THE WASHINGTON POST CONTINUES TO DISTORT THE NORTH CAUCASUS

COMMENTARY

 by Gordon Hahn

The Washington Post once again distorts reality in Russia’s North Caucasus. The Post’s (and U.S. mainstream media’s) malpractice of covering the North Caucasus only within the context of Russian human rights violations continues (see “Russia's political murders - When was the last time that killings of human rights activists were so blatant, and so common?,” Washington Post, 29 August 2009).  At first glance Philip Pan’s October 30^th article “In Russia, an intensifying insurgency” seemed a turn for the better.  However, a close reading reveals conformity with the biased approach.

To be sure, Pan mentioned the region’s jihadi terrorist organization the ‘Caucasus Emirate’ (CE) – a structure, which unites about one thousand rabid jihadi fighters plus thousands of fellow travelers.  Capable of projecting power farther afield, the CE is active not only in Chechnya but also in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and especially in Ingushetia (the jihad’s center of gravity for more than two years).  This is the Post’s first mention of the Caucasus Emirate – nearly two years after its creation.  During that period, CE jihadists carried out over a thousand attacks and violent incidents, killing over a thousand and wounding over a thousand more federal and local military, security, and police personnel as well as civilians.  Except for the occasional spectacular high profile terrorist attack such as the 2004 Beslan school hostage-taking and massacre, the Post maintained a similar silence about the jihadi terrorism of the CE’s predecessor organization, the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which from 1998 was increasingly dominated and run by jihadists.  The U.S. mainstream media emphasized primarily the Russians’ mistakes, corruption, and theories of possible collusion rather than the jihadists’ violent history, cruelty and ideology.

Despite this level of bloodletting and the fact that the CE’s declared jihad against the U.S., Israel and the larger West, the Post ignored the Caucasus Emirate and still refuses to feature it in a detailed report.  Pan’s article was a perfunctory report that got some facts wrong, used Western sources with no expertise in the CE, and emphasized not the CE’s violence but rather the federal and local law enforcement’s violations of human rights.

Pan writes of “a brief calm following two wars” in Chechnya.  One wonders what ‘brief calm’ he could be thinking of.  The conventional war petered out in 2002, when Russian forces defeated the ChRI’s forces on the conventional battlefield.  In October 2002 there was the horrendous Dubrovka theatre-hostage taking among other terrorist attacks.  The only reason for the ‘relative calm’ (calm as compared to all-out war) was the Chechen rebel’s need to regroup into an unconventional insurgency. This was accompanied by a summer 2002 Shura or war council, which jihadized the ChRI’s constitution. It required that all of ‘national separatist’ leader President Aslan Maskhadov’s decisions be in compliance with the Koran and the Sunna as determined by a Shariah judge and designated successor Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev.  In 2003 there was a spate of suicide bombings in Moscow and Chechnya among other types of insurgent warfare-style attacks.  In 2004, Beslan occurred among other attacks.  In 2005 there was over 300 attacks in the North Caucasus with a slight decline in 2006.  In 2007 the number of operations reached 2005’s level, and the jihad shifted its focus to Ingushetia.  In 2008 there were 372 attacks in the North Caucasus, and this year the same number of attacks was reached on September 1^st, with the CE set to reach 500 attacks carried out by year’s end.  

Pan cites a study by the CSIS Human Rights and Security Initiative to claim that 519 “people were killed in rebel attacks and clashes with government forces from May to September, up from 299 during the same period last year” in the North Caucasus.  Here Pan is inaccurate.  The study’s graph shows 450 killed in 2009 and 149 in 2008.  The study does not differentiate between casualties resulting from 1) jihadi attacks and 2) those resulting from state forces’ counter-terrorist operations.  “Violent incidents” are lumped together to include both “rebel” attacks and police and military operations. The  study also does not use the jihadists’ sites which allow one to distinguish better between mujahedin attacks, security operations, and criminal and inter-clan violence.  The study’s author Sarah Mendelsohn inadvertently revealed perhaps the reason for this approach in an article in which she blamed jihadi violence on only those factors for which the Russians could be held responsible (see Sarah Mendelsohn, “(Un)civil Society in the North Caucasus,” Foreignpolicy.com, August 12, 2009, www.foreignpolicy.com).  The violent customs of the Caucasus, Islamic radicalism and jihadist ideology go unmentioned. 

In this way, all the violence, including that of the jihadists, can be laid at the Kremlin’s door.  According to this one-sided view, Moscow’s brutality creates a backlash; therefore, it is to blame not only for its operations and those of local allies like Kadyrov, but also for all of the jihadists’ attacks as well.  Such an approach alleviates the authors from subjecting themselves to the inconvenient truth they would face in perusing the jihadi websites and from attempting to distinguish jihadi attacks from inter-clan and intra-“mafia” violence.  After the present author criticized this approach, the CSIS study comparing violent incidents in the summers of 2008 and 2009 was removed from its website (see Gordon M. Hahn, “Uncivil Jihad in Russia’s ‘Caucasus Emirate’,” Russia – Other Points of View, 28 August 2009 ; for a copy of the report once at http://csis.org/publication/49-steps-improve-human-rights-and-security-north-caucasus contact gordon.hahn@miis.edu).  One hopes for a revision. 

My own count uses both jihadi and non-jihadi sources and covers the republics and the period from May 1^st to Aug 31^st, 2009 covered by the CSIS study.  It shows 311 jihad-related violent incidents (the overwhelming majority were attacks initiated by mujahedin) that left approximately 242 killed (223 state officials and servicemen and 19 civilians) and 511 wounded, the overwhelming majority being state officials and servicemen.

In discussing the CE jihad’s new rising star, Said Abu Saad Buryatskii, numerous quotes in effect praise Buryatskii as loved by Ingush youth, excluding the nuance that this is only so among the radical Islamic elements of Ingushetia’s young Muslims.  One source is cited claiming Buryatskii is no worse than Russian federal and local Caucasus authorities.  Since Buryatskii’s activities are not detailed (like those of the authorities’ are in this article and numerous other U.S. mainstream media) and the love of the young Ingush is not parsed, readers are led to believe a moral equivalence.  Certainly one is free to come to that conclusion, but one should not do so without examining all the facts.  This presumably should be the function of the media; alas, it is not any longer.

Finally, Pan notes that “recruits are often young men seeking revenge for relatives who have been killed by the authorities.”  Of course, the author has no yardstick with which to assert that this occurs “often.”  Moreover, the most important CE recruit in recent years, Buryatskii himself, did not live in the Caucasus and experienced no relatives being killed.  Rather, he converted to Islam, traveled to Egypt and Kuwait to study with Islamic scholars and returned an Islamist ready to ‘go to the forest’ and jihad – another word that does not appear in Pan’s article, the CSIS report and the bulk of the politically correct American mass media and think tank milieu.

ARTICLE IN QUESTION:

Washington Post

October 30, 2009

In Russia, an intensifying insurgency - Under crackdown, Chechen separatism turns into a regional Islamist revolt

PHILIP P. PAN

SUNZHENSKY, RUSSIA -- Her face wet with tears and framed by a black shawl, Madina Albakova sat in her ransacked living room and described how she had become another teenage widow here in Ingushetia, the most volatile of Russia’s Muslim republics.

The details emerged between sobs: the arrival of the security forces earlier in the day, her husband's panicked attempt to flee, the gunfire that erupted without warning. He was a law student, barely 20 and "so beautiful," she said, but the soldiers planted a rifle next to his body and called him an Islamist rebel. Then they took everything of value -- the family's savings, a set of dishes, even baby clothes, she said.

Such heavy-handed tactics by the Russian security forces have helped transform the long-running separatist rebellion in Chechnya, east of Ingushetia, into something potentially worse: a radical Muslim insurgency that has spread across the region, draws support from various ethnic groups and appears to be gaining strength.

Moscow declared an end to military operations in Chechnya in April, a decade after then-President Vladimir Putin sent troops into the breakaway republic. But violence has surged in the mountains of Russia's southwest frontier since then, with the assassination of several officials, explosions and shootouts occurring almost daily, and suicide bombings making a comeback after a long lull. On Sunday, a popular Ingush opposition leader was fatally shot, months after the slaying of Chechnya's most prominent human rights activist.

The insurgency is a key reason Russia has been reluctant to support sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program; diplomats say the Kremlin is worried Tehran might retaliate by setting aside sectarian differences and backing the rebels in Muslim solidarity. Washington, meanwhile, is concerned that the area is becoming a recruiting ground for militias in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At least 519 people were killed in rebel attacks and clashes with government forces from May to September, up from 299 during the same period last year, according to a study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. The fighting is concentrated in the largely Muslim eastern part of the North Caucasus, an area the size of Oregon with 14 million people from as many as 50 ethnic groups.

After a brief calm following two wars, militant attacks have spiked in Chechnya, as well as in nearby Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria. But the violence has been worst in Ingushetia, the smallest and poorest of Russia's provinces, where rebels and security forces compete in brutality and even rights activists carry guns.

A few hours after the soldiers killed Albakova's husband, Movsar Merzhoyev, in this rural district on Oct. 9, a car bomb exploded several miles away in what appeared to be a failed suicide attack. Over the next week, gun battles here left 11 suspected militants and three police officers dead.

Ingushetia has been on edge since June, when a suicide bomber hit the convoy of the republic's president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, putting him in a coma and killing three bodyguards. Two months later, as Yevkurov was returning to work, another suicide attack leveled the police department of Ingushetia's largest city, Nazran, killing at least 24 people and injuring 200 others.

Russia has long blamed violence in the region on Muslim extremists backed by foreign governments and terrorist networks, but radical Islam is relatively new here. In the 1990s, it was ethnic nationalism, not religious fervor, that motivated Chechen separatists. That changed, though, as fighting spilled beyond Chechnya and Russian forces used harsher tactics targeting devout Muslims.

In 2007, the rebel leader Doku Umarov abandoned the goal of Chechen independence and declared jihad instead, vowing to establish a fundamentalist Caucasus Emirate that would span the entire region. After Moscow proclaimed victory in Chechnya in April, he issued a video labeling civilians legitimate targets and reviving Riyad-us Saliheen, the self-described martyrs' brigade that launched terrorist attacks across Russia from 2002 to 2006.

A major figure in the recent violence is Alexander Tikhomirov, a young preacher known here as Sayid Buryatsky who joined the rebels last year after converting to Islam in his native Siberia and studying in Egypt.

Tikhomirov, thought to be in his late 20s, has become the new face of the insurgency and appeared in videos claiming a role in the Yevkurov assassination attempt and the police station bombing. The latter showed him sitting with a barrel of explosives in the truck purportedly used in the attack.

Tikhomirov's fluent Russian and religious training set him apart from other rebel leaders, and he appears to be playing a key role in uniting loosely linked ethnic and local factions under the banner of the Caucasus Emirate, said Grigory Shvedov, editor of the Caucasian Knot, a Web site that reports on the region.

"He's exactly what they needed," Shvedov said, arguing that Tikhomirov's status as an outsider and his unusual heritage -- half-Russian and half-Buryat, a Buddhist minority -- have made him a powerful symbol for the movement.

In a sign of Tikhomirov's rising profile, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin's strongman in Chechnya and the most powerful politician in the region, has disparaged his Muslim credentials and accused him of using drugs to brainwash recruits. Kadyrov's forces appear to be gunning for him, too. In August, soldiers at a checkpoint shot and killed a Russian police officer they mistook for him.

Tikhomirov's sermons on the Internet have resonated in Ingushetia, where unemployment is as high as 75 percent, corruption is rampant and the young see few chances to improve their lives. He has also tapped into anger against the security forces, who are widely thought to engage in abductions, torture and killings.

Even leaders of the moderate opposition have expressed admiration for Tikhomirov, who mixes passages of the Koran with jabs at Putin and Kadyrov.

"He has charmed so many young hearts. The youths of Ingushetia just love him. . . . At least somebody is pushing back against Kadyrov and his men," said Maksharip Aushev, a prominent Ingush businessman and opposition figure, who argued this month that Tikhomirov was no worse than security officers engaged in "state terrorism."

Though he opposed the Caucasus Emirate, Aushev said that most Ingush believe they would be better off living under Islamic law than with the government's excesses, and that many of the rebels had been "forced into terrorism" by the abuses of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB.

Such criticism of the authorities, he added, made him a target. On Sunday, two weeks after welcoming journalists to a son's wedding and foiling an attempt to abduct some of them from a local hotel, Aushev was gunned down in his car on a major highway.

When Ingush join the rebels, locals say they have "gone to live in the woods." Timur Akiyev of the human rights group Memorial said the recruits are often young men seeking revenge for relatives who have been killed by the authorities. Police make matters worse, he added, by targeting Muslims who reject local traditions in favor of what they consider purer forms of Islam.

Akiyev cited the case of two brothers, Khusein and Khasan Mutaliyev. Because Khusein had studied in Egypt, police detained him for questioning and beat him. After he filed a complaint with Memorial's help, they returned and fatally shot him when he tried to flee.

His brother filed a complaint, but it was ignored. When Memorial next heard from him, Khasan had joined the insurgents. He died in February with rebels who detonated a bomb during a police raid, killing four officers.

Magomed Khazbiev, an opposition leader who was blocked from running in local elections this month, said the rebels promise something that the government has been unwilling or unable to deliver: justice.

Several months ago, a few rebels showed up at his home wearing long beards and carrying assault rifles, he said. They urged him to stop organizing protests for democratic reform, saying his efforts were futile and drawing recruits away from them. "They said, 'We don't want a constitution written by people who refuse to follow it,' " he recalled.

In two years at most, the rebels vowed, "we would be living under the law of Allah," he said. "They really believed it." 

Comments

[Steve]

I make no comment on the level of insurgency, just the need for attacks from both sides to be openly reported and investigated. At the moment there is not a sufficient level of investigations into killings as to create an atmosphere where press freedom can be fully realized. HRD's and journalists continue to suffer attacks (http://stevehynd.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/another-murder-in-the-north-caucasus/).

Equally, there needs to be a way in engaging the wider world in the whole context of Chechnya. Making people aware of the level and intensity of attacks is important.

To tackle both sides of this coin there needs to be greater state support for thorough investigations. This needs to be pushed at an international level. Within this context, the US press could play a role that they are currently choosing not to!