Kavkaz Center
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kavkaz Center (KC) is an Internet publication that claims to be "a Chechen independent international Islamic internet agency".
The KC was founded in March 1999 in the city of Grozny, by the National Center for Strategic Research and Political Technologies, headed by Movladi Udugov, former Minister of Information of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and current leader of a "national information service". [1] The self-proclaimed mission of the site is to provide news and commentary of interest to the Muslims. Critics say that it serves largely to spread Chechen rebel propaganda and disinformation, and to promote Udugov's personal political aims.
The website published in four languages, English, Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, the contents of the four language web pages differ wildly and seem to have no relation to each other - the Russian version primarily lists articles attacking the Russian government. The English version contains articles that seek to draw attention to claimed human rights violations by the Russian army, and increasingly also to support Iraqi, Afghan and Indonesian Islamic insurgents, as well as the Palestinian militants. Some sources allege most of the content on the Kavkaz Center is written by Udugov himself under pseudonyms. [2]
In 1999 the site was ranked 21st in popularity among sites accessed in Moscow, probably because Udugov's site represented an alternative source of information early in the fighting. [3]
The Kavkaz Center caused a controversy in September of 2004 when the server it was being hosted on, located in Lithuania, was shut down by Lithuanian authorities on hate speech charges, after a letter from Shamil Basayev claiming responsibility for the Beslan school hostage crisis was published on the site (Basayev and Udugov are claimed to be close friends). The website subsequently re-opened on a webserver in Sweden.
After the October 2005 Nalchik attack in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, the Kavkaz Center was targeted by what could be a discredit campaign allegedly from the FSB, which consisted on a massive worldwide distribution of spam mail which supposedly came from the Kavkaz Center website. After receiving several DoS attacks, a message was published in the homepage, stating that they never sent the spam many people received, and that it was a discredit campaign against them because of their pro-rebel points of view. Another spam attack campaign was active again on November 29th, 2005, soliciting donations to a bank account in Sweden.
