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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Chechnya becoming Russia's nightmare as violence spreads across Caucasus |
| 2005-12-03 |
| The film is shaky, its pixillated frames jarring as it scans across the contents of the makeshift morgue. A leg, a dark mound of pubic hair, a heavily burned head, a broad chest that must for years have seemed invulnerable. About 60 bodies are heaped without decency or clothing on the floor of the refrigerated wagon, their blank faces caught by the mobile phone's camera. "It looks like something from Treblinka," says Raya, whose son Vyacheslav, 30, a former Russian special forces soldier, lies among the dead. "I looked for him for a week before I found him there." Yet the authorities say these are not the bodies of victims but of "terrorists", some of at least 92 men shot dead by special forces when they staged one of the biggest uprisings in Russia since the second Chechen war in 1999. On October 13, about 200 men in the sleepy southern spa town of Nalchik staged simultaneously eight armed attacks on police stations, the headquarters of the security and prison services. The attacks failed spectacularly. Groups of about eight to 10 men, many from the town's educated, young middle classes, appeared hopelessly ill-trained to face Russia's souped-up special forces. One witness who watched the storming of the security services building recalls hearing them shouting frantically at each other: "How do you reload a grenade launcher?" Officials say that the attacks began when police unearthed an arms dump meant to supply a larger uprising in early November, and the militants decided to go for broke, summoned by just a phone call from the underground Islamic groups that they had joined. Police responded with brutal efficiency and the insurgency was over within hours. In total, officials said, 33 police and 12 civilians died, far fewer casualties than after previous attacks by Islamic militants in the region. But the violence had one undeniable consequence: Russia had lost the control and the cooperation of yet another town in the troubled north Caucasus. In mid-2002, when I first came to the region, extremist and separatist violence was limited to the grey ruins of Chechnya, crippled by two separatist wars in the 90s. But by 2003, the violence had begun to spread to neighbouring Ingushetia, then further west to the tiny town of Beslan in September last year. By the end of this year, months of violence in Dagestan, to Chechnya's east, and the Nalchik attacks in the previously dozy republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, proved conclusively that the Kremlin had failed to keep a lid on the violent radicalisation of an entire region. Moscow may blame foreign fundamentalism for infecting its southern flank, but it is clear that Europe now has its own indigenous Islamist movement with militant teeth, what one analyst close to the Putin administration has called a "Russian Hamas". Extremists within the movement advocate establishing by force an Islamist caliphate across the north Caucasus. Last Sunday, Russia attempted to complete the political solution it has imposed on the republic by holding parliamentary elections, a final bid to convince the outside world that the conflict is ebbing rather than intensifying. Ahead of the vote, I travelled from Nalchik in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria through five other republics to see how and why Islamic radicalism began to captivate the north Caucasus. The bodies of the dead of Nalchik will not be returned to their relatives. Russian anti-terrorist laws forbid it, but critics say the move is designed to thwart the Muslim imperative to bury the dead within 24 hours. Raya's son Vyacheslav had wanted to be a policeman when he left the elite Russian special forces. "He tried to join, but I did not have the money to pay the bribe needed to get a job there," she says. "Nobody needs people like him, who don't smoke, drink or pay bribes. All he wanted to do was live cleanly and honestly." She says her son joined a local "jamaat", or council, a strict Islamic group which claims to offer an alternative system of justice to the corruption of the local authorities. Raya's membership of the jamaat and regular attendance at a mosque attracted the attention of the local police, says his mother. He was arrested twice, she says, once as he left prayer. "They beat him, once on the kidneys so badly that he could not work [as a builder] for a week. After you go through that, you are ready to do anything." Tales of police abuse are echoed by others. Fatima Mamayeva's husband, Timur, is now on a police wanted list for suspected involvement in the uprising; earlier this year, he was arrested and heavily beaten four times. "They put a plastic bag over his head to partially suffocate him." She says police recently joked to her that she will have to take revenge as a "shakhidka", or female suicide bomber. Another suspect is Rasul Kudayev, a former wrestling champion whom the Russian authorities cite as proof of the international connection to the militants. Kudayev was arrested in Afghanistan by US troops in 2001 and held in Guantánamo Bay. In May 2004, he returned home to Nalchik, telling his family he had been given mysterious coloured pills and subjected to extreme temperatures, irritant gels and stress positions. He told them that local police continued to harass him for