Ibrahim wrote:Antipatros wrote:...most effectively by
Imam Shamil, with informal British support. None of which says a thing about
Current Events.
It says a great deal about current events, which are of a piece with the history of this conflict.
Of course you're right, Ibrahim. Inter-Muzzie telepathy and a series of video games necessarily trump actual study. After all, the authors are only subject-matter experts. What do they know? But just for the hell of it, let's examine what they say about the
very recent roots of the conflict.
Dr. Gordon M. Hahn,
The Caucasus Emirate Jihadists: The Security and Strategic Implications, at 25-26:
AQ’s intervention and the growing influence of the global jihadi revolutionary movement led the radical Chechen national separatist movement down a path traversed by many such movements across the Muslim world in recent decades. In the Caucasus, especially Dagestan, they mixed with the very limited indigenous history of Salfism and significant contemporary flood of young Caucasus Muslims to study abroad in the Middle East and South Asia, on the one hand, and of Wahhabi and other Salafi teachings from there to the Caucasus through the Internet on the other. In the 18th and certainly by the 19th centuries, Salafism was brought in from abroad by Caucasians like Mukhamad Al-Kuduki after travels in Egypt and Yemen introduced him to scholars like Salikh al-Yamani.64 The revival of this relatively recent, if thin, Salafi Islamist usable past, along with the national myths during the perestroika and post-perestroika periods, yielded the rehabilitation and of the 19th century imams and religious teachers who led the gazavats against Russian rule teachers.65 But the nationalist ideas and cadres were gradually displaced by jihadist elements, transforming the secular movement into a jihadist one. This process was increasingly legitimized and gained momentum as Islamic elements were incorporated into the ChRI proto-state and foreign Salafists, Wahabbis, and other Islamic extremists continued to infiltrate the movement throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, bringing finances, guerrilla and terrorist training and, most importantly, a new jihadist ideo-theological orientation. The Salafist historical myth and related historical figures served as models for some local Salafists, who played key roles in the ChRI’s incomplete Islamization even before 2007.66
65. The extent to which the Russian conquest and the Caucasus, especially Dagestani resistance in the 19th century, were marked by an intra-Caucasus struggle between gazavatists, defending local sovereignty and the customs of adat and Sufism, and pro-Shariah quasi-Islamists like Imam Shamil, Gazi Mukhammad, and Kuraly-Magoma, sometimes backed by the Iranian Shah, is often overlooked. See, for example, N. I. Pokrovskii, Kavkazskie Voiny i Imamat Shamilya, Moscow, Russia: ROSSPEN, 2009.
Dr. Svante E. Cornell,
The “Afghanization” of the North Caucasus: Causes and Implications of a Changing Conflict, at 125-127:
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
The present condition of the conflict in the North Caucasus is a fairly recent development, having undergone deep transformations in the past decade. An overview of the history of the conflict makes this clear. Indeed, it suggests that in 1989, ethnicity was increasingly politicized across the former Soviet Union. The ethno-nationalist uprisings and movements of 1989-94 clearly provide corroboration for that assessment. By contrast, religion was not politicized, and would not be for another decade. Among North Caucasus ethnic groups, only the Chechens had both the incentives and the capacity to sustain an insurgency against the Russian state, while a religious revival gradually got under way, centered on Dagestan. It was the first war in Chechnya in 1994-96 that attracted militant Islamist groups to the North Caucasus, whose ideology came to spread across the region, fanning out from Chechnya and Dagestan to span the North Caucasus.
The Salience of the Deportations.
The resistance of Chechens as well as other North Caucasian peoples to Russian rule in the 19th century is legendary. It is instructive to note that Russia had annexed Georgia by 1801, and acquired control over Armenia and Azerbaijan gradually in 1812-13 and 1827-28. By contrast, the areas north of the mountains were not subjugated until 1859-64. It took Russia 30 years after gaining control over the South Caucasus to pacify the North. Chechens, Dagestanis, and the Circassian peoples to the west fought an unequal battle until the 1860s to escape Russian rule.6 Under the legendary Dagestani chieftain, Shamil, the areas that today form southern Chechnya and inner Dagestan formed a shrinking independent Islamic state, an Imamate, from 1824 until the Russian capture of Shamil in 1859.7 The Circassian rebels were not defeated until the mass expulsion of Circassians to the Ottoman Empire in 1864.
Even following the incorporation of the North Caucasus into the Russian empire, the northeastern regions were only partially pacified, but never appeared to become integrated with Russia in ways that other minority-dominated areas, such as in the Volga region, did. The physical expulsion of the majority of the Circassian population helped Russia manage the northwestern Caucasus; but Chechnya and Dagestan remained unruly. Whenever Russia was at war or otherwise weakened, these lands saw rebellions of varying length and strength. This occurred after World War I during the Russian civil war 1918-21, and, though in a much smaller scale, during the collectivization of the 1930s and World War II. In 1944, this obstinate refusal to submit had tragic consequences. Falsely claiming that Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, and Balkars had collaborated with the invading German forces, Joseph Stalin in February 1944 ordered the wholesale deportation of these peoples to Central Asia. Entire populations were loaded on cattle wagons and transported in the middle of winter to the steppes of Central Asia, where little preparation had been made for their arrival. An estimated quarter of the deportees died during transport or shortly after arrival due to cold, hunger, or epidemics.8
The largest number of the deported peoples of the North Caucasus was the Chechens. However, until deportation, Chechens primarily identified with their Teip or clan, not as members of a Chechen nation. More than anything, deportation helped develop national consciousness among the Chechens. The demographic consequences of deportation and the 13-year exile of the Chechens until they were allowed to return in 1957 are very tangible. Between 1926-37, the Chechen population increased by 36 percent; in another 11-year period, between 1959 and 1970, the figure was 46 percent. But during the 20-year period from 1939-59, the rate of increase was only 2.5 percent, although the population would almost have doubled under normal circumstances.9 Thus, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the deportations in the collective memory of the punished peoples. With regard to the Chechens, it had important political consequences that did not immediately materialize among the much smaller Ingush, Karachai, and Balkar populations. Most leaders of the Chechen movement for independence in the 1990s were either born or grew up in exile in Kazakhstan. The deportation convinced many Chechens that there was no way for them to live securely under Russian rule; it also explains the extent of support for separation from Russia among the people and perhaps the readiness among portions of the population to embrace radical ideologies of resistance....
6. Marie Bennigsen Broxup, ed., The North Caucasus Barrier, London, UK: C. Hurst, 1992; John Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 1-40.
7. Rhubarb Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, London, UK: Routledge, 2003.
8. Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War, New York: W.W. Norton, 1981; Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War, Basingstoke, UK: Pan Books, 1997, pp. 56-75.
9. Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, London, UK: MacMillan, 1970, p. 160.