Centuries-old dispute haunts Sochi Olympics

Date

January 2, 2014

North Caucasians have long railed against Russia’s rubbery notions of people and place.

A bomb ripped apart this bus in Volgograd this week, killing 14 people. Photo: Reuters

Why would a Chechen war widow become a suicide bomber in Volgograd? Why would Chechens attack the Sochi Winter Olympics? It’s because both places are significant to North Caucasian Muslim people.

Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, was where Stalin became a hero when the Red Army smashed the Germans in the Second World War. But Stalin was no champion of the Chechens. In 1944, as the Soviet Union pushed the Nazis into history, he ordered the half a million who comprised the Chechen nation to be deported to Kazakhstan en masse. About 170,000 died along the way.

None of the Chechens returned to their homeland for 13 years, by which time Stalin was long dead. Many of the Chechen rebels who appeared on our television sets in the mid-1990s were born in exile.

When looking at the suicide bombings in Volgograd, many commentators seem trapped by old thinking, just as they did when two American boys laid a bomb and strolled away in Boston last April. Few then saw significance in their Chechen and Dagestani background. It was their Islamic faith that was important. The belief in these instances is that since the assailants are Muslims, they must be following an al-Qaeda format, and this format will continue when the Sochi Olympics begin. However, this misses the importance of Sochi.

Sochi was part of the lands of the mainly Muslim Circassian people until the Romanovs exiled almost all of them to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. Recently, the descendants of these exiles in modern day Turkey have joined the remaining Circassians in Russia in protesting against these Olympics, which are on their ancestral land.

A clear threat comes from the so-called Caucasus Emirate. Although an Islamic group, it has a specifically Caucasian agenda and it includes veterans of the 1999 Chechen invasion of Dagestan when Vladimir Putin first became president. They surely have their own ideas for what should happen in their western frontier.

In recent weeks the Russian government has created diversions. Confronted with Western concerns about homophobic laws, as well as jailed rock stars and environmentalists, Putin has met the West halfway. He freed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch turned political opponent, as well as members of Pussy Riot, an anti-Putin punk band. He has done so not only to deflect criticism, but to divert attention from Russia’s unresolved social problems, especially those that revolve around the place of the North Caucasian republics in the Russian Federation.

Russia considers the most famous of these republics, Chechnya, now to be a stable place. Far from the bombed-out cavities of 15 years ago, the rebel republic that Yeltsin once tolerated is no more and all the old rebels are now dead. One pro-Putin leader has remained in charge over the past decade. If you believe the polls, 99 per cent of Chechens have voted for him. Others say he rules with bullets.

So while there is a facade of calm, the rebels who once controlled the valleys and mountain passes have made their home out of sight. They are not afraid to take the war to the world, just as the IRA brought its war to London in the 1980s.

While these fighters are largely Muslim, their grievances are distinctly Caucasian. They are all people who have found themselves within borders drawn without their consultation. The recent Volgograd attacks stem from the same source as the war between Russia and Georgia five years ago, when that Caucasian republic sought to assert its sovereignty over South Ossetia, which is another region where people refuse to recognise where the borders were drawn.

A similar shadow hangs over Armenia and Azerbaijan, where snipers fire daily at soldiers while they finger through history books, determining who has the moral high ground. This is the problem haunting Dagestan, one of the most beautiful, most historic and most diverse places on earth, where normalcy – tea, picnics and soccer matches – occurs against the backdrop of suicide bombings.

Russia’s problems may be Russia’s problems, but don’t think for a moment that they won’t be brought to an international arena during an event like the Winter Olympics. The events of the past 12 months indicate that this will be the case. These are not the ethno-nationalist conflicts that plagued the ’90s, or the jihadism of the post 9/11 era. This is a new generation of Caucasians with its own understanding of a 200-year-old dispute. Sochi may be the next arm-wrestle in which it is decided who has the right to violate whose rights, and who is truly autonomous in the Russian Federation.

Dr James Barry is an anthropologist with Monash University.