Redivision of the World, Islam and Russian Policy
Islam's role has been fast growing in the world. About a billion people practise the religion. The number of Moslems living in the post-Soviet states stands at 80 million. There are major Moslem communities in 120 countries, and Moslems are in the majority in 42 of them. According to the latest census, there were close to 12 million historic Moslems in Russia in 1989. As of January 1996, there are 2,494 Moslem religious communities in Russia.
The growing role of the Islamic factor in world politics is worthy of special note. This is explained by appreciable human resources and dimensions of the Moslem East, the region's strategic location, rich natural resources, commercial and economic capabilities, and the mighty spiritual and historic potentialities of Islam.
One well-known view is that the planetary confrontation between the 'capitalist West' and the 'communist East' has degenerated into a face-off between the 'Christian civilisation of the rich North' and the 'Afro-Asian demographic majority of the South'. The Soviet Union's disintegration has released a multi-million army of Moslems to mark the beginning of the largest geopolitical re-division of the world since World War Two.
The new circumstances are pregnant with unpredictable consequences for Russia. Islam is equally a factor of domestic life and that of international policy for Russia, both of which are worrying. Not surprisingly, the notion of the 'arch of instability' characterises the situation in regions and countries located along the Southern contour of Russia's frontiers. Moslem enclaves inside Russia actively interact with the outside world to add to and exacerbate the geopolitical alignment of forces in the post-Soviet space.
The Moslem world is variable and complex, which is why it is often allocated, in geopolitical projects, the role of both an independent player and an instrument in the hands of third parties operating in the world. There is a variety of subjects of political action which constitute the Islamic factor. This is why the Islamic factor is primarily seen as political.
The Moslem countries have founded important governmental and non-governmental organisations. The largest one is the Islamic Conference Organisation. There is a number of specialised organisations: the Islamic Development Fund, the Islamic Development Bank, etc. Also, there are the cultural centres and various foundations representing the interests of different branches of Islam.
There are quite a few international Islamic organisations: the Moslem World League, the World Islamic Organisation headquartered in Kuwait, the World Islamic Assistance Organisation based in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Assistance agency, the International Islamic Call Organisation, the International Organisation of Moslem Women, the World Assembly of Islamic Youth, the Association of Islamic Directions' Rapprochement headquartered in Teheran, the Islamic People's Congress headquartered in Khartoum, etc.
Aleksandr Ignatenko, Ph.D., notes in NG-Stsenarii No. 8 of November 21, 1996, that Islamic public and political movements and parties are clearly differentiated by the methods they use.
There are charities, enlightening, cultural and political organisations which act within the laws of the country in which they are based and are loyal to the current authorities, believing that all forms of violence are unacceptable for them.
On the other hand, there are quite a few organisations that are in opposition, often irreconcilable opposition, to the regimes in their respective countries. They are extremist non-governmental religious political organisations. As a rule, their objective is either to overthrow these regimes, or to ensure Moslems' political and state self-identification by way of violent actions. Some of them are: the Moslem Brotherhood in several Arab countries, HAMAS in the Palestinian autonomy, Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, the Islamic Revival party in Tajikistan, etc.
There is data to indicate that the Moslem Brotherhood began operating in the Chechen part of the then Checheno-Ingushetia in early 1990s. In the Soviet times, the secret services devised the term Wahhabis to denote extremist fundamentalist Moslem groups, which had being existing first in Central Asia and then in the Caucasus since the 1980s. Extremist organisations defy borders, as a rule, and their militants usually operate both at home and abroad. Islam knows not of state frontiers.
Specialists note that some Islamic public and political organisations have two-tier structures-legal and underground. The extremist organisations' clandestine activities create beneficial conditions for manipulations with them or on their behalf, and sometimes, even on behalf of the Islamic protest movement.
