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Islamic revival stirs angry youths in six Russian republics By Douglas Birch Sun Foreign Staff Baltimore Sun July 17, 2005 NALCHIK, Russia - Dzhamed Tsakoyev knelt on the carpet and laid the paperwork out like tarot cards, as if shuffling medical and police reports might make sense of his son's brutal death. Last year, police in the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria arrested Tsakoyev's son, Rasul, a cell phone dealer who was also a devout Muslim. Rasul Tsakoyev's captors allegedly shocked him with electric wires, put cigarettes out on his skin and beat him unconscious. They left him for dead on a trash heap. The young man, remarkably, revived himself and stumbled toward home. He told his parents his story. A few days later, he died in a hospital of his injuries. His only crime, his mother, Zukhra, said, was his refusal to sign a false confession claiming he was a terrorist, and his regular attendance at Friday prayers at a mosque. "What kind of a life can we have if our only son was killed in such a manner?" she asked. An atmosphere of distrust is spreading here, like a plague affecting all the Caucasus. Russian troops have fought separatist guerrillas in nearby Chechnya for most of the last decade, in a struggle marked by massacres, kidnappings and summary executions. Now, a mix of poverty and endemic corruption is helping create legions of angry, unemployed youths in six of Russia's other ethnic republics in the Caucasus Mountains. An Islamic revival has given those young men a cause to fight for. Human rights groups charge that authorities have responded to isolated attacks with indiscriminate violence, creating a cycle of repression, radicalization and retaliation. Even Russia at stake At risk are six republics - Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia and Adygyea - and Russia itself. What happens here will also come to matter to the rest of the world, much as the fighting in Chechnya has contributed to the suspicion and hostility between Islam and the secular west. Russian authorities say that domestic and foreign radical groups carefully laid the groundwork for bloodshed in the Caucasus. "They've gradually been forming a fifth column," Sergei N. Ignatchenko, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in a recent interview. "They pay a lot of attention to involving the younger generation, starting in their teens. It's a well-functioning, well-adjusted system." But Ignatchenko conceded that poverty, police brutality and corruption have all aided the radicals' cause. Now, experts say, the region's radicals and authoritarian officials are preparing to harvest what they have sown. "We will have in the next year an explosion in the North Caucasus," said Alexei Malashenko, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center. "It's practically inevitable." In Kabardino-Balkaria, authorities have conducted mass arrests, tortured suspects and closed all the mosques in the capital - except the huge, new central mosque that residents call "the KGB mosque" because it is government controlled. "We are concerned and disturbed by the growing radicalism of the region," said Valery Khazhatukov, of the Kabardino-Balkaria Human Rights Center. "All these repressions play into the hands of the radical leaders." In Ingushetia, insurgents began carrying out abductions and geurrilla raids in 2002, after Moscow closed refugee camps housing tens of thouands of Chechens. North Ossetia - predominantly Christian - still grieves the slaying of 331 students, teachers and others during the Beslan school siege last November, blaming both local officials and the republic's Islamic neighbors. In Karachayevo-Cherkessia, minority ethnic groups are demanding more autonomy and an end to alleged corruption. Protesters stormed the president's office last fall after seven business rivals of the president's son-in-law were slain at the son-in-law's vacation house, their bodies thrown down a mineshaft. In Dagestan, fighters this year have slain more than two dozen police, prosecutors and other officials in bombings and shootings, injuring scores of others. In June, a bombing derailed a freight train. This month, a bomb blew up a truck carrying solders, killing 10. Some senior officials have warned Russian President Valdimir V. Putin that conditions are explosive. In a report leaked to the Russian press, Putin's envoy to the Caucasus warned that Dagestan could fall into anarchy; the republic, he concluded, is approaching a "drastic escalation of protests and civil disobedience." Hope for Islamic state In 1999, militants invaded Dagestan from Chechnya, hoping to forge the two Russian republics into an Islamic state. Leading the fighters was Shamil Basayev, the person Moscow considers the most dangerous of insurgents in the region. But this time his fighters encountered resistance, and they were fought off. Russia has long been able to count on Dagestan's loyalty, if only because its many ethnic groups are so divided. But their allegiance is being undermined by wide-spread unemployment - a third of the workforce is without work - and a deepening distrust of authorities. "The terrorists are active now," said Saigidpasha Umakhanov, the mayor of Khasavyurt, a town near Dagestan's border with Chechnya, and who helped organize a militia that fought off Basayev's invaders. "They are hunting policemen and political leaders. And young people sympathize with the bandits." Many of the militants are young villagers who move to larger cities, where some drift into lives of crime. Those young people come from places like the leafy hamlet of Ghimri. Nestled in a narrow gorge, Ghimri is the birthplace of Imam Shamil, a legendary 19th-century guerrilla fighter who frustrated Russian forces for decades until his capture in 1859. It's now one of the places where officials are struggling to maintain control. One of their strategies is to expand Islam's official role in society, under religious leaders considered politically reliable, and gradually to merge government and religion. Several Dagestan political leaders, for example, have endorsed a call by clerics to legalize polygamy, banned under Russian law but permitted by the Koran. During graduation ceremonies this spring at Ghimri's village school, the district's chief Muslim cleric scolded educators for not devoting more classroom time to Islam. Most of the 485 students stood in the dusty courtyard, the boys in suits but no ties, the girls all wearing headscarves. Forty students competed in a test of their knowledge of Islam. Imam Gazim Magomedov, the chief cleric, gave the winner, a girl in a brightly colored head scarf, 