The US Media and Moscow Subway Bombings – Cynical Obfuscation

COMMENTARY 

By Gordon M. Hahn

“Still, neither the WSJ nor any of the U.S. mainstream media has yet given the American public a detailed analysis of the North Caucasus mujahedin, the so-called ‘Caucasus Emirate’, who were behind these attacks and over a thousand others since its formation in October 2007.  This was another chance; they passed it up.”  GH 

U.S. mainstream media continued to report from the same one-sided view in covering Moscow’s subway bombings that killed 39 and wounded 74. Refusing to unmask “militants” likely behind the attacks, what they stand for––and how the U.S. media and think tank community has gotten it wrong from the beginning, the the New York Times on the left to the Wall Street Journal on the right, chastised Moscow and Russian PM Vladimir Putin for the attacks and relied on the same politicized and ignorant sources for their ‘analysis’.

Take a look at the following titles:

“Moscow Attack a Test for Putin and His Record Against Terror,” New York Times, March 30, 2010;

“Home to Roost - The Russian government told its citizens that it had defeated Islamists in the Caucasus. This morning's attack belies the point,” Newsweek.com, March 29, 2010;

“Bombings Expose Weakness in Kremlin's Chechnya Push” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2010

A fourth article had a title reflecting reality, but was nothing more than a color piece which included among “conspiracy theories” any involvement by the North Caucasus jihadists––and concluded “no one knows who was responsible for the attacks”.  The only answer he can muster suits the New York Times’ agenda: Muscovites are surrounded by evil. (Sergei Kuznetsov, “Moscow Under Attack,” New York Times, 30 March 2010). The reader can easily surmise that the ostensible evil is Russia.

The most outrageous article of all came from the NYT’s oped page.  The March 31 article “What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?” claimed that Caucasus Emirate amir Doka Umarov “made clear that his campaign was not about restoring an Islamic caliphate, but about Chechen independence: ‘This is the land of our brothers and it is our sacred duty to liberate these lands.’ The problem is that this quote does not prove their point. 

For Umarov and the CE “brothers” refers to fellow male Muslims, and “these lands” refers to all the North Caucasus regions as well as regions across, and even outside of Russia.  Umarov and other CE leaders have stated their desire for a Caucasus emirate and global caliphate tens if not hundreds of times, and various documents and maps they produce indicate the same.  But authors - Robert Pape, Lindsey O'Rourke and Jenna McDermit - recipients of tens of thousands of research dollars, cherry-picked and distorted one sentence in order to support their perverse ‘findings.’ 

The New York Times’ has refused to acknowledge the jihadization of the ‘Chechen separtists’ and of mujahedin across the North Caucasus for years.  Facts suggest that its publication of this faulty oped piece is no accident.  This is collusion to cover up the facts.

The March 30^th New York Times article “Moscow Attack a Test for Putin and His Record Against Terror” by Clifford Levy was on the whole balanced in addressing what little it actually discussed.  As usual, what was left out was more important than what was put in, rendering the piece grossly inadequate and unbalanced.

It avoids terms that would admit to the extremist Islamist nature of the “insurgency” – actual terms such as “Islamist”, “jihadist”, “mujahedin”, “amir”, and “Caucasus Emirate” were not used.  He hides the mujahedin’s radicalism behind non-decript and ideologically vague words like “insurgent” and “rebel.”  Moreover, the Caucasus Emirate (CE) jihadis’ and its predecessor organization’s record of terrorism over the last decade is obliterated from view in the article.  The article’s entire focus is to implicitly and at times explicitly, to criticize Russia, its leaders, and their policies.

Levy and the NYT managed to make another of their mistaken agenda points.  They and much of mainstream media have been working hard to debunk the view that President Dmitrii Medvedev and Premier Putin have ushered in a legitimiate political (and economic) thaw.  The thaw involves a new ‘glasnost’ and leadership approach, including massive investement to provide employment in the North Caucasus, plans for a major destatization of the economy, major reforms of the penal and police system, and minor but nevertheless significant reforms of the judicial, legal, and political systems.  Despite denials of all this, the NYT now raises the question of whether the metro attacks will prompt the Russian leadership to roll back allegedly ‘non-existent’ reforms?!  Levy avoids giving the Medvedev-Putin tandem credit for any real reformist action and distorts Medvedev’s record when he writes that Medvedev merely “has spoken” in favor of liberalizing the government.

A truly notorious bit of journalistic malpractice came with Newsweek.com’s March 29^th article by Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova titled “Home to Roost.”  The title says everything.  Recall the use of this expression “the chickens came home to roost” by President Barak Obama’s former preacher Jeremiah Wright commenting on 9/11 blaming the U.S. with satisfaction for the jihadists’ murder of 3,000 innocent civilians.  This is what Newsweek, Owens and Nemtsova also are indicating: that Russia deserves such terrorist attacks because of its brutal conduct of the two post-Soviet Chechen wars.  Never mind the Chechens’ pre-war illegal seizure of power in Grozny, illegal declaration of independence, and illegal arming of citizens.  Never mind their psychological terrorism before the first war in the form of ethnic cleansing of Russians and threats to attack nuclear power stations and to raise an army of one million “mujahedin.”  Never mind the literally thousands of Chechen and jihadi terrorist attacks since the first war began.  Never mind that there would be no Russian military or security operations in the North Caucasus if the Chechens had not picked up arms in order to achive independence and certainly not for the last decade if the Chechens had truly laid down their arms under the 1996 Khasavyurt Peace Accords.