Dr. Ignatenko highlights the influence non-Islamic groups and organisations have on the Islamic factor of international affairs. These are research centres and foundations, the media, industrial corporations and financial groups operating in the Islamic zone, and lastly, secret services. The NATO countries, the US in the first place, are at the forefront of these efforts. The same can well be said of Japan, India and China. The methods they use are those of clandestine diplomacy, spying, information proliferation, etc. The objective is to influence the Islamic factor with the aim of creating beneficial economic and geo-strategic conditions for the relevant non-Islamic countries in the Islamic zone.
That the subjects of political action, which form the Islamic factor are many, testifies to its heterogeneity. There are several lines to prove the inherently contradictory nature of the Islamic factor: the 'official' Islam and the 'opposition' Islam; the various national interests of the Islamic subjects of political action (Turks and Tajiks in Central Asia; Pashtoons, Uzbeks and Tajiks in Afghanistan; Kurds and Turks in Turkey, etc.); the differences between the Sunni and Shiite communities (e.g. in Pakistan's Punjab); geo-strategic competition exacerbated by the Shiite-Sunni differences (e.g. Iran and Saudi Arabia); conflicting economic interests of the various Islamic states; the social and class contradictions exacerbated by ethnic and community differences (guest workers from Pakistan and other Moslem states in the Arab states of the Gulf). The more liberal social, political and economic relations in the post-Soviet states have generated similar contradictions in the Islamic factor in the post-Soviet space, in Russia including.
But apart from the confrontational trends, there are, in the Islamic world, mighty impulses of integration within a certain union or conglomerate. But even in this direction, there is no unanimity of visions of, and approaches to, to the implementation of unifying macro-projects. Steps are being made to revive the once traditional unions and form new ones. The states of Central Asia and the Caucasus and Russia's Moslem regions are expected to join them.
There are two leading unifying trends: pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic. They can hardly materialise, because they are traditional rivals. But even attempts to materialise them can and do create new power vectors in a vast region and thus influence global politics.
The authors of a Nezavisimaya Gazeta article (Yevgeny Nikitenko, Nikolai Pikov, Sergei Shilovsky, "Arch of Instability," NG, December 4, 1996) note that pan-Islamism appeals to the supra-national, while the so called Moslem nationalism, the backbone of pan-Turkism, to the national consciousness. Adherents of the Islamic solidarity idea in Moslem Brotherhood in Iran and Saudi Arabia call on all Moslems to unite outside national boundaries, while ideologists of Moslem nationalism in Turkey, Iraq and partly in Libya want the region's Moslems to stand apart on an ethnic and religious basis and eventually turn the community into an independent political state.
The theory of pan-Turkism is based on a religious chauvinistic doctrine of the Great Turan. Its three basic postulates are the unification of Turkic nations, adherence to Islam and the community of language, historic culture and Oriental mentality. Turkey's claim of leadership in the Turkic world is quite legitimate. The country is an attractive symbol for a hundred-million diaspora, the majority of whose members reside in the territory of the former USSR.
The idea of building the Great Turan is opposed by plans of the proponents of Islamic solidarity in Iran and other countries to restore a pan-Islamic state of the times of the Arab Khalifate with a modern ideological filling. The 'Moslem reserve' in the Southern parts of the former USSR is seen by them as the best catalyst of unification processes in the Moslem East.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among others, are not averse to leading a movement for the unification, around themselves, of the post-Soviet Moslem republics. In their bid to form a nucleus of a future all-Islamic union, whether built on pan-Turkism or pan-Islamism, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey do not exclude the possibility of interfering militarily into the affairs of the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Moreover, they have been and are openly interfering in Central Asia and the Russian regions in the North Caucasus, especially Chechnya and Daghestan.
It has been noted earlier that the Islamic factor includes not only forces of the Moslem world. The world is a scene for combinations and confrontations of differing interests that form most intricate political figures.
Russia and the West have been engaged in a covert and open struggle for influence in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia for the past few centuries.
