ARTICLE CRITIQUE
With Minor Improvement, The Washington Post Again Misleads U.S. Public on Russian-Muslim Relations
By Gordon M. Hahn
The Washington Post, through the pen of Kathy Lally, is up to its old tricks. Writing articles that try their best to appear unbiased, it tries to impress on the uninformed its one-sided view of Russia and, in this case, its relations with its Muslim.
In a September 5th article on the jihad in Dagestan “In Russia’s Dagestan, resentments erupt into violence”, the WP and Lally do their best to give the appearance of balance. Sure enough, the article begins with mention of suicide bombers emerging (going on for over two years already in Dagestan) and that weekly “three policemen are killed and numerous civilians become casualties.” But there is no mention anywhere in the article of the organization behind these attacks: the jihadi terrorist network of more than a thousand mujahedin and tens of thousands of supporters called the Caucasus Emirate (CE).
In years past, the WP never mentioned the CE’s amir Dokku ‘Abu Usman’ either. Thus, minor progress can be noted here in that Umarov is mentioned along with his alliance with Al Qa`ida. But this is like writing about Ayman al-Zawahiri and mujahedin in Afghanistan and Pakistan without mentioning Al Qa`ida or Anwar al-Awlaki and mujahedin in Yemen without mentioning Al Qaidia in the Arabian Peninsula. Lally writes about Umarov as if he were a lone terrorist trapped in the woods not the amir of the CE and its thousand or more mujahedin: “Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist with al-Qaeda connections suspected of hiding in Dagestan who has been accused of terrorist attacks on Moscow.” In fact, Umarov’s role is much more central. He appoints and leads the top amirs of the CE’s four main regional networks spread across the North Caucasus called ‘vilaiyats’ or governates, including the amir of the Dagestan Vilaiyat’s (DV) mujahedin. A former DV amir, moreover, is the CE’s Shariah Court judge or qadi.
Moreover, it is the entire CE which is allied with Al Qa`ida. Ali Abu Mukhammad al-Dagistani has given us the most concise and explicit statement of the CE’s goals and ideology, though by far not the only such one: “We are doing everything possible to build the Caliphate and prepare the ground for this to the extent of our capabilities” (“Stennogramma video: Kadii IK Abu Mukhammad – ‘Otvety na voprosy’ – 1 chast’,” Guraba.info, 8 July 2011).
Yet Lally writes about the Chechen “insurgency” (that is, mujahedin) as if it were a phenomenon separate from the CE and its Dagestani mujahedin: “Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent, finding expression in a conservative form of Islam taking root in the beautiful severity of the mountain landscape.” The “insurgency in neighboring” is none other than the mujahedin of the CE’s Chechnya-based network, the Nokchicho Vilaiyat, the amir of which is nione other than CE amir Umarov himself.
At each turn Lally and the Post continue to hold back, deleting any direct connection the terrorism in the region, on the one hand, and the CE and the global jihadi revolutionary alliance, on the other. The article even separates the “rebels” and “armed men in the forest” from the Umarov: “Local journalists estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 armed men are in the forest at any one time, with perhaps 5,000 others prepared to join them. The forest shelters organized terrorism as well - the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist with al-Qaeda connections suspected of hiding in Dagestan who has been accused of terrorist attacks on Moscow.”
Left out is the fact that after Umarov was put on the U.S. State Department’s list of specially designated terrorists in June 2010, the CE was placed on the list this May. There also is no mention of the CE’s alliance with Al Qa`ida and affiliated organizations reflected by: a common theo-ideology, common propaganda, foreign fighters form other jihadi groups under the CE, CE mujahedin trained by Al Qa`ida and allied organizations like the Islamic Jihadi Union, pro-Al Qa`ida sheikhs endorsement of the CE, and the CE’s propaganda support for Al Qa`ida and its affiliates and allies comprising the global jihadi revolutionary movement.
The article then gives free rein to a leading Dagestani Salafi identified as Abu Umar to expound his intolerant views and dreams of a Dagestan under a Sharia law. Abu Umar and Salafists of Dagestan (and the North Caucasus) like him are referred to several times by Lally as “conservative Muslims,” when in fact many if not most Salafis are hardly conservative in any sense of the word. They are opposed to the status quo, intolerant of the Caucasus’s traditional Sufi Islam, and demand the institution of religious rule under a harsh version of Sharia law. Many of Dagestan’s Salafis as elsewhere are radicals, even extremists; the CE mujahedin are themselves Salafis and leading proponents of theocratic Sharia law-based rule. Salafi imams have defected to and fought and died for the CE, which is responsible for the killings of hundreds of Muslims and tens of local muftis and imams.
Eleven days later, Lally and the Post again picked up the theme of Russia’s Muslims in an article strategically titled “Moscow destroys central mosque.” The title demonstrates the impression the purveyors of the article wished to leave on its dwindling readership. For those who perused only the headline or read only the first two-thirds of the piece and did not pursue it to the end, the disinformation operation was a success. They would be left wondering just how terribly totalitarian ‘eternal Russia’ remains, destroying mosques so Muslims have to pray in the cold. No wonder Muslims are rising up in Dagestan and the Caucasus.
Those who persisted through to the end might have rethought their first reaction to the piece, when they read that a new mosque was already under construction adjacent to the old one.
Left out of the article is that the Russian state at various levels spends tens of millions of dollars a year building and reconstructing mosques, Islamic universities, and cultural centers using tax payer funds of Muslims and non-Muslims.
Yes, there are problems in Russia with prejudice among non-Muslims towards Muslims, including occasional killings by skinheads. But these are outnumbered by a factor of 50 the killings of Muslims and non-Muslims alike by the Caucasus Emirate mujahedin based in Russia’s North Caucasus. Lally and the WP mention Muslim, indeed the jihadi violence in cursory fashion to cover themselves, while Russians’ real and perceived violence and oppression are featured.
The false violence against property implied by “Moscow destroys central mosque” gets more ink than the CE ever has. The WP, NYT and the rest of the U.S. mainstream media have yet to do one feature piece on the Caucasus Emirate and its victims – four years and 2,000 attacks after its creation. Do not hold your breath.
Gordon M. Hahn is 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/faculty/ghahn/report.
ARTICLES IN QUESTION:
Washington Post
September 5, 2011
In Russia's Dagestan, Salafi Muslims clash with government authorities
By Kathy Lally
MAKHACHKALA, Russia The latest episode in Moscow's struggle with rebellious Muslims is unfolding here in Dagestan, a forbidding North Caucasian realm where peaks as high as 13,000 feet descend sharply to running rivers.
Suicide bombers have emerged. Each week, an average of three policemen are killed and numerous civilians become casualties. Tanks and helicopters, weapons blazing, pursue guerrillas in the woods.
Until recently, it was the insurgency in neighboring Chechnya that had posed the biggest challenge to Russian leaders. But now, it is the traditionally independent and Muslim Dagestanis whose resentments are turning violent, finding expression in a conservative form of Islam taking root in the beautiful severity of the mountain landscape.
Authorities blame Muslim extremists for the unrest. Conservative Muslims blame government repression. The fighting sometimes appears dangerously close to civil war, with imams attacked and killed, liquor stores blown up, and angry young men taking up arms and going into hiding which in the North Caucasus is called going to the forest.
"They terrorized the people," a 30-year-old religious leader known as Abu Umar said of regional authorities. "And now, the people terrorize them."
When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Russia emerged independent, its new president, Boris Yeltsin, promising democracy and prosperity in a multiethnic nation. Twenty years into statehood, a minority has accumulated great wealth while the average citizen has been disappointed by lack of opportunity and an increasingly authoritarian government run on corruption and disregard for law. Ethnic tension has grown.
Few protest. Chechnya has been subdued. But Dagestan roils with religious disputes and anger at Moscow, mixed, almost indistinguishably, with vicious commercial and political struggles.
"Russia will never make Dagestan prosperous," Abu Umar said. "We are a third-class people for them. They want us humiliated, and we feel it."
On a late-summer afternoon, only the mosquitoes look bloodthirsty in a muddy field where Abu Umar politely offers insect repellant and a tour of a self-sufficient Islamic community about 70 miles northwest of Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital. He is a Salafi, what Russians call a Wahhabi and consider synonymous with extremism.
The walls are already up on the three-story madrassa, or religious school, where Salafis say they intend to provide social services , sports, education and opportunities untainted by corruption. As a bulldozer rumbled, Abu Umar pointed out the spot reserved for an orphanage to care for children he says the government neglects.
He imagines citizens obeying the law of Allah, making police and other accouterments of the state unneeded, allowing Muslims to live in peace and prosperity. The government considers such talk a dangerous cover for subversion and terrorism. Abu Umar says the authorities have lost their moral bearings and are wrong about the Salafis.
"We are building," he said, "not destroying."
The emergence of Salafism
Islam arrived here in the late Middle Ages, becoming a moderate Sufism infused with local customs. But religion was mostly forced underground during the officially atheistic years of the Soviet Union, and in Dagestan, believers buried their Korans in the forest and suffered silently as their mosques were destroyed.
When religion began to reemerge in Russia as the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, Salafism a puritanical form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia began to drift here through Afghanistan. The disillusionment and chaos of the 1990s as Russia struggled to replace communism with democracy provided fertile ground for it to take hold.
Salafis believe a Muslim has a direct relationship with God and should study the words of the prophet Muhammad. Sufis in Dagestan follow the instruction of their sheiks, who stand between them and God and have anywhere from 500 to 20,000 deeply loyal followers.
Salafis dislike the Sufi alliance with the government. Sufis run the government-sanctioned Spiritual Board of Muslims, to which the official clergy belong. They also support a secular state. Salafis do not.
"Whether he's Sufi or Salafi," Abu Umar said, "if a man is not dreaming about sharia, he's not a Muslim."
Violent and unsolved deaths have become a routine part of life here. At a Makhachkala sports center, a tiny grandmother named Nisakhan Magomedova who presides over the front desk takes a rat-a-tat-tat pose as she describes how the director of the judo program was gunned down recently, just after getting a bigger job at another club, targeted perhaps by a professional rival.
Residents can point out the spot at the beach where a bomb went off last year, a protest against women in bathing suits that cost one woman her leg.
Police have killed 100 people they identified as rebels since the beginning of the year, Interior Ministry officials said in June, and human rights activists accuse police of killing first and then finding a crime to assign to the body.
Local journalists estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 armed men are in the forest at any one time, with perhaps 5,000 others prepared to join them. The forest shelters organized terrorism as well - the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist with al-Qaeda connections suspected of hiding in Dagestan who has been accused of terrorist attacks on Moscow.
In Dagestan, all policemen are targets, because they represent government authority and because they are accused of treating the population brutally. In one Makhachkala district, police line up for morning roll call behind heavy fortifications, yards from where a suicide bomber smashed into a gate, only to be rammed by a police van. Six police officers died as both vehicles exploded.
"Property is being divided" as it was in the U.S. era of the robber baron, said Abrek Aliev, the head of protocol for the city of Makhachkala.
Greeting visitors with sweet fresh apricots, dark red cherries and juicy local strawberries, he opens a bottle of cognac in a City Hall anteroom and offers a toast to the mayor's health.
Said Amirov, mayor of Makhachkala since 1998, has survived 15 assassination attempts, one of which severed his spine and left him unable to walk.
"There are people who try to live outside the law," the mayor said, "and I don't let them do what they want."
Amirov heads Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in Makhachkala. He said he is busy building the housing and infrastructure required for a city of 710,000 whose population is expected to grow to a million. The birthrate in Dagestan is much higher than in the rest of Russia, and people are moving to the city looking for work.
"We want a secular state here, as part of the Russian Federation," he said. "If those in the forest stop fighting and drop their guns, they can rejoin the peaceful population. They are our people, too."
'We want to live under sharia'
On a hot, sunny afternoon, a half-dozen police officers in street clothes are talking about the forest. Publishing their names would put them in grave danger from the authorities.
"All this fighting is the consequence of bad political, social and economic policies," said a 47-year-old captain with gold teeth, quoting Jean Jacques Rousseau on the social contract and Thomas Jefferson on the rights of man. "All the institutions in the country are corrupt, and Russian federal power is the source of it."
On a Saturday night, a young Salafi couple offered tea and cake in their small Makhachkala apartment, as their 14-month-old son toddled on newly walking legs and their 6-year-old son played quietly.
"Russians came here to our land and told us how to live," said Ayat Abdurakhmanova, 28, who wears the hijab, or head scarf. "They brought prostitution, alcohol and cigarettes and told us if we didn't like it, we should leave."
As Abdurakhmanova kissed her giggling toddler, her husband, Rashid, played a YouTube video, recorded by a store surveillance camera, that showed an acquaintance entering a liquor store, clearing out staff and customers, and setting off an explosion.
The friend's 21-year-old wife, wearing a hijab and pink dress, watches, drinking tea and saying nothing, as her husband becomes a hero. He strides out of the store before the bomb goes off, wearing camouflage and holding a gun. The video does not show him and his accomplices coming under police fire soon after, dying in their exploding car, leaving her a widow with a baby.
"We don't want to impose our beliefs on anyone else," Rashid said, "but we want them to let us live as we wish. We want to live under sharia."
Washington Post
September 16, 2011
Moscow destroys central mosque
By Kathy Lally
For more than a century, Moscow's Muslims have found affirmation in their Cathedral Mosque, painted in a minty pastel so evocative of the city's cherished old buildings, with a golden crescent high above, proclaiming their identity.
On Thursday, the mosque built by Tatar Muslims who have lived in Russia for a thousand years was a pile of splintered wood, shattered brick and billowing plaster.
The mosque was demolished last weekend, the official reason being that the 1904 building was badly deteriorated and heavy rains had made it so dangerous that it had to be destroyed before it collapsed and killed someone. But longtime Muscovites, Muslim and not, were unconvinced, saying it was a historic monument that should have been preserved at all costs.
Ravil Gainutdin, the chief mufti who works out of offices next door, shed no tears. Gainutdin heads the government-backed Spiritual Board of Muslims of the European Part of Russia, and recently he had been complaining that the mosque was not properly aligned with Mecca and that it had no historic value.
Farid Asadullin, chairman of the scientific and public department of the Council of Muftis, said houses of worship are destroyed all the time, pointing out that Moscow's 1883 Orthodox Christ the Savior Cathedral was torn down in 1931 (by Stalin, who replaced it with a swimming pool) and then built anew in the 1990s.
"Renewal of a mosque is a natural process," he said.
Little was heard outside the official religious structure until Thursday, when several Moscow Muslims and preservationists organized a news conference to mourn their loss. They had a hard time finding space but finally ended up in the attic of a marginalized political party, Yabloko, with mostly religious and ethnic media members in attendance.
"I am not such a believer," said Adil Belayev, an elderly man with pure white hair who said some of his kin had helped build the mosque. "I don't pray every day. But that was a holy place, and I felt it."
The mosque was built despite czarist disapproval, and it withstood revolution and repression, said Mukhammyat Minachev, who is Muslim. "And now someone has demolished our memories," he said.
Gayar Iskandyarov, an engineer and leader of the Foundation for the Development of the Muslim People, said the mosque had been a cultural center for Tatars, keeping their language and traditions alive even though they were a minority in Orthodox Russia. As if in witness, the water on the tables was Holy Spring, from the Orthodox Golden Ring city of Kostroma. A church a block away from the mosque displays the Orthodox cross, with a crescent at its base signifying the victory of Christianity over Islam.
"The walls held our prayers," Iskandyarov said.
A new mosque is being built next to the destroyed one. The cornerstone was laid in 2005, but it is still far from finished, and no work has been done in a few years. Now, officials said, the permits are in hand and work can proceed.
Around the edges of the room, journalists whispered that a Muslim from the Caucasus had donated a great deal of money to finish construction of the new mosque and that tearing down the old one represented a shift in power. Once Tatars defined the Muslim community; now they are outnumbered by Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The Muslims at the news conference Tatars who grew up in Moscow said they should have been told that the mosque needed repairs. They could have come up with alternatives. The old one could have been incorporated into the new one.
"That would have been too expensive," interrupted Farit Farisov, chairman of the board of trustees of the Council of Muftis, who attended the event. "Where would we get the money?"
Of course people had been told, he said later. "Maybe we didn't use the word 'demolish,' but we talked about reconstruction," he said. "I'm a lawyer. I cannot define demolish or reconstruct. Talk to an architect."
He said that the new mosque will be finished within a year or so and that the old one will be restored as part of it. Frescoes were saved, he said.
"Don't worry," he said. "Everything will be fine."
As he spoke, a large yellow steam shovel was biting into the rubble of the mosque, dropping it into a red dump truck.
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