The New Chechnya. What happened after the two wars.

Abstract

“A new Chechnya” explains the post-war situation of this country, which was devastated by two wars and which faced an uncertain future at the beginning of the 2000s. Russian President Vladimir Putin chose Akhmad Kadyrov, a powerful and respected Chechen man, as the new leader of Chechnya in October 2003. The second Chechen war had started already in 1999, when Putin was Russian Prime Minister, and would officially end only in 2009, with the conclusion of the “counter-terroristic operations”. Kadyrov had to make Chechnya and its people reliable: terrorism had to be fought by any means, and the country had to be rebuilt in order to let Chechens start a new life and forget what had happened in the previous decade. Entire cities had been destroyed, human rights were not respected, thousands of people had died, and hundreds of men had run away to fight within the resistance movement against the Russian oppressor. In these conditions, Putin decided to heal Chechnya and make it a secure region of Russia, through the so-called “chechenization policy” and a new President, Ramzan Kadyrov. Today Chechnya is definitely a different country, compared to a decade ago: Russian money helped the reconstruction of the modern cities that we can see nowadays; children receive an instruction and go regularly to school; the main religion is still Islam – sign of a certain degree of independence, which Chechen people had been fighting for; terrorists have been defeated and only a few are fighting against Russia; human rights condition got relatively better.