Catastrophe in Chechnya: Escaping the Quagmire
December 10, 2003
Speaker Biographies
Ilyas Khamzatovich Akhmadov was appointed the foreign minister in the government of Aslan Maskhadov. Between 1981 and 1985 he served in the Soviet Army’s Strategic Missile Forces. In 1991 he graduated with distinction in political science from Rostov University and started working in the political department of the Chechen Foreign Ministry. He fought in the 1994-96 Russia-Chechen war, and retired to private life until called to serve as foreign minister in 1999. He is the promoter of a peace plan proposal that calls for a UN resolution for the Russian troops to withdraw from Chechnya and be replaced by a UN peacekeeping contingent that would pacify the region and set the foundation for representative institutions and eventual elections.
Leon Aron is resident scholar and director of Russian studies at AEI. He is the author of the first full-scale scholarly biography of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (2000). Since 1998, he has written Russian Outlook, a quarterly essay on economic, political, social and cultural aspects of Russia’s post-Soviet transition, published by AEI. He has contributed numerous essays and articles to newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (London), Newsday, the National Interest, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Times Literary Supplement. A frequent guest of television and radio talk shows, he has commented on Russian affairs for, among others, 60 Minutes, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Charlie Rose, CNN International, C-SPAN, and NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
Andrei Babitsky is a special correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). During the perestroika years, he took part in the human rights movement in Moscow, and from 1987-89 he was on the editorial board of Sergei Grigoryant's journal Glasnost. As a result of his human rights activism, Mr. Babitsky was subject to administrative arrest. In 1989 he became a RFE/RL correspondent, and during the August 1991 putsch he reported from Moscow. When the first Chechen war broke out, Mr. Babitsky became the RFE/RL special correspondent reporting from the war zone; from 1996 until 1999 he worked in Moscow and the north Caucasus. In August 1999 he covered the military operations in Dagestan.
Khassan Baiev was born in Alkhan Kala, a suburb of the Chechen capital Grozny. He conducted his medical studies at Krasnoyarsk Medical Institute in Siberia where he graduated in 1985 as a reconstructive surgeon. At the beginning of the first war, he gave up his practice to perform emergency trauma surgery. During the first and the second war, he obeyed only the Hippocratic oath and equally treated civilians, Chechen rebels, and Russian army men. As a consequence, he was persecuted and threatened with death both by Chechen rebels and Russians soldiers. In 2000 he was forced out of Chechnya under death threats by the FSB, and reluctantly emigrated to the United States, where he has become an outspoken advocate for human rights.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is former national security adviser to President Carter. Prior to this post, he taught at Harvard and Columbia University, and he headed the Institute on Communist Affairs. During the 1960s, Mr. Brzezinski acted as an adviser to the administrations of President Kennedy and President Johnson. He emphasized the further development of the U.S.-China relationship, favored a new arms control agreement with Moscow, and sought international cooperation in foreign policy. Mr. Brzezinski has been active as a writer, teacher, and consultant. He is the author of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998) and of The Geostrategic Triad: Living with China, Europe, and Russia (2000).
Thomas A. Dine is president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc. RFE/RL broadcasts every day to twenty-three countries of Central and Eastern Europe and across Eurasia, and to two countries of the Persian Gulf-Iran and Iraq. Prior to joining the radios in August 1997, Mr. Dine served as assistant administrator for Europe and the New Independent States at the U.S. Agency for International Development (1993-1997), and executive director of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (1980-1993). Earlier he served as a staffer in the U.S. Senate and the American Embassy in New Delhi, India, and as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines.
John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is an expert on Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, nationalism in the former Soviet Union, Russian cultural politics, and the politics of religion in Russia. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters in books regarding political, social, and cultural developments in the states of the former Soviet Union, as well as of The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (1995) and of Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (1998).
David Ensor is CNN’s national security correspondent. Based in Washington, D.C., he reports on the U.S. intelligence community and on national security issues such as international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the national missile defense debate. Before joining CNN, Mr. Ensor served as a diplomatic correspondent for ABC News based at the U.S. State Department, where he covered Middle East diplomacy, U.S. troops in Bosnia and other major international stories. From 1992 to 1995, he reported from Moscow for ABC, covering two coup attempts, the collapse of Communism, and the first war in Chechnya. In the early 1980s, Mr. Ensor was ABC’s Warsaw bureau chief, reporting on martial law and the rise of the Solidarity movement. Before this, he reported from El Salvador, the Soviet Union, and Argentina during the Falklands War. He was among the recipients of the 2002 National Headliner Award presented to CNN for investigative reporting on the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.
Jerry Fowler is staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to this post, Mr. Fowler was legislative counsel for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. He served as a member of the Lawyers Committee delegation to the 1998 Rome Diplomatic Conference on the International Criminal Court. His most recent publication is ‘Not Fade Away’: The International Criminal Court and the State of Sovereignty (2001); his most recent Congressional testimony was submitted to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus briefing on Sudan in April 2001. Mr. Fowler is on the adjunct faculty of George Washington University Law School, where he teaches Refugee and Asylum Law, and has previously been a Scholar-in-Residence at American University. From 1983 to 1987, he was stationed in Germany as an officer in the United States Army. From 1993 to 1995, he served as special litigation counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor and a columnist for the Washington Post, for which he has been a reporter since 1981. From 1991 to 1995, he served as correspondent and co-bureau chief in Moscow, covering Russia and the former Soviet Union. From 1987 to 1990, he was co-bureau chief of the Washington Post’s Northeast Asia bureau based in Tokyo, and reported on Korea and Japan. Before joining the foreign staff of the Washington Post, Mr. Hiatt covered military and national security affairs for three years as a member of the newspaper’s national staff. Prior to that assignment, he covered government, politics, development, and other issues in the State of Virginia and Fairfax County. He is the author of The Secret Sun: A Novel of Japan (1992), as well as two books for children, If I Were Queen of the World (1997) and Baby Talk (1999).
Frank Judd of Portsea is a member of the British House of Lords. He served consecutively as parliamentary under secretary of state for defense, minister for overseas development, and minister of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs. He has been the rapporteur for Chechnya to the Political Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and he co-chaired the Joint PACE-Duma Working Group on Chechnya. He visited Chechnya eight times. After the first war, his delegation called for an immediate cease-fire to be respected by both sides, and called on the Russian government to begin negotiations with the elected Chechen representatives concerning a political resolution to the conflict. Lord Judd announced his resignation as rapporteur in January of 2003 out of frustration with his Russian counterparts over their insistence on pressing forward with the March 2003 referendum.
Ruud Lubbers has been the UN high commissioner for human rights since January 2001. He served as Dutch prime minister continuously from 1982 to 1994, the longest-serving post-war premier, and as minister for Economic Affairs (1973). After leaving politics, he taught university courses on globalization and sustainable development at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and as a visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was also vice-chairman of the Independent World Commission on the Oceans and chair of Globus, the Institute for Globalization and Development based in Tilburg.
Alexander Lukashevich is the senior political counselor of the Embassy of the Russian Federation to the United States. He graduated from the State Institute for International Relations and became a career diplomat specializing in European affairs and in cooperation with European institutions. Since 1995 he visited Chechnya on several occasions, and he particularly followed the OSCE activities and involvement in the region. He took part in several negotiations for the resolution of the Chechen crisis, and he has a wide knowledge of Islam.
Andrew Meier is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After The Fall (2003). Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001, Mr. Meier has been a recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2001-2002) and the Alicia Patterson Foundation for Journalism (1996). A graduate of Wesleyan and Oxford universities, he first studied in Moscow in 1988 and spent the following three years living in Russia and traveling throughout the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Baltics. His writing on foreign affairs has also appeared in Harper’s, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wilson Quarterly and Wired, among other U.S. and international publications. Additionally, Mr. Meier reported on Russia’s 1998 financial crisis for the PBS/Frontline documentary The Crash, and has appeared as a commentator and guest on NPR, the BBC, VOA and CNN. A contributor to Time Europe, he is now based in Washington, DC.
Rajan Menon is Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. Mr. Menon is also chairman of the Eurasia Policy Studies program of the National Bureau of Asian Research and academic fellow and advisor for the International Peace and Security Program at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He has received honors and awards from institutions such as the United States Institute of Peace, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. Mr. Menon is author and editor of numerous publications on international relations and security in Russia and the other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including: Treacherous Terrain: The Political and Security Dimensions of Energy Development in the Caspian Sea Zone (1998); Russia, The South Caucasus, and Central Asia: The Emerging 21st Century Security Environment (with Yuri Fyodorov and Ghia Nodia, 1999); and Energy and Conflict in Central Asia and the Caucasus (2000).
Andrei A. Piontkovsky is the director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Moscow and an independent analyst and observer of Russian politics. A frequent contributor and commentator for publications such as Chechnya Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, the Moscow Times, and Novaya Gazeta, Piontkovsky has also been a guest of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America. His recently published article The Second Putin Republic looks at the changes in Russian politics from Yeltsin to Putin. He has provided analysis for the World Security Network, the Federation of American Scientists, as well as the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Danielle Pletka is the vice president for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East, South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. From 1992 to 2002, Ms. Pletka was a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. She also served as a staff writer for Insight magazine, as well as an editorial assistant for the Los Angeles Times and Reuters in Jerusalem.
David Satter is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a visiting scholar of the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow of the Jamestown Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Mr. Satter specializes in the Soviet Union and Russia in the post-Communist era. From 1976 to 1982, he was the Moscow correspondent for the London Financial Times, and then became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal from 1982 to 1988. From 1990 to 1993, he was a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Mr. Satter has contributed articles and commentary pieces to numerous magazines and newspapers, and he is the author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (1996) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003).
Radek Sikorski is the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative and resident fellow at AEI. He was Poland’s deputy minister for foreign affairs from 1998 to 2001. As the country’s deputy minister for defense in the first democratically elected government after the fall of communism, he spearheaded Poland’s drive to join NATO. From 1986 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a war correspondent to Afghanistan and Angola, contributing to the London Spectator and the New York National Review. He is the author of Dust of the Saints: A Journey to Herat in Time of War (1989) and The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland (1997). His photograph from Afghanistan received the World Press Photo award in 1988. From 1981 to 1989, Mr. Sikorski was a political refugee in the United Kingdom.
Stephen J. Solarz is senior counselor of APCO Worldwide, a global communication consultancy, and president of Solarz Associates, an international consulting firm. Mr. Solarz served in public office both in the New York State Assembly and in the U.S. House of Representatives for 24 years. In 1996, he served as a foreign policy spokesman for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign. In 1995, together with former Senator George Mitchell and Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, Mr. Solarz founded the International Crisis Group (ICG), a private, multinational organization, committed to strengthening the capacity and resolve of the international community to anticipate, understand, and prevent man-made crises. As a congressman, Mr. Solarz emerged as a leading spokesman on behalf of democracy and human rights. He has written extensively for several journals and newspapers.
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