A country waiting to happen.

For 200 years, Russia tried to subdue the Chechen people. In their most recent defiance of Russian colonization, the Chechen leader, Dzhokar Dudayev, declared their homeland to be an independent sovereign state in 1 9g1. At the end of 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered his troops into Chechnya to put a stop to the independence movement. Under a withering bombardment, the Chechen soldiers were forced to flee their capital, Grozny. They took to the hills and harassed the Russian soldiers constantly. The Russian invasion served to unite a badly divided people behind the push for independence. In the summer of 1996, the Chechens attacked and retook Grozny (the city has since been renamed Dzhokargala in honour of the man who started the recent separatist moves and who was killed in the war). A poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly led Russian army took heavy casualties and was forced to withdraw. Mr. Yeltsin sent in his security adviser, Alexander Lebed, to make peace. Mr. Lebed silenced the guns but there seems to be a difference of opinion aboUt the peace agreement he signed. Russia appears to believe that Chechnya is now, and always will be, a part of the Russian Federation. The Chechens say that Chechnya is now, and always will be, a sovereign independent nation. The Chechen point of view was strengthened in January 1997, when Aslan Maskhadov was elected president. He won by a wide margin and adamantly states that Chechnya has been an independent Islamic state since 1991. President Maskhadov insists that he wants to settle the issue with Russia at the bargaining table not on the battlefield. Most analysts agree that Chechnya has already achieved a practical form of independence; it is only waiting on formal recognition of this from Moscow.