Page 49 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

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dence has gone down
RUSSIA CASPIAN
in history. That land is SEA
North CHECHNYA
Chechnya. Ossetia
South
The origins of the Ossetia DAGESTAN
ABKHAZIA
Muslim Chechens'
GEORGIA
great struggle against
AZERBAIJAN
the Russians go back
to the late eighteenth
century with the cap-
ture and subsequent
death of Imam
Mansur, the legendary
resistance fighter, in 1791, at the Russians' hands. In 1816, after the Czar
appointed General Yermolov to lead the Russian army, the Chechen
people in the northern Caucasus were subjected to terrible slaughter.
When the Chechen Muslim leader Imam Hamzat was killed, Sheikh
Shamil took over the leadership of the Chechen army, and began the
struggle for independence, the details of which have come down from
generation to generation right down to the present day.
Sheikh Shamil's armies heroically resisted Russian expansionism
for fully a quarter century, from 1834 to 1859. In the end, however,
Russia conquered the region, and never again left it.

What is the Source of the Problem?
There are a number of reasons, historical and economic ones in
particular, behind the violent oppression and cruelty that the Chechen
people have been exposed to. Chechnya is in fact of far greater impor-
tance to Russia than the other Caucasian republics. The region contains
considerable energy reserves, especially oil and natural gas. During the
Cold War, communist Russia met all its raw material needs very
cheaply from that country, and used them to serve itself. After the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union, however, declarations of independence is-
sued by Chechnya – a huge source of raw materials – and the other
ex-Soviet republics placed Russia in a terrible quandary.