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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Terrorism spreading in Russia |
| 2005-02-17 |
| Terrorism is expanding its reach in Russia, in part because of corruption and lawlessness in government, police and the military that make it impossible for impoverished people to improve their lot, a Kremlin aide said Wednesday. Aslambek Aslakhanov, a former Soviet and Russian Interior Ministry official who serves as President Vladimir Putin's adviser on the North Caucasus region, said terrorists were increasingly finding recruits across Russia's south. "Terrorist attacks aren't always politically motivated, sometimes they're carried out for revenge - against the corruption of authorities, the lawlessness of police and military structures, mass unemployment and the inability to feed one's family," Aslakhanov said in an interview with The Associated Press. "They try to do something (to improve their lot) and are not allowed to, and it's the bureaucrats who are to blame," he added. Aslakhanov, an ethnic Chechen, said Putin had given him the task of tackling poverty in the region by creating an international corporation that would attract investment to the North Caucasus, particularly war-battered Chechnya, where he said unemployment was as high as 90 percent. He said government forces, which are supposed to ensure order, often helped fill terrorists' ranks with their methods. "The excessive cruelty of certain police and military structures in the country, especially the abduction of people, their torture and execution and disappearance without a trace ... has an impact on the terrorist situation," he said. Russian forces have been fighting rebels in Chechnya for the better part of a decade, but over the past few years police clashes with Islamic rebels in other regions of the North Caucasus have increased. Aslakhanov said he believed the various groups had ties; for example, some get extremist literature from a single source. But "organization, strict discipline, subordination one to the other - these things still don't exist, thank God," he said. "They all use violence to achieve their goals, whether it's creation of an independent state or liberation of people who have been arrested, or revenge," he said. Aslakhanov, 62, a former member of the Russian parliament from Chechnya, rose through the ranks of the Soviet Interior Ministry and taught criminal policy and law at the Russian Interior Ministry Academy from 1993 to 2000. He withdrew from the race for Chechnya's presidency in October 2003 to take the Kremlin position. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |