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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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Stanhope Hall, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301March 1, 2000
Contact: Patricia Coen, 609-258-5764
"What's at Stake in Chechnya" Features Keynote Address by James Baker III '52
Princeton, NJ -- Former Secretary of State James Baker III ‘52 will deliver the keynote address at an event titled "What's at Stake in Chechnya: Causes, Prospects, Solutions" at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs on Thursday, March 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall. Baker's remarks will be followed by comments from diplomats, experts on Russia and Chechnya, and policymakers.
The event has been organized by Princeton University's Liechtenstein Research Program on Self-Determination (LRPSD) as part of an international project bridging academia, diplomacy, business, and the interests of ethnic communities in Russia. LRPSD has already done comparable work in the Balkans during the last decade, and LRPSD Director Wolfgang Danspeckgruber was personally involved in the negotiations to end the first Chechen war in 1996.
The Province of Chechnya has had autonomy since then, but is an integral part of the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. The recent conflict started when Russian federal forces tried to clean out so-called Chechen "terrorists" from their homeland. Russian authorities blame these militants for killing about 300 Russians in a series of apartment house bombings last summer. Chechnya-based Islamic militants in turn tried to expand their zone of control and invaded the neighboring region of Dagestan. The Russian military has now committed more than 100,000 troops to eradicate Chechen rebel forces, has destroyed the capital city of Grozny, and is currently engaged in fighting in the Chechnyan southwestern mountain region, to which the rebels have withdrawn. There is widespread destruction, and the fighting has caused some 30,000 casualties and turned more than 300,000 citizens into refugees.
Because of abundant natural gas and oil reserves in the region, this crisis demonstrates the interrelationships between a region's drive for greater independence, internal security problems, terrorism and organized crime, politics, violations of fundamental human rights, sovereign powers, natural resources, and pipeline and energy politics.
The LRPSD project on Chechnya will analyze the present situation in Chechnya -- its military, humanitarian, political, economic, and conceptual dimensions; put them into the local and regional context; and discuss models for possible amelioration of the current situation, and strategies to avoid regional crises in the future.
Respondents expected to join Baker and Danspeckgruber include Chechen Foreign Minister Ilyas Akhmadov; Chechen expert Marie Bennigsen Broxup, editor of Central Asian Survey; Professor Stephen Holmes of Princeton's Department of Politics; and Professor Robert Levgold of Columbia University's Department of Politics.
The event is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School University's Liechtenstein Research Program on Self-Determination.