Press and Conflict in the North Caucasus

• The press—to establish an Islamic republic, or perhaps it was about control over customs.
• The Ingush minority, whose lands after the expulsion were seized by Orthodox Ossetians supported by Moscow and branches of the old KGB, such as the paramilitary organization "Les" [Forest], live on the border with Chechnya.
• USSR repressions against Sufi brotherhoods, elections in Karachay-Cherkessia.
• Kidnappings—the main economic activity of Chechnya, the hijacking of a plane of the Russian presidential administration with a special Kremlin envoy.
• Pipelines as the reason for the region's vital importance to Russia at any cost, the prehistory of Russia's struggle with England for India in the 19th century.
• Paralysis of Maskhadov's government. Contraband. Adoption of Sharia and cooperation with Basayev and Raduyev—political suicide.

Integrist Struggle?

• Wahhabism is alien to the majority of Chechens.
• The "Naqshbandiya" ritual as a legacy of Sufi brotherhoods, "people of the mountains" as adherents of liberal concepts in religious ideas, have nothing in common with Saudi integrism, the promoter of Wahhabism.
• In 1995, the Wahhabis were a small detachment sent by Riyadh, whom Chechen commanders did not trust.
• The Jordanian Khattab invaded Dagestan.

Russian Interests

• Starting from 1996, Moscow shuddered before a large wave of terrorist attacks in city buses.
• Luzhkov, the Kremlin, and the Moscow press pointed to the Chechens.
• Subsequent confessions by former members of the security services revealed that FSB agents organized the terrorist attacks to provoke a devastating war—the explosions were in early August 1996—against the Chechens.
• Is there any logic in the recent terrorist attacks in Russia for the Chechens? None, except for the rise of anger and hatred, similar to 1996.
• Basayev took responsibility for the slaughter in Buynaksk, but denies his responsibility for the attacks in Moscow.
• A publication such as "Moskovskiye Novosti" claims that the oligarch and Yeltsin family accountant Boris Berezovsky financed Khattab's activities in Dagestan to justify an authentic strike by the State Palace in the Kremlin, which allows the president to rule under martial law and postpone indefinitely the parliamentary elections in December—which is of little importance, given the zero power of the Duma—and the decisive presidential elections next June.
• The Yeltsin family and Berezovsky, as well as 780 high-ranking functionaries, according to tax service investigations, are convinced that they will go to prison in the event of a loss in the elections; this is a real possibility, among a number of others, if only because it concerns the political party that represents them in the elections and which protects them before tribunals.
• It is no longer about the old accusations of the communists that the masters of the Kremlin liquidated the USSR. It is about the fact that Yeltsin, family members, high-ranking officials, and their associates, no fewer than 1,500 people, stole an amount equivalent to half of the Russian gross domestic product starting from 1993.
• The "Yeltsin Clan" is playing for more than just power, but to avoid standing trial and going to prison.

Photo - caption: Police register a Chechen - in reality, he has his hands up etc.

In the same place: "Final Solution"—a note about the inclination of Russian public opinion and a number of politicians toward the idea of solving the Chechen problem with nuclear weapons.

10/18/99 Russia again - the Chechen trap (Carlos Bradac)

"The lack of evidence regarding the 'Chechen' authors of the bloody attacks in Moscow—whose alleged authorship was the motive declared by the Kremlin for undertaking a new war in the North Caucasus—has already shown that the Russian goals were to violate the agreements of August 31, 1996... which left the final status of Chechnya in limbo until the summer of 2001, although they recognized that the legal definition of Chechnya would be given on the basis of International Law, which preceded the recognition of its independence."

[steps of preparation for war; "Yeltsin decided that his best election campaign leads through war"]