“Home to Roost” begins with a falsehood and continues in like fashion.  First, the authors claim: “For most Russians who get their news from state-controlled television, this morning's subway bombings in Moscow were a bolt from the blue.  The official message was that Chechnya was pacified ­and that the reign of terror imposed there by Vladimir Putin's lieutenant, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, had put an end to terrorist attacks forever.”  When was the official message that terrorism had been stopped “forever” conveyed and by whom?  Was it in the nearly weekly state television channels’ coverage of terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus and the nearly daily coverage in the print media?  To be sure, Russian state media play down rather than play up terrorism, and the Russian leadership has claimed it has stabilized Chechnya.  But the Kremlin never claimed terrorism had been stopped “forever.”

Second, the authors do not even have their basic facts correct.  They claim “the truth is that there have been 15 suicide bombings in South Russia since 2009, most dramatically the truck bombing of a police station in Dagestan last August that killed 20.”  In fact, with the two attacks on Monday, there now have been 22 suicide bombings in Russia since May last year.  The truck bombing of the police station did not occur in Dagestan but in Nazran, Ingushetia, and it killed 25 (not 20) and wounded anywhere from 150 to 260, including 13 children (Gordon M. Hahn, “The Caucasus Emirate’s Return to Suicide Bombing and Mass Terrorism,” Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report, No. 3, November 30, 2009; see also a brief report on the January 6, 2010 suicide bombing attack in Dagestan in Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report, No. 9, February 24, 2009).

Matthews and Nemtsova ridicule Muscovites for having “bought into the official propaganda that Putin had brought peace to the Caucasus.”  The authors do manage to mention the Caucasus Emirate, but from the mouth of one of those easily-duped “Muscovites” who nevertheless managed to surmise that the CE had sent the authorities a “message.”

The authors are quick to charatcterize Russian humans rights violations In their haste, they cite Human Rights Watch to assert that “more than 20,000 people­ mostly young men “­have been ‘disappeared’ by the security forces since the supposed end of the Chechen war in 2002.” However, this figure clearly exceeds the total number of killed in the region for this period by a factor of several times, and the figure and Human Rights Watch are provided without a link to the data.  While giving readers false figures for deaths brought about by the Russians and their allies in the Caucasus, the authors pointedly neglect any such figures for killings carried out by the mujahedin, which do numer in the several thousands.

Matthews and Nemtsova, like the Times’ Levy, raise the issue of a threat to the allegedly non-existent political thaw: “Opposition politicians fear that the attacks will quickly become an excuse to strangle a gathering political thaw encouraged by President Dmitry Medvedev.”  But just a week ago the same authors wrote that the thaw and Medvedev were “phony” (see Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, “Moscow’s Phony Liberal,” Newsweek, March 8, 2010.)

The Wall Street Journal article “Bombings Expose Weakness in Kremlin's Chechnya Push” by March Champion begins with the same premise but makes different mistakes.  Champion claims that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s tough regime has pushed Chechen terrorists into neighboring regions.  The fact is that these regions – due to a variety of factors such as propagation of and penetration by the jihadist ideology into the local Muslim communities, endemic poverty and corruption, and a Caucasus culture of violence and blood revenge, and spillover from Chechnya – have been long producing their own homegrown jihadists.  For years top amirs of the Caucasus network of jihadi terrorists, the self-declared ‘Caucasus Emirate’, have included ethnic Ingush, Kabards, Avars, and Dargins from Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabardino-Balkaria as well as foreign jihadists and emissaries from groupos like Al Qa`ida.  The fact that U.S. mainstream media outlets like the WSJ have chosen not to write about this,  does not make it not so.

The good news is that this article is the first in the WSJ to acknowledge the jihadization of the ‘Chechen separatists’.  The article cites the inaccurate figures on violence in the North Caucasus produced by a Center for Strategic and International Studies project which does attempt the difficult albeit task of distinguishing between jihad-related violence and non-jihad-related violence and does not use jihadi websites as sources as a way of doing so.  This approach overstates the level of violence being produced by the jihad considerably (For a project that does attempt to isolate jihad-related violence and use jihadi sources see Gordon M. Hahn, “The Caucasus Emirate’s ‘Year of the Offensive’ in Figures: Data and Analysis on the Caucasus Emirate’s Terrorist Activity in 2009,” Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report, No. 7, January 18, 2010  and Gordon M. Hahn, “Comparing the Level of Caucasus Emirate Terrorist Activity in 2008 and 2009,” Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report, No. 8, February 5, 2010). Overall, however, the WSJ article was the most balanced in its approach.

Still, neither the WSJ nor any of the U.S. mainstream media has yet given the American public a detailed analysis of the North Caucasus mujahedin, the so-called ‘Caucasus Emirate’, who were behind these attacks and over a thousand others since its formation in October 2007.  This was another chance; they passed it up. 

Dr. Gordon M. Hahn – Analyst/Consultant, Russia Other Points of View – Russia Media Watch; Senior Researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California; and Senior Researcher, Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group. Dr Hahn is author of two well-received books, Russia’s Revolution From Above (Transaction, 2002) and Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), which was named an outstanding title of 2007 by Choice magazine.  He has authored hundreds of articles in scholarly journals and other publications on Russian, Eurasian and international politics and publishes the Islam, Islamism, and Politics in Eurasia Report (IIPER) at www.miis.edu/academics/researchcenters/terrorism/research/Hahn/IIPER. 

The Dangers of Meddling in Russia’s North Caucasus

By Gordon M. Hahn

Readers may recall that in the wake of the August 2008 five-day war in South Ossetia and Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Georgia’s other breakaway republic, Abkhazia, as independent states, then U.S. presidential candidate Sen. John McCain proposed that the U.S. support separatism in Russia’s North Caucasus.  On March 20-21, the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and Ilia State University in Tbilisi co-sponsored in the Georgian capital a conference titled “Hidden Nations, Enduring Crimes: The Circassians and the Peoples of the North Caucasus Between Past and Future.”  The Jamestown Foundation is a think tank with ties to unidentified U.S. corporations and “foundations,” which may receive U.S. government funding.  The conference adopted a resolution calling on Georgia’s parliament to adopt its own resolution that would recognize as “genocide” the killing and exile of thousands of ethnic Circassians by the Tsarist regime a century and a half ago (Giorgi Kvelashvili, “Should Georgia Recognize the Circassian Genocide?,” Jamestown Foundation, 22 March 2010, http://jamestownfoundation.blogspot.com/2010/03/should-georgia-recognize-circassian.html).

To be sure, Russian forces used great violence to establish St. Petersburg’s control over the North Caucasus much as Washington did during our own Indian wars and conquest of the American West.  If the former was genocide, then the latter is.  So why should Russia not push the adoption of parliamentary resolutions that recognize the American conquest of native American tribes?  But this is not the main problem.

The conference seems to have been designed to put Sen. McCain’s aforementioned idea into action.  By recognizing a Russian genocide of the Circassians, the stage would be set for recognizing, under certain interpretations of international law, the right to independence of several of Russia’s North Caucasus republics, including at least Kabardino-Balkaria (Circassian Kabards) and Karachevo-Cherkessia (Circassian Cherkess), where Circassian ethnic groups reside.  The Circassian Adygs comprise 26 percent of the population of Russia’s republic of Adygeya, which is embedded inside and completely surrounded by Russia’s Krasnodar Krai.  A very small number Circassian Kabards, Cherkess, and Adygs seek a unified Circassian republic within the Russian Federation.  A smaller number seek an independent Circassian state for their own or for all the ‘Circassian’ republics.  An infinitessimally small number of radical nationalist Circassians would claim Krasnodar lands stretching to the Black Sea resort of Sochi where the 2014 Olympics are scheduled to be held.  Most Circassian nationalism is expressed in demands for re-districting between Circassian and Alan areas.

The joint American and Georgian gambit seeking recognition of the right of Russia’s Circassians to independence is clearly an attempt to take revenge for Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia’s independence.  The ethnic Abkhaz who populate Georgia’s breakaway republic of Abkhazia are a Circassian people and kin of Russia’s Circassian peoples.  Does anyone besides the present author find it at all ironic and cynical that the Georgia that has sought to deny Circassian autonomy, no less independence for two decades in Abkhazia is the same Georgia that is playing at being an honest broker or champion of the Circassian interests and an ostensible cause of Circassian independence from Russia?

The American-Georgian gambit deletes some important history.  At the time of the Circassian massacres and exiles in the 19^th century, Georgia was part of the Russian empire and helped Russia defeat the Circassian tribes and conquer the North Caucasus.  Later, Georgians were among those ethnic groups that resettled in Circassian lands after the exile of Circassians to Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere.  I will let an Abkhaz commentator on the Johnstown.org blog where the conference was covered describe the Georgians role during the Stalinist deportations of Circassians: “(T)here was one notorious incident in the village of Khaibak, where in 1944 hundreds of people were herded into a barn which was then set on fire; any one escaping was shot. The commander of the NKVD group responsible was a Svan (Gvishiani), acting under the general directorship of Beria (Mingrelian), who was himself responsible to Stalin (Georgian).” 

In more recent times, the Abkhazians were driven to separatism from Georgia by Tbilisi’s oppression and violence against them.  We will put aside a detailed account of Georgia’s oppression, violence and calls for genocide against the Ossetians, Abkhazians, and Ajarians perpetrated by its late perestroika era and early post-Soviet government under ultra-nationalist president Zviad Gamsakhurdia (see Robert English, “Georgia: The Ignored History,” The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 17, November 6, 2009; www.nybooks.com/articles/22011).  Suffice it to say that Gamsakhurdia and his ministers, denied Abkhazia and the other ethnic regions autonomy, called for genocide of the Abkhaz and sent unregulated militia to the region where they beat and shot people.  We will not detail Gamsakhurdia’s invasion of Abkhazia in 1992, but one can see the videotape of the Georgian army commander’s television broadcast announcing that prisoners will not be taken (“The Georgian Commander-in-Chief on TV threatens the Abkhazian nation with genocide,” YouTube, accessed 25 March 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzvtaZIMy98).  One can also read the April 1993 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique in which Georgi Khaindrava, Georgia’s war minister Minister of War at the time, warns that Georgian forces “can easily and completely destroy the genetic stock” of the Abkhaz nation. (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1993).  One can also see a videotape of Georgian forces destroying the Abkhaz National Library in Sukhumi, which held much of the documentary record of Abkhaz nation’s history and that of ancient Greek communities in the region (“A history erased - Abkhazia's archive: fire of war, ashes of history,” Abkhaz World, 17 March 2009, 9:18,

www.abkhazworld.com/headlines/151-a-history-erased.html).  Breakaway and de facto independent Abkhazia was the target of an attempted 2004 coup organized by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2004 and would certainly have been the target of an invasion had his attack on South Ossetia in August 2008 been allowed to stand.

More ominously, the Circassian separatist nationalism that the American-Georgian conference seeks to whip up can quickly morph into jihadism, just as nationalism has transformed into jihadism in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan.  The strongest communalist movements in the North Caucasus is no longer nationalism but Islamism and jihadism, and Chechnya, Ingushetia and Degaestan are not the only regions where jihadism has raised its ugly head. 

Russia’s North Caucasus Circassian-populated republics of Kabardino-Balkaria (RKB), Karachaevo-Cherkessia (RKCh), and Adygeya have also seen a smattering of jihadi terrorists.  All of the North Caucasus mujahedin are part of a 1,000-strong network of mujahedin cells united under the self-proclaimed Caucasus Emirate (CE), spearheaded by ethnic Chechens, Ingush, and various Dagestani jihadists.  Its ethnic Circassian as well as Alan (Balkar and Karachai) mujahedin in the republics of the RKB, RKCh, and Adygea are united under the CE’s so-called United Vilaiyat (Governate) of Kabardia, Balkaria and Karachai, the amir of which is the ethnic Kabardian head of the CE’s Shariah Court, Anzor Astemirov or Seifullah.  The CE is allied with Al Qa`ida and other organizations that comprise the global jihadist social movement, and in the last three years CE mujahedin have killed more than a thousand and wounded several thousand more Russian citizens.  Most of the casualties have been among Russian and North Caucasus security, police and military personnel and civilian officials, but hundreds of civilian casualties have been documented as well.  The CE has also sent operatives to Azerbaijan, which also confronts a still less potent jihadi threat.

Like the U.S. mainstream media, Jamestown’s reporting on the North Caucasus mujahedin does its best to avoid references to the CE, the structure and geographical scope of its network, its pronounced jihadist theology and ideology, and its alliance with the global jihadi social movement and the likes of AQ.  One article emphasized that the CE was more virtual than real (Mikhail Roshchin, “Caucasus Emirate: Virtual Myth or Reality,” Jamestown Foundation   North Caucasus, Issue 10, No. 10, March 13, 2009, www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=34708&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=d6a8434332.).  Despite the fact that Seifullah regards all non-Muslims as infidels worthy of death, unless they refuse to convert to his Salafist brand of Islam, he granted an interview to the Jamestown Foundation a year ago.  The interview was published on the main CE website as well (“Amir Seifullakh (Anzor Astemirov) dal interv-yu Dzheimstausnomy Fondu”, Kavkaz tsentr, 26 March 2009, 13:41, www.kavkazcenter.com/russ/content/2009/03/26/64698.html).  This could be considered the aiding and abetting of terrorist propaganda, which in some democratic states is regarded as a crime.       

The Jamestown article on the conference acknowledged that “if Georgia agrees to recognize the mass killings of Circassians as genocide, it will infuriate Russia and risk further worsening the already-strained Russo-Georgian relations.”  But then argued the recognition could benefit Tbilisi “in other ways which could outweigh the Russian ire.”  It “could strengthen the image of Georgia as a defender of ‘the Caucasus cause’ in the eyes of not only Circassians but other ethnic minorities in the North Caucasus too.”  Jamestown went on to propose that Georgia lead the “Caucasus cause’ along with countries with large Circassian diasporas.  This would mean Turkey’s involvement and more NATO meddling along and inside Russia’s borders.   Elements within the Circassian diaspora have already bankrolled the Chechen separatist movement and perhaps people like Seifullah inside the CE jihad.

Americans and Georgians would do well not to play with the fire of nationalism among Russia’s Muslim peoples, especially where jihadism is close by.  After all, the CE has declared jihad against not only Russia but also the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and any country currently fighting against Muslims anywhere on the globe.  We would do well also to remember that the 2014 Olympic Games to be held in Sochi will take place just a few hours drive from the heart of the CE jihad.  And there are many more soft Western targets for the CE’s jihadists to target in Russia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.  Be careful what you pray for; you just might get it.

ARTICLES IN QUESTION

New York Times

March 31, 2010
What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?
By ROBERT A. PAPE, LINDSEY O'ROURKE and JENNA McDERMIT
Chicago
Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Lindsey O'Rourke is a doctoral student there, and Jenna McDermit is an undergraduate majoring in anthropology.

ALMOST every month for the past two years, Chechen suicide bombers have struck. Their targets can be anything from Russian soldiers to Chechen police officers to the innocent civilians who were killed on the subway in Moscow this week. We all know the horror that people willing to kill themselves can inflict. But do we really understand what drives young women and men to strap explosives on their bodies and deliberately kill themselves in order to murder dozens of people going about their daily lives?

Chechen suicide attackers do not fit popular stereotypes, contrary to the Russian government's efforts to pigeonhole them. For years, Moscow has routinely portrayed Chechen bombers as Islamic extremists, many of them foreign, who want to make Islam the world's dominant religion. Yet however much Russia may want to convince the West that this battle is part of a global war on terrorism, the facts about who becomes a Chechen suicide attacker ­ male or female ­ reveal otherwise.

The three of us, in our work for the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, have analyzed every Chechen suicide attack since they began in 2000, 42 separate incidents involving 63 people who killed themselves. Many Chechen separatists are Muslim, but few of the suicide bombers profess religious motives. The majority are male, but a huge fraction ­ over 40 percent ­ are women. Although foreign suicide attackers are not unheard of in Chechnya, of the 42 for whom we can determine place of birth, 38 were from the Caucasus. Something is driving Chechen suicide bombers, but it is hardly global jihad.

As we have discovered in our research on Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, suicide terrorist campaigns are almost always a last resort against foreign military occupation. Chechnya is a powerful demonstration of this phenomenon at work.

In the 1990s, the rebels kicked out tens of thousands of Russian troops who had been sent to the region to prevent Chechnya, a republic within the Russian Federation, from declaring independence. In 1999, the Russians came back ­ this time with more than 90,000 troops ­ and waged a well-documented scorched-earth campaign, killing an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 civilians out of a population of about 1 million. Ordinary guerrilla tactics and hostage-taking ­ the keys to ousting the Russians the first time ­ now got the rebels nowhere. New tactics were employed and women were central from the start.

On June 7, 2000, two Chechen women, Khava Barayeva and Luiza Magomadova, drove a truck laden with explosives into a Russian special forces building in Alkhan-Yurt, Chechnya; while the Russians insist only two soldiers were killed, the Chechen rebel claim of more than two dozen fatalities seems more likely.

This was the first Chechen suicide attack and showed the many advantages of female suicide bombers. They were deadly, as Chechen female attackers generally are, killing an average of 21 people per attack compared to 13 for males. Perhaps far more important, they could inspire others to follow in their footsteps, women and men alike.

Ms. Barayeva made a martyr video, as many suicide bombers do before their attacks. While warning Russia that she was attacking for Chechen independence, she also directed a powerful message clearly meant to provoke men to make similar sacrifices out of a sense of honor. She pleaded for Chechen men to "not take the woman's role by staying at home"; so far, 32 men have answered her call.

Just as important, Ms. Barayeva is considered responsible for inspiring a movement of "black widows" ­ women who have lost a husband, child or close relative to the "occupation" and killed themselves on missions to even the score. In total, 24 Chechen females ranging in age from 15 to 37 have carried out suicide attacks, including the most deadly ­ the coordinated bombings of two passenger flights in August 2004 that caused 90 deaths and (according to Russian authorities) the subway blasts on Monday that killed nearly 40.

The bombers' motives spring directly from their experiences with Russian troops, according to Abu al-Walid, a rebel leader who was killed in 2004. "These women, particularly the wives of the mujahedeen who were martyred, are being threatened in their homes, their honor [is] being threatened," he explained in a video that appeared on Al Jazeera. "They do not accept being humiliated and living under occupation."

And female suicide attackers have one more advantage: They can often travel inconspicuously to their targets. A July 2003 investigative report by the Russian news magazine Kommersant-Vlast found that a potential female suicide bomber could easily avoid public suspicion. Just days after a Chechen suicide bomber, Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, tried but failed to blow up a Moscow cafe in 2003, one of the magazine's journalists ­ wearing a niqab, tightly clutching a black satchel to her chest, and behaving in a nervous manner ­ was able to get a table at the same cafe without ever being questioned. Perhaps not surprisingly, Chechen women have carried out 8 of the 10 suicide attacks in Moscow.

Although we are still learning the details of Monday's bombings, there were warnings that a major attack in Russia was coming. Twice this year one of Chechnya's leading rebel commanders, Doku Umarov, issued video statements warning of attacks in Russia proper. "The Russians think the war is distant," he said. "Blood will not only spill in our towns and villages but also it will spill in their towns ... our military operations will encompass the entirety of Russia." He also made clear that his campaign was not about restoring any Islamic caliphate, but about Chechen independence: "This is the land of our brothers and it is our sacred duty to liberate these lands."

With so many Chechen suicide attacks, one could easily be forgiven for being skeptical about the prospects for a lasting peace. Yet, a closer examination of the conflict's history suggests solutions that both sides may be able to accept.

The trajectory of Chechnya's suicide campaign reveals a stark pattern: 27 attacks from June 2000 to November 2004, no attacks until October 2007, and 18 since. What explains the three-year pause?

The answer is loss of public support in Chechnya for the rebellion, for two reasons. The first was revulsion against the 2004 Beslan school massacre in which Chechen rebels murdered hundreds of Russian children. "A bigger blow could not have been dealt on us," one of the separatists' spokesmen said at the time. "People around the world will think that Chechens are beasts and monsters if they could attack children." Second, the Russians pursued a robust hearts-and-minds program to win over the war-torn population. Military operations killed significantly fewer civilians. Amnesty was granted to rebel fighters and nearly 600 Chechen separatists surrendered in 2006 alone.

Unfortunately, the Russians then over-reached. Starting in late 2007, Moscow pressured the pro-Russian Chechen government of Ramzan Kadyrov to stamp out the remaining militants. It complied, pursuing an ambitious counterterrorism offensive with notably harsh measures of its own.

Suspected rebels were abducted and imprisoned, their families' houses were burned, and there were widespread accusations of forced confessions and coerced testimony in trials. An investigation by The Times in February 2009 reported claims of extensive torture and executions under the Kadyrov administration, and detailed "efforts by Chechnya's government to suppress knowledge of its policies through official lies, obstruction and witness intimidation." There is one more riddle to explain: Why did the current wave of Chechen suicide attacks gain force in the spring of 2009 after Russia announced an end of all its military operations in Chechnya? Because the Kadyrov government's counterterrorism measures had grown so harsh that some had actually begun to view Moscow as a moderating force in the region.

Still, the picture is clear: Chechen suicide terrorism is strongly motivated by both direct military occupation by Russia and by indirect military occupation by pro-Russia Chechen security forces. Building on the more moderate policies of 2005 to 2007 might not end every attack, but it could well reduce violence to a level both sides can live with.

Because the new wave of Chechen separatists see President Kadyrov as a puppet of the Kremlin, any realistic solution must improve the legitimacy of Chechnya's core social institutions. An initial step would be holding free and fair elections. Others would include adopting internationally accepted standards of humane conduct among the security forces and equally distributing the region's oil revenues so that Chechnya's Muslims benefit from their own resources.

No political solution would resolve every issue. But the subway attacks should make clear to Russia that quelling the rebellion with diplomacy is in its security interests. As long as Chechens feel themselves under occupation ­ either directly by Russian troops or by their proxies ­ the cycle of violence will continue wreaking havoc across Russia.

New York Times

March 30, 2010
Moscow Attack a Test for Putin and His Record Against Terror
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW ­ The brazen suicide bombings in the center of Moscow confronted Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin with a grave challenge to his record of curbing terrorism, and raised the possibility that he would respond as he had in the past, by significantly tightening control over the government.

The explosions Monday, set off by female suicide bombers in two landmark subway stations, killed at least 38 people and wounded scores of others, touching off fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia, including Chechnya, was once again being brought to the country's heart.

The attacks during the morning rush hour seemed all but designed to taunt the security services, which have been championed by Mr. Putin in the decade since he took power in Russia. The first one occurred at the Lubyanka subway station, next to the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, also known as the F.S.B., the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B. that was led by Mr. Putin in the late 1990s.

