In the weeks leading up to the 2014 Olympics, international media has been fixated on the potential threat that terrorism poses to the games. Yet, few know the reason behind the insurgency that has gripped the Caucasus or the history of a conflict that has impacted the region since the fall of the USSR on Dec. 26, 1991.
Dutch journalist Arnold van Bruggen teamed up with photographer Rob Hornstra to document life in and around the North Caucasus. They had just covered a story from the bordering region of Abkhazia when Russia’s bid for the Olympic games was declared the winner.
“You have something like the Olympics, which gets so much attention for a brief period of time, it grabs people’s imaginations,” Greg Harris, assistant curator of the ‘Sochi Project’ exhibit currently being shown at DePaul’s Art Museum, said. “They were like, this is the hook we need to try to tell the story of Abkhazia, the North Caucasus and the region.”
“The stories you’ll get there, just going through towns, knocking doors, are amazing. So we wanted to dive real deep into this region because it’s connected with Sochi historically and in the sense that there’s a huge terrorist threat coming from North Caucasian groups to this Games,” van Bruggen said.
In 1991, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, 15 republics that had once functioned as states of the union declared independence. Chechnya, which was considered part of the Russian state at the time, pronounced itself a sovereign nation as well.
Former Soviet general Dzhokhar Dudayev ousted the communist party of Grozny, the Chechen capital, with a considerable amount of popular support. It later split with the newly created province of Ingushetia, which joined the Russian Federation.
The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria then declared its full independence and refused to sign a treaty recognizing a Russian federal government. By 1994 it was the only one out of 88 areas within the new Federation that did not recognize Moscow’s authority.
“The territory represents a sort of red line. Russians tolerated the independence of the Union Republics, but will not stand to see any territory that is perceived as part of Russia become independent,” Brian Boeck, a history professor at DePaul, said.
“This is a colonial conflict. It’s strange to notice, after traveling (to Sochi), that people in Sochi completely don’t feel connected to this region. They really stared at us when we said we ‘d been traveling to the North Caucasus the other day: Why would you go there?” van Bruggen said. “Sochi is like the subtropical suburb of Moscow, the North Caucasus (a few hundred miles east of the city) is Russia’s black hole.”
After two failed attempts to capture Grozny, Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the Russian army to restore ‘constitutional order.’ What was presented by the generals as a ‘surgical strike’ quickly developed into a quagmire of guerilla warfare, forcing the Russians to sign a ceasefire and temporary peace treaty in 1995 without addressing the question of independence.
“The North Caucasus in general, and Dagestan and Chechnya in particular, were major centers of underground Islamic activity during the Soviet period,” Boeck said. “While the communists controlled the mosques and official Islam, underground networks controlled more hearts and minds. After the fall of the Soviet Union, fundamentalist, text-based forms of Islam from abroad established an important presence in the region.”
In 1999, after Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov announced the gradual implementation of Sharia law, a local Islamic militia invaded neighboring Dagestan in August in an effort to support separatists there in creating an Islamic state. This, along with apartment bombings blamed on militants that killed almost 300 people, led newly inaugurated president Vladamir Putin to reoccupy Chechnya and declare direct rule from Moscow in a second military offensive.
Accusations of human rights abuses from Russian forces mounted during the Second Chechen war with a discovery of mass graves in the area.
“There’s no single generation over there that didn’t witness war, terror, large scale human rights abuses, missing persons, even half of the population was deported to central Asia in 1944,” van Bruggen said, referencing Russia’s forced deportations in retaliation for those in the Caucasus who had collaborated with invading Germans in World War II.
“The Games have a bad impact on the wider region. Abkhazia has been cut off during the Games, for security reasons. They won’t profit at all from it,” van Bruggen said. “The North Caucasus situation worsened. Security services are given free hand to do what they’d like to make suspicious people disappear, put them in prison, torture them. In the struggle between state and separatists, civilians got caught in between.”
Despite its relatively remote location on the edge of the Russian Federation, Chechen rebels have been successful in carrying out reprisal attacks against the state in retaliation. In 2002, Chechen rebels took 700 people hostage at a Moscow theater for three days, and 120 hostages and 50 rebels died when Russian forces launched a bungled operation to end the standoff.
Just two years later at what would later be known as the Beslan tragedy, 400 people including hundreds of children were killed in a school standoff between insurgents and security forces in North Ossetia, which borders Chechnya. After years of continued warfare, Russian forces ended their counter-insurgency operations in Chechnya in 2009 under the rule of Moscow-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Despite all this, the most expensive Olympic games in history, with costs approaching $51 billion, will begin in Sochi Feb. 7.
“Sochi is the summer capital of Russia. Quite relaxed, if you are able to live (with) mass tourism, with its loud music, smell of beer and barbecue and noisy tourists. Now it’s a military zone,” van Bruggen said. “Almost 80,000 armed personnel patrol the region; military, police, security services, even the old Cossacks are called to duty. Outside the Olympic bubble, it’s a police state.”