Richard
08-22-2010, 15:25
Russia's war on terrorism is essentially a civil war. "Our Afghanistan is inside Russia" is how Lipman puts it. Even so, on most days, the war feels far away.
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Russia's Long (and Brutal) War on Terror
Time, 22 Aug 2010
Part 1 of 2
On a Monday morning, March 29, suicide bombers attacked two metro stations in the heart of Moscow. The detonations, timed 40 minutes apart during rush hour for maximum damage, in some ways resembled the 2004 commuter-train attack in Madrid, the July 7 bombings in London a year later and numerous other public acts of terrorism around the globe. These similarities were not lost on world leaders, who were quick to express not just sympathy but also empathy. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "When Moscow is attacked, we are all attacked." In June, just days before the exposure of a U.S.-based Russian spy network, Barack Obama stressed unity with visiting Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, saying that "terrorists threaten both our people, be it in Times Square or in Moscow."
But if Russia faces a similar threat, that does not mean it has the same approach to the war on terrorism. In fact, in its long war against extremism, Russian leadership sometimes seems to act as the id of the global community--uninhibited, revenge-minded, saying things European and U.S. leaders dare not. The Kremlin and its generals have consistently prosecuted the war domestically in ways that seem both brazen and brutal by international standards. Yes, the West has done its own rough work behind closed doors--CIA renditions, the prison at Guantánamo--but in Russia, this work is almost celebrated. A newspaper with ties to the Kremlin lauded a new state prosecutor as a "tough man" who operates "on the edge of legality." Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made intimidation a large part of his political persona. But beyond the posturing lies a key question: Whose approach works better? If Western democracies are struggling to reconcile openness with vigilance, does the freer hand of the Kremlin, whose rule is closer to autocracy, give it an advantage in fighting its war on terrorism?
The Fortress City
Moscow was a fortress before it was ever a city. The Kremlin, sited on Borovitskaya Hill in 1156, was its first grand building, made originally from pine, then oak, limestone and finally red brick. As its walls grew thick, Moscow began the "gathering of Russia"--the conquering of principalities around it. It was the beginning of an expansion that, at the zenith of Soviet power, encompassed not just Russians but the world's largest tapestry of subject peoples: more than 100 ethnic groups speaking more than 200 languages, living in 11 time zones. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow divested itself of many of those entanglements, but some regions that agitated for more autonomy were located inside the century-old border of Russia and could not be carved out. Chief among these was the North Caucasus, a predominantly Muslim region that includes Chechnya, a tiny republic that fought two failed wars of independence. Since 2007, Chechnya has been ruled by the strong hand of Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin-backed president who at first extinguished all open rebellion. But even Kadyrov's grip is slipping, and the fight against the Kremlin has flared in neighboring republics, which have served as a base for insurgent groups to mount successful attacks from southern Russia all the way to the fortress city on the Moscow river.
The March 29 bombers, Dzhennet Abdullayeva, 17, and Maryam Sharipova, 28, were so-called black widows--young women radicalized by the death or disappearance of their husbands--from Dagestan, a tiny, mountainous republic south of Chechnya that, together with the rest of the North Caucasus, serves as a strategically important buffer between Russia proper and its enemies (like Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgia) to the south.
Dagestan's sorry recent history mirrors that of the rest of the region. The post-Soviet era was chaotic and corrupt. Regional governments co-opted Sufism--a variant of Islam popular in Central and South Asia--by building government Islamic schools and mosques, but their own venal appetites tainted the faith by association. So when students and preachers began bringing Wahhabism--the strict Saudi version of Islam--to the North Caucasus, it seemed clean, devout, otherworldly. The ensuing struggle between Kremlin-backed Sufi authorities and the growing tide of Wahhabis has been bloody and clannish, and it has reached far beyond the mountains of the Caucasus. In Dagestan, a Chechen former engineer named Doku Umarov has declared himself the emir of the nonexistent emirate of the Caucasus. Umarov claimed responsibility for the Moscow-metro bombings, telling Russians in a video message, "I promise you that the war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your lives, feel it on your own skin."
It is not surprising to hear a terrorist leader making ghoulish threats, but in Russia, the authorities talk just as tough. Putin, who flew to a Russian base in Chechnya shortly after becoming President in 1999 to hand out daggers to the soldiers, was relatively restrained after the March 29 bombing when he said that those responsible "will be eliminated." President Medvedev flew to Dagestan shortly thereafter and was heard on national TV telling his commanders that although Russia had been able to "take the heads off the most notorious gangsters," they may need to use "harsher" methods. Kadyrov was blunter yet, writing in an editorial for the Russian paper Isvestia that "terrorists must be hunted down and found in their lairs, they must be poisoned like rats, they must be crushed and destroyed."
Boris Dubin, a sociologist and pollster with the Levada Center in Moscow, says that Putin's rhetorical flourishes over the years--he once promised to kill terrorists "in the outhouse," to scrape them from the sewers--are calculated political theater. "There is a Russian code of political language," Dubin says. "From time to time, you should use crude language." This bravura echoes on national television news, which is largely controlled by the Kremlin. A characteristic of the Putin era is that TV news avoids coverage of disaster. (It took several hours for the major networks to acknowledge the Moscow attacks.) And when coverage does begin, it is carefully focused on acts of composure and resolve by the authorities. "The general message of Russian television is that we--Putin and Medvedev--are in charge," says Masha Lipman, a media expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Russians seem to take comfort from this paternalistic message. Dubin's polling shows that Putin's approval ratings hovered around 80% before and after the latest attacks, as it had through previous national tragedies. "It's as if we had several Katrinas and the approval rating of the President and Prime Minister remained at 80%," says Lipman.
The Downside of Paternalism
But faith in Medvedev and Putin doesn't extend to the institutions below them, which means few Russians are inclined to play their part in the war on terrorism. New Yorkers are familiar with signs saying "If you see something, say something," and it was a street vendor in Times Square who first alerted the police to the smoldering SUV bomb that failed to detonate in May. Russians have little trust in their police: in one survey, 55% said the government could do nothing to protect Russians from terrorism and 24% said they think the security services themselves may have played a role in the metro attacks.
This mistrust of the authorities is even more acute in Moscow's immigrant communities, where Russian law enforcement--unlike police in, say, New York City or London--has failed to cultivate informants and maintain other useful relationships. Svetlana Gannushkina, a human-rights worker and advocate for Moscow's immigrant communities, says that after earlier attacks, it was "simply a hunt" throughout Moscow for Chechens, even Georgians--anyone from the Caucasus. Security analyst Andrei Soldatov says xenophobia among officials is "the biggest problem" in the war on terrorism. "Law enforcement intimidates the North Caucasians all the time. There's no trust," he says. "But if you want to fight terrorism, you have to work closely with those communities."
A visit to Friday services at the Moscow Central Mosque shows just how marginalized the Muslim diaspora in Moscow is. The barricaded street leading up to the mosque is not supposed to be prayer space, but hundreds of worshippers roll out their prayer rugs on the asphalt. Head imam Ildar Alyautdinov explains that in a city with 2 million Muslims, the authorities have allowed only three mosques. "You can talk about human rights," he says, "but we are not allowed to worship here."
(cont'd)
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Russia's Long (and Brutal) War on Terror
Time, 22 Aug 2010
Part 1 of 2
On a Monday morning, March 29, suicide bombers attacked two metro stations in the heart of Moscow. The detonations, timed 40 minutes apart during rush hour for maximum damage, in some ways resembled the 2004 commuter-train attack in Madrid, the July 7 bombings in London a year later and numerous other public acts of terrorism around the globe. These similarities were not lost on world leaders, who were quick to express not just sympathy but also empathy. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, "When Moscow is attacked, we are all attacked." In June, just days before the exposure of a U.S.-based Russian spy network, Barack Obama stressed unity with visiting Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, saying that "terrorists threaten both our people, be it in Times Square or in Moscow."
But if Russia faces a similar threat, that does not mean it has the same approach to the war on terrorism. In fact, in its long war against extremism, Russian leadership sometimes seems to act as the id of the global community--uninhibited, revenge-minded, saying things European and U.S. leaders dare not. The Kremlin and its generals have consistently prosecuted the war domestically in ways that seem both brazen and brutal by international standards. Yes, the West has done its own rough work behind closed doors--CIA renditions, the prison at Guantánamo--but in Russia, this work is almost celebrated. A newspaper with ties to the Kremlin lauded a new state prosecutor as a "tough man" who operates "on the edge of legality." Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has made intimidation a large part of his political persona. But beyond the posturing lies a key question: Whose approach works better? If Western democracies are struggling to reconcile openness with vigilance, does the freer hand of the Kremlin, whose rule is closer to autocracy, give it an advantage in fighting its war on terrorism?
The Fortress City
Moscow was a fortress before it was ever a city. The Kremlin, sited on Borovitskaya Hill in 1156, was its first grand building, made originally from pine, then oak, limestone and finally red brick. As its walls grew thick, Moscow began the "gathering of Russia"--the conquering of principalities around it. It was the beginning of an expansion that, at the zenith of Soviet power, encompassed not just Russians but the world's largest tapestry of subject peoples: more than 100 ethnic groups speaking more than 200 languages, living in 11 time zones. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow divested itself of many of those entanglements, but some regions that agitated for more autonomy were located inside the century-old border of Russia and could not be carved out. Chief among these was the North Caucasus, a predominantly Muslim region that includes Chechnya, a tiny republic that fought two failed wars of independence. Since 2007, Chechnya has been ruled by the strong hand of Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin-backed president who at first extinguished all open rebellion. But even Kadyrov's grip is slipping, and the fight against the Kremlin has flared in neighboring republics, which have served as a base for insurgent groups to mount successful attacks from southern Russia all the way to the fortress city on the Moscow river.