Mr. Putin, the former president and still Russia's paramount leader, has built his reputation in part on his success in bottling up the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia and preventing major terrorist attacks in the country's population centers in recent years. If the bombings on Monday herald a renewed campaign by insurgents in major cities, then that legacy may be tarnished.

The attacks could also throw into doubt the policies of Mr. Putin's protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who has spoken in favor of liberalizing the government, increasing political pluralism and dealing with terrorism by addressing the root causes of the insurgency.

While Mr. Medvedev has not yet put in place many major changes, Mr. Putin has generally allowed him to pursue his course. More terrorism, though, could cause Mr. Putin to shove Mr. Medvedev aside and move the security-oriented circle of advisers around Mr. Putin to the forefront.

"Putin said, 'One thing that I definitely accomplished was this,' and he didn't," said Pavel K. Baev, a Russian who is a professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo.

"My feeling is this is not an isolated attack, that we will see more," Mr. Baev said. "If we are facing a situation where there is a chain of attacks, that would undercut every attempt to soften, liberalize, open up, and increase the demand for tougher measures."

Mr. Putin on Monday limited his comments largely to vows to destroy the terrorists who organized the attacks, who have not been identified, but who the Russian authorities said they suspect came from Chechnya or neighboring regions in the Caucasus Mountains. But when he last faced a spate of such violence, in 2004, he reacted with a sweeping reorganization of the government that he said would unite the country against terrorism, but also concentrated power in the Kremlin.

He pushed through laws that eliminated the direct election of regional governors, turning them into presidential appointees, and made it all but impossible for political independents to be elected to the federal Parliament. He also increased the strength of the security services.

Boris I. Makarenko, chairman of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, a research organization, cautioned that it was too soon to speculate whether Mr. Putin might feel the need to clamp down. Mr. Makarenko said he believed that Mr. Putin's reputation had not suffered badly because of terrorist attacks early in his tenure as president.

But Mr. Makarenko noted that the bombings in the Moscow subway came as Russia's financial problems had been agitating the government. Protests have broken out in some major cities, and the opposition, while still relatively weak, has been gaining some support.

"The public has become more skeptical about the government in general in recent months, due to the government's limited ability to tackle the effects of the economic crisis, to the inefficiency and misbehavior of the police, and other issues," he said. "These terrorist attacks might be another piece in the efforts of those who want to go after the government."

The subway system in Moscow is one of the world's most extensive and well managed, and the bombings on Monday spread anxiety that is unlikely to dissipate for some time. For many people here, the day's events recalled the tense times in the early part of the last decade when the city, including the subway, was hit with several terrorist attacks.

While the Muslim insurgency has not subsided in recent years, major attacks outside the Caucasus region had been unusual, and in April 2009, the Kremlin even announced what it described as the end of special counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.

But in November 2009, terrorists bombed a luxury passenger train that was traveling in a rural area from Moscow to St. Petersburg, killing 26 people. Last month, a Chechen rebel leader, Doku Umarov, threatened in an interview on a Web site to organize terror acts in Russian population centers.

"If Russians think that the war is happening only on television, somewhere far off in the Caucasus, and it will not touch them, then we are going to show them that this war will return to their homes," he said.

Mr. Medvedev, who took office in 2008, has called for a somewhat different tack on the insurgency, saying that the government should aggressively hunt down the terrorists, but also focus on the poverty and government malfeasance that he contended nurtured extremism.

Last June, Mr. Medvedev visited the region and gave an unusual speech in which he seemed to offer an implicit rebuff to the uncompromising Putin strategy.

"It is no secret to anyone here that these problems in the North Caucasus, and in the south of our country in general, are systemic," Mr. Medvedev said. "By saying that, I am referring to the low living standards, high unemployment and massive, horrifyingly widespread corruption."

Mr. Medvedev also appointed a new leader of Ingushetia, a Muslim region, who echoed his belief that hard-line measures would only stir a backlash.

On Monday, though, some senior members of Mr. Putin's party, United Russia, were already suggesting that the government needed to adopt a stern new plan to combat terrorism.

Vladimir A. Vasilyev, chairman of the security committee in Parliament, lashed out at law-enforcement authorities, saying that they should be punished for allowing the attack.

"I am convinced that all those who failed to carry out their duty will bear responsibility," he said, adding that current laws were "ineffective."

For his part, Mr. Medvedev voiced only a determination to catch those behind the attacks. "We will continue our counterterrorist operations with unflinching resolve until we have defeated this scourge," he said.

Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry, Andrew E. Kramer, Michael Schwirtz and Yulia Taranova.

www.newsweek.com

March 29, 2010
Home to Roost
The Russian government told its citizens that it had defeated Islamists in the Caucasus. This morning's attack belies the point.
By Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova | Newsweek Web Exclusive  

For most Russians who get their news from state-controlled television, this morning's subway bombings in Moscow were a bolt from the blue. The official message was that Chechnya was pacified­and that the reign of terror imposed there by Vladimir Putin's lieutenant, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, had put an end to terrorist attacks forever. But the blasts at Moscow's Lubyanka and Park Kultury stations­which killed at least 38 people­are the clearest possible evidence that the Kremlin's tactics haven't worked. Far from being pacified, the North Caucasus republics of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan remain dangerously unstable.

The message from the terrorists could not have been clearer: by striking at the Lubyanka metro, just yards from the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB in Russian), Prime Minister Putin's alma mater (when it was known as the KGB), they are sending a signal that they still have the capacity to strike at the very heart of power in Russia's capital. According to FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov, the bombings were carried out by two women. That tactic is terrifyingly familiar from attacks on Moscow between 1998 and 2004. (Two Chechen women blew themselves up on the Moscow metro in 2004, killing 50 people, and women terrorists played a key role in the Moscow theater siege of 2002.)

