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INTERNET
INSURRECTION
Joan
Beecher Eichrodt
Reporting of the
Dagestani conflict in both the Russian and foreign media
has been much more one-sided—in most cases, having
little sympathy with the insurgents—than previous
reporting on the Chechen war. The army of
international journalists, so conspicuous in Chechnya, is
absent this time around; the threat of kidnapping has
seen to that. Not one of the Dagestani and Russian
journalists covering the conflict has been behind rebel
lines. Even the most free-thinking media
outlets—including independent news sources on the
Internet—primarily depend on press releases from
Russian military headquarters and from official Dagestani
sources.
Earlier this summer
when the guerrillas first launched their offensive, the
Dagestani government immediately responded with an
all-out media campaign against the invasion, utilizing
radio, television, the press, and the Internet. By
10 August, it had established a new website with several
mirror sites, including one in the United States,
<www.kavkaz.com>. According to the Ministry
of Nationalities, Information, and External Relations,
which launched the site, its primary purpose is “to
provide the broadest possible coverage of events for the
benefit of all media.” And its motto, according to
the Ministry, is “to tell the truth about
Dagestan.” The message underlying the site’s
material is that all Dagestanis have united in the face
of aggression—an invasion launched by a horde of
Chechen bandits and foreign mercenaries. For the
most part the Moscow-based media echo the same line.
One source that has
regularly provided a different viewpoint – by
depicting the guerrilla action as a Dagestani liberation
struggle against the Russians and the notoriously corrupt
local government—is the Chechnya-based
“Caucasus Center”—known as
<kavkaz.org>.
Like <kavkaz.com>, <kavkaz.org>—founded
earlier this year—aims to capture Russian and world
public opinion. The mastermind behind it, Movladi
Udugov, is credited by the Russians themselves with
having defeated them in the information war in Chechnya,
even before they lost the shooting war.
As minister of
information for the late Chechen president Dzhokhar
Dudayev, Udugov was tireless in disseminating his
side’s version of events, always making himself
available to Russian and foreign journalists. In
1997, after the war, he ran for the Chechen presidency,
as the candidate of his own party, Islamic Order.
After losing to Aslan Maskhadov, he served for a while as
Maskhadov’s foreign minister, although he has long
been at odds with the Chechen president. Udugov has
devoted himself to the creation of a united
Chechen-Dagestani Muslim state, an idea Maskhadov has
explicitly rejected. At present, Udugov is the vice
chairman of a public organization called the Congress of
Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan (recently renamed the
Mejlis of Muslims of Chechnya and Dagestan), which was
formed to promote this goal of unification. Shamil
Basayev is the chairman. This group not only united
the leaders of the uprising in Dagestan, but served as
the organizational force behind it.
In a telephone
interview with Transitions Online, Udugov pointed out
that even though <kavkaz.org> is often referred to
as “Udugov’s site,” it is really owned by
a group of young programmers in Grozny. “I
help them out with some money—it doesn’t take
much money to run a website—and I supply them with
analytical reports, from my research institute [the
Grozny-based Institute of Strategic Research]. They
have two old computers, and no support staff. . . .
And their local correspondents in Dagestan are
volunteers; they don’t charge anything for their
services. It’s basically a shoestring
operation.”
Letting off Steam
Few people have
Internet access in Dagestan, fewer still in Chechnya,
which lacks even the most elementary telephone
system. But more and more Russian citizens are
turning to the Internet to get their news.
According to recent estimates from the Regional Public
Center of Internet Technologies
<http://inter.net.ru/13/41.html>, about 1.5 million
people—just under 50 percent of them in the
immediate Moscow area—have Internet access, and the
number has been growing exponentially.
By 12 September,
<kavkaz.org> had become one of the most popular
Internet sites in Russia, taking 21st place in the
Rambler search engine’s list of Russia’s top
100 Internet sites, which is ranked by the number of
hits. The Dagestani government’s site came in
as number 357.
The site’s
success can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it
has been the only alternate source of information on
events in Dagestan. The news items are generally
brief: for the most part, merely reprints—without
commentary—of press releases from the Islamic
Government of Dagestan, and statements from various
leaders. A further attraction is a new
section—Yeltsingate—which reprints press
articles about the Russian governing elite’s
reported financial misdeeds.
It also seems
likely that many visitors come to the site simply to
vent. After all, the kind of people who are
connected to the Internet in Russia are not likely to
be won over by language such as this excerpt from the
site:
For 140 years Islamic Dagestan has been occupied by
the Russian kafir. For 140 years Islamic
Dagestan has been ruled by the law of Satan and his
servants. . . . We want victory or Paradise!
And, God willing, we will free Dagestan from the
kafirs! . . . Drive the Russian aggressors and
their hangers-on out of your villages and
cities. Establish the Shariat of Allah, and
perhaps you will be saved. (From Shamil
Basayev’s “Address to the Muslims of
Dagestan,” 15 August 1999)
Or such as this:
“Our dead are in Paradise. Your dead are in
Hell.” (Basayev statement, 9/7/99)
The political cartoons
displayed on the site won’t appeal to the average
Russian websurfer either, most particularly the one
showing Russian soldiers speared—as on a shishkebab
skewer—on a Caucasian dagger.
The site has helped
fuel an outburst of Chechenophobia, serving to evaporate
any guilt Russians may have felt about being the
aggressors in the Chechen war. Now that Chechens
are viewed as the aggressors, advocates of the total
extermination of the Chechen people have been
prolifically posting in every Russian chatroom
available—including the one on <kavkaz.org>
itself.
“Our Brave
Hackers”
Outraged at what was
beginning to look like another Udugov propaganda coup,
hackers have vowed to wipe out his site. For about
a week, beginning on 30 August, it looked as if they
might have succeeded. On the left of the page the
hackers posted a picture of the poet Mikhail
Lermontov—who fought in the Caucasus War over 150
years ago—holding a Kalashnikov, and with the legend
“Misha was here!” next to his head. Then,
to the right of the page: “This site has been closed
down at the request of Russian citizens. This is
what will happen to all websites of terrorists and
murderers!”
Russian state
television gleefully congratulated “our brave
hackers” for their derring-do. It is not clear
whether the deed was indeed done by independent hackers,
or by operatives of Russian intelligence.
But within a week,
“Misha” disappeared. Udugov’s site
was registered in the United States earlier this year by
Albert Digaev, a computer science student, who then
placed it on a server in California, where he has a
website of his own. By a ruse, someone, evidently
located in Chelyabinsk, Russia, obtained the password to
the site, and had the traffic diverted to another server,
also in the United States. At that point, Digaev
says, the “Misha” page was substituted for the
<kavkaz.org> home page. After the ruse was
discovered, traffic was simply redirected to the original
server, and the site was up again.
Udugov’s site may
be facing a more sophisticated enemy. According to
a 9 September BBC report, Russian Interior Minister
Vladimir Rushaylo announced that he had given the FBI
more information about the alleged “Chechen-Bin
Laden Connection.” He then went on to say that the
FBI, in return, offered its help in combating the rebels
in Dagestan, including assistance with “eliminating
Internet sites set up by the rebels.”
Then, on 13 September,
following the two explosions that destroyed Moscow
apartment buildings and caused over 200 deaths, Digaev
received an e-mail from the company operating his server
in California. It informed him that the company was
canceling the <kavkaz.org> account because of
escalating complaints about the site. The
complaints alleged that “the content includes
terrorist propaganda, and discriminatory/hate
material.”
Digaev has since moved
<kavkaz.org> to one free server, temporarily; then
to a second; and now is moving it to a third. The
reasons are still unclear as to whether the disruptions
are due to technical glitches, or outside
intervention. But <kavkaz.org> has
disappeared from the Rambler ratings, and Udugov’s
chances of winning the information war this time around
are beginning to look fairly dim.
* Joan Beecher Eichrodt is
a historian and a journalist who has spent much time in
the North Caucasus over the last decade, including a year
in Chechnya (1994-1995), on a grant from the MacArthur
Foundation.
Reprinted with Permission
Copyright © 1999 Transitions Online
<http://www.transitions-online.org/>
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