months and then accused him of attacking a police checkpoint on October 13. They arrested him 10 days later. His lawyer, Irina Komissarova, says that when she saw him on October 26 he had to be carried into the room and had clearly been beaten. One woman, Ira, had two sons who died in the arrests, Rustam, 25, and Ansur, 21. She says they were both graduates with no history of arrest. "If they are guilty, then they are guilty, but how can they be terrorists? They attacked government buildings and police." The mobile phone film of the morgue is circulating, and fuelling their anger. "What do you think is going to happen next if we can't get the bodies?" says Rustam, hinting at further insurrection. "What would you want to do?" Moscow's bid to master the predominantly Muslim Caucasus is a centuries-old and turbulent enterprise, born in tsarist times of an imperial need to "civilise" a neighbouring people. But since the fall of the proudly secular Soviet Union, corrupt local government and intense poverty have been the catalyst of an Islamic revival in the north Caucasus. The Kremlin has often played down social decline in this tinderbox region. But in June this year, Putin's envoy to the north Caucasus, Dmitri Kozak, wrote a report for his boss that said intense local corruption, unemployment and police abuses were bolstering the role "extremist groups" and "Sharia enclaves" were playing in the region. Poverty hasn't helped; over the past three years, the United Nations Development Programme in Moscow has noted, living standards have risen across Russia but remained the same in the north Caucasus. In this climate, anger has grown, and the response from Moscow has been brutal, the practical application of Putin's famous promise to "kill the terrorists in the outhouse". All of which has made the Islamist alternative appear more attractive. Rasul is a senior figure in the Kabardino-Balkaria jamaat. Young, well shaven and liberally doused in aftershave, Rasul is the only one of three deputies to the jamaat's head - a fugitive ideologist called Musa Mukhozhev - who is not on the run or believed to be dead. Rasul spent three and a half years at a retreat in Saudi Arabia, where he learned Arabic. His jamaat, which forms smaller deputy councils in each village, requires that its members go to the mosque as often as possible to pray. "The jamaat is never supposed to do anything against the local government," he says. "We go to the local administration and say that we have a group of young, physically fit volunteers who are ready to help people with any problem." He says the groups, which are often led by a young man rather than a village elder, follow a contemporary take on sharia law that bans drinking and frowns upon smoking and premarital sex. Suspected criminals are called to make amends before their peers and are threatened with expulsion from the jamaat, he says. Would the group ever use violence to further its ends? "Yes. When we have to." Rasul blames the Nalchik attacks on a months-long crackdown by police against suspected radicals. "They started arresting the youth in the villages," he says. "They were shaving crosses in their heads." He says many were tortured: a 28-year-old had a bottle inserted in his rectum and had to go to hospital to have it removed; people were battered on the kidneys; fingers were slammed in doors. A spokeswoman for the Kabardino-Balkaria police denied all accusations of torture and said such "rumours" are distributed by those interested in "destabilising the republic". Rasul says most participants in the October 13 violence were "well connected" to local jamaats. "There is not one person who took part in that who was not beaten by the police," he claims. "If the torture continues then it [the conflict] will become more radical. If they keep beating our sisters and parking armoured personnel carriers near our houses, then the 4,800 men left in the jamaats will not listen to Musa [Mukhozhev, their leader]. They will not listen to anyone." A lockdown now chokes Nalchik. Thousands of Russian troops, drafted in from across Russia's south, stand on street corners and sleep in school gyms, where six-year-olds now go to school next to men with AK47s. One senior Russian ministry of interior officer says: "Chechnya is now in the 10th stage [of insurgency]. They are getting cleverer and cleverer. But this place is in stage one. We have to take hardcore measures; it will die down and we can go home." To reach Chechnya, I have to pass through the republics of North Ossetia and Ingushetia. The former is home to Beslan, where at least 32 gunmen held a school hostage last September, killing 331, roughly half of whom were children. In 2002, the United Nations rated Ingushetia as the second worst place to live in Russia (after the remote republic of Tyva, just north of Mongolia). Since then it has also begun to resemble a conflict zone. In June last year, militants took over the capital Nazran for a night, killing up to 100 local police. Chechnya's own capital, Grozny, is a city ground down to a dusty despair. When I arrived, prior to the elections on Sunday, it was under a deep fog. The vote marked an almost surreal attempt to impose some common ground on the warring factions among Chechen society, whose internecine violence is proving such a powerful recruiting tool for Islamic militants. The pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, won nearly two-thirds of the votes, amid widespread accusations of serious electoral fraud. In March 2003, the Kremlin handed over control of Chechnya to a loyal group of Chechens headed by the mayor of Grozny, Akhmed Kadyrov. Installed as president in October that year, he and his son Ramzan, 28, began buying up an impressive army of former militants and mercenaries that became known as the "Kadyrovtsi" - Kadyrov's people. The Kremlin gave these pro-Russian Chechens the task of suppressing fellow Chechen separatists and militants, thus turning Chechen against Chechen. The Kadyrovtsi, who quickly earned the Russian military's brutal reputation, have gradually become the republic's new caretakers. There are now four main groupings among the pro-Russian Chechens, some more orderly than others. On June 4, a unit from one of the battalions carried out an operation on the border between Chechnya and Dagestan. Just after 4pm, 300 masked troops burst into the village of Borozdinovskaya and, in an uncomfortable echo of the Beslan massacre, herded its men into the school, where they were held, say witnesses, for nine hours. Eleven men were led away and have not been heard of since. It's a familiar equation, one that Zerem, a senior commander in another unit, says makes the militants even more popular. "All the time we are bickering among ourselves, they get stronger and stronger," he says, pointing to a region on a map of Chechnya on the wall of his Grozny office. With his finger he draws an oval around four villages in the south: the volatile Vedeno and Nozhai-Yurt regions. In this region, Zerem says, the militant leader Doha Umarov commands 200 men out of a scattered force of about 3,000 Islamic militants. Zerem says this year eight men have left his home village to join the Islamists. "The militants are agitating very strongly right now. They have a recruiter in every village. The government is paying no attention to the youth at the moment, and if someone is beaten, let's say by federal troops, he will join the militants to take revenge." High in the hills of the mountains above the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala, about four hours' drive from Grozny, is the village of Ghimri. A ramshackle tunnel bores through the mountains for the last three miles, leading out on to what seems like a different country, the green star and crescent flags of Islam peppering the unrefined beauty of the landscape. The local school teaches Arabic, women cover their hair, arms and legs, and in rare cases, their faces. When someone was last caught drinking two years ago, they got 40 lashes. Local criminals are asked to repent before their peers at the local mosque. Most residents claim the village adheres to some form of sharia law; whether it adheres to Russian law is open to question. In May three men shot dead a local police chief who was trying to stop them blowing up the tunnel to the village. They hid in Ghimri, the village refused to give them up and the police dared not enter. Outside the mosque, Magomed-Ali, 17, says: "We have sharia here. Theft does not occur. People do not drink. Some smoke, but only a bit." The town has its own jamaat that works alongside (some say above) the local administration. Habib, 27, moved here after finishing his Islamic studies in Syria in 2001. "Each person has their own path and we have ours here," he says. "You know the situation. Our youth talk about jihad. I have my children, my family and we all fulfil what we can of our Islamic obligations." Habib expresses concern that the federal authorities might move to reassert secular control over the village. "Who wants their home destroyed?" he asks. He is right to be concerned. The town of Karamakhi , a mucky cabbage plantation a few hours drive from Ghimri, renounced Russian rule and declared itself under sharia law in 1998. By September the next year, Putin's military had removed many of the roofs from the village's houses, leaving its 5,000 residents to live among the ruins. According to Ibadullah Mukayev, now the head of the local administration, at least 50 residents were killed. "People saw how bad it was," says Mukayev, "what happened to their homes. If you go against Russia, where do you go?" But Dagestan retains active, extremist local jamaats. Explosions and gunfights have claimed the lives of police and militants almost every second day since January. In Makhachkala, I am given a propaganda video made by local young "mujahideen" by a militant sympathiser who gives his name only as Abdul. The son of a well-known Islamic ideologist in the region, he begins the now familiar justification. He was himself tortured by the police two years ago, he says. "They picked me up off the street, and knew who I was. They beat me with telephone cables, batons. They put a gas mask on my head and beat my chest. I weighed 70 kilograms when I went in, and 47 when I came out two months later." He lists other torture methods he has heard of: objects violently inserted into the anus, women and children raped in front of male relatives. The Dagestani police deny all allegations of torture. Like Rasul in Nalchik, Abdul is a meek young man reeking of aftershave. Yet his rhetoric becomes less gentle when he speaks of what should follow. "The reaction of any man to this is to take up arms and get revenge. The jamaat provides a focus for the soul, and our members are not the unemployed or discontented, but the educated and middle class. We have lost 40 Dagestani members of the jamaat so far this year against the police. The aim of the jamaat is to create a united Islamic caliphate in the north Caucasus and live as is written in the Koran. Will the fight be difficult? Yes. It is written that it should be." Civilian casualties are an "unintentional consequence" of jihad, he says. As we pass a checkpoint, he winds up the window between him and the police officer outside and continues with an ominous confidence. "No part of this jamaat is underground. We can all go where we want, rent a flat, raise a family, travel to Moscow." He mocks police incompetence: "They do not know who we are." Then he shakes my hand in parting, courteous and demure. "Assalam alaikum," he says. Peace be with you. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #11 I like the line: "How do you reload a grenade launcher?" I detect an individual who hasn't bothered to comtemplate Plan "B." |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2005-12-03 14:41 |
| #10 No pig parts, offal and blood? Sounds like the Russians are treating them better then Gen Pershing would have. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2005-12-03 10:31 |
| #9 Of course Islam can be reformed by its adherents. They just need to find a reason to do so, just as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc have modified their understanding of their own history and religious tenets through the centuries. A catastrophic defeat of the forces of Islamofascism would certainly provide impetus in the anti-jihadist direction. Destruction of the current secular Arab regimes would equally help guide Islamic thought into a more desirable path, as those current Arab regimes that proclaim themselves "secular" are simply Arab fascist as opposed to Muslim fascist. Ataturk's Turkey appears thus far to have been the only truly secular Muslim state which subjected itself to the rule of law and to democratic principles... and unfortunately that appears to be eroding more quickly than the secularists should be comfortable with under the current government. Long term I imagine Jihadist Islam will have gone the way of World Communism and National Socialism; thus far, however, the process hasn't been nearly as painful as it is going to become in order to achieve the necessary understanding amongst Islam's noisier adherents. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-12-03 09:38 |
| #8 And yet the Russians can not make the mental link between Iran and these islamic terrorists. Just keep the Iranians happy with more deals, that's the ticket. Wasn't it Lenin who said a capitalist is one who will sale you the rope you hang them with? |
| Posted by: Hupeasing Ebback2494 2005-12-03 08:48 |
| #7 Where do u live Cazifarcus, Birmingham? |
| Posted by: Nockeys Nilsworth 2005-12-03 08:48 |
| #6 Mucky has cabbage plantations? Makes sense. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-12-03 08:46 |
| #5 The bodies of the dead of Nalchik will not be returned to their relatives. Russian anti-terrorist laws forbid it, This sounds like a wonderful idea, destroy one of the basic concepts of the Muslim terror idea, that you do NOT get to paradise when you get killed. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2005-12-03 08:24 |
| #4 For the life of me I can't understand why the Russ bother with these peculiars. The town of Karamakhi , a mucky cabbage plantation a few hours drive from Ghimri, I've seen Dilbert parachute into this joint. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-12-03 08:08 |
| #3 Everywhere on the face of this earth - including my own neighborhood - Muslim pigs are embracing the genocidal jihad ideology of the Islamofascist. Islam can't reform, and its danger to Civilization can only be heightened as those animals breed themselves in majority positions. Why? Because our leaders chose to subsidize, through limited war folly (Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq) and forced recognition of political Islam by the few remnants of Secularism in the Middle East, the legitimation of Islamofascism in the name of expanding some moron's notion of "freedom." Our leaders should want the mortal enemy to die; they prefer to let them vote. |
| Posted by: CaziFarkus 2005-12-03 06:08 |
| #2 The Guardian is spreading its muck again. In summary: they did it, the Russian spcecial forces guys killed them while they were doing it, and the families are upset that as a consequence the bodies of the dead are heaped naked somewhere, and won't be given back for a proper Muslim burial. Oh yes, and by their actions the Russians lost the sympathy of those involved in the attacks and their relatives. Had they only not fought back, and certainly not kept the bodies of the dead, the locals would still love being ruled by Mother Russia. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-12-03 02:19 |
| #1 High in the hills of the mountains above the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala, about four hours' drive from Grozny, is the village of Ghimri. A ramshackle tunnel bores through the mountains for the last three miles, leading out on to what seems like a different country, Picture yourself in a boat on a river, With tangerine trees and marmalade skies Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, A girl with Al Ruterscope eyes. Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, Towering over your head. Look for the shakhidka with the sun in her eyes, And she’s gone. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-12-03 02:16 |