ABSTRACT
D On August 7, 1999, approximately 1,200 Chechen fight ers entered the Russian province of Dagestan and seized control of a number of villages in the mountainous Botlikh region.
Dagestan, located on the Caspian Sea bordering Chechnya, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, has a diverse popu lation. Its two million inhabitants belong to thirty-three different ethnic groups, but an estimated 71 percent of them also speak fluent Russian. Despite the linguistic and cultural diversity, most of the groups are Islamic, and the Wahhabi fundamentalist sect has made significant inroads in the area. Islamic fundamentalism and opposition to Russian rule have been abetted by poverty and the in efficiency and corruption of the government. Dagestan possesses one of the highest provincial levels of unem ployment in the Russian Federation. However, Mukhu Gumbatovich Aliyev, the chairman of the People s Assem bly of Dagestan, has asserted that 90 percent of the Dagestanis desire to remain part of Russia. According to Aleksei Malashenko of the Carnegie Endowment for In ternational Peace, “The Dagestanis don’t want indepen dence. They are a multiethnic, multinational society. For them, a struggle for independence means civil war.”