But over the last year, Russian media have been playing down violence in the Caucasus, which has been spiraling out of control. This attack is the first to hit Moscow in five years, but the truth is that there have been 15 suicide bombings in South Russia since 2009, most dramatically the truck bombing of a police station in Dagestan last August that killed 20. Police in Ingushetia have fought running battles with radical Islamic insurgents for the last year, and in February they scored an apparent victory in killing 20 rebels, including Anzor Astimirov, the leader of a radical Wahhabi group from Kabardino-Balkaria. There is speculation that yesterday's attack could be the rebels' revenge for that killing.

It's hard to overstate how badly the attacks have shocked Muscovites who bought into the official propaganda that Putin had brought peace to the Caucasus. This morning, pedestrians hurrying away from the scene talked of never taking the metro again. One elderly man, who declined to give his name, said "the Caucuses Emirate sent [the powers that be] a message"­a message that radical Islamic rebels, known colloquially by Russians as the Emirate, were not beaten. Meanwhile, central parts of Moscow resembled a war zone, with helicopters circling overhead, large areas of the city around the bomb sites closed to traffic, and many people staying at home in fear. Mobile-phone signals were jammed by police who feared that more bombs could be detonated by a phone call.

Opposition politicians fear that the attacks will quickly become an excuse to strangle a gathering political thaw encouraged by President Dmitry Medvedev. "Russian authorities will use every excuse to shut down independent movements in Russia," says Yulia Latynina of Human Rights Watch. "I fear that the opposition protest planned for March 31 will be beaten back by police or [the pro-Kremlin youth group] Nashi." The Kremlin certainly has a track record of using terror as a justification for political crackdowns: in 2004, after a spate of attacks, Putin scrapped elections for regional governors. Tatyana Lokshina, of the opposition group Another Russia, says that the authorities' reaction will be a bellwether of how far Medvdev has managed to change the system. "This is going to be a test for Medvedev's liberal views­hopefully he will let his people speak their mind out on March 31," she said.

Putin himself appeared on Russian television today looking visibly angry and vowed to bring the culprits to justice and stamp out terror. But Putin came to power on the same promise in 2000 after four horrific bombings in Moscow and southern Russia demolished apartment buildings and left more than 300 dead. A decade later, his words ring a little hollow­all the more so because the tactics Russian police and the FSB have used against Islamic rebels have brought terror to the local population. Russian police death squads have admitted tosystematic torture of suspected rebels and their families. And according to Human Rights Watch, more than 20,000 people­mostly young men­have been "disappeared" by the security forces since the supposed end of the Chechen war in 2002. Kadyrov's troops have even been filmed torturing their own men to maintain a medieval brand of discipline.

What's not clear is what Putin can do to stop the attacks. As Israel found before its security barrier, it's almost impossible to secure a city against suicide bombers­especially if they have access to high explosives. Unlike failed bombers in London and more recently on transatlantic aircraft, this morning's attackers didn't have to rely on homemade explosives but instead used around a kilo of TNT, which is more compact and more devastatingly reliable than homemade fertilizer explosives.

Unlike Israel, though, Putin does not have the option of building a wall across the North Caucasus to keep out bombers. The likely reaction will expanded surveillance powers for the FSB and stop-and-search powers for the police­thereby cutting off a fledgling civil-society movement to crack down on corruption and institute wholesale reforms of both those institutions. Most worryingly of all for the Kremlin, if the state continues to fail to provide security to its citizens, popular protests will only grow-­putting opposition groups on collision course with a strengthened police.

Wall Street Journal

March 30, 2010
Bombings Expose Weakness in Kremlin's Chechnya Push
By MARC CHAMPION

Russian officials' reaction to Monday's twin subway bombings included a tacit admission that unrest along the country's southern border, which long centered in war-torn Chechnya, has broadened to neighboring republics.

Officials said that based on early investigations, the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers from the North Caucasus region. That contrasts with a Moscow subway bombing of six years ago, when security officials and analysts in Moscow pinned initial suspicions on Chechen separatists.

Russia largely won the war in Chechnya after 15 years of brutal fighting and suppression that left tens of thousands dead. The iron-fisted regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, installed by the Kremlin, has restored order across much of that republic, using extensive financial aid from the Russian capital to rebuild the ruined economy.

Mr. Kadyrov's regime has stressed Islam, but of a more home-grown variety than the Saudi Wahhabism that inspires many Islamist radicals. He encouraged many Chechen fighters to come down from the mountains, while others were killed.

Pressure from Mr. Kadyrov has thinned the ranks of militants, but those who remain have been driven deep into Chechnya's mountains and beyond, primarily into neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia. With the dream of an independent Chechnya effectively dead, the insurgency has transformed into a loose web of Islamic militants who hope to create Islamic rule across the patchwork of Russian republics that make up the North Caucasus, analysts say.

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"What we have had is a complete conceptual shift in the nature of the war," says Kygryzstan-based Paul Quinn Judge, an analyst for Central Asia and the Caucasus with the International Crisis Group. "Go back...even to the early 2000s and this was still a war being fought for independence by an armed force that was in its majority secular. Now we have a religious war fought for a caliphate."

The transition to jihad didn't take place overnight. Even in the 1990s, top Chechen military commander Shamil Basayev led a more radical wing of fighters who were willing to use terrorist tactics in the fight with Moscow. By 1999, he had broken with Chechnya's president and launched an unsuccessful attack on Dagestan aimed at establishing an Islamic Chechen-Dagestani Republic.

