by Eric Margolis
SOSPEL, FRANCE - Lenin called the Russia Empire 'the prison house of
nations.' Though much shrunken, Russia remains today the last 19th century
colonial empire, and nowhere more so than in the towering Caucasus
mountains, where long oppressed peoples have drawn their swords and risen
against the new Czar in Moscow.
The latest uprising comes in Dagestan, a multi-ethnic Russian-ruled state
of 2 million lying between the Caspian Sea and Chechnya on the northern
slope of the Caucasus. Important pipelines carry oil north from
Azerbaijan through Dagestan to southern Russia.
In recent weeks, Dagestani and Chechen mujahidin, or Islamic holy
warriors, waged fierce battles in the mountains against Russian forces.
The insurgents are led by famed Chechen chieftan, Sheik Shamil Basayev,
who played a key role in defeating and driving the Russian Army from
Chechnya (Ishkeria) in 1994-1995, one of the most heroic victories in
modern military history.
Russia's prime minister of the month, dour ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin,
vowed to crush the Dagestani rebels. Fifteen thousand elite Russian
troops, backed by massed artillery and hundreds of air strikes, drove the
800 Islamic rebels from the remote Dagestani mountain villages they seized
two weeks ago. Russia poured massive artillery fire and bombs on civilian
targets, as it had in Chechnya, where Russian forces massacred 100,000
people. Basayev ordered his men to disperse in the face of overwhelming
force and continue guerrilla warfare.
Moscow was repeating the infamous tactics of Marshall Yermolov, the
brutal, 18th century Russian conqueror of the Caucasus, who proclaimed, 'I
desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently
than chains or fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law
more inevitable than death.'
The principal Muslim peoples of the Caucasus – Chechen, Ingush,
Circassians, Abkhaz, Dagestanis – have been in almost constant revolt
against their Russian colonial rulers for three centuries. The greatest
uprising was led in the mid-1800's by the legendary Dagestani Imam, Sheik
Russsia crushed all revolts with ruthless ferocity and twice attempted
genocide. In the 1940's, Stalin deported nearly all the 1.5-million
Chechen to Siberian concentration camps, where 25% died. Two million
other Soviet Muslims, including many Dagestanis, were also sent in cattle
cars to Stalin's death camps. Hitler used gas; Stalin used the Russian
In a July, 1988 this column predicted the Chechen and Dagestanis would
revolt against Russian rule. Six years later, the fierce Chechen rose up
and, after ferocious fighting, defeated the Russians. But the rest of the
world shamefully ignored the Chechen and refused to recognize their
independence. Russian disinformation convinced much of the international
media, and President Bill Clinton, who helped finance Russia's war in
Chechnya, that the Chechen were merely 'mountain bandits.'
The skilful disinformers at KGB's Moscow Center are again spinning lies.
They are planting stories in the western media that the Dagestani and
Chechen rebels are 'Islamic terrorists,' backed by the nefarious Osama Bin
Ladeen and other sinister Mideast terror groups. Or 'Wahabis,' an ultra-
conservative Saudi sect. A shadowy 'Arab fanatic' named 'Khattab' –
certain evidence of an Islamic conspiracy - is said to be at Basayev's
The anti-Islamic British conservative press has amplified this canard. In
a remarkably obtuse and bigoted editorial, a new British-Canadian
newspaper actually made the preposterous claim that an independent,
Islamic Dagestan (2 million people) would 'spark unrest' throughout the
Caucasus, somehow including Christian Georgia and Armenia, as well as
Turkey, other Russian republics, even the entire Middle East. It
concluded: 'Moscow has good reason to act preventively in Dagestan.'
In fact, the so-called 'shadowy Arab fanatic,' Khattab, is actually a
descendant of Dagestanis who fled to Jordan to escape Russian genocide.
The Chechen and Dagestanis are not Saudi 'Wahabis,' but traditional
Caucasian Sufi Muslims, known as Naqshbandi. No outside powers are
helping the Caucasian mujahidin in their valiant, David v. Goliath
struggle to throw off 300 years of savage Russian colonial rule.
How ironic that the same western media that ardently campaigned for the
liberation of another captive Russian people and their return to their
historic homeland – the Jews – now calls on Russia 'to act preventively'
to crush the Muslims of the Caucasus.
On 31 July, 1937, Stalin's secret police shot 14,000 Chechen and Ingush,
3% of the total population of those tiny nations, and dumped their bodies
into a pit – four years before Hitler's SS committed a similar mass murder
of Jews in the pit at Babi Yar. It is time we add the Muslim peoples of
the Caucasus to this century's victims of genocide. If anyone deserves
their own homeland, they do.
To many westerners, Muslims often seem like constant trouble-makers or,
worse, terrorists. But let us recall the Muslim world was the principal
victim of rapacious 19th and 20th century European and Russian
colonialism. The majority of France's, Holland's, and Russia's colonial
subjects, and almost half of Britain's, were Muslims. Muslims, including
Dagestanis and Chechen, are fighting today in many lands to regain the
freedom they long ago lost.
Instead of branding the Dagestani and Chechen fighters as 'terrorists,'
the west should be aiding them and demand Russia set free the peoples of
[Eric Margolis is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and
broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada.]
Copyright © 1999 Eric Margolis - All Rights