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Monday, 29 November 2004
FORMER RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT SPEAKER IDENTIFIES CAUSES OF FIRST, SECOND CHECHEN WARS
By empty (11/29/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)
In an interview published in the 22 November issue of \"Yezhenedelnyi zhurnal,\" Ruslan Khasbulatov said that the decision to send Russian troops into Chechnya in late 1994 was taken partly to distract public attention from growing economic problems, and partly because then Russian President Boris Yeltsin feared that Khasbulatov himself -- one of the leaders of the October 1993 confrontation between Yeltsin and the Duma -- might come to power in Chechnya in the event that his campaign to oust Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudaev peacefully was successful. Khasbulatov claimed that hundreds of thousands of Chechens supported that ill-fated campaign. As for the second Chechen war, Khasbulatov argued that it could have ended in 2000-2001 if the Russian military had apprehended the leaders of the Chechen resistance, but that Chief of Army General Staff Anatolii Kvashnin did all in his power to prolong the conflict while constantly affirming that it was \"manageable\" and \"localized.
In an interview published in the 22 November issue of \"Yezhenedelnyi zhurnal,\" Ruslan Khasbulatov said that the decision to send Russian troops into Chechnya in late 1994 was taken partly to distract public attention from growing economic problems, and partly because then Russian President Boris Yeltsin feared that Khasbulatov himself -- one of the leaders of the October 1993 confrontation between Yeltsin and the Duma -- might come to power in Chechnya in the event that his campaign to oust Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudaev peacefully was successful. Khasbulatov claimed that hundreds of thousands of Chechens supported that ill-fated campaign. As for the second Chechen war, Khasbulatov argued that it could have ended in 2000-2001 if the Russian military had apprehended the leaders of the Chechen resistance, but that Chief of Army General Staff Anatolii Kvashnin did all in his power to prolong the conflict while constantly affirming that it was \"manageable\" and \"localized.\" (RFE/RL)