Vladimir Degoyev, Ph.D. (History) (see Nezavisimaya Gazeta for October 16, 1997) believes that the 'power triangle' of Muscovy (which later became Russia), Iran and Turkey (together with its satellite, the Crimean Khanate) was formed way back in the 16th century.
Until the 1770s, the dominating process in the 'triangle' was the Iranian-Turkish rivalry accompanied by wars and periodic re-divisions of spheres of influence. Playing on their contradictions was Russia's main instrument of long standing while it was weak militarily and economically. Russia was thus maintaining a balance of forces in the Caucasus and preparing for its own interference in the region's affairs.
Before Russia became capable of making military moves, it had striven to strengthen its influence in the Caucasus through the locally influential forces, what is now referred to as 'elites.'
In the late 1760s, Russia risked entering into an open confrontation with Turkey. As a result of victories in two Russo-Turkish wars (1768-1774 and 1787-1791) Russia seized a number of territories in the North Caucasus and strengthened its standing in Transcaucasia, which could not but affect its relations with Iran. A military confrontation was inevitable. It was triggered by the liberation of Georgia from vassalage to Iran's Shah and its coming under the aegis of the Russian Tsar. In the first third of the 19th century, Russia waged two victorious wars with Iran (1804-1813 and 1826-1829) and two victorious wars with Turkey (1806-1812 and 1828-1829). These victories yielded effectively the whole of the Caucasus to Russia. In Transcaucasia, where there were rather well developed states, Russia resorted to arms, more often than not, only to beat enemy, i.e. Iranian and Turkish, armies. Russia used the diplomacy of temptations and bribery vis-a-vis the local rulers. In their majority, the people of Transcaucasia accepted Russia's coming without animosity.
Russia's policy in the North Caucasus was less flexible or successful. One reason was that, as distinct from Transcaucasia, it came up against a legion of patriarchal clans subordinated to nobody, disunited and fighting each other. They belonged to different language and ethnic groups, professing various religions while standing on different rungs of the social ladder. They were very hard to manage for this reason. For want of state institutions, the strategy of instilling authority with the help of the local 'elites' was not as successful in the North Caucasus as it was in Transcaucasia. The mountainous people's military experience and habit of making sallies made them bad neighbours to have for Russia. The Russian government attempted to militarily cut the Gordian knots of the mountainous policy and to win a foothold in the whole of the Caucasus. As a result, it had to fight the protracted Caucasus War (1817-1864).
Ever since the end of the 18th century, the structure of international relations around the Caucasus had a new element, namely the interference of England and France who made their claims on the Caucasus. But since the start of the 19th century an appreciable part of the Caucasus was within the sphere of Russia's interests and influence, the intensity of London's and Paris' policy on the Caucasus wholly depended on the state of Russian-English and Russian-French relations which were known to vacillate.
By the beginning of 1830s, the geopolitical situation in the Caucasus had changed beyond recognition. There was no buffer zone, i.e. Transcaucasia, and no natural obstacle, i.e. the Caucasus Ridge, between the Russian Empire, on the one hand, and Turkey and Iran, on the other. Having drawn the new Southern frontier, which was preserved until 1991 with insignificant alterations, Russia had obtained a key geo-strategical bridgehead from which it could directly threaten Anatolia and Western Iran on the approaches to the Persian Gulf and India. Having the Caucasus in the empire, Russia had command of the Eastern part of the Black Sea and effectively all of the Caspian Sea, which opened up the way to Central Asia. The Russian government did not waste any time. Having recognised Russia's rights, Iran quit the struggle. Turkey, while cherishing the idea of revenge, had neither the resources nor allies to effect it, up until the Crimean War.