1,000 rubles - about $36 - and a book, How to Raise Children in the Way of Islam. His role now extends beyond education and religion to reviewing all decisions by the district's civilian administrator. "He takes his laws and I take my Koran and we compare them, and we try to make a compromise," Magomedov said over tea and cakes at his home near the school. In Russia, militant Islam is often called Wahabbism, after the puritanical Islamic traditions practiced in Saudi Arabia. During the Soviet era, any Soviet citizen who practiced Islam outside state-approved mosques was labeled a Wahabbist. Later, the term came to be applied to the fundamentalist missionaries, and students who returned from the Middle East critical of local religious practices. The new militancy unsettled authorities, who responded with crackdowns on religious schools, mosques and allegedly radical teachings. The results, wrote analyst Anssi Kullberg in 2003, have been predictable: "The Islamist opposition was radicalized." Kaplan M. Kanbabaev, deputy chairman of Dagestan's government-run Council on Religious Affairs said authorities had little choice. "Wahabbism is not a purely religious organization," he said. "It's religious with a political arm. They've chosen the criminal way of pursuing religion." Likewise, regional government leaders here say Dagestan can't afford half-measures in a struggle with radicals. "Suppose you are living in the wild forest, where there are wolves and bears," said Abusupian M. Kharkarov, a senior Dagestani official. "Either you must protect yourself with determination, or the beasts will come." Search in a cemetery When high school senior Zaur Abuyev returned home in May from St. Petersburg to Beslan, in North Ossetia, he wanted to see his friends. He looked for them in Beslan's flower-choked cemetery. The town buried most of the 331 people who died at School No. 1 last fall in a former sheep pasture. Most of the victims had spent 2 1/2 days as hostages before their lives ended amid gunfire and explosions. Strolling among rows of graves, Abuyev gently stroked the varnished wooden posts serving as temporary headstones. "I have all these memories," he said. "They are all coming back. All these kids, girls and boys, we were sitting together. And now? I still can't believe it." The tragedy at School No. 1 shattered the trust between parents and teachers, officials and citizens, North Ossetians and their neighbors in the Caucasus. And the mistrust has been sharpened by the trial of the only survivor among the 32 guerrillas, Nur-Pasha Kulayev, because key aspects of his testimony have proved embarrassing for the government. Kulayev testified that the hostage-takers were prepared to release 300 of the children if the presidents of Ingushetia and North Ossetia - Amurat Zyazikov and Aleksandr Dzasokhov - had agreed to face-to-face talks. But the Kremlin vetoed the talks. Parents of the slain children demanded Dzasokhov's ouster, accusing him of negligence and incompetence. Shortly after Kulayev's testimony, Dzasokhov resigned as president but retained his seat in Russia's appointed upper house of parliament. Other officials involved in the crisis have left their jobs. But all of them, as the mothers of the Beslan school victims point out, have been promoted or given high-ranking jobs elsewhere. "The pain is worse when you realize that the fact that no one is punished, no one is blamed," said Susanna Dudiyeva, whose 13-year-old son died in his 19-year-old sister's arms. "Over the years, our government has proved to be irresponsible and worthless. They have lied, and now they are starting to believe their own lies." Avenging revenge No one knows precisely when the cycle of revenge began here, in the tiny republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, where the snowy Caucasus peaks loom like distant thunderheads. But the beginning may have been the summer of 2003, when the insurgent leader Shamil Basayev and his wife spent at least a month north of the republic's capital, Nalchik. He then slipped away, allegedly with the help of police. Local authorities evidently panicked. Police raided mosques, rounding up and beating hundreds of young men. Some were questioned for 10 days. Many were forced to cut off their beards, or ordered to shave crosses in one another's scalps, as attested by human rights groups and families of some of the young men. The raids were followed by retaliatory attacks on police. Authorities in turn closed 18 mosques here in Nalchik, forcing the city's faithful to worship at a single central mosque, which could be easily monitored. Kabardino-Balkaria's supreme religious leader, Mufti Anas M. Pshihachev, said authorities blundered in closing the mosques. "I told them, this fact will be used by the extremists," Pshihachev said. "They started shouting on every corner that the mosques were closing down, that they didn't have their religious rights. This should not have happened. The local officials were not listening." Later in 2003, a local Islamic guerilla group calling itself Yarmuk Jamaat declared war against the government. In an Internet statement, the group's leader, Muslim Atayev, denounced authorities as "mere apologies for rulers, who sold themselves to the invaders, have made drug addiction, prostitution, poverty, crime, depravity, drunkenness and unemployment prosper in our Republic." Russian officials say Atayev was one of about 20 men who trained as guerillas in Georgia's Pankissi Gorge in 2002. He allegedly led a raid against a government office here in Nalchik. Ten gunmen killed four employees, set fire to the office and seized more than 250 weapons. This past January, security forces cornered Atayev, his wife, Sakinat, and several others in two apartments in a working-class section of town. After two days of talks, police and Interior Ministry troops stormed the apartments. Everyone inside the apartments was killed. Zalimkhan Katzayev, Sakinat's father, sat at home watching his daughter die in a live broadcast on local television. "Allegedly, the authorities waited," the 67-year-old retired construction worker said. "Allegedly, they negotiated." For seven days Katzayev pleaded for the bodies of his daughter, grandchild and son-in-law. Authorities refused. "You have tortured us," he recalls a prosecutor telling him. "Now we will torture you." Finally, the Katzayevs buried their daughter. But now police have called his son in for questioning. For Katzayev, it is no mystery why the young people of his village are being caught up in the Caucasus' whirlpool of violence. "I'm 70 years old," he said. "But they're pushing me to commit a crime." Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun.