Introduction
In the summer and fall of 1999, the protracted Chechen crisis was thrown into sharper relief. The August incursion into Daghestan by illegal armed units commanded by Chechen field commanders contributed to escalation of the conflict. The explosions of residential blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September suggested that the terrorists based in Chechnya had extended the zone of their operations far beyond the limits of the North Caucasus region. The event that followed revealed that after long vacillations the federal authorities had decided to use force to liquidate terrorist and essentially bandit units of Chechen field commanders and terminate the sources of their support.
After the signing of the Khasavyurt agreements with Moscow, the official authorities in Grozny failed to ensure that the illegal armed units surrendered their arms, or liquidated camps where terrorists and saboteurs (not only from among Chechen nationals) were trained on a regular basis. Nor did they eradicate the criminal business of kidnapping.
Consistently pursuing a separatist policy and demanding that Moscow recognise unconditionally the independence of the Chechen Republic, the Maskhadov government faced by the current crisis actually sided with the militants and terrorists on the basis of anti-Russian positions.
Today, the road to peace where a man "with a gun or dynamite" shall not take the life of unarmed people in Chechnya, Buinaksk, Vladikavkaz, Moscow or Volgodonsk, again lies through war. The enforcement of peace against those who make their living from war, terror and the slave trade is an indispensable pre-condition for honouring the right of the man-in-the-street to live without fear. The experience of Chechnya itself suggests that no self-organisation of a nation can be achieved without that.
The Khasavyurt peace accords did not bring peace to Chechnya. Armed clans which divided the republic into "zones of influence" have constantly fought against official Grozny over their right to power. The internal Chechen conflict became permanent. Furthermore, differences among the Chechen politicians as to what model of state (secular or Islamic) should be chosen, and consequently who will be Chechnya's strategic allies outside the country, became an important element of the conflict. Missionary views professed by some part of the Chechen elite predetermined the export of the "Chechen revolution" under the green banner of Islam. Actually, all of us witnessed an insolent attempt to translate into life yet another ideological utopia.
No conclusions must have been drawn from the recent Soviet experience of materialising the communist utopia. And as usual, it is the people, who is not too keen on ideological subtleties, that has to pay for it. The multi-ethnic people who happened to dwell on the land which became the testing ground for realising that utopia - this time in Chechnya.
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