>Riding home on the train it suddenly struck me why the answer to this has
>to be no -- why we have to conclude Basayev really means Islamic state and
>not Chechen state: Dagestan. It's not only that he led that invasion, and
>that it was done explicitly to combine Dagestan and Chechnya into an
>Islamic Republic that transcended their national differences. It's that,
>even in the unlikely event you could explain away such a clear
>declaration, I don't think it's possible to come up with any conceivable
>motivation that would lead a Chechen nationalist, a military leader of a
>tiny country with whom Russia had signed a peace treaty, to attack a huge
>country like Russia unprovoked and attempt unilaterally to occupy its
>territory. (Dagestan is as much a part of Russia as San Antonio is of the
>US).
>
>In retrospect, this seems like an open and shut case to me. If Basayev is
>the Chechen military leader in chief -- and he is -- then the Chechens are
>fighting for an Islamic state.
>
>Michael
What boggles the minds of most Russians is that the Western media still by and large don't seem to have gotten this through their heads because of some ideological blindness I can't fathom -- the Chechen "nationalist" underpinning of the first war, such as it was (Chechen self-identity is based on the clan, not the nation), went out the window some time ago. The mujaheedin want a pan-Caucasian Islamic state. Chechnya was under Shuriah law from 1996-1999, for God's sake. Chechen nationalism and independence were in no way served by starting the current war, as you correctly point out. Basayev is interested in Chechen independence only in so far as it provides a launching point for expansion of his dreams of a Caucasian fundamentalist state. They don't give a flying f. about the Chechen people. Chechen nationalists don't get Saudi money -- mujaheedin do.
As you say, Caucasian Islam has historically been moderate and, shall we say, rather alcohol-friendly. However, the despair and anomie brought about by the collapse of the USSR, plus the loss of Soviet identity, which was the defining category for allegiance in a region with little history of national consciousness, have allowed (mostly) foreign ideologies celebrating Islamic identity to make inroads. In most Central Asian or Caucasian villages in the Muslim areas you will have two mosques; the imam of one is an older man who subscribes to traditional Islam, and the imam of the other a young guy, often a foreigner from the Middle East or Pakistan, who spends his time preaching radicalism and denouncing his older counterpart as a lukewarm fake. This is in Chechnya, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, Tazhikistan, Tatarstan, everywhere.
PS. There are some accusations that the cognac near Barayev's body was planted.
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