Why they kill

About the Chechens, Sept 2004

Palden Jenkins

The origins of the Chechens are not clear, but there's a good chance at least some of them are descended from Jews, from the time of the dispersion by Nebuchadnezzar.

For at least the last thousand years, Chechens have had many similarities to the Sicilians - a clannish, vendetta-based society which has long been involved in smuggling and crime - the Pankisi Gorge, now in north Georgia, has always been crucial to this trade. Though, clearly, 'crime' is defined by the laws of states and empires. The Chechens have for a long time lived on the edge of many big empires - Greece, Rome, Persia, the Baghdad Caliphate, Byzantium, the Mongol and Ottoman empires - and Russia. Hence the smuggling! It's an ancient tradition, partly fuelled by rivalry between Chechen families. Chechnya, in itself, is not a prosperous place, because of climate, mountains and lack of valuable resources, so the criminality has been a way of increasing the wealth of the Chechens.

When the Russians arrived in the area in the 1600s, the Chechens and other Caucasian mountain folk resisted, but by the 1800s, the Russians took the Caucasus, after bloody battles with the Chechens. In the Soviet period it was no better. The Soviets re-took Chechnya in the early 1920s, after the revolution, and Stalin deported most Chechens to Siberia in the later 1930s. The Russian relationship with Chechens has always been forceful, violent and statist, and the Chechen relationship with them has always been rebellious, cheeky and something to do with smuggling.

In the late Soviet period, the 1970s-80s, as USSR became increasingly corrupt and inefficient, the Chechens engaged more and more in smuggling and fixing. They fixed anything. They led the drugs-and-weapons trade with Afghanistan, also being involved with supplying the Lebanese civil war and other conflicts. They worked partially with American secret ops during the Afghan war - hence a connection with Osama bin Laden. When the Soviets and then the Americans left Afghanistan, and the Afghan warlords then fought each other, the Chechens made even more money, exchanging drugs for guns and profiting from both.

And here comes the big fact that no one talks about: by 1990 the Chechen crime gangs were the largest in the world, with wealth that was larger than the Columbian drug barons, the Mafia, the Russian mafia, the Golden Triangle lords and all big organised crime gangs put together. They were also willing to smuggle nuclear materials, art, rare species and all manner of other goods that other gangs tended not to touch. The Chechens played a part in the Iran-Contra operation, as high-level fixers.

Organised crime is secretly important to the world capitalist system because it creates large pools of unaccounted funds, particularly in offshore banks and the background world economy (primary markets, and so on). This is useful to corporations, arms dealers and government black-ops organisations, as a way of drawing on very large funds temporarily without having to make official paperwork. It's a massive slush fund. In return, crime gangs gain protection from high up. But the system works only as long as crime gangs are stopped from getting too dominant. This was why the Americans started reducing but not eliminating the Columbian drug barons in the 1980s - to cut them back to size.

By 1993 the Chechens were in a position to upset the international financial system - their money-funds were so very large. This was not dissimilar to Saddam Hussein's situation in 1991: by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia, he could control over 25% of the world's oil and therefore affect the world economy. That's why USA didn't invade Baghdad - they needed just to cut him down. So, the West needed the Chechens to be cut down to size too, and they secretly leaned on Yeltsin to do something. He needed their money and favour, and had little option. But it suited Yeltsin too, because the Chechens were competing with the Russian/Moscow mafia, and they were then in danger of gaining control of the Russian crime scene, and therefore threatened the government and economy. These were in the days when there were lots of murders in Moscow in the earlier 1990s, arising from this competition. There was also a major oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Black Sea, passing through Chechnya, which was valuable to Russia.

I first heard about the wealth of the Chechens on a BBC programme called 'From Our Own Correspondent', in about 1997. This information was secret, and the programm aired once and was squelched. Nothing about this has been mentioned in the media since. I did some further research and found it to be correct. But still, very few people know about it.

Chechnya had always been a problem for Russia, and with the independence of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and the other former USSR states, Chechnya became a Russian border state - ideal, again, for crime and smuggling, and an irritant to Moscow. Geo-strategically, it makes sense for Russia to keep control of the Caucasus, which otherwise could become a Muslim border stronghold. Yet, paradoxically, they have made it a Muslim stronghold and stoked the fires of terrorism by repressing the Caucasians.

So the West prompted Yeltsin to go to war. This is why the West has been very quiet about complaining about Chechnya, and even now just mutters impotently about human rights, as a PR device. As a criminal gang, the Chechens are now disabled - and, meanwhile, the Chinese Triads have grown stronger, the Columbians weaker, and a new global balance has developed, which the banks and economists favour. USA and UK have given asylum to key Chechens because they owe a few favours from the past.

And that's the beginning of the current conflict in Chechnya, which has become conflated with Islamic fundamentalism, even though the Chechens weren't greatly Muslim. They have always had their own ways of doing things, and Persians, Turks and Arabs have often distrusted them too, as well as Russians. By nature, Chechens are an independent mountain-and-valley people who just want everyone else to keep out.

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