U.S. recruits people from Kadyrov's inner circle

3 December 2010

The American ambassador to Moscow Burns said that the U.S. recruits puppets from Kadyrov's inner circle, according in his cables to Washington posted by website Wilikeaks in another set of compromising materials from the U.S. State Department.

The ambassador reports:

"Beyond the technical aspects of how best to engage, we need to review the context in which we have placed Chechnya. Previous conceptions of the Chechen tragedy, still current in certain think-tank circles, simply do not apply.

The thesis that there is a real government up in the hills, deriving its legitimacy from the electoral mandate Aslan Maskhadov won ten years ago, that is still locked in battle with the Russian invaders and their usurping compradors.

That situation ended years ago, with the execution of the deal between Putin and Kadyrov senior: the insurgents won, just a different set of insurgents; those still in the hills no longer represent any more of a moral authority or commitment to democracy than does Kadyrov.

This is sad for those who were outraged by Russian atrocities in the first two wars and hopeful for the success of the Maskhadov government between them. Sad, but true.

Attempts to portray Dokku Umarov as a fighter for democracy, or even a fighter against Russian misrule, simply do not correspond with reality.

This does not mean we can accept the Russian version that all opponents of Kadyrov are international terrorists, or that flaws in Umarov's behavior in any way justify Kadyrov's.

But it does mean that we need to engage with the Chechen government, at an appropriate non-Kadyrov level, as a prerequisite for engagement with the Chechen people -- and Chechen welfare, so bound up with the stability of the North Caucasus, the containment of Islamic extremism, and the direction that Russia ultimately takes, is a major U.S. interest".

Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2010/12/03/13033.shtml.