Kavkaz Center
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The Kavkaz Center (KC) is an Internet publication that claims to be "a Chechen independent international Islamic internet agency". The self-proclaimed mission of the site is to provide news and commentary of interest to Muslims. Since its inception it has broadcast Chechen separatist propaganda in support for the secession of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The website published in five languages, English, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish.
Soldiers of the Russian army, police and other non-Chechens involved in the fight against militants in the materials agency calls occupiers. For residents of Chechnya who cooperate with the Russian authorities or support their actions, the agency uses a special definition - "national traitors". The site is constantly being published statements by Chechen militants leaders to call upon the armed action against Russia. Publications express approval of the killing of federal troops and other militant acts.
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] 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 Second Chechen War.[2]
The Kavkaz Center caused a controversy in September 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 and a series of photos from the preparations to the attack were published on the site (Basayev and Udugov were claimed to be close friends).[citation needed] The website subsequently re-opened on a webserver at the Internet Service Provider PRQ, in Sweden.
After the October 2005 Nalchik attack in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, the Kavkaz Center was allegedly targeted by a discredit campaign from the FSB, which consisted on a massive worldwide distribution of spam mail which supposedly came from the Kavkaz Center website.[citation needed] After receiving several DoS attacks, a message was published on 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 29, 2005, soliciting donations to a bank account in Sweden.[3]
