Terrorism And War:
Post-Soviet conflicts in the Caucasus

The map on the left is just the Kartvellian/Caucasian group. The one on the right shows the whole region. The three Indo-European groups are the dark green Kurds in the lower left, the green Armenians in the lower central, the mustard yellow Ossetians in the middle. The Azerbaijanis in the lower right speak a form of Altaic near to Turkic.

Most of the individual incidents of strife, and all the most violent, occuring after the dissolution of the Soviet Union happened here, one of the more linguistically complex areas in all of Eurasia.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some smaller regions within the fifteen former Soviet Republics also tried to become independent, e.g. Tatarstan, Dagestan and Chechnya from Russia and Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.1 2 There was a major confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, there was a civil war in Tajikistan, and an undoing of part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on the Moldovan-Ukrainian border (Transnistria). Tatarstan, Tajikistan and Transnistria I discuss elsewhere . This article refers principally to the Caucasus mountain region.

Russia took the Caucasus Mountain region in the early 1800s in sixty years of Caucasian wars . Recent reports say Russian is spoken by only 2% of Armenians, 6% of Azeribaijanis and 7% of Georgians.3 In all of the below cases except one, the conflict occurs between two of the major language families of the region. The one exception is the secession of Abkhazia, which divides groups in two separate subgroups of the Caucasian family.

Chechnya

The Chechen conflict is occuring between two groups representing distinct language families of the world, Indo-European (the Russians) and Caucasian (the Chechens). The Chechen conflict has been the longest and bloodiest of the post-Soviet Caucasus conflicts. The first phase of the war, occuring in 1994, three years after the declaration of Chechen independence, certainly cost more than 50,000 lives, with some reports putting the total at twice that. There was a coup attempt in 1993 by the Russian side which was put down, and in 1994 rebels, supported covertly by the Yeltsin government in Russia, launched a military effort to take over. In late 1994 the Russian military became directly involved after an ultimatum for surrender was spurned by the Chechens. The Russians and Chechens agreed to a cessation of hostilities, and five days later the Russians invaded en masse in an attempt to take Grozny and the country. This was expected to be a quick war, as the Russian military outnumbered the Chechen army 10 to 1, but two years later there had been no conclusion.

By one estimate, in all up to 5,000 non-Chechens served as foreign volunteers; they were mostly Caucasian and included possibly 1,500 Dagestanis , 1,000 Georgians and Abkhazians , 500 Ingushes and 200 Azeris , as well as 300 Turks , 400 Slavs from Baltic states and Ukraine, and more than 100 Arabs and Iranians 4 .

The war was mostly stopped by the end of 1996, with Chechnya effectively an indpendent country. It later involved itself in an invasion of Dagestan in 1999, which was used as a causus belli for a second invasion by the Russian military, this time with the result that Chechnya was returned to Russia after more than a year of bloody fighting. This conflict is still ongoing, with Chechen rebels waging a guerilla campaign.

Dagestan

Dagestanis speak a wide variety of languages, most of the major ones are parts of the Northeast Caucasian language grouping. However, Dagestan itself hosts over thirty separate "ethnic" identity groups. Yeltsin's military campaign into the region beat back a small, but sometime succesful insurgent campaign, which was basically based in Chechnya and composed of Chechens and Dagestanis.

South Ossetia

South Ossetians, for all practical purposes, seceded from Georgia in 1994 with the apparent help of the Russian military. The war lasted about a year and a half, resulting in a few thousand dead.

The war started up again in 2008.

North Ossetia vs Ingushya

As a result of a 1934 decree from Moscow, much of the Ingush Autonomous Republic was merged with the Chechen autonomous oblast, but the Ingush area of Prigorodny was given to North Ossetia5 . Ingush and Chechen, again, are Caucasus family languages, while Ossetic is in the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The war was called by Human Rights Watch an ethnic cleansing of Ingush speakers by their Ossetian neighbors.

Abkhazia

This conflict has two parts, from 1992 to 1994 and again in 1998. The Abkhazians, seeking to secede from Georgia, killed tens of thousands of Georgians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more6 . Ethnic Armenians and Russians tended to side with the separtists against the Georgians.

The 1998 war was a counter-attack by Georgians, 10s of thousands of whom had returned to the Gali district after the 1994 war.7 . This conflict is outstanding, with Abkhazia exercising independence but still internationally recognized as part of Georgia.

Nagorno-Karabakh

This conflict began during Soviet rule in 1988, when Gorbachev's perestroika led to Armenian moves to have the Nagorno-Karabakh region reunited with Armenia. Probably 75% of the region's population is Armenian speaking, despite efforts by the Soviet leader's efforts to Azerify the area.8 This conflict is outstanding, with Nagorno-Karabakh effectively in Armenia's sphere but internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.