A few days after Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, had declared that Russian troops would never leave Chechnya, Chechen mujahideen killed 10 members of the Russian General Staff, comprising two generals and eight colonels, and at the same time attacked Gudermes, the republic’s second largest city.
Since China and Russia recently signed a treaty of friendship in Moscow, supposed by some to be a response to US president George W. Bush’s missile project, trade and military contacts between Moscow and Washington have mushroomed.
Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous Muslim republic in the Russian Federation, is dropping the Cyrillic alphabet imposed on it by Joseph Stalin in 1939, adopting instead the Latin alphabet.
When Moscow celebrated the 56th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in the second world war on May 9, there was no mention of its latest military challenge, the fighting in Chechnya, stepped up by the Chechen mujahideen on the arrival of spring...
Credit where credit is due: to the Chechen people, whose successful defiance of the Russian army’s might has come to dominate the policies and activities of president Vladimir Putin and his aides in recent weeks, although he insists (with little credibility) that Moscow has won a resounding victory and will soon withdraw the Russian army.
Mass-graves containing bodies of civilians executed in the last four months have been discovered near Russian military bases in Chechnya by a Moscow-based human-rights group.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed three major decrees in one week last month, making important changes to the Russian occupation regime in Chechnya...
Muslims throughout the world celebrated Eid al-Fitr on December 27, coinciding with a less pleasant event that has been virtually forgotten by most of us by now. On this date in 1979, tens of thousands of Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, setting off alarm bells in world capitals, not least Washington, then a leading champion of the ‘cold war’ mentality.
The plight of the Chechens trapped in Johar-Gala (‘Grozny’) was briefly brought to the west’s attention earlier this month when the western media highlighted a leaflet dropped in the city by Russian aircraf
The Russians are not doing as well militarily in Ichkeria (formerly the Caucasus republic of Chechenya) as they claim, nor are the Chechen fighters doing as badly as the Russian media reports. What Moscow is clearly winning is the propaganda war, having learnt the important lessons from its former enemies in the west.
The Muslims of Ichkeria are facing a long, hard winter as over 250,000 have been forced to flee their homes to avoid Russian military operations and air raids, and many are stranded in the open or with little shelter as the region’s harsh winter weather sets in.
The Ichkerian capital Jauhar-Ghala (called Grozny by the Russians) was effectively under siege again as Crescent went to press. It had been subjected to repeated air and missile attacks in the previous few days, in which hundreds of people had been killed and thousands left homeless
The Chechen peace agreement of August 1996 left the question of Ichkeria’s political status to be resolved within five years. This diplomatic fudge was differently interpreted by the various parties involved.
Thousand of Chechen civilians have been killed or driven from their homes in several weeks of Russian military operations in the north of the country that began in the middle of September.
Moscow has been desperately trying to involve the west in its futile war in the Caucasus by invoking the name of Osama bin Laden, the US’s current villain of the month, but with little success so far.
Kazakhstan lifted the ban on Russian rocket launches from the launching-pad at Baikonur on September 1, ending a two-month stand-off between the two countries.
Despite centuries of strong Russian influence and decades of communist rule under the former Soviet Union, Muslims in the region - now consisting of countries organized as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) - never lost their Muslim identity.
If, as is generally accepted, there is a language time-bomb ticking away in Kazakhstan, then it seems likely to explode sooner than anyone thought possible only two years ago; the issue was then believed to have been resolved by the 1997 language law, which declared Kazakh the language of the State and Russian that of common use.
Former Chechen mujahideen leader, Shamyl Basayev was elected leader of Ichkeria’s unofficial new Mekh Khhel (Shura Council) on February 20. The 35-member Council was established by opposition leaders on February 9, apparently in an attempt to create a de facto alternative to president Aslan Maskhadov’s increasingly isolated and beleaguered government.
President Aslan Maskhadov of Ichkeria (formerly Chechenya), was greeted with much respect at a conference in Washington DC from August 7-10. The Chechen president had cause to be proud of his people’s valiant struggle against heavy odds.