The March 29 bombers, Dzhennet Abdullayeva, 17, and Maryam Sharipova, 28, were so-called black widows--young women radicalized by the death or disappearance of their husbands--from Dagestan, a tiny, mountainous republic south of Chechnya that, together with the rest of the North Caucasus, serves as a strategically important buffer between Russia proper and its enemies (like Mikheil Saakashvili's Georgia) to the south.
Dagestan's sorry recent history mirrors that of the rest of the region. The post-Soviet era was chaotic and corrupt. Regional governments co-opted Sufism--a variant of Islam popular in Central and South Asia--by building government Islamic schools and mosques, but their own venal appetites tainted the faith by association. So when students and preachers began bringing Wahhabism--the strict Saudi version of Islam--to the North Caucasus, it seemed clean, devout, otherworldly. The ensuing struggle between Kremlin-backed Sufi authorities and the growing tide of Wahhabis has been bloody and clannish, and it has reached far beyond the mountains of the Caucasus. In Dagestan, a Chechen former engineer named Doku Umarov has declared himself the emir of the nonexistent emirate of the Caucasus. Umarov claimed responsibility for the Moscow-metro bombings, telling Russians in a video message, "I promise you that the war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your lives, feel it on your own skin."
It is not surprising to hear a terrorist leader making ghoulish threats, but in Russia, the authorities talk just as tough. Putin, who flew to a Russian base in Chechnya shortly after becoming President in 1999 to hand out daggers to the soldiers, was relatively restrained after the March 29 bombing when he said that those responsible "will be eliminated." President Medvedev flew to Dagestan shortly thereafter and was heard on national TV telling his commanders that although Russia had been able to "take the heads off the most notorious gangsters," they may need to use "harsher" methods. Kadyrov was blunter yet, writing in an editorial for the Russian paper Isvestia that "terrorists must be hunted down and found in their lairs, they must be poisoned like rats, they must be crushed and destroyed."
Boris Dubin, a sociologist and pollster with the Levada Center in Moscow, says that Putin's rhetorical flourishes over the years--he once promised to kill terrorists "in the outhouse," to scrape them from the sewers--are calculated political theater. "There is a Russian code of political language," Dubin says. "From time to time, you should use crude language." This bravura echoes on national television news, which is largely controlled by the Kremlin. A characteristic of the Putin era is that TV news avoids coverage of disaster. (It took several hours for the major networks to acknowledge the Moscow attacks.) And when coverage does begin, it is carefully focused on acts of composure and resolve by the authorities. "The general message of Russian television is that we--Putin and Medvedev--are in charge," says Masha Lipman, a media expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Russians seem to take comfort from this paternalistic message. Dubin's polling shows that Putin's approval ratings hovered around 80% before and after the latest attacks, as it had through previous national tragedies. "It's as if we had several Katrinas and the approval rating of the President and Prime Minister remained at 80%," says Lipman.
The Downside of Paternalism
But faith in Medvedev and Putin doesn't extend to the institutions below them, which means few Russians are inclined to play their part in the war on terrorism. New Yorkers are familiar with signs saying "If you see something, say something," and it was a street vendor in Times Square who first alerted the police to the smoldering SUV bomb that failed to detonate in May. Russians have little trust in their police: in one survey, 55% said the government could do nothing to protect Russians from terrorism and 24% said they think the security services themselves may have played a role in the metro attacks.
This mistrust of the authorities is even more acute in Moscow's immigrant communities, where Russian law enforcement--unlike police in, say, New York City or London--has failed to cultivate informants and maintain other useful relationships. Svetlana Gannushkina, a human-rights worker and advocate for Moscow's immigrant communities, says that after earlier attacks, it was "simply a hunt" throughout Moscow for Chechens, even Georgians--anyone from the Caucasus. Security analyst Andrei Soldatov says xenophobia among officials is "the biggest problem" in the war on terrorism. "Law enforcement intimidates the North Caucasians all the time. There's no trust," he says. "But if you want to fight terrorism, you have to work closely with those communities."
A visit to Friday services at the Moscow Central Mosque shows just how marginalized the Muslim diaspora in Moscow is. The barricaded street leading up to the mosque is not supposed to be prayer space, but hundreds of worshippers roll out their prayer rugs on the asphalt. Head imam Ildar Alyautdinov explains that in a city with 2 million Muslims, the authorities have allowed only three mosques. "You can talk about human rights," he says, "but we are not allowed to worship here."
(cont'd)