resistant can still repossess the region given their long drawn guerrilla tactics. Did not the Mujahideen chase the Soviets from Afghanistan some 10 years or so after seizing the country?

It is puzzling but understandable, why the Russian war crimes in Chechnya are not making the headlines on the international media or counted on the priorities of International Human Rights bodies or even the United Nations: this is because Muslims are involved unlike in East Timor or Burma.

Darfur is not about protecting the Muslim people there, but fighting the Islamic regime in Khartoum and a scramble for oil which the hapless region is potentially rich. The Chechen people have no option but to continue the struggle against Russian hegemony and genocide painful as it is though even as the largely pro-western Muslim regimes leave them to their fate.

The hard fact is, the war in Chechnya is of unwinnable stuff because the Chechens are fighting a last ditch war of national defence and the defence of their Islamic Religion and Cultural identity. They have nowhere else to go and can thus keep fighting for generations.
The Chechen resistant may have resolved that the greatest tribute to its martyrs including General Dudayev is to press on with the struggle bloody and long drawn it may be though, but the glad tiding of God is to those who fight for the just cause.  
 
http://www.triumphnewspapers.com/che1412008.html#