The following paragraph from the WP catches the flavor of the mainstream media’s entire take on the North Caucasus: “(Estemirova) was a meticulous researcher, but she was also fierce in her determination not to submit to the fiction, so ardently purveyed by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his circle, that Chechnya is quiet and that the problem there has been solved. It has not. House burnings have become a frequent form of collective punishment by local authorities, with at least two dozen incidents in the past year and a half. Suspected militants and collaborators, their relatives and any other perceived enemy of the regime can be tortured, abducted and assassinated” (Tanya Lokshina, “Another Voice Silenced in Russia,” Washington Post, July 17, 2009).
Commentary:
To be sure, Estimirova's life work was courageous and her death despicable, but it is far from the only or even the most urgent PROBLEM in the North Caucasus. THE MAIN PROBLEM IS THE underground network of jihadi terrorists CALLING ITSELF THE 'CAUCASUS EMIRATE.' In 2008, the mujahedin of the self-proclaimed "Caucasus Emirate" committed on average of one terrorist attack per day, killing approximately 410 and wounding approximately 440 federal and local police, military, security, and civilian officials and servicemen. Jihadi attacks also killed 36 and wounded 55 civilians. This year's pace of attacks is set to exceed 2008's levels. 2009 has also seen a revival of the notorious terrorist sub-unit, the Riyadis Salikhin, created by the infamous Shamil Basaev, and a return to suicide bombings that Basaev and the Salikhin specialized in. But you will
>not read, hear about, or see this in the Western mainstream media.
The mainstream media has not run one feature or editorial respectively highlighting or condemning Russia’s Caucasus jihadists’ reign of terror. Instead, the media focus exclusively on violence that may or may not have been committed by ‘state actors’, in particular, those of Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov. To be sure, Mr. Kadyrov and his local allies are no gentlemen and have likely had a hand in some of the high profile murders of journalists and human rights activists in Chechnya and Moscow. However, it is not consistent with journalistic standards to jump to conclusions about the perpetrators of an act one day after, without evidence, and without presenting at least in passing the alternative scenarios. Moreover, it requires a shockingly flexible stretch of the imagination to believe that Moscow and local authorities have been responsible for more deaths in the region than the jihadists, who since the early 2000s have killed and wounded many thousands and perhaps as many as ten thousand people.
The scale of the one-sidedness of the U.S. mainstream media appears to be something much worse than journalistic malpractice; it constitutes a deliberate and ideologically-driven propaganda campaign by an independent but perversely biased media complex.
Those who would be quick to condemn then president Vladimir Putin and present President Dmitrii Medvedev for supporting the Kadyrov clan would do well to take into account several factors.
First, in its global war with international jihadism, the U.S. has had to ally with very nasty characters. For example, in order to stabilize Iraq, U.S. forces allied not only with tribal leaders but groups that had formally committed atrocities against Iraqi civilians and even U.S. troops and are only slightly less extremist than Al Qaeda in Iraq. The same is now true for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Second, since Russia is dealing with an Islamist threat that is more internally than externally-driven, there is an even greater imperative to get into bed with unsavory characters.
Third, culture and life in the Caucasus traditionally has been contentious and violent. The Caucasus is a region of numerous mutually antagonistic clans and ethnic groups saturated with a mountain-warrior culture with deeply rooted traditions that include blood revenge, honor killings, brutal violence, bride stealing, etc. In short, there are very few good guys in the North Caucasus – and few if any of those would refrain from violent infighting or even pretend to be able to get a hold over the situation there.
Consequently, Moscow is faced with the choice of either siding with unsavory elements or letting the region descend into absolute chaos, civil war, separatism, and a stronghold for local and perhaps international jihadists.
Instead of covering the complexity and dark side of what are the Caucasus and its jihad, the U.S. and Western mainstream media focus exclusively on the state’s inevitable human rights violations in the region, blaming them exclusively on Moscow and its local allies.
In June when a suicide car bombing nearly killed one of Moscow’s local allies, president of the North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia Yunus Bek Yevkurov, the incident (and thousands more like it after the Beslan school massacre in September 2004) was either ignored or discussed as evidence that non-jihadi violence is the key to understanding terrorism in the Caucasus! (See for example the article published in the Wall Street Journal’s and Financial Times’ joint Russian-language project Vedomosti “Chelovek nedelu - Yunus-Bek Yekurov,” Vedomosti, 29 June 2009, p. A4) This was stated or subtly implied despite the fact that the jihadis openly declared their intent to kill such officials, have killed such officials, claimed responsibility for the attack, and celebrated the attack on its websites. Federal and local investigators have largely concluded that the Ingush mujahedin of Caucasus Emirate were behind the attack. The military amir of the Caucasus Emirate is the ethnic Ingush ‘Magas’ (aka Akhmed Yevloev), and Ingushetia has been the center of gravity of jihadi operations for more than two years. President Yevkurov, in contrast to his predecessor, has been aggressive in courting the opposition, human rights activists, and civil society overall.
Rather than confront the complex and obvious, U.S. and Western mainstream media use vague phrases to refer to but essentially hide the jihad in the North Caucasus. For example, when they are mentioned at all, the Caucasus mujahedin are referred to as alleged rebels, militants, military groups or as in the New York Times editors’ recent formulation: “suspected anti-Kadyrov insurgents”! (“Slain for Daring to Report,” New York Times, July 17, 2009) We should be clear: the said ‘anti-Kadyrov insurgents’ are opposed to much more than president Kadurov. But no one in the West knows that because the U.S. mainstream media and various political analysts have denied or covered up their explicitly jihadist ideology, their alliance with global jihadists like Al Qaeda, and their record of terrorism and murder, even after Beslan in September 2004!
The U.S. mainstream media is careful to delete the jihadists from the North Caucasus story. On this score, The Economist deserves some credit for being the first to give at least a brief one-paragraph overview of the Ingush mujahedin. It even noted that “the rebels” used a suicide bomber to kill Ingushetia president Yevkurov. Not much, but a first for a Western mainstream media outlet, and a real scream in the dark compared to the deadly silence in the rest of the U.S. mainstream media. True, the assassination attempt was reported nearly a full month after the fact, and who the “rebels” are and what they are rebelling for or against went unmentioned as usual. The Economist too has yet to mention even in passing the Caucasus Emirate and its amir Doka Abu Usman Umarov to whom the Ingush mujahedin it briefly mentioned are loyal. But the NYT, WP, and WSJ continue to omit the North Caucasus jihadists from the picture completely.
Western and U.S. mainstream media repeatedly report any real or alleged increase in kidnappings, murders, repressions of suspected jihadists and their families, but they never report on the increase in the number of jihadi terrorist attacks. The fact is that the number of jihadi terrorist attacks has increased continuously since 2006; this year in particular. As I predicted in early May, this summer has seen an explosion of jihadi terrorism that has been left uncovered in the Western and U.S. mainstream media (Gordon M. Hahn, “Russia’s Counter-Terrorism Operation in Chechnya Ends – the Jihadi Insurgency Continues,” Russia – Other Points of View, 11 May 2009, www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2009/05/russias-counterterrorism-operation-in-chechnya.html).
Thus, the Western media bias is simply a mirror opposite reflection of Russian media bias. As The Economist noted: “Ms Estemirova’s murder topped the headlines of foreign television networks, but was mentioned only in passing by Russian channels, despite a prompt condemnation from Mr Medvedev.” Similarly, the attack on Ingushetia President Yevkurov and even aspects of the resurgent jihad topped Russian headlines but was mentioned only in passing by Western media (“A mountain of troubles,” The Economist, July 18-24, 2009). Any mention downplayed or ignored the likely jihadi origins of the attack.
The New York Times jumped on the Estemirova murder but ignored the assassination attempt on Yevkurov. In its editorial condemning the cruel murder of the journalist and calling for the removal of Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov, Yevkurov’s replacement of former Ingushetia president Murat Zyazikov was mentioned as a model, but the suicide-bomb assassination attempt on Yevkurov that left two dead and the Ingush president gravely wounded was left unmentioned (“Slain for Daring to Report,” New York Times, July 17, 2009). Only state actors, especially Putin’s ostensible enemies, are mourned in the slanted world of the U.S. mainstream media. The NYT called for justice in Russia, failing to understand that a low intensity civil war and jihad are occurring in the North Caucasus simultaneously, driven by traditions, separatism, and most of all by the new age of global jihadism. In such conditions, justice is much easier to pontificate about than to achieve.
One alternative
explanation of attacks on activists and journalists like Estemirova is that the
jihadists themselves have carried out some of them, precisely because they know
the Western media and the most radical Russian liberals will immediately blame
Kadyrov and/or Putin. But this
possibility could never be mentioned in the Western mainstream media because
for them the Caucasus Emirate and its cadre of zealous jihadists do not exist.
In an unbiased media universe, stories like the Estemirova murder and the Caucasus jihadis would get much more equal coverage. This begs the question: If the Western media is free and independent and the Russian media is state-owned, why is the level of bias on both sides not so very different? This would be the subject of media dissertation and cannot be addressed here.
Writing in the Washington
Post,
Tatyana Lokshina wrote: “We Russians have a saying, ‘The dogs bark, and the
caravan moves on.’ Europe and the United States have found it convenient to let
Chechnya slip off the agenda in their meetings with Russian policymakers. The
dogs are barking” (Tanya Lokshina, “Another Voice Silenced in Russia,” Washington
Post,
July 17, 2009). Let the dogs bark
and Chechnya be put back on the West’s agenda, but let the dogs bark about the
whole complex of issues and not just those facing Chechnya but the entire North
Caucasus - first and foremost, the jihadi threat.
There was a moment there when (some in) the West understood.
"For our part, we now understand that Russia's warnings about the dangers of terrorism have not just been motivated by the need to dispel Western criticism of the Chechnya campaign.
We may disagree on the means Russia has chosen in the handling of that conflict... But we have certainly come to see the scourge of terrorism in Chechnya with different eyes."
(“A New Quality in the NATO-Russia Relationship” Speech by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson at the Diplomatic Academy, Moscow, 22 Nov 2001, http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2001/s011122a.htm).
But that understanding seems to have disappeared somewhere.
Posted by: Patrick Armstrong | July 30, 2009 at 02:34 PM