The situation worried England, which feared Russia's expansion to the South and Southeast, i.e. towards India. England adopted the policy of containing Russia in the Caucasus. The Caucasus war was instrumental for England's interference, as it hamstrung Russia. In the course of the Crimean War of 1853-1856, England was backed by a mighty coalition with France, Turkey and, effectively, Austria, attempting to make the Caucasus a buffer between Russia and Moslem powers. Russia lost the war. But differences between the members of the anti-Russian coalition stood in the way of attaining the objective. The 1856 congress of Paris confirmed Russia's sovereignty over the Caucasus as an international legal reality. The Paris treaty provided the foreign policy conditions, while the end of the Caucasus War ensured the domestic ones, for finally turning the Caucasus into a part of the Russian Empire and establishing relative stability there.
Russia's expansion to the South and its proximity to England's strategic communications with its Indian colonies, plus Russia's more active policy in Central Asia in the subsequent years were a cause of great concern for London. To strengthen India's defences, England formed a huge buffer zone incorporating Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and the Central Asian khanates. The failure to find a power solution with Turkey's assistance in 1877-78 to the Caucasian problem forced England to seek accord with Russia in the east on the basis of agreements on the division of spheres of influence. Petersburg reciprocated.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the geopolitical influence of the Caucasus was growing as it became involved in the global economy. The region's rich natural resources, in particular oil reserves, turned it into an arena of acute economic competition of European powers, Russia included.
The Russian Empire at the turn of the centuries was the largest producer of oil in the world, and its Baku and Grozny oil fields were vital parts of Russia's oil industry. English, Swedish, German and American (Rockefeller's Standard Oil) capital was represented in Baku. In 1900, oil dominated in Russia's fuel and energy balance with 41.7%. But the first decade of the 20th century saw a rapidly rising consumption of coal both in Russia and the rest of the world, plunging the oil share to 12.1% in 1908.
The economic interests of the global oil companies were hugely responsible for the involvement in the struggle for the Caucasus after the Russian Empire's collapse in 1917, of European and Mideastern states and regimes that had come to power in Transcaucasia who were striving to break away from Bolshevik Moscow.
Thus, 26 Baku commissars, who supported the Moscow Bolshevik government, were executed by a firing squad of the English expedition corps in the Caucasus. German troops, on which the Menshevik government of Georgia tried to rely, strove to strengthen Germany's standing in the region. Neighbouring Turkey was also counting on a piece of the pie.
But the Lenin-led Bolsheviks were not going to cede control over the Caucasus. They were merciless in achieving their aims. When British and Turkish troops threatened to seize Baku in 1918, Lenin wrote, on June 3, a message to chairman of the Baku Soviet of People's Commissars' extraordinary commission, or Cheka, Ter-Gabrielyan: "...tell Ter to prepare to burn Baku in case of intervention and to publicly announce this in Baku."
While the 11th Red Army was fighting in the Caucasus, Lenin kept a close watch on the task of seizing the oil fields of the North Caucasus and Baku. On February, 1920 he sent a cable to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasus front: "To Smilga and Ordzhonikidze. We desperately need oil. Draft a manifesto to tell the population that we will massacre everyone if they burn or spoil oil and oil fields. On the contrary, we will let everybody live if they yield Maikop and especially Grozny, undamaged."
The Red army was only approaching Baku, but Lenin had already appointed Alexander Serebrovsky, a talented officer, to manage the Baku oil fields. Kirov, the then commander of the 11th Army, is now remembered as the 'conqueror of the Caucasus,' even though he was the one to restore Azerbaijan's oil industry exceptionally fast once the Civil War was over.
The formation of the Soviet Union in 1922 placed the Caucasus and Transcaucasia within a single Soviet border, thus settling, for that historic stage, the geopolitical dispute between the West, Turkey and Moscow in favour of Moscow.
