Why not Chechnya?

It's a question you read in some articles about how the West should react to Russia - that if Russia is going to try to help the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia breakaway from Georgia, that maybe the West should encourage Chechnya to split from them? After all, Russia has fought two wars to keep Chechnya in the union during the past 15 years; they must be just yearning to be free from Moscow, right?

Well, it's not going to happen, largely because Chechnya's current president, Ramzan Kadyrov, is decidedly pro-Moscow.

It's a point he stressed in a recent interview with the BBC. The headline of the article was about Kadyrov's belief that the United States encouraged Georgia to start the recent conflict with Russia, but the important message of the piece was that Chechnya's government today is solidly on Moscow's side. In fact Chechen paramilitaries were reported to have fought along with the Russian forces in Georgia last month.

Chechnya's capital, Grozny, is finally recovering from years of war, thanks in large part to financial aid that has flowed freely from Moscow. Construction projects have sprung up around the capital including one that build a huge presidential complex for Kadyrov, another that has constructed one of the largest mosques in Europe, and others that have rebuilt apartment blocks destroyed during the wars.

Kadyrov's father Akhmad started out fighting against Russia during Chechnya's first war in 1994-1996. But when the second war began in 1999, the Kadyrovs had a change of heart. While Chechnya is predominantly Muslim, they tend to practice a moderate form of Islam. The conflict through attracted radical, jihadist Muslims, including forces loyal to al-Qaeda. Their presence in the conflict prompted the Kadyrovs to switch sides and align themselves with Moscow, according to Ramzan. It also made them targets. Akhmad Kadyrov was elected president (in an election disputed by international monitors, who said that Chechnya was too damaged from the war to hold a fair election) and subsequently killed in a terrorist bombing in Grozny in 2004, Ramzan stepped into his role as leader of the region.

Chechen rebel groups, meanwhile, increasingly began to turn to terrorism in their struggle against Russia. They carried out a series of brutal terror attacks against civilians, including the bombing of two airliners in mid-flight, seizing a theater full of people in Moscow (more than 100 people died in the subsequent rescue operation) and in the worst attack of all, launching a two-day siege of a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan, killing more than 300 children. By 2006, after years of fighting, much of the rebel leadership had been killed, including Shamil Basayev, the alleged mastermind behind the terrorist attacks in Beslan and Moscow. The Chechen rebellion fell apart.

Ramzan Kadyrov brought a sense of stability to Chechnya - with sometimes brutal tactics and the use of his personal militia locally called the Kadyrovtsy according to human rights groups - and has built ties with Moscow. And that's the problem with the idea of saying we in the West could always just go ahead and recognize Chechnya's independence. The government in Chechnya now wants to be part of Russia, and even if you were to argue that Kadyrov is just a puppet of Moscow, the reality is the Chechen rebels (what’s left of them) are a group of airplane-bombing, schoolchild-killing terrorists aligned with al-Qaeda - not exactly the kind of folks you can embrace as aspiring democrats yearning to live free.

As much as the United States might like to one-up Russia by encouraging a separatist movement within its borders, they can’t spend seven years fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because (supposedly) al-Qaeda was using them as terrorist bases only to encourage the creation of one within Europe.