Caucasus Region Becoming Lawless Again

Russians were shocked on Tuesday morning by the news of a successful large-scale terrorist attack on Chechnya’s very well protected Parliament building in Grozny.

Chechnya (Discovery Corp)

The attack began when vehicles containing rebel militants made their way into parliamentary grounds by following cars taking lawmakers to work, according to Ria Novosti. A suicide bomber then blew himself up, and in the confusion the other militants reached the main building. There were several deaths, but no casualties among lawmakers.

It was just a year ago that Russians had been assured by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the Chechen insurgency had been quelled for good. Since that time, there have almost daily terrorist attacks in the Northern Caucasus, which refers to Russian southern provinces of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan. Several attacks in recent months have been spectacular.

The brazenness of Tuesday’s attack has reignited fears among the Russian people that the Caucasus provinces are becoming lawless again, as they were during two wars of independence, one in the 1990s, and one in the early 2000s.

However, the nature of the rebel movement has changed since the earlier wars. The two Chechen wars were along ethnic fault lines, with Chechnya’s clans and warlords versus the Russian people and leaders.

Then, in 2007, the Chechen rebel leader, Doku Umarov, created the “North Caucasus Emirate” or the “Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus” (IEC), and made himself the “Emir,” with the objective of uniting the North Caucasus provinces into a single jihadist conflict with Moscow.

However, the rebel movement is still split along ethnic and clan lines, according to the Eurasia Daily Monitor. On October 7, three rebel field commanders announced that they were renouncing their oaths of allegiance to Umarov. The renegades said that they would still be part of the North Caucasus Emirate, but that they would form their own legislative bodies.

One of those renegade warlords is Khusein Gakayev (or Hussein Gakaev), and Chechen officials have now named Gakayev as the organizer of Tuesday’s attack, according to Russia Today.

Gakayev and his family are from the Vedeno province in the east of Chechnya, according to a 2008 biography by Kavkaz. He fought the Russians in the two Chechen wars, where three brothers were killed, and his sister was kidnapped, with whereabouts still unknown.

He was bodyguard to terrorist Shamil Basayev, according to BCM (Russia). Basayev was the mastermind of the horrific 2004 Beslan terrorist attack that killed 340 people, including 156 children. (See “Russian President Putin asks revenge for Beslan.”)

Before splitting from Umarov, he was commander of the Eastern Front of the Caucasus Emirate Armed forces. The split occurred because Umarov’s objective is an Islamic Emirate that unites all of Russia’s Caucasus provinces. Gakayev is less interested in a greater Emirate, and more interested in gaining independence from Russia for Chechnya.

Historically, the Caucasus region is one of the most violent on earth, because of the interethnic wars, and because it’s one of the major regions (along with the Crimea and the Balkans) where fault line wars have been fought between the Muslim civilization and the Orthodox Christian civilization. Thus, a small regional war in the Caucasus could spiral into a much larger war very quickly, since Russia is currently deep into a generational crisis era.

That’s one of the major reasons — often overlooked by Western journalists and politicians — for Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. At that time, Georgia and South Ossetia were beginning a conflict that could have spread quickly from Georgia into Russia’s southern provinces. Undoubtedly one of Vladimir Putin’s major reasons for intervening was to prevent a larger war.

If Gakayev did engineer Tuesday’s attack, then it indicates a severe split in the leadership of IEC, and a greatly increased level of ethnic and clan tension throughout the Caucasus. An ethnic war in Chechnya could spiral into a full scale ethnic and religious war in the Caucasus region and beyond.

For centuries, and especially since the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453, Moscow has taken on the role of “protector” of Jerusalem as the center of the true or “Orthodox” Christian Church.

Russia has had three major wars with Western Christians — the Great Northern War with Sweden in the early 1700s, the war with Napoleon in 1812-14, and the war with the Nazis in World War II. However, although these were generational Crisis war invasions by the Europeans, they were non-crisis wars for the Russians. In all three cases, the Russians won by taking strategic advantage of the extremely harsh Russian winters, often by simply letting the enemy sit and freeze to death.

Russia’s crisis wars were a combination of civil wars along ethnic lines and external wars between the Orthodox Christian and Muslim Civilizations.

Generational Dynamics predicts that the Caucasus region will once again be the fault line of a major genocidal crisis war between these two great civilizations, along with numerous ethnic wars playing a role.

My expectation is that, in the coming “Clash of Civilizations” world war between China and the United States, America’s allies will include Russia, India and almost certainly Iran, while China’s allies will include the Sunni Muslim states. It’s impossible to predict what event will trigger this world war, but a spiraling war in the Caucasus region is one possibility.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the violence in the Caucasus is following a familiar pattern. Low-level violence occurs for years or decades, often punctuated by peace agreements or temporary ceasefires. Each time the violence flares up again, it’s more lethal and more genocidal, until finally it crosses the line into a full-fledged generational crisis war. Generational Dynamics predicts that the Caucasus region is headed in that direction, but this should hardly be news to anyone, since it’s happened so many times over the centuries.

Correction: In my October 19 article, Red Sludge and Anti-Semitism Spread in Hungary, there is a quote from Angela Merkel saying that non-German speaking immigrants are not welcome. I obtained this quote from a news story, but it apparently was a mistranslation. Merkel’s actual statement implies that immigrants who learn German after they arrive are still welcome. The first sentence of the quote should be deleted.