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| The Second Chechen War began in 1999, purportedly on account of attacks by Chechen forces on neighboring Dagestan, and a series of terrorist attacks on residential buildings in Russian cities that caused nearly 300 casualties, which were attributed to Chechen militants. (See: Russian Apartment Bombings.) |
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Outline of conflict
In addition to a guerilla-style ground conflict within Chechnya, many terrorist attacks by Chechen terrorists have occured. The Moscow Theatre Siege took place in October, 2002, when a group of Chechen terrorists held a crowded theater hostage for three days. On October 26, 2002, Russian special forces used an anaesthetic gas (fentanyl) to disable the theatre's occupants, causing the deaths of many hostages through adverse reactions to the gas. This brought many questions and doubts about the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin's strategy against Chechen militants. In December 2002, two truck bombs killed more than 70 people in the Chechen capital, Grozny and destroyed the headquarters of the pro-Moscow government.
According to Chechen rebel sources (see news links) 250,000 civilians, including 42,000 children, have died so far in this war.
History
During the initial months of the war, Russia made effective use of air power instead of immediately rushing in massive numbers of ground troops. The Russians thus avoided the first war's extremely high casualties. Russian forces later resorted to heavy carpet bombing and ballistic missile strikes against Grozny and other major cities. Though corridors were made for civilians to exit the cities when the attacks occurred, rebels sometimes blocked their escape. Some Western countries have criticized the heavy-handedness of the Russian military in dealing with the rebels, despite their own heavy-handedness which was demonstrated in the second Iraq war. Both Chechen militants and Russian troops, militia and security services (whose number of 80,000-100,000 has remained basically constant since 2000), as well as the mostly Chechen-staffed paramilitary forces by Russia-backed Ramsan Kadyrov ("Kadyrovcy") have been and continue to be charged with substantiated claims of abductions, torture, rape, murder, looting, smuggling, and embezzlement.
In March 2002, the leader of the Fundamentalist Islamic rebel operations, Amir Khattab, was killed. Amir Abu al-Walid replaced him.
In December 2002, a Russian court tried Russian Colonel Yuri Budanov on war crimes charges. He was accused of raping and strangling Elza Kungayeva, an 18-year-old Chechen woman whom Budanov claims was a rebel sniper. In a controversial decision, he was initially found not guilty by reason of insanity on December 31, 2002 and committed to a psychiatric hospital for further evaluation and treatment. Later this decision was overturned. He is currently serving a ten year sentence in Ulyanovsk Oblast.
Some Chechen militant leaders have repeatedly found refuge in various Western countries, to the great protest of Russia.
Despite public statements by Putin and other Russian officials insisting that the war is over, the Chechen forces led by Aslan Maskhadov and Islamist militants led by Shamil Basayev continue to wage a guerilla-style war against Russian troops and the pro-Russian administration in Chechnya.
Many have attributed the Beslan school hostage crisis(in which at least 344 civilians died when Chechen terrorists attacked a Russian school), and several other terrorist attacks on Russia, to Russia's role in the ongoing conflict. Russia has been accused of human rights abuses since the conflict began, and the European Court of Human Rights agreed to hear civilian cases brought by Chechens against Russia for the first time, in October 2004 .
How the existent war turned publically non-existent
Reportedly, in the Russian political vocabulary the period 1999-2002 of the CW2 was called consistently an antiterrorist operation that understandably caused some military losses, too. Also then, in an already classic way, those numbers were downplayed but in a pretty clumsy way.
Since then, in the same vocabulary, the partisan-styled phase of the WC2 has been called not a true war at all but sporadic attempts instead while effectively blocking out news of war inspired by no news, no war logics while the war goes on undercover producing other traces of war beeing seen on the streets; neonazis and skinheads, abuses on foreigners and the dark due to the war traumas of the endless war, a political shift to totalitarism justified publically only by this militarily non-existent but politically very existent 5 year's war, etc.
The Chechnya weekly (http://www.jamestown.org/publications_archives.php?publication_id=1) of the Jamestown Foundation (http://www.jamestown.org/about.php) in Washington, DC, is the foundation's special coverage of the crisis in the breakaway republic. Its mission is to inform policymakers, the media, and the public of developments in Chechnya, discuss the origins of the conflict and explore the possibilities for peace.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Second Chechen War". |
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