The West was not going to put up with the situation. Recently published archives contain, in particular, a Soviet agent's report containing, a transcript of a talk with the British military attaché in Teheran. The document is dated 1923. Colonel Sanders, hoping for the fall of the Bolshevik regime (the New Economic Policy tended to generate such hopes), enumerated important objectives, including that of dismembering Russia "to better manage it... As regards Turkestan, we have made some advances in this respect. It is now the turn of Transcaucasia. We want to form an independent Transcaucasian Republic of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Daghestan. This would finally make Central Russia dependent on us, especially as regards liquid fuels, and we would be masters in the Black Sea. Georgians and Tatars en masse and even among ranking officials, rather support this idea. Underground committees are already operating, especially in Georgia, Batum, Tiflis, Kutais, Khoni, Gori, Sukhum, Azerbaijan, Karabakh. The situation is worse in Armenia. There are more Russian supporters there. Armenians prefer Bolshevism because they fear being one to one with Turks without Russian support... It looks as if Armenians do not believe in assistance, ours or another European power's, other than Russian. And the Armenian dashnaks dream of a Greater Armenia within such borders that they are hard to work with...
"It is very important to establish a 'Poland' in the form of an independent Kurdistan between Turkey and Persia. The goal of pan-Islamism would crash against that wild country. Kurdistan would be the bogey in this or that political situation here in the Orient-now for Turkey, now for Persia, and now for Transcaucasia. Kurdistan has been formed with our money and our hands and will thus fully depend on us." (We can only state that Kurdistan is still an instrument of the Western powers' policy in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Also, British and American oil companies have been quick to come to the Caspian to work its oil riches after the collapse of the USSR.)
Soviet Intelligence was at that time making its own plans for strengthening Russia's standing in the Caucasus and thus counter Western designs. On April 30, 1921, Russia's military attaché in Tbilisi Pavel Sytin wrote in a secret report to Moscow that "Russia should endeavour to restore, in new forms, its influence in Transcaucasia." He suggested 'delineating' Georgia into a number of autonomous parts "subordinated to the influence of the RSFSR," and retaining under the Russian influence Tiflis, Baku, Batum, which he believed would help "best resolve the Transcaucasian problem from the viewpoint of Russia's interests." He pointed, in particular, to the danger of Abkhazia (which was then trying, just like it is trying these days, to secede from Georgia) joining the Mountain Republic, which in his opinion could mean that "in case of trouble, the RSFSR would face a barrier from one sea to another."
We will return to the project of establishing the Mountain Republic, and limit ourselves to noting at this time that while building the USSR in the early 1920s and engaging in the consequent national and territorial delineation, the central authorities tried to create a system of checks for both national separatism and the influence of external forces. The boomerang hit back seventy years later: the giant state crumbled along the frontiers which once had been drawn as administrative. The separatism of 'titular' nations and the territorial disputes generated the many 'hot' and 'smoldering' spots of conflicts on post-Soviet territory.
But way back in the 1920s, the inclusion of the Caucasus with minor losses into the USSR turned it into the Soviet Union's geopolitical instrument of influencing the Middle East and Southwest Asia. After 1945, this influence became an instrumental factor of equilibrium maintained by the two super-powers-the USSR and the USA. This balance persevered until the late 1980s while ensuring regional and global security.
Following the USSR's collapse, the level of security plummeted; Russia, in the very least, faced new historic challenges. Rivalry between the leading global powers for the re-division of spheres of influence has embraced territories immediately adjacent to Russia and even its component parts, in particular the Moslem regions of the late USSR, the Caucasus and Central Asia in the first place.
In this context, the Chechen issue (which is the most painful for Russia these days) is but a part of the conflict in the Greater Caucasus. The countdown commenced with perestroika: Baku, Tbilisi, Karabakh. Having failed to contain the centrifugal forces, the Soviet leadership endeavoured to apply instruments created in the 1920s-and count on the autonomies as a means of pressurising the Union republics. While the concept of a 'renovated USSR' was in the making, the autonomous republics wanted their status raised to that of Union republics and did not want to secede from the Union.