Mr. Basayev, who was killed in an explosion in 2006, is believed to have been responsible for the Chechen use of female suicide bombers. Known in Russia as Black Widows, these have become something of a hallmark for Chechen terrorists since one struck in 2000, killing 27 Russian special forces soldiers. Mr. Basayev also claimed responsibility for a 2002 attack on a Moscow theater in which Chechen suicide bombers, many of them women, took some 850 hostages, of whom more than 100 died.

According to a 2004 paper on female suicide bombers produced for the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, Chechen women had by 2004 carried out nine successful attacks, killing more than 300 people. At least some had lost husbands or children at the hands of Russian troops.

Terrorism analysts say women are used mainly because they are less likely to be detected than men, but also because they can have a greater psychological impact on a society.

Though most suicide bombers remain Chechen, there's clear evidence that violence is spreading through the region. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, tallied 900 deaths from violent incidents in the North Caucasus in 2009, compared with 586 in the previous year. Chechnya trailed Dagestan and Ingushetia in its share of fatalities, according to the study, which was compiled mainly from news reports.

In Dagestan, there is little popular support for separatism, yet policemen are killed on a weekly basis. In 2007, Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov said in a statement published on a radical Web site that his group's goal was now to create an "Emirate of the Caucasus."

The militants' tactics have changed. Little attempt is made any longer to hold territory. But suicide bombings rose to 15 instances in 2009, from four the year before, according to the CSIS study.

Sarah Mendelson, director of the CSIS Human Rights and Security Initiative, cautions that little is known about how much unity of organization or purpose there is between militants in one republic and the next. According to the CSIS survey, nine of last year's suicide attacks were in Chechnya, with just one in Dagestan.

The rebels have also moved from a quasi-military structure to individual cells that are more dispersed and more difficult to infiltrate, according to Andrei Soldatov, a Moscow-based terrorism analyst.

Some analysts saw the Moscow metro attack as a possible revenge attack for the slaying in Ingushetia this month of rebel ideologue Alexander Tikhomirov, a convert to Islam from Russia's far Eastern province of Buryatiya who was schooled in Egypt, and of another rebel leader in Kabardino-Balkaria.

Mr. Soldatov, however, thought that unlikely, because such operations usually take months to plan. "The terrorists saw an opportunity and they took it," he said.

Analysts are generally critical of Russian policies in the region, which they say have done too little to deal with chronic unemployment and other economic issues, focusing instead on military means.

Russia President Dmitry Medvedev in January made what was hailed as a potentially important step to recognize that the Kremlin too will need to approach the North Caucasus as a whole and do more to develop its economy, setting up a new North Caucasus Federal District to govern much of the region. Instead of choosing the Chechen president or a former security official for the job, as expected, Mr. Medvedev picked a former governor from Siberia with a background in finance for the job, and made him a deputy prime minister.

Attempts by Moscow to stamp out the movement don't appear to be working.

Russian officials including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in late 2008 that they hoped the scale and determination of the Russian intervention in neighboring Georgia would convince Russia's own insurgents across the border in the North Caucasus of the futility of continuing to fight.

Some other policies floated in Moscow also appear to seek to isolate the problem, rather than solve it. Earlier this month, the head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor General's office sparked outrage across the region when he suggested the e ntire population of the North Caucasus should be fingerprinted.

New York Times, March 30, 2010

Moscow under Attack 

by Sergey Kuznetsov

EVERY time some disaster hits the Moscow subway, I remember that Soviet propaganda used to call this the most beautiful subway in the world.

Incredibly, in this one case, it wasn’t lying: Moscow subway stations are marble palaces with pillars, mosaics and statues of happy swimmers and oarswomen.

Despite all this decoration, I was afraid of the subway as a child. I felt that there was some hidden terror in the gap between the sparkling stations and the dark noisy tunnels with their all-too-obvious symbolism.

Most of my life has been spent along the same subway line. Its official name is Frunzenskaya, but since Muscovites nickname their subway lines according to their color on the map, everybody just calls it Red Line.

This morning when I made my way to the nearest station, Park Kultury, I heard sirens and saw fire trucks, ambulances and police cars near the entrance.

“What the hell is that?” my wife asked. I got my iPhone and read the news.

“It’s an explosion at the Lubyankya station,” I told her. “Forty minutes ago.”

“We must have had a second one,” she said. She was right: five minutes later, the news agencies reported an explosion inside Park Kultury.

Moscow, understandably, was in a panic. Monday was the first day after spring break. The Beslan school hostage crisis of 2004 took place on the first day after summer vacation.

Out of the panic came conspiracy theories. It was said that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was starting his next presidential campaign. After all, his rise to power in 1999 began with his fierce response to a series of explosions that destroyed Moscow apartment buildings. Others said the explosions had been set by Mr. Putin’s foes, using a terrorist attack to rock the boat. The majority blamed Chechens and Islamic terrorists.

In addition to the political conspiracy theories, the explosions carried symbolic force: the first station to be bombed was near the former K.G.B. building. “Lubyanka” is an informal term for state security and the symbol of Soviet state terror.

I don’t know why nobody has thus far pointed out that Park Kultury — the Park of Culture and Recreation — is a symbol of the Grand Totalitarian Style, the almost joyous aesthetic of Stalin’s era, represented by those statues of happy swimmers and oarswomen in the station.

In fact, Park Kultury and Lubyanka are two sides of the Soviet epoch. The contrast between them represents the gap between the marble stations and the dark tunnels that frightened me.

Of course, this analogy is the same rubbish as most conspiracy theories ....

I am writing about the history of the Moscow subway, my childhood, the two sides of the Soviet epoch because I don’t want to think about the dead and injured, about their loved ones, their families.

In the end, nobody knows who is responsible for this attack. They have simply reminded Muscovites: Evil exists, and horror is always right beside you.

Tomorrow, we will wake up and live with these truths. At least, until we forget them again, as we have many times before.

Sergey Kuznetsov is the author of the novel “Butterfly Skin.”