Kavkaz Center

The Kavkaz Center (KC; Kavkaz-centr) is a privately run website/portal which aims to be "a Chechen internet agency which is independent, international and Islamic". The stated mission of the site is to report events related to Chechnya and also to "provide international news agencies with news-letters, background information and assistance in making independent journalistic work in North Caucasus". Since its inception it has broadcast views supporting independence of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and later the Caucasian Emirate and the mujahideen worldwide. The website is published in five languages: English, Arabic, Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish. Founded in March 1999 in the city of Grozny in Chechnya, the KC was organized and headed by Movladi Udugov, former Minister of Information of Chechnya and then-leader of the "national information service". The organisation is banned in Russia. According to Dr Greg Simons from Swedish National Defence College, "not all of the content on Kavkazcenter can be classified as being extremist and dangerous. However, some material that appears on the website clearly is falling into the realm of extremist and terrorist material." On the other hand, David McDuff, an editor with Prague Watchdog, has written that the Kavkaz Center is "thought by some observers to be a disinformation center run with the help of Russia’s special services." The Kavkaz Center caused a major controversy in September 2004 when the server hosting it, located in Lithuania, was shut down by Lithuanian authorities (under pressure from Russian secret services) on hate speech charges, after a letter from the Chechen rebel commander Shamil Basayev claiming responsibility for the Beslan school hostage crisis and a series of photos from the preparations for the attack were published on the site. The website subsequently re-opened on a webserver at the Internet service provider PRQ, in Sweden, and then in April 2008 it moved to an Estonian server, supplied by the AS Starman.