That was the time when a national movement, which had much more radical ambitions, was formed in the Caucasus: the Assembly of Mountainous Peoples of the Caucasus which met in August 1990 in Sukhumi. It was headed by Musa Shanibov, a Kabarda. It was attended by AF General (Ret.) Dzhokhar Dudayev and the currently well-known Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. Abkhazia, which was not on speaking terms with the official Tbilisi, was playing host to leaders of "national movements for perestroika and renaissance".
While officially advocating equal participation in the Union Treaty, the Assembly promoted, on the grass-roots level, the idea of historic justice, revenge for the Caucasus War of the 19th century and political compensation for the Stalinist repression with respect to peoples of the Caucasus. This thrust could not but generate anti-Russia and anti-Russian sentiments. The press wrote that the Assembly was a monster child of the federal KGB. Even if that were true, the monster got out of hand and soon stopped being the instrument of manipulating nationalist movements of the multi-ethnic Caucasus to start consolidating separatist, anti-Russia forces.
The Assembly's ideologists suggested the strategic objective of building a confederation of Caucasian autonomies to be eventually recognised as an independent state, the Mountain Republic, stretching from the Caspian to the Black Sea. (That was exactly what Russian military attaché Pavel Sytin warned against in 1921.)
While riding that wave, Chechnya's Popular Front was transformed, in October 1990, into the United Congress of the Chechen People. The Congress launched an aggressive attack on the Supreme Soviet of Checheno-Ingushetia, then headed by Doku Zavgayev who had good contacts with Moscow. General Dudayev, whose popularity was on the rise, and his supporters in the Congress began forming what was effectively parallel bodies of authority.
That was the time of unending rallies in Grozny. The August putsch in Moscow had had its consequences for Chechnya. The Soviets were being disbanded en masse as pillars of the Communist regime. Ruslan Khasbulatov is believed to have arrived in Grozny soon after the August putsch to prod Zavgayev to resign. The stake had been placed on Dudayev. The Congress assumed total authority and set a date for the simultaneous elections of the president and parliament of Chechnya-October 27.
On November 1, 1991, Dudayev, the newly elected president, made public his decree on the Chechen Republic's sovereignty. Moscow's reaction was anything but adequate. In effect, Chechnya announced its secession from Russia. The political face-off between Grozny and Moscow eventually escalated into an open war.
Moscow was busy 'divorcing' itself from the Union Centre: the Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords were signed in December 1991, the USSR collapsed and the former sister republics began dividing its inheritance. Availing themselves of the situation where the Union bodies of authority and power structures were no more, and the Russian analogues were still in the making in the late 1991 and early 1992, Dudayev's followers seized control over military bases and arms depots in Chechnya and started building armed formations. Russians and Russian-speakers were persecuted: over the three years of Dudayev's rule, close to 300,000 non-titular residents left the republic.
Moscow seemed not to notice the challenge. Moreover, the Russian government continued, for a whole year after Dudayev's mutiny, to transfer resources for Chechnya's social needs, while Russian oil was freely flowing to the Grozny refineries which exported petroleum products via Russian pipelines to bring a lot of money to the Dudayev regime.
Dudayev's success strengthened his prestige in Chechnya, which became the wager for separatist forces in the Caucasus and the movements supporting them from without, especially those in the Islamic world. The Assembly met in congress in November 1991 to be transformed into the Confederation of the Mountainous Peoples of the Caucasus. Its objective was publicly announced to be the secession of the North Caucasus from Russia, Abkhazia's separation from Georgia and their membership in a new confederation.
The Confederation's plans tallied with the scaled pan-Islamist and pan-Turkic projects, in particular with the idea of Turkey's geopolitical breakthrough to the East and its hegemony in Transcaucasia and Central Asia. One is advised against treating as empty rhetoric the Turkish Islamists' calls for the restoration of an empire stretching from Morocco to Kazakhstan. Even if the project is hardly feasible in full, it would certainly stir the radical nationalist forces of the pan-Turkic tinge throughout the Islamic world. It was in effect a policy of realistic expansionism in the vast zone of Russia's vital interests-the North Caucasus, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
A branch of the International Islamic Brotherhood opened in Grozny in 1992 to train Chechens prepared to fight for the ideas of Islam in any country of the world. It was manned by instructors from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Algeria.
The participation of the mountain peoples, in particular of Chechen units under the command of Shamil Basayev, in Abkhazia's armed struggle for its secession from Georgia was a part of the pan-Islamist plan of a 'move to the West'. Sukhumi's fall in the autumn of 1993 was a big victory for Caucasian separatists. Their forces controlled two important bridgeheads in the west and the east of the Caucasus, spearheaded against Georgia and Russia. Throughout 1993, Moscow, meanwhile, was busy trying to normalize relations between the tiers of authority, which culminated in the known events of October 3 and 4.
It was only in March, 1994 that the newly elected Duma addressed the affairs of the Caucasus by adopting a resolution on the political settlement of relations between Russia's bodies of state authority and those of the Chechen Republic. Moscow supported the anti-Dudayev forces of Chechnya, led by Umar Avturkhanov. A congress of representatives of the Chechen people met on June 4, 1994 to recognise Avturkhanov's Provisional Council as the supreme body of authority in the republic. On July 27, the Provisional Council asked the Russian President to recognise it as the only legitimate power in Chechnya. In August, the Provisional Council formed a government of the Chechen Republic.
The rift in Chechnya was anything but fortuitous: not everybody supported General Dudayev who had formed armed units but done nothing to normalize life in the republic. Avturkhanov had Moscow's backing and, provided its policy was wholesome, stood a good chance to prevail over Dudayev who had no more than 2,000-3,000 men under arms in October and November, 1994. Changing the situation in favour of the anti-Dudayev opposition took time. But certain external circumstances prodded Moscow, which had wasted three years, to try and quickly change the order of things by using force.
Oil of the Caspian was prominent among these external circumstances.
Oil is always a crucial factor for developments in the Caucasus.
The collapse of the USSR marked the beginning of mammoth deals for the production and transportation of Caspian oil. On September 20, 1994, Azerbaijan signed the 'contract of the century' with a number of foreign oil companies.
Active prospecting work with Western participation began on the Azeri shelf of the Caspian Sea in 1992. The more active there were Britain's British Petroleum, the US Amoco, Unocal and Pennzoil, Turkey's state-owned TPAO, and Norway's Statoil. Russia, as represented by LUKOil, got on the train rather late, in late 1993, and could not claim a leading position, for this reason. Two years of exploration identified three giant fields on the sea shelf close to Baku-Cirac, Azeri and Gunesli. Agreements to tap them came to be known as the 'contract of the century.'
The trans-nationals and the governments backing them could not stand the temptation of using the Chechen developments as a tool of ruthless competition for beneficial conditions of transporting the Caspian oil and of the geopolitical game for influence in Transcaucasia and the Black Sea.
A chronicle of events provides indirect proof.
In November 1994, the leading Western countries and the International Energy Agency met in Lisbon to sign the Energy Charter for Europe in which investments into Russia's oil and gas production were made conditional on unhindered transit of oil from the CIS to the West.
On December 10, 1994, Russia made the first attempt to 'restore Constitutional order' in Chechnya which is a strategic link in the system of pipelines carrying oil for export from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
The Caspian oil is produced: in the Azeri sector by the International Operations Consortium (IOC) formed in 1994; in the Kazakh sector, the US Chevron Corporation, which came there in 1993. The IOC, Chevron and the governments of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan guaranteed, in 1993-1994, that oil would be pumped to Novorossiisk via Russian pipelines. It was only natural that Russia had to try and regain control over Chechnya.
The protracted war in the Caucasus and attempts by the Transcaucasian states and Turkey to distance themselves from Russia resulted in a series of agreements between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, on the one hand and Chevron and the IOC, on the other on the transit of Caspian oil to ports of Georgia and Turkey.
On October 9, 1995, the IOC announced that Azeri oil would flow, apart from Novorossiisk, via Georgia and Turkey, the latter being the more advantageous route strategically.
In 1993 and 1994, Russia negotiated with interested companies on their assistance in the construction of a pipeline in circumvention of Chechnya (Kizlyar-Budennovsk-Tikhoretsk- Makhachkala-Babayurt-Kizlyar). Dudayev's men made raids to Budennovsk and Kizlyar to demonstrate their ability to destabilise the situation in the strategic points of the oil routes.
In June 1995, Moscow, Baku and the IOC signed an agreement on oil transit via the North Caucasus. The very next day Chechen militants staged an act of terrorism in Budennovsk.
In November, 1995, NATO and Eastern European countries met in Madrid to sign a joint declaration in line with which oil importing countries could apply any collective measures, military included, to ensure stable oil flows from oil exporting regions and countries.
Massachusetts University political scientist Daniel Fyne stated that the US was advised to provide the same guarantees to the Caspian countries that it did to the countries of the Persian Gulf. Potential instability could trigger an operation to be named Caspian Storm.
In January 1996, Dudayev's men attacked Gudermes and Kizlyar immediately after Russia's ministry of fuels and energy had announced that the signing of a 'final' agreement with the IOC was imminent.
The flatland sectors of the border with Daghestan that the Chechen rebels controlled were also important for them because of the arms supplies routes from Turkey and other countries via Azerbaijan. (The former Azeri interior officer who identified these routes in an Obshchaya Gazeta interview and was in opposition to Aliyev, was assassinated in Moscow soon after disclosing this information to the paper.)
In the summer of 1994, Turkey introduced limitations on tanker traffic through the straits Bosporus and Dardanelles. Russia's subsequent losses as of early 1996 approached 700 million dollars.
In mid-November, 1995, Turkey demanded that NATO should apply collective sanctions to Russia after it had radically increased its military contingent in the North Caucasus, under the pretext of 'flank limitations' on troops and conventional arms established by the conventional forces in Europe treaty.
Indicatively, while in Kizlyar, Dudayev's men put forth similar demands - the withdrawal of the federal troops from both Chechnya and the whole of the North Caucasus - as a condition of releasing hostages.
On February 18, 1996, the Russian government adopted a resolution to enact the Russian-Azeri agreement on the transit of Azeri oil through Novorossiisk to commence at the end of the year. The day after Russia and Azerbaijan signed the agreement, member of Dudayev's parliament Akhmed Maltsarov told a press conference in Baku: "The pipeline would not be operable without Chechnya's consent."
In 1997, i.e. after the end of hostilities in and the withdrawal of the federal troops from Chechnya, Moscow and Grozny signed agreement on regulations of pumping the early Caspian oil from Baku to Novorossiisk via Chechnya. But since the pipeline crosses the unstable Chechnya, the matter of Caspian oil transit is still open. Azerbaijan and the IOC increasingly call for the construction of a pipeline from Baku and via Georgia and Turkey.
The war in Chechnya was the culmination of the pan-Caucasian conflict. The end of hostilities in and withdrawal of the federal troops from Chechnya does not signify its end. The integrity of the Russian state is at stake. Russia seeks economic and political measures in order to reach a compromise with the separatist-minded Chechen leaders. But victors in the war find it hard to get used to the idea of incomplete independence.
Does Moscow possess the arguments and resources to counterpoise the Chechens' separatist aspirations? The question is anything but rhetorical. In case of Russia's strategic defeat, there may be geopolitical changes both in the Caucasus and the rest of the world.
The developments of the past few years prove that there are forces in the international arena, which are striving to realise a scenario of Russia's weakening by turning it into a confederation, if not of its complete disintegration. The North Caucasus is a rather vulnerable link in this respect, especially after the Chechen war.
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