-Caveat Lector-
Dagestan crisis worse than Chechnya
Published: Tuesday, 10 August 1999
Author: MARTIN SIEFF - UPI National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 (UPI) - The Islamic nationalist rising in
Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus confronts President Boris
Yeltsin and his new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a crisis
that threatens to dwarf the Chechnya war, leading analysts warn.
"The Russian government has predicted that it will close down the
revolt in Dagestan in two weeks," said Paul Goble, former chief
State Department analyst on Soviet nationalities in the Bush
administration. "But it made the same prediction about the 1994
Chechnya war and that assessment will prove as erroneous now as
it did then." Goble is now deputy director of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty. He spoke in a private capacity.
More than 100,000 people were killed in Chechnya during 11/2
years of fighting from December 1994 to the summer of 1996 before
Russia recognized its inability to crush that fierce Muslim
mountain people.
But the Dagestan uprising threatens to be even worse because it
is deeply religious as well as nationalistic and could engulf
many other Muslim peoples within the sprawling Russian
federation.
"The Dagestan explosion is going to tap into Islamic passions as
well as nationalist ones," Goble said. "That will make it far
more difficult for the Russians to contain it."
The Shura of Dagestan, an Islamic council, declared independence
at a meeting last weekend in a mountain town and declared an
Islamic state. They also declared a jihad, or holy war, and
called on the neighboring Chechens to support their struggle for
independence.
The Shura is dominated by a radical Wahhabi Sunni Islamic sect
that is determined to win independence for the mostly Islamic
republics of the Caucasus, which have been part of Russia since
the 1830s - longer than Texas has been a state of the Union.
David Kramer, a Eurasian affairs expert at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, said the Dagestan rebellion marked a
significant escalation in Muslim militancy within the Russian
federation against the central government in Moscow.
"The uprising is somewhat reminiscent of Chechnya," he said. "But
this time, the initiative for violent escalation of the conflict
did not come from Moscow or from the Russian military. It came
from the Islamic forces in Dagestan themselves. It seems they are
taking advantage of what they see as the growing weakness and
chaos of the central government in Moscow to launch their own
bold challenge for independence.
The Russian military - with the bitter memories of its enormous
casualties and poor performance in Chechnya still fresh - has
already hit back hard at the rebels with air attacks and
artillery bombardments. Several thousand civilians are already
reported to have fled from the disputed Botlikh region.
But Kramer said the Russian army appeared reluctant to get
involved in repressing another popular Muslim uprising after its
traumatic experiences in Chechnya and in the 1980-88 Afghanistan
war.
"It will be harder for the Russian political and military
leadership to get away with another Chechnya," he said, referring
to the enormous casualties caused by the indiscriminate Russian
bombardment of the Chechen capital Grozny. "And the (Russian)
military's willingness to go into Dagestan on a large scale is
much less since their experience in Chechnya."
Also, Kramer said, "The Russian military of 1999 is at a far
lower state of readiness and cohesion to fight such a conflict
than it was even in 1994 when it went into Chechnya."
Goble said that the mountainous terrain of Dagestan presented the
Russian military with a difficult choice: suffer more heavy
casualties by sending its poorly equipped and under-trained
conscript forces to fight the rebels on their home turf, or cede
victory to the Dagestan uprising.
"In Chechnya, the Russians were very reluctant to fight in the
mountains, but almost all of Dagestan is mountains, and they are
of an even more imposing nature than the Dolomites in northern
Italy, and far, far worse than the Appalachians (in the eastern
United States)," Goble said.
Even if the Dagestan conflict does not flare into a full-scale
war on the Chechnya scale, it will increase Russian-Muslim
tensions and encourage the restiveness of Russia's fast-growing
Muslim minority, which now comprises 25 million in a total nation
of 145 million people, Goble said.
"Currently, around 18 percent of the population of Russia are
Muslims," he said. "But if current trends continue, as soon as
2005, the percentage of Muslims in Russia will have risen to 22
percent.
"Right now, the ethnic Russian population in absolute terms is
shrinking by around half a million people a year, while the
Islamic peoples' population (in Russia) is growing at a rate of
3.5 percent to 4 percent a year."
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