Attacking neighboring regions of Russia in order to conquer them is a strange way to seek independence!
Moscow Times August 26, 2004 Remembering Basayev's Raid Five Years On By Zaira Abdullaeva Zaira Abdullaeva, a freelance journalist based in Moscow, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
Five years ago this month, Shamil Basayev led hundreds of well-armed fighters into Dagestan, where they seized a number of remote mountain villages. Later, footage shot by a cameraman in Basayev's group was shown around the world: bearded men with Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles marching along a dusty road in the Botlikh district and the dismayed faces of local residents.
But all that came later. In the beginning there was fear. Fear and loathing in this southern Russian republic plagued by robbery and kidnapping during three years of so-called Chechen independence.
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/8343-18.cfm
The rebels had expected to receive more support from the local Muslim population. Indeed thousands of Dagestani's have already indicated they are ready to take up arms. However, the situation in Dagestan is significantly different from that in neighbouring Chechnya. The Chechens make out the big majority in their republic and managed to reach a greater degree of unity on the issue of independence from Russia. Especially after Russian forces resorted to brutal means to quell the independence drive. In Dagestan however, no single nationality has an overall majority. The republic is home to more than thirty small ethnic groups, who have learned to live together in what today is Russia's poorest region. Many Dagestani are convinced that the incursion of Islamic rebels from Chechnya can only disturb the fragile ethnic balance that has been reached in Dagestan.
http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/archive/rus/html/dagestan990823.html
By 1999, when he and Basayev launched the raid into the mountains of Dagestan that helped trigger the start of the second Chechen war, Khattab was already deeply unpopular in Chechnya. He should have known that his fundamentalist brand of Saudi Islam was very unpopular in both Chechnya and Dagestan, where Sufism has been the central faith for two centuries. But the second war gave him a chance to take up the fight again.
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/cau/cau_200205_127_4_eng.txt
However, the ordeals suffered by an estimated 3,300 Russian nationals at the hands of Chechen kidnappers have received little publicity in the West - hence last week's delegation to Geneva.
As well as Perchenko's testimony, journalists and officials heard accounts from Aslambek Khasbulatov, former rector of the Chechen State University, and Grozny regional head Shaid Dzhamaldaev. The talks were followed by the screening of a film, "The Slave Trade", which focuses on the horrendous tactics adopted by professional kidnappers in the breakaway republic.
The members of the delegation claimed that kidnap victims - some of them infant children -- were bought and sold in a "slave market" in the town of Urus-Martan, then imprisoned in caves or cramped underground cells.
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/cau/cau_200009_50_03_eng.txt
The kidnappers have been known to mutilate their captives, even children, severing their ears or fingers. Gangs have sent videotaped recordings of mutilations and beheadings to relatives to terrify them into finding the ransom. Russian authorities have used the gruesome videos to feed anti-Chechen sentiment and boost public support for Moscow's latest war in the separatist republic. When the kidnapping industry reached its peak a few years ago, there was even a relatively open "slave market" in Grozny, near Minutka Square, where the names and details of human livestock circulated on lists for interested buyers. Gangs often traded hostages or stole them from one another. In the years between Russia's first war in Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, and Moscow's launch of a new war against Chechen rebels last fall, kidnapping was one of the biggest sources of enrichment for criminal gangs in an economy that had little else to offer but oil theft, arms trade, counterfeiting and drug smuggling.
http://www.vor.ru/Chechnya/arx.html
'Nuf said.
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