Dzhokhar Dudaev

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**Dzhokhar Dudaev**
Image:Dudayev.JPG
Order:	1st President
Took Office:	November 9, 1991
Left Office:	April 21, 1996
Predecessor:	None, Inaugural
Successor:	Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev
Date of Birth:	April 15, 1944
Place of Birth:	Yalkhori, Soviet Union
Date of Death:	April 21, 1996
Place of Death:	Gekhi Chu, Chechnya
Political party:	none

Dzhokhar Musayevich Dudayev (Chechen Latin: Dzoxar Dudayev; Cyrillic: Джоха́р Муса́евич Дуда́ев, 15 April 1944 – 21 April 1996) was a soviet air force general and a Chechen leader, the first (separatist) president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, an unrecognized breakaway state in the Caucasus.

1 Early life
2 President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria
3 Independence
4 War with Russia
5 See also
6 References

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Early life

Dzhokhar Musayevich Dudayev was born in February 1944, during the enforced deportation of his family (together with the entire Chechen, Ingush, Balkar, Kalmyk, Crimean Tatar and other smaller nations, on the orders of Joseph Stalin) from their native village of Yalkhori in the Chechen-Ingush autonomous oblast. He spent the first 13 years of his life in Kazakhstan. Following the 1957 repatriation of the Chechens and Ingush, he studied at evening school in Checheno-Ingushetia and qualified as an electrician. He entered flying school and graduated from the Tambov Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots in 1966. It is alleged he officially misrepresented his ethnicity as Ossetian in order to sidestep discrimination against the Chechen people. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1968.

Dudayev served in a heavy bomber unit of the Soviet air force in Siberia and Ukraine. He studied at the Gagarin Air Force Academy (1971-74) and rose steadily in the air force, assuming command of the strategic air base at Tartu, Estonia, in 1987 with the rank of major general. Dudayev learned Estonian and showed great tolerance for Estonian nationalism when he ignored Soviet orders to shut down the Estonian television and parliament. A large room in the Barclay Hotel in Tartu, once used as Dudayev's office, is now called the "Dudayev Suite" in his honour. In 1990 his division was withdrawn from Estonia and he resigned from the Soviet Airforce and in May 1990 and returned to Grozny, the Chechen capital, to devote himself to local politics.

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President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

In November 1990 he was elected head of the Executive Committee of the unofficial opposition All-National Congress of the Chechen People, which advocated sovereignty for Chechnya as a separate republic within the U.S.S.R..

When the communist leadership of Doku Zavgayev in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic publicly expressed his support for the Moscow putsch in August 1991, his days were numbered. Following the failure of the putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union began to disintegrate rapidly as the constituent republics took moves to leave the beleaguered USSR. Taking advantage of the Soviet Union's implosion, Dudayev and his supporters acted against the Zavgayev administration. On September 6, 1991, militants of the All-National Congress of Chechen People (NCChP), headed by Dzhokhar Dudayev, stormed a session of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR Supreme Soviet, killing the Soviet Communist Party chief for Grozny, Vitali Kutsenko, severely injuring several other Soviet members, and effectively dissolving the government of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. Doku Zavgayev, the Chairman of the Soviet, was not present and was able to flee to Russia.

After a referendum in October 1991 confirmed Dudayev in his new position as president of "Ichkeria", he unilaterally declared the republic's sovereignty and its secession from the Russian Federation. In November 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin dispatched troops to Grozny, but they were withdrawn when Dudayev's forces prevented them from leaving the airport. Russia refused to recognize the republics independence, but hesitated to use further force against the secessionists. From this point the "Chechen Republic of Ichkeria" had become a defacto independent state.

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Independence

Initially Dudayev's government held diplomatic relations with Georgia where he received much moral support from his aggressively anti-Russian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia. When Gamsakhurdia was overthrown in late 1991 he was given asylum in Ichkeria and attended Dudayev's inauguration as President. While he resided in Grozny he also helped organised the first "All-Caucasian Conference" which was attended by independentist groups from across the region. Other than Georgia during 1991, Ichkeria never received diplomatic recognition from any other internationally recognised state.

The entity formerly known as the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic split in two in June 1992. After Chechnya had announced its initial declaration of sovereignty in 1991 its neighbouring entity Ingushetia opted to re-join the Russian Federation. The remaining rump state of Ichkeria declared full independence in 1993. During 1993 the Russian language stopped being tought in Chechen schools and it was also announced that the Chechen language would start to be written using the Latin alphabet (with some additional special Chechen characters) rather than the Cyrillic alphabet that had been imposed on the Chechen people during the 1930s. The state also began to print its own money and stamps.

Dudayev's aggressively nationalistic, anti-Russian policies soon began to undermine Chechnya's economy and, Russian observers claimed, transformed the region into a gangsters' paradise. In 1993 the Chechen parliament attempted to organize a referendum on public confidence in Dudayev on the grounds that he had failed to consolidate Chechnya's independence. He retaliated by dissolving parliament and other organs of power. Beginning in early summer 1994, armed Chechen opposition groups with Russian military and financial backing tried repeatedly, but without success, to depose Dudayev by force. Chechnya long has had a reputation in Russia as a center of organized crime and corrupt business practices; the Chechen mafia has a particularly fierce reputation. The proportion of Chechens and other Caucasians in Russia's emerging market economy is much higher than the representation of these nationalities in the population as a whole. In its propaganda campaign to justify military action against Chechnya, the Russian government played upon the stereotypes of the criminal and the dishonest businessman. It also illustrated the brutal practices of the Chechen rebels by broadcasting photos of the severed heads of victims along the roads in the breakaway republic. Meanwhile, Russians adopted the habit of including individuals of apparently non-Slavic appearance under the heading "Caucasian," widening the existing strain of racism in Russia's society.

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War with Russia

On December 1st 1994 the Russians began bombing Grozny airport and destroyed most of the Chechen Airforce (former Soviet jets requisitioned be the republic in 1991). In response Ichkeria declared war on Russia and mobilised its armed forces. On December 11th, five days after Dudayev and Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev of Russia had agreed to avoid the further use of force, Russian troops invaded Chechnya from three different directions.

Expectations of a quick surgical strike followed by Chechen capitulation were horribly misguided. The Russian units advancing from Nazran in the west (through Ingushetia) were met with roadblocks by the local Ingush people. Similar actions by north-Caucasian people in support of the Chechens took place as Russian units passed through Kizlyar in Dagestan. The units which invaded from Mozdok in Christian Northern Ossetia also met some resistance as they passed through each village. It was widely believed in Russia that the conquest of Chechnya would only take three days - these predictions would be shown to be hopelessly optimistic. The fight to reach the River Terek in central Chechnya took nearly three weeks. It was not until 31st December 1994 that the Russians who had set up base in the Karakh Mountains a few miles north of Grozny were prepared to assault the city.

Highly mobile units of Chechen fighters inflicted humiliating losses on Russia's ill-prepared, and not seldom, demoralized troops. The Russian military command then resorted to devastating air raids and use of artillery, causing enormous losses among the (Chechen and Russian) civilian population. When the Russians attacked the Chechen capital of Grosny during the first weeks of January 1995, about 25,000 civilians died under a week-long air-raids and artillery fire in the sealed-off city. The Russians are reported to have lost some two thousand soldiers during their first three days of this assault. It took until 19th January 1995 to capture the Presidential Palace in the central Freedom Square (Minutka Square).

After the fall of Grozny, Dudayev moved south with his forces and continued leading the war throughout 1995 from a missile silo close to the historic Chechen capital of Vedeno.

He continued to insist that his forces would prevail after the "conventional" warfare had finished. Chechen fighters continued to operate across the entire country picking off Russian units and demoralising their soldiers. A Jihad was declared on Russia by the Mufti of Ichkerika, Akhmad Kadyrov, and foreign fighters began pouring into the republic from neighbouring North Caucasian moslem republics, such as Dagestan, Abkhazia and Ingushetia, and from further afield.

President Dudayev was killed on April 21 1996 by two laser-guided missiles when he was using a satellite phone, after his location was detected by a Russian reconnaissance aircraft, which intercepted his phone call. Despite America's ban on assassinations, it is believed the NSA was involved in the assassination by providing one of their SIGINT satellites to assist in the trilateration.[1] At the time Dudayev was reportedly talking to a liberal deputy of the Duma in Moscow. Additional aircraft were dispatched (an Su-24MR and an Su-25) to locate Dudayev and fire a guided missile. Exact details of this operation were never released by the Russian government. However, it is known that Russian reconnaissance planes in the area have been monitoring satellite communications for quite some time, trying to match Dudayev's voice signature to existing samples of his speech. It was a gross mistake on Dudayev's part to use a satellite phone, especially with his experience as a Soviet Air Force general.

He was succeeded by Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev (as acting President) then after new elections by Aslan Maskhadov.

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