>Impressive, as most conspiracy theories. There is only one question - if
>the plot to start a "small war" in Chechnya was sooooo secret as he claims,
>how the hell did he find about all its details?
>
>
>wojtek
Conspiracy is certainly involved but, fortunately, the owner of "the" Marxism List, circulated an article as long ago as 15th November explaining that the local difficulties in Chechnya are all a conspiracy co-ordinated from a gray building in Rawalpindi, and financed by at least $25 million of bin Ladin's money. (attached below).
An internationalist islamic terroristic conspiracy which strikes indiscriminately at the heart of governments of both Russia and the West, and everything familiar and comfortable.
>From this point of view it would be quite unethical for Putin to negotiate
with the legitimate government of Chechnya, would it not?
The iron power of marxist analysis allows us to debunk such petty bourgeois reformist illusions. Where would we or the Chechens be without it?
Chris Burford
London
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The Gazette (Montreal), October 26, 1999, FINAL
Who's calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan
LEVON SEVUNTS
Since 1990, Levon Sevunts has covered wars and ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus as a freelance war correspondent and reporter with the Armenian TV news program Haylur. In 1992, he moved to Montreal where he is a freelance journalist, writing in English, Russian and Armenian.
Sevunts replaces David Manicom in the rotation of Gazette foreign-issues columnists. Manicom, a Canadian foreign-service worker, is on assignment in Beijing.
When you land on Khodinka military airfield in Moscow, you see a glass office tower, surrounded by a windowless three-storey fort, overlooking the runway. This glass tower houses the eyes, ears and once feared long arms of the Russian army - the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian army, known by the abbreviation GRU. During the Cold War these eyes and ears were focused on another glass and concrete fortress - the Pentagon. But now the Russian army is facing a very different threat and the GRU has found a new enemy.
The GRU's new nemesis dwells in a grayish concrete office block on the outskirts of Rawalpindi, a bustling Pakistani city near Islamabad. It is the headquarters of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's main security service and the grand puppet master behind a host of Islamic insurgent movements all over the world: from Harakat ul-Ansar in Kashmir, Tajikistan, Bosnia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, to Shamil Basayev's forces in Chechnya.
GRU's first battle with the ISI was 20 years ago. An elite team of ''spetznaz'' (special purpose) commandos boarded a military transport plane on Khodinka airfield and lit an inferno 3,369 kilometres southeast of Moscow by storming the presidential palace in Kabul and assassinating Afghani President Hafezullah Amin.
For all nine years and 50 days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the ISI, teamed up with the CIA, armed, trained and sheltered different factions of Afghan mujaheddin - most of them radical Islamic groups. When the Soviets finally departed, Pakistan was left with an explosive motley of thousands of armed and zealous men with a lot of time on their hands and who knew nothing but how to fight.
Sending these restless young men to die for Islamic causes in faraway lands became at once a practical necessity and a means of achieving the geopolitical objectives of Pakistani leadership: creation of a trans-Asian axis stretching from its eastern border with China through Afghanistan, the former Soviet republics of central Asia to the oil- and gas-rich shores of the Caspian Sea.
To do that, Pakistan would have to control all of Afghanistan and drive out of central Asia the last remnants of Russian influence. Russia, however, has designs of its own for central Asia and has done everything in its power to create a buffer between pro-Pakistani Taliban forces and former Soviet republics of central Asia, bordering Afghanistan from the north.
By some strange twist of fate, the role of this buffer fell on a man the GRU hunted unsuccessfully for nine years - Uzbek warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, whose forces now control a narrow strip of land along Afghanistan's northern frontier with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. If it weren't for the military help Shah Massoud is getting from Russian forces stationed in Tajikistan, he would have never survived the Taliban onslaught.
To stop the flow of arms to Ahmed Shah Massoud, Pakistanis needed a diversion that would have forced Russians to switch their attention and resources away from central Asia. That diversion soon presented itself in the form of a brewing conflict between Moscow and its rebel Autonomous Republic of Chechnya, which wanted full independence from Russia. It was a perfect opportunity for the Pakistani intelligence.
In 1994, Shamil Basayev, a young Chechen field commander, who a year earlier had distinguished himself in Abkhazia - a breakaway republic of the former Soviet Georgia - caught the attention of Pakistani intelligence stationed in the neighbouring oil-rich Azerbaijan, where about 1,500 Afghan mujaheddin under the command of Pakistani officers were fighting Armenians to reclaim for Azeris the rebel Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh. In April 1994, the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transfered to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defence General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.
Drug Flow Stopped Up
That same summer, the Pakistan-backed Taliban offensive against the government of the Iranian- backed president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani (later expelled), threatened to cut the Chechen drug trade. The Taliban had taken Amir Muawia and other Khost-area camps, disrupting plans to train hundreds of Chechen fighters there. After personal intervention of General Babar, Taliban and government forces allowed shipments of Chechen drugs through their lines while they were slitting each other's throats. The training of Chechen fighters also went as scheduled in Khost-area camps now controlled by one of the largest Kashmiri terrorist groups, the Harkat ul-Ansar. Pakistani intelligence also sent experienced and battle-hardened officers to train Chechen fighters on site. One of the most prominent Pakistani nationals is Abu Abdulla Jafa, who along with Basayev and Jordanian-born Afghan veteran Khattab (he goes by the one name) has organized a ''terrorist academy'' in Chechnya, according to U.S. and Russian sources.
Russians also suspect that Abu Abdulla Jafa is a career officer of Pakistan's elite Northern Light Infantry Brigade, and the tactical mastermind behind Basayev's August invasions into Dagestan. Russian security services also suspect that Pakistan supplies Chechens with deadly shoulder-launched Stinger anti-aircraft missiles - leftovers of the Afghan war.
Meeting in Mogadishu
The Russian air force has already lost at least three SU-25 ground attack planes and a half dozen helicopters to Stingers. But Pakistan's involvement in the Chechen conflict goes far beyond supplying Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war. According to a renowned terrorism expert, Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the master plan for the latest flare-up in Kashmir and in the Caucuses was prepared in August and September 1996, during a secret summit of HizbAllah International in Mogadishu, Somalia. The summit, according to U.S. anti- terrorism experts, was attended by now infamous Osama bin Ladin and high- ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers.
Pakistani ISI General Javed Ashraf was charged with organizing the logistics of transporting Afghan mudjahedeen and Chechen fighters and their weapons from training camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan and Lebanon. Saudi terrorist-billionaire bin Ladin undertook the financing of the whole operation. Russian intelligence analysts estimate that the current campaign in Chechnya and Dagestan has cost bin Ladin $25 million.
That is one of the reasons that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has so far refused to negotiate with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov: he knows that the decision to stop fighting is not in the hands of Maskhadov, who one day vows to hand in Basayev and Khattab, but the next day appoints him commander of the eastern front. Russian officials are certain that for the war to stop in Chechnya, the decision must be taken in the gray building in Rawalpindi, by the new military government of General Pervaiz Musharraf.