Momentous Shifts in the Ideology of the Chechen Resistance

Zusammenfassung

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While adat (customary law) obliges even distant relatives to care for a family's women and children in the absence of the breadwinner, in view of the catastrophic state of the economy and the physical danger to which the members of their families were subjected during wartime operations and the subsequent zachistkas (mopping-up operations carried out by Russian forces and pro-Moscow Chechen police units), this situation could not go on forever. Coming onstage were representatives of the wartime generation - men whom the war had denied any education other than military training, who had never experienced life during peacetime, who had grown up surrounded by the suffering and violence of war and whose way of thinking is based on the cynical principles of war.

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Auszug

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Momentous Shifts in the Ideology of the Chechen Resistance

AFTER many of the prominent figures of the resistance movement, generally in their thirties and older, had died in the course of the operations of the Second Russo-Chechen War (1994-1996), a serious problem developed with finding leaders. A certain percentage of the older, experienced men forming the core of the officer corps had families at the time when the second war began, and therefore they had something to lose. Some of them later chose to return to civilian life. To do this, they took advantage of current amnesties and of their established contacts with people from the Ahmad Kadyrov clan, who were chosen by the Kremlin to hold office in the newly established pro-Moscow Chechen government in Chechnya's ruined capital, Grozny. Either through Ahmad Kadyrov himself or through his allies, they sought positions offered in the republic's administration and especially in the militias. While adat (customary law) obliges even distant relatives to care for a family's women and children in the absence of the breadwinner, in view of the catastrophic state of the economy and the physical danger to which the members of their families were subjected during wartime operations and the subsequent zachistkas (mopping-up operations carried out by Russian forces and pro-Moscow Chechen police units), this situation could not go on forever. The announcement on 4 September by the President of Chechnya that he wanted to find a new name for his war-ravaged land seems unlikely to make any difference.

Since the state of war in the country one way or another has lasted for more than a decade, more moderate nationalist separatists have been replaced by young men who were ten to fifteen years old in the mid 1990s, so the core of the resistance movement has become drastically younger. Coming onstage were representatives of the wartime gen...

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