Page 63 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

HARUN YAHYA (ADNAN OKTAR)
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people who thought they could never destroy the Chechens, with their
unbreakable unity, by force of arms alone, and so resorted to under-
mining them from within and tried a number of means of doing so. The
communist deep state worked to destroy that popular solidarity and
create disorder in Chechnya by interfering in elections, buying politi-
cians, kidnapping and committing acts of terrorism, using pro-Russian
clerics to try and stir up religious differences, as well as through eco-
nomic and political pressure.
However, these methods failed to lead to the success they had ex-
pected.
Russia's occupation of Chechnya in 1991 was ended by Dzhokhar
Dudayev. Then the serious harassment in November 1994 turned into
war on December 11 of that year. More than 100,000 Chechens lost their
lives in that war, and tens of thousands were forced to flee. The use of
banned chemical weapons resulted in a kind of genocide. Furthermore,
because Russia had portrayed Chechnya as an "internal matter," no se-
rious reaction came from the outside world. No helping hand except a
few European countries was extended to the Chechen people.
The war ended in August 1996 when the Russians admitted defeat.
This Chechen success against the Russians deeply affected their fellow
republics in the Caucasus. In 1998, the peoples of the northern
Caucasus met in the "Northern Caucasus Peoples' Convention" in the
Chechen capital, Grozny. All the participating countries agreed on a
common position in order to avoid any conflict breaking out between
the peoples of the northern Caucasus, and to support each other in the
event of a Russian attack. This unity meant the nightmare the commu-
nist Russian deep state had feared for so long actually becoming a real-
ity. This was one of the main reasons why a second operation was
launched against Chechnya. This time, even more ruthless methods
were employed, and inhuman tortures inflicted on defenceless people
before the eyes of the world. Yet for some reason, the savagery was gen-
erally regarded as a Russian "internal affair."
This second full-scale war between the Chechens and the Russians
started when the latter surrounded and bombed a number of villages in