| Wars in the Caucasus | |||||||
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| Part of the post–Cold War era, the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union | |||||||
     Clockwise from top: A Chechen child soldier stands in front of a burning house; a mourning ceremony for victims of the Khojaly massacre at Agdam Mosque; Dutch Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe monitors inspecting a Georgian military installation near the South Ossetian line of contact; Zviadist soldiers hiding from gunfire behind the Georgian Parliament Building; destruction in the Abkhaz capital of Sukhumi following the War in Abkhazia, 2006 | |||||||
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Total deaths: c. 102,000–231,000+ Displaced: c. 1,500,000–2,000,000 | |||||||
The Wars in the Caucasus were a series of interrelated ethnic and political conflicts which engulfed the Caucasus in the period shortly before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[3][4][5][2][6] The conflicts, resulting from centuries of ethnic tensions, reached a boiling point as the former republics of the Soviet Union began to seek independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Exacerbated by ethnic nationalist claims, they led to the establishment of several de facto independent states, violent government change and a refugee crisis that led to the displacement of 1.5–2 million people.
Colonised by Russia during the 19th century, the Caucasus experienced significant unrest from 1917 to 1923, during the Russian Civil War. During World War II, several ethnic groups were expelled to Central Asia and Siberia by the Soviet government, and the land was subsequently settled by other peoples. After expellees returned to the Caucasus during the Khrushchev Thaw, they found that their homes were now occupied and that the Soviet government was continuing attempts to eradicate their cultures. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, dissent against the Soviet Union emerged in the North Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia. Between 1985 and 1989, this grew into a low-level uprising, as perestroika and glasnost led to increasingly-open dissent. Amidst the Soviet Union's dissolution, armed militants began engaging one another in combat.
The Wars in the Caucasus have at times been described as a series of decolonisation wars,[7] ethnic conflicts[8] or wars against Russian neocolonialism in the region. The Russian military was actively involved in all of the region's conflicts, pursuing strategies of securing strategic aims such as natural gas and railways or motorways. Russia intervened against nationalist, pro-Western leaders in Georgia (Zviad Gamsakhurdia), Azerbaijan (Abulfaz Elchibey)[9] and Chechnya (Dzhokhar Dudayev), killing the latter.
The Wars in the Caucasus had a destructive effect on the region, leading to one of the steepest declines in economic output in the world during the 1990s. Numerous war crimes were committed during the war, including acts of ethnic cleansing and, in the case of Chechnya, what is occasionally referred to as genocide. As much as 10% of the population of the Caucasus was displaced by fighting, and organised crime, drug trafficking and Islamic extremism proliferated, leading to the insurgency in the North Caucasus and the growth of the Islamic State.
- ^ Güneylioğlu 2017, p. 10.
- ^ a b c d Cheterian 2012, p. 1626.
- ^ Blank 2012, p. 182.
- ^ Cornell 2017.
- ^ Väyrynen & Alieva 2000, p. abstract.
- ^ Güneylioğlu 2017, p. 1.
- ^ Blank 2012, p. 183.
- ^ Cheterian 2012, p. 1628.
- ^ Güneylioğlu 2017, p. 